Category World War II

Just a Reminder

Just a reminder, if you pre-order The Battle of Prokhorovka through Amazon.com it is selling for $28.43: Buy from Amazon. The list price on the hardcover is $44.95. I do not know what price it will be listed at on 1 June 2019 (nor do I have any involvement or say in these matters).

The chapters for the book are listed in this post:

https://dupuyinstitute.org/2019/05/07/the-battle-of-prokhorovka-16-chapters/

What else is in the book (besides words) is listed in this post:

https://dupuyinstitute.org/2019/05/08/the-battle-of-prokhorovka-what-does-the-book-consist-of/

The reason why I wrote this book is discussed in this post:

https://dupuyinstitute.org/2019/05/09/the-battle-of-prokhorovka-book-why/

The book can obtained from Stackpole at: Stackpole Books

Or from Amazon.com at: Buy from Amazon

You might want to pre-order the book

By the way, if you pre-order The Battle of Prokhorovka through amazon.com it is selling for $28.43: Buy from Amazon The list price on the hardcover is  $44.95. I do not know what price it will be listed at on 1 June 2019 (nor do I have any involvement or say in these matters).

The book can obtained from Stackpole at: Stackpole Books

Or from Amazon.com at: Buy from Amazon

The Battle of Prokhorovka book — why?

My original contract back in 1999 to prepare the Kursk book was for a single book of 450 pages. During the writing process….the book grew. This is discussed in this article: http://www.aberdeenbookstore.com/the-largest-history-book-ever

When I realized how large the book was, I contacted the publisher and discussed the issue with him. I suggested that we go ahead and complete the large book I was writing and then go back and do an abridged version. He graciously agreed, but unfortunately I was unable to complete the original book in 2003/2004 (although it was mostly done) due to my work at The Dupuy Institute, magnified by a war or two going on.

So, when I was finally able to get back to this book (thanks to government budget cuts and sequestration), I was left with an original book of 1,662 pages. Clearly there was a need for a smaller book.

This is not that book. This book is the updated chapters of the original book that focus on the fighting by the SS Panzer Corps, III Panzer Corps, parts of the Sixth Guards Army, Sixty-Ninth Army, Fifth Guards Army, Fifth Guard Tank Army and parts of the Seventh Guards Army from 9 to 17 July 1943. As such, it is 40% of the original book sectioned off as a separate stand alone book.

I could do four such books from my original book. This is the first of these books. I am currently finishing up a second such book (Aces at Kursk: The Belgorod Offensive Air War). I could do two more books along that line (Battle of Tolstoye Woods and The Belgorod Offensive), although I am not sure that I ever will. It depends on demand, sales, the publisher’s interest, my time, and my mood.

I may also get around to writing a single 300-page book summarizing the offensive in the south. We shall see. There are a lot of other projects I am also considering.

The book can obtained from Stackpole at: Stackpole Books

Or from Amazon.com at: Buy from Amazon

The Battle of Prokhorovka — what does the book consist of

The book consists of:

  1. 638 numbered pages (and 14 pages of front matter)
  2. 75 Listed illustrations and maps
  3. Four photo sections
    1. 15 terrain photos
    2. 12 recon photos
    3. 64 battlefield photos
    4. 70 commander photos
  4. One map section with 17 maps
  5. 18 numbered tables
  6. 21 graphs
  7. 44 sidebars
  8. 76 engagement sheets

Just for the record, my original mega-book consisted of 192 engagement sheets. So one could make the argument that this book covers 40% of the Belgorod offensive (at least compared to the original book).

The book was edited by the same editor of the original book, Ariane Smith of Capital A: http://www.capitala.net/. Therefore, it is of a very similar format and style.

The book can obtained from Stackpole at: Stackpole Books

Or from Amazon.com at: Buy from Amazon

The Battle of Prokhorovka – 16 chapters

My new book The Battle of Prokhorovka consists of 16 chapters (the original mega-book had 27). The chapters are:

1. Preparing for the Showdown…..page 13
2. The Soviets Prepare…..page 35
3. The Belgorod Offensive: 4-8 July 1943…..page 51
4. The XLVIII Panzer Corps Heads West: 9 – 11 July 1943…..page 113
5. The Advance on Prokhorovka: 9-11 July…..page 133
6. The Advance on the Severnyii Donets: 9-11 July 1943…..page 203
7. The Situation as of 11 July 1943…..page 229
8. The Air War: 9-18 July 1943…..page 243
9. The Tank Fields of Prokhorovka, 12 July 1943…..page 291
10. SS Panzer Corps Attack Stalls, 13 July 1943…..page 359
11. Soviet Counterattacks against the III Panzer Corps: 12-13 July 1943…..page 375
12. Aftermath of Prokhorovka: 13 July 1943…..page 401
13. Cleaning Up the Donets Triangle: 14-15 July 1943…..page 475
14. The Battlefield is Quiet: 16-17 July 1943…..page 511
15. The German Withdrawal: 18-24 July 1943…..page 539
16. Post-Mortem…..page 559

There are only two short appendices in this book (the original book had 7 appendices totaling 342 pages):

