Best WWII Eastern Front PC Games - Sims, Tactics, Strategy

[bob48]

you'll get on any pole Bawb.

...the Pirhana Brothers are going to pay you a visit........

[magnus]

 Caiden's book about Kursk is very good, not long on details, but very good.

Glantz's books have a lot of details, but his almost adoration for the Soviets shows through all of them.

Germany's war aims and it's armed forces actions were utterly detestable, but to me the Soviets were just as bad. The German army for more than half the war was a first rate fighting force.

Glantz comes across as the Germans were inept fools and the Soviets were war masters.

I just saw posted somewhere ( SimHQ? ) some numbers that were interesting. The Germans had a AFV kill rate of 2.95 to 1.If there had been no western front and all of Germany's AFVs were available for Russia, their kill ratio would only need to 2.45 to 1 to destroy all of the Soviet AFVs.

I was brought up learning that the western powers had won the war and then with all my reading swung toward the Soviets could have defeated Germany on their own.

I now believe Germany could not have been defeated without the western powers. In fact if Kursk was allowed to continue without the loss of German troops to Italy it may well have succeeded.

[MengJiao]

  Glantz comes across as the Germans were inept fools and the Soviets were war masters.

  I suppose Glantz is on a mission.  It's hard to tell.  There are weirdly profound moments in Glantz, wherein after hundreds of pages of Germans obliterating Russian armies (I'm re-reading the first book of the 5-book Stalingrad "Trilogy") a lot of stuff starts happening under
the German strategic radar.  Glantz has the data there showing some Russian attacks taking crucial bridgeheads over the Don in September and the Germans are just too busy to notice.  At about the same time the Russian 64th and 62 Armies manage an accidently perfect delaying action and get back to Stalingrad.  I'd never noticed how all those little, almost unnoticeable, shifts in fortune start building up.

  So yes, Glantz is hard to read and he does spend a lot of time dismantling German accounts ( this is especially true in End Game at Stalingrad...but the end at Stalingrad or more exactly Wintergewitter really does seem to have triggered some unusually unreliable German narratives), but overall I think he is a very reliable source.

  Which brings up another point: how close were the Germans to winning in 1942?  They could not win in 1941 due to logistics and they could not win after Stalingrad due to all sorts of things including the Western Allies -- but they really had all of 1942 to win (unless it seems the defeats of early 1942 were the real beginning of the end).

[sandman2575]

  Which brings up another point: how close were the Germans to winning in 1942?  They could not win in 1941 due to logistics and they could not win after Stalingrad due to all sorts of things including the Western Allies -- but they really had all of 1942 to win (unless it seems the defeats of early 1942 were the real beginning of the end).

Interesting question. My own sense is that victory in Russia was never really in the cards for the Germans, owing to its increasingly (by '42) dysfunctional military hierarchy, the needlessly convoluted politics of OKH vs. OKW, and probably above all, Hitler's profoundly misguided meddling. There's a nice sentence I recall from Max Hastings -- "War made Hitler a fantasist, but it made Stalin a realist" -- which nicely captures an essential difference between OKH/OKW and Stavka.  Stalin was willing to allow his top generals (above all Zhukov) to direct strategy. Of course, if they failed, their lives were at risk. Hitler by contrast increasingly took it upon himself to direct strategy, with predictably disastrous results. Hitler never gave a damn about logistics -- he was obsessed with ideas of esprit de corps and the uniquely German Will to fight -- these were dangerous illusions.

[GDS_Starfury]

I think the Germans could have won the Eastern Front in 41/early 42.

[MengJiao]

  Which brings up another point: how close were the Germans to winning in 1942?  They could not win in 1941 due to logistics and they could not win after Stalingrad due to all sorts of things including the Western Allies -- but they really had all of 1942 to win (unless it seems the defeats of early 1942 were the real beginning of the end).

Interesting question. My own sense is that victory in Russia was never really in the cards for the Germans, owing to its increasingly (by '42) dysfunctional military hierarchy, the needlessly convoluted politics of OKH vs. OKW, and probably above all, Hitler's profoundly misguided meddling. There's a nice sentence I recall from Max Hastings -- "War made Hitler a fantasist, but it made Stalin a realist" -- which nicely captures an essential difference between OKH/OKW and Stavka.  Stalin was willing to allow his top generals (above all Zhukov) to direct strategy. Of course, if they failed, their lives were at risk. Hitler by contrast increasingly took it upon himself to direct strategy, with predictably disastrous results. Hitler never gave a damn about logistics -- he was obsessed with ideas of esprit de corps and the uniquely German Will to fight -- these were dangerous illusions.

