No Better Day for the Apocalypse AAR

[Player_B]

It's a cold, foggy October evening in Schweben, an hour north east of Frankfurt. What better day for the apocalypse?


One largely intact Soviet motor rifle battalion is moving towards the town with the intent of spending the night there, ahead of further offensive actions in the morning. Even with the world ending, the offensive must continue. Arrayed against them are a mixed US cavalry and engineer unit - presumably they were far enough forward, or far enough back, to have avoided being glassed along with their main unit by the initial nuclear strike.

Now, I should admit a certain amount of... carelessness, in my preparation for this battle. I was playing against @hmstanley, a third match in a series that was then tied one each - I had seized an Italian hill with my Fallschirmjägers, while their greyhounds had run roughshod over my pumas in Normandy. Feeling inclined to something a bit bigger, we settled on a large Cold War battle as a suitably epic finale. Hmstanley hadn't had much opportunity to play the Americans, while I hadn't had much experience of Cold War at all, and so I agreed to take the Soviets and the battle conditions were set to random. This would be important later!

I constructed my force from a BMP-1 motor rifle battalion, with T-62 tanks and one company mounted in BMP-2s. To afford the artillery, air support and general extra odds and ends, I dropped one of the infantry companies, so I was left with one BMP-1 company, one BMP-2 company, one T-62 company (the 1975 version with the all-important laser rangefinder), their attendant 120mm mortars, some 122mm howitzers, and a handful of hinds armed with just their 12.7mm cannons (which are dirt cheap, and so I like throwing in just to disrupt the enemy and give them a bit of a shock when the sky starts shooting at them). As this was fairly close to a standard formation, I was fairly confident it could deal with a fairly standard-looking map. True, it all looked a bit grey and bleak, but I live in Wales so that's quite normal. 'Light fog' sounded find, might slow down spotting a bit but with the mass of tanks I was concentrating that shouldn't be a huge issue. With the plan set and the fire missions placed the companies were racing away towards their first waypoints.

I am fairly sure this isn't proper Soviet doctrine. I was charging headlong down my right flank with very little information about the location of my enemy. I will defend this, to a certain extent, as the initial 'land grab' of a meeting engagement. Even if my enemy is planning to defend against this exact move, if I hit them at full speed then they're unlikely to be fully ready - with BTRs to act as tripwires for enemy tanks (and filled with infantry to spot if they make it through), followed up by a BMP platoon, I was confident the enemy tanks and ATGMs would spot and engage those vehicles first, which would allow my tanks to spot them (there's 13 of them - someone will spot the flash of light). I think most players tend to be more cautious, but after playing a bit with the Ukrainians against the Russians in Black Sea I learnt that 'cautious' works for NATO because as long as they don't charge in headlong they will usually to almost always spot first. That is not something I can rely on, especially with my dated T-62s, so my preferred approach is provoking the enemy to fire first. I've got loads of BMPs that are scary enough to need shooting, so why not?


Even with the relatively open spaces, forming a line with the required 50m spacing proved quite challenging, but by and large my tanks were correctly spaced and all pointing down the railway line towards my opponent. Then two of them exploded.

A BTR full of MG teams (which I admit not having much use for and so were assigned scout duties) also got hit, and while some of my battalion weren't able to see past the forest down to the far map edge, the rest did get a contact marker but no further spots were made. You can see that some of my BMPs and BTRs got through, and as all the rifle teams had an RPG-7 and an RPG-18 I was fairly sure they would at least delay any effort by my opponent to hide their tanks or dragon teams in those areas. This wasn't a great start, but it wasn't a crisis either. Unfortunately I hesitated, then split my tank company, with each tank diving either into the low ground around Schweben (four tanks) or the forest (seven tanks). This was a mistake. One that I actually repeated in my more recent game against @Cargol, so apparently I'm not the quickest on the uptake, but the instinct to rush every armoured vehicle into cover from effective enemy fire is a strong one and it overwhelmed my academic understanding that my tanks needed to be kept together. Танковый together strong.

It was at this point that I checked the conditions and realised the mess I was in. This was 1982, and that long-range shot was a clear sign my opponent had M60s with Tank Thermal Sights - suddenly the worry that the M60s would have a close-range advantage in the fog due to their higher rate of fire became a concern that they would have a dominating advantage at range because I couldn't see them at all (the T-62 is not treated as having a proper night sight in CM:CW, just 'IR Optics'). With this 'new' information, and the situation I found myself in, a new plan was devised (and yes, that sound is every single Soviet general rolling in their grave at the idea of a 'new plan' mid-firefight - sorry comrades, I'm obviously not properly committed to the Soviet cause and way of war. You can shoot me once the Americans have had their turn at it).