Appendix I: German and Soviet Terminology…..page 615
Appendix II: The Engagements…..page 623

The book can obtained from Stackpole at: Stackpole Books

Or from Amazon.com at: Buy from Amazon

A Time for Crumpets

Charles MacDonald published in 1985 A Time for Trumpets, one of the better books on the Battle of the Bulge (and there are actually a lot of good works on this battle). In there he recounted a story of why the German Panzer Lehr Panzer Division, commanded by General Fritz Bayerlein, was held up for the better part of a day during the Battle for Bastogne. To quote:

For all Bayerlein’s concern about that armored force, he himself was at the point of directing less than full attention to conduct of the battle. In a wood outside Mageret, his troops had found a platoon from an American field hospital, and among the staff, a “young, blonde, and beautiful” American nurse attracted Bayerlein’s attention. Through much of December 19, he “dallied” with the nurse, who “held him spellbound.” [page 295]

Apparently MacDonald’s book was not the only source of this story: http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=186079

Now, I don’t know if “dallied” means that they were having tea and crumpets, or involved in something more intimate. The story apparently comes from Bayerlein himself, so something probably happened, but exactly what is not known. He was relieved of command after the failed offensive.

Fritz Bayerlein, March 1944 (Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1978-033-02/Dinstueler/CC-BY-SA 3.0)

When we met with Charles MacDonald in 1989, I did ask him about this story. He then recounted that he was recently at a U.S. veterans gathering talking to some other people, and some lady came up to him and told him that she knew the nurse in the story. MacDonald said he would get back to her….but then could not locate her later. So this was an opportunity to confirm and get more details of the story, but, it was lost (to history). But it does sort of confirm that there is some basis to Bayerlein’s story.

Now, this discussion with MacDonald is from memory, but I believe (the authors) Jay Karamales, Richard Anderson and possibly Curt Johnson were also at that dinner, and they may remember the conversation (differently?).

Anyhow, A Time for Strumpets Trumpets is a book worth reading.

Company Commander

I recently re-read Company Commander by the late Charles B. McDonald. I had read it as a kid and picked up a used copy of it for my son. It was a Bantam War Book, specially illustrated edition. It still had the original price tag from 1979 on it: $2.25. My son never read it, so I decided to earlier this month.

What caught my attention on the re-reading was a passage on pages 212 and 215 that stated:

The buildings on either side of us disrupted the weak platoon radios, and I could not contact Sergeant Patton. We moved forward quickly, calling over the radio as we went, until we established contact. They had run into German machine guns in the last scattered house of the town and were having a stiff fight. I said I would send our light machine guns to help and called for them from the weapons platoon. They hurried up the street toward the sound of the firing.

Battalion radioed a change of orders….

I tried to call the platoons, but I could contact only the 1st and 2d, and Sergeant Patton said he did not know if he could disengage himself from the fire fight.

I told him to get out as quickly as he could, “Then move back to the castle and follow us around to the left. You’ll be the support platoon. If you can’t get away soon, we’ll start on up the hill without you. Just leave the Krauts. F company will take care of them.”

We’ve got three prisoners in the basement of a house,” Patton said, “and we have to cross a hundred yards of open field to get back out. We’ll never make it with the prisoners.”

“Roger,” I answered. “Do what you can.”…[page 212]

[page 215] Sergeant Patton’s platoon arrived, tired and dusty from the tiring uphill walk from Bendorf-Sayn. The prisoners were not with them.

Company G today committed a war crime. They are going to win the war, however, so I don’t suppose it really matters. [This paragraph was in italics in the original]

There is also a brief passage on pages 286 and 288:

Colonel Smith sent a messenger to tell me to meet him at a house in the center of the town….

“I just ran into your boy Junior,” Colonel Smith said. “He’s having a little trouble with a German major who claims he’s in command of all the flak defenses around Merseburg and seems quite put out that your men took him prisoner. He kept begging Junior either to shoot him or let him shoot himself. Junior was about to let him have his way when I happened up.” [page 286]

[page 288] “OK, Mac,” the Colonel answered….”By the way,” he added, “you can tell Junior that we finally had to dispense with his German major. He tried to make a run for it.”

Company Commander appears to be a very honest account. These are certainly uncomfortable passages. He did have the option to leave them out.

I did meet with Charles Macdonald back in the late 1980s. Him and Hugh Cole were consultants to the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base (ACSDB).

Validation Data Bases Available (Ardennes)

I still recall our conversations with him, particularly about the American nurse and German General Fritz Bayerlein at Bastogne, but that is the subject of another post.

Battles versus Campaigns (for Validation)

So we created three campaign databases. One of the strangest arguments I have heard against doing validations or testing combat models to historical data, is that this is only one outcome from history. So you don’t know if model is in error or if this was a unusual outcome to the historical event. Someone described it as the N=1 argument. There are lots of reasons why I am not too impressed with this argument that I may enumerate in a later blog post. It certainly might apply to testing the model to just one battle (like the Battle of 73 Easting in 1991), but these are weeks-long campaign databases with hundreds of battles. One can test the model to these hundreds of points in particular in addition to testing it to the overall result.

In the case of the Kursk Data Base (KDB), we have