   Of course, Glantz somehow makes it seem like the German apologetic narrative is always misleading: either in the Kursk book none of it was really Hitler's fault or in the Stalingrad series -- it was mostly Hitler's fault.
   Chris Bellamy (Absolute War) thinks the Soviets were defeated for all practical purposes sometime in 1942 and staged a comeback based on the level of ruthlessness they somehow attained -- winning by being overall much more effectively nasty than the Germans.  Winning by being Worse.  Or more systematic in their nastiness.   This sort of makes it not Hitler's fault, though you could argue that ideologically the Soviet methods of terrorizing their own population were less squeamish and ultimately more effective than the Nazi policy of selective terror.  Which The Wages of Destruction ( a book on the problems of waging war using Nazi economics) argues were so obviously counter-productive that by 1943 the need for slave labor began to outweigh the need to selectively kill off Slavs and Jews  (see
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview16 ).   

[magnus]

 The biggest choice was where to attack in 42.

I believe a concentric attack on Moscow was their best bet.

In the south they could trade space and make the lines ultimately too long for the Germans.

With an attack on Moscow they would not have been able to trade space and would have to fight the whole time.

Would the Soviets have been able to overcome their deficit in training and men and equipment before the end of a campaign for Moscow?

That is the big question.

[MengJiao]

The biggest choice was where to attack in 42.

I believe a concentric attack on Moscow was their best bet.

In the south they could trade space and make the lines ultimately too long for the Germans.

With an attack on Moscow they would not have been able to trade space and would have to fight the whole time.

Would the Soviets have been able to overcome their deficit in training and men and equipment before the end of a campaign for Moscow?

That is the big question.

   It is a close thing no matter how you look at it.  For example, suppose the Germans had built up their forces in the north rather than the south.  They didn't have the resources to do both and the Russians did.

   Some come May 1942, the Russians attack at Kharkov and there aren't enough Germans there -- because they are all up north getting ready to take Moscow.  The Germans shift to belatedly block the Kharkov mess and then the Russians start mopping up all the pockets up north.

   Not pretty, but of course better than Stalingrad.

[JasonPratt]

Interesting question. My own sense is that victory in Russia was never really in the cards for the Germans, owing to its increasingly (by '42) dysfunctional military hierarchy, the needlessly convoluted politics of OKH vs. OKW, and probably above all, Hitler's profoundly misguided meddling.

Ditto here; reinforced by Eisenhower's judgment: this was his after-action evaluation in his autobiography Crusade in Europe, that the greatest reason the Allies won and the (western) Axis lost was due to organizational solidarity vs freaky organizational chaos. The Allies had the supplies and the will to win, too; but the Germans, by the time of Fortress Europa, also had the will to win and enough entrenched supplies to shatter a disorganized Allied will to win.

Admittedly, one might expect this from Ike since he was a big proponent of the Supreme Commander concept (not necessarily with himself at the top but objectively no one else seemed able to do that particular organizational job). But then, one could argue this was exactly why he was such a strong proponent of it.

In essence, the key reason the Germans lost the war was by being Nazis, with the heads of the hydra tangling up and snapping at each other. Put another way, they got as far as they did thanks to Rommel and his crew inserting enough congruent organization for a while.

There's a nice sentence I recall from Max Hastings -- "War made Hitler a fantasist, but it made Stalin a realist" -- which nicely captures an essential difference between OKH/OKW and Stavka.  Stalin was willing to allow his top generals (above all Zhukov) to direct strategy.

Eventually, after killing almost all his other generals. Sure, by the time the Huns were at the gate Stalin was desperate enough to give Zhukov and any surviving competent generals a free enough rein to save the day. But it was largely thanks to Stalin's murderous meddling that things came down so close to the wire for the Soviet Union. (See for example the Russian WW2 documentary Russia's War: Blood on the Snow.)

One thing Glantz definitely contributes to, is an appreciation of JUST HOW MUCH ASSKICKING went on during the Eastern Front which has never properly been accounted for, and probably never will be thanks to the insane governments of each side trying to ignore and distort inconvenient facts. Whole armies worth of divisions and corps, two or three armored operations larger than Kharkov, several more of comparable size. Had Stalin not been interfering so much, the eastern Wehrmacht would have had a much tougher time in Barbarossa, and might have been stopped with a brick wall despite unit quality disparity.

Of course, if they failed, their lives were at risk. Hitler by contrast increasingly took it upon himself to direct strategy, with predictably disastrous results. Hitler never gave a damn about logistics -- he was obsessed with ideas of esprit de corps and the uniquely German Will to fight -- these were dangerous illusions.