You can see me splitting my four T-62s on the left into two teams of two. Once again, yes, it's obvious with hindsight, but I'm still very used to operating NATO tanks where this is perfectly normal. On the right I will defend it as getting additional angles on the enemy tank contact. My BMPs were right into the forest, and with only one enemy tank contact I thought that I had jumped a single screening tank before its infantry (probably with ATGMs) could deploy to support it. I had my tanks 'covering' that BMP rush (which I had thought was into an empty forest), but when it was apparent that either the darkness or a slight change in terrain meant that they couldn't see, I did roll them forward en-mass to try and support the BMPs and their infantry as they spread out. This is when things went bad.

Very bad.

It turns out than when my infantry get out and start listening (and before they get shot), they hear rather a lot more vehicles.

These would be some of the only times I spotted my opponent's tanks. And that was only because the infantry were right next to them (and even then some of them - invariably the team with the RPG-7 - missed them). My tanks couldn't see a thing, and the spots would take too long to transfer through the C2 network. In my defence, I think this was an error on the part of my opponent too - @hmstanley is free to argue their point back, of course, but in clear conditions I would have thrown over two tank platoons and a platoon of BMP-1 infantry right into this moving US force and taken out those two tanks in return during this engagement. If I'd had the whole tank company, it would have been even more one-sided. What would have followed would have been a close-in mess that would have been hard to predict, but even though the M60s are better in those kinds knife-fights, these are really expensive M60s with all the latest optics, while my T-62s and BMP-1s are cheap and numerous and also just as able to spot them at close range. Even with the awful spotting problems in the fog, this was probably my single best opportunity to smash a section of the US force and I squandered it by withdrawing - that's definitely on me.

Now, factoring into my thinking was an emergency test I ran in identical conditions. Normally testing scenarios during a battle feels a bit too 'gamey' to me, but in this instance I ran a simple test to see when a platoon of T-62s would spot an M113. My initial test, of an M113 hidden in a treeline at 100m, had the M113 spot the T-62s, pop smoke, and reverse away - the T-62s saw nothing. Trying at 100m in the open, the same thing happened. Closing to 50m (which was hard when the M113s were determined to reverse away from the T-62s that they had a constant good spot on) didn't show anything either, and when I opened up the T-62s the M113 gunner opened fire on them... and the T-62s didn't even get a spotting icon. It was only at 30m that they were able to spot the M113, and I think even then it backed away before they could blow it apart. So at this point in the battle I realised that my tanks were effectively useless against the M60s - they could spot and kill at over 1km, while I had an effective spotting range of 30m. My plan then, was simple - get into the town, which was the sole objective, and stop the Americans from entering it. I had plenty of RPG infantry, and so long as none of them set foot inside I could get enough points from scoring the objective to scrape a draw.

Circle the wagons and wait for dawn.

 

[Player_B]

There are a few different moving parts to the rest of the game. My opponent had a foothold in the edge of Schweben, but they didn't push too far in (lacking infantry, this was probably a wise move, but it did mean I could move through most of Schweben uncontested and force the remainder of my BMP-1 company in after my scouts without worrying that they'd take a LAW and cook the troops inside). There was an infantry engagement - one I mismanaged by running my infantry up along the path my BMP-2 was firing along and getting several of them killed by the rounds that fell short.

They then ran back through the cannon fire, (which is entirely on them!) which made matters worse, but my key advantage here was that the US infantry had taken up positions in buildings, and while I couldn't 'spot' them, I did know where they were. My BMP-2s were key here, as unlike the tanks they could see about 100m out (albeit still not well) so they could shoot the buildings, and I was able to clear out that edge of the town.

Meanwhile, I'd reassembled my full tank force in the low ground by Schweben. This was my initial defence - if the M60s came over the top then they would be within 30m of the tanks and so could actually be spotted and shot at. With a handful of infantry popped up to listen for vehicles, it was the best I could do at that moment.

Realising that the enemy force on the edge of Schweben wasn't well supported, I considered a desperate move with my tanks. Even if they couldn't see, most of the force there were infantry, and the BMP-2s could suppress those while the tanks dashed forwards to within 30m of the handful of enemy vehicles there so that they could spot them. As plans go it's not the best, but finding an actual use for my near-blind tanks was hard so it was the best I had.

And yes, the spotters on the left of that image did have to get that close to see a target and so call in artillery on it. More on them later though.

It was at this point I got my first kill of an enemy vehicle. An M113 got too close, and a team put an RPG-18 through the front of it. This wasn't actually my last vehicle kill, but it was the last (and only) direct fire vehicle kill (though another heroic conscript did kill a turned-out Bradley commander with a single rifle shot.)
As an example of how bad the spotting was, one US vehicle (the TOW vehicles are also marked as 'tank contacts', so it could have been one of those) got this close to the survivors of the right flank debacle, and neither spotted the other.
Meanwhile, my vehicles were being picked off from across the map.

I did call in artillery on the small collection of buildings my spotters were working towards - I had seen an M60 lurking there, as well as identifying it as the launch position of several dragon ATGMs, so I knew some people were hiding there. My tanks were to follow this barrage, but by the time the barrage came in more US armour had arrived and so I'd missed my chance to send in my T-62s. This was when I scored my other vehicle kills - several M113s of a US engineer unit were parked there, and a number of them were scrapped by the barrage. Turns out M113s aren't actually that great at surviving even not-so-near misses from 122mm howitzer fire, although maybe I got lucky.

By this point I'd pulled everything back into the town, and @hmstanley brought out their 155mm guns. Funnily enough I'd already hit my own troops with 120mm mortar fire, and that seemed to cause more casualties than the 155mm fire. The buildings also held up pretty well, but with nearly an hour on the clock my opponent wasn't in a rush. Perhaps if it had been the last 15 minutes I could have held out, but what followed was a mixture of artillery fire, tank shots and ATGM launches picking off the vehicles in Schweben.

For the record, I'd already 'called' that this would happen. I knew full well that I was confining myself to a single area that was just begging for my opponent to barrage it with all the guns available to them, but I really didn't have a choice. I'd lost the battle in the open during force selection, and I suspect even the better-equipped Soviet tanks would still have been unable to spot at the ranges the TOW and M60 TTS could (though I thought TOW couldn't fire through these conditions due to the wires shorting? They managed a good number of kills though). By the time the infantry push came, my battalion's vehicles consisted of one supply truck I'd hidden in a forest in my setup zone (even the AA vehicle got spotted taken out in another treeline). The apocalypse had come to Schweben, not with nuclear fire but the constant barrage of the American guns.

I will point out to what I think was one other mistake by my opponent - their barrage was quite heavily dispersed across the town. It did still suppress my troops, at least while it was going on, in part due to their shaken state, but aside from a few that ran out of a house into the open and were gunned down by a Bradley my casualties were quite light considering it was 155mm fire.

At this point, I must commend my spotter team for Hero of the Soviet Union to a man, as having called in the artillery strike that killed multiple enemy M113s, they stayed in place in their field as an M60 rolled up nearby. They crawled towards it, and despite lacking an RPG (7 or 18) one of them was able to throw two grenades at it. I was a little disappointed they didn't destroy it, but they were able to immobilise it before being gunned down by its MG. This is the closest I got to killing an M60 this battle.

When the barrage ended I was still able to bring a couple of squads up to contest US troops pushing into the edge of the village, but when they went to ground in the ruins of a house inside the objective area my troops lost the spot and so I agreed to a ceasefire.]
While the casualties tell of the massacre that occurred, I killed far more US troops than I expected - always when they moved near a terrain object that I suspected they'd want to occupy. I skipped over this, but a whole squad had a good covered position by a bridge where they could pop up and look down the main street. Spotting a suspected contact, my BMP-2s opened up on that ridge, and even without the modern airbursting shells enough cannon fire was sent in that direction to kill the whole squad. Likewise I blasted every building I could on a regular basis, shelled the area around them to try and kill any infantry that had retreated from them, and generally flailed about with as much firepower as I could to do as much damage as I could... and I took out over 45 soldiers with it, as well as denying the objective to my opponent. Perhaps the polite thing to do would have been to surrender, given the clear superiority of the enemy position and force, but over 50 of those soldiers were still in Schweben at the end, with their RPGs, and even if I failed at most of the Soviet doctrine I was going to hold the objective or die trying (though my battalion commander was actually hidden in the woods in my setup zone with the mortars and so presumably survived to be shot by his high command. If they were even still alive).

Credit to @hmstanley for bringing the clearly superior force and using it with the right mix of care and aggression to win the battle without seriously risking their force. While some day I will bring another Soviet force to challenge them in less inclement conditions, this caps off our three games as a 2 to 1 victory to them.

Good game, well played.

 

[Lethaface]

Nice AAR. The first PBEM I played in CMCW was against a long time oppo. We agreed on a none rarity large/huge qb to try out all the new assets, believing it to be more 'balanced' compared to CMBS/CMSF. For conditions we went with dawn overcast, a typical cloudy late autumn day. Well it was one of those dark mornings I know all to well from in NL, and while I didn't go for the Abrams I had 2 platoons of TTS and a platoon of recon Bradley's. (and infantry, AA, TOW, air, arty). My opponent had ~2 companies of tanks (T-64 & T-80), probably minus a platoon each (and infantry, AA,arty).
The vision wasn't as bad as in your game, but the thermals on all my infantry, tanks, Bradleys and TOW vehicles was obvious. I think back then there was a bug which gave all M113 thermal optics too .
Anyway I still took some losses from returnfire by T-80s and AT-7 teams setup in forests, but low light/sight & thermal optics really ups the challenge for USSR and moves it towards CMSF 'balance'. It wasn't what we had expected from the battle, although he probably tried to fight the USSR forces like he operated other forces in CM.

So while on the observation front your forces are certainly not on par, at the same time knowing this one can take it into account. Don't fight at range or think that smoke blocks the enemy view.
I like playing low visibility but in CMCW I think the better approach to those is 1979, without TTS/Abrams/Bradley. Although the Dragon teams still give US infantry superior observation.

 

[Player_B]

but the thermals on all my infantry, tanks, Bradleys and TOW vehicles was obvious

This really does seem to be key. At least in Combat Mission anyway, though I remember back when this battle was still ongoing Military History Not Visualised put out a video with the Chieftain who recounts how they used thermal imagers back in their time.

While I had originally assumed that tank optics were 'detailed but focused', in that especially with thermals but even with magnification the best vision is directly forwards while they're far less aware of their sides and rear, the innovative use of amping up the contrast and sensitivity and doing a scan of the surrounding to look for a 'flash' of heat made me a bit more accepting of the M60 TTS' ability to spot my tanks at 90 degrees to them at over 1km. Good optics are also highlighted in that video as being the deciding factor when you modernise a tank - if you go cheap, then at least get the good optics. Alas, not an option for the T-62s, but I think I will probably be looking at the more 'Gucci' Soviet tanks in the future - that they have a chance to defeat almost all enemy fire in their frontal arc is also a bonus.

I also wasn't aware that the Dragon had thermals until Free Whisky's recent video on how to use the Red Army (or it might have been the follow-up podcast) which was too late to inform either this game or the next one. From hearing that it was 'a bit naff' prior to CW, I have learned a lot of respect for it since (especially after losing half my tank company to Dragons in my most recent game).

All of which has been a very valuable learning experience. Perhaps some day I'll even remember it when the lead starts flying.

 

[Lethaface]

Yeah I have both giveth and taketh Dragons through smoke, they're nasty especially against anything that isn't a T-64 or better. Good quality troops do help them hit their targets.

 

[Rinaldi]

Great AAR. Takes a lot, I think, to examine the defeats as closely as the victories (something I am terribly guilty of failing to do). Really puts it into perspective just how deeply NATO can own the night (or similar low visibility conditions) even by the late 70s/early 80s.

 

[Player_B]

Great AAR. Takes a lot, I think, to examine the defeats as closely as the victories (something I am terribly guilty of failing to do). Really puts it into perspective just how deeply NATO can own the night (or similar low visibility conditions) even by the late 70s/early 80s.

Thanks. It is really interesting to see assorted technical differences, which I'm not a particular student of in the abstract, leading to vivid differences in the field - I do point to Usually Hapless' "90 Seconds" video as one of the best examples (plus making for a good story). Though in my case some of the disadvantages are self-inflicted as I do have a fondness for bringing the older formations (alongside a couple of multiplayer outings with Soviet T-62 Motor-Rifle Battalions I've been playing the earlier Fortress Italy scenarios & campaigns recently).