That's true, but also describes Stalin from early on; the main difference is that though Hitler was imposing goofy ideas from early on in the war, he had enough sense to reward and promote competent generals and incorporate them into his public relations machine with himself at the top. Stalin was too crudely paranoid and competitive (having come through a wild round of revolutions, to be fair).

Hitler could generate a real morale, perverted though it was. Stalin couldn't until things got super-desperate. Stalin indiscriminately killed as many of his own people as the German Armed Forces did. Hitler sacrificed scapegoats for national morale in the Holocaust, but really did (in his own way) believe in, and promote, the positive value of his people.

And yet, the Nazi ideology so affected and infected their military organization, that as tensions mounted (41/42 winter and being unable to crack Moscow and the grads; Torch liberating North Africa; Med invaded; Overlord coming) the handicaps compounded.

[sandman2575]

One of the things I do like about GG's War in the East (a game I have lots of reservations about) is that it makes very visible the deficiencies of the German OOB on the eve of Barbarossa. Huge reserves of manpower and infantry, yes, but the panzer divisions are relatively few, with highly variable TOEs -- some not outfitted with anything better than the captured Czech tanks -- reflecting highly variable quality. Army Group North is almost laughably unimpressive -- "they really hoped to capture and hold Leningrad with just this?"

It says a lot about German generalship and quality of the officer corps (as well as the wretched organizational state of the Red Army in '41) that they succeeded as amazingly as they did in the opening months of Barbarossa -- almost managing to fulfill Hitler's prediction that "we need only kick in the door and the whole rotten edifice will collapse."

In the end, though, I find it hard to believe that Germany could have decisively defeated the USSR. They came awfully close in some respects. But when you consider the reserves of men and material (enhanced by Lend Lease) that the Soviets had at their disposal, it just doesn't seem credible to me that the Wehrmacht possessed the fighting strength to prevail. The Russians took massive losses, but they could afford it.

If the Germans had managed to capture Moscow before winter set in in '41 -- would that have ended the war?  Would the Soviets have capitulated?  It's unclear. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which loss of Moscow would not have meant Russian capitulation -- after all, sacrificing Moscow is precisely what Katuzov did against Napoleon.

EDIT -- good points, Jason.  Indeed, Stalin deserves all the blame for the parlous state of Russian officer corps, through his paranoia-fueled pogroms of the 30s. Still, at the moment of truth, he had presence of mind enough to let Zhukov go to work. Hitler was not as paranoid as Stalin in the sense that he didn't see all his generals as potential political rivals (at least, not until the Stauffenberg attempted assassination), but he increasingly distrusted and overruled the judgments of his best generals as the war wore on, and that proved disastrous.

[Gusington]

I was just about to type something similar. It was amazing that the Germans did as well as they did at the beginning of Barbarossa at all. It was by far Hitler's greatest mistake. If Germany and Russia remained allies, they would have ruled Europe together.

[sandman2575]

I think there's almost no chance Germany and USSR could have avoided war -- the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a cynical ploy by both sides, far from an alliance. I'm not sure USSR would have launched a war against Germany (at least one Russian historian argues USSR was gearing up for just that -- I find it incredible to say the least), but I think a Nazi invasion of USSR was all but inevitable -- for ideological and geopolitical reasons.  It was a catastrophic mistake, but I think it was 'baked into the cake' of national socialism from the beginning, even if it was suicidal.

[JasonPratt]

^^ Quite true (both Gus and Sandy).

Ultimately, there was only one way the Nazi regime could win, whether on the East or on the West: convince the opponent to stop fighting.

Which of course played exactly into the Nazi ideology of cultural and genetic supremacy, the will to power. They had the will, they DEMONSTRABLY had the will. The only problem was that the British Commonwealth (who could beat them on the sea if not in any other regard at first), Russia, and America (and the French Resistance, in a limited but real tactical sense), also had the will to keep going to the bitter end, and this was something the Nazi ideology simply could not account for.

That being said, what saved Russia (aside from some crippling German organizational problems thanks to Nazi internal competition and domination) wasn't primarily Stalin finally figuring he had nothing left to lose between eating a bullet and letting his generals do their jobs; but the Motherland itself (geographical size and rivers plus Russian winters) and the Russian people. Caught unsavably between the grinding stones of Hitler and Stalin, they damn well stepped up and showed why YOU DO NOT MESS WITH RUSSIA PERIOD. (Brutally stepped up, too, but those were the circumstances.)

[magnus]

Do not forget about Lend-Lease.

The sheer volume of all the material was staggering and left Russia able to build only armaments.

[jomni]

I thought we're talking about games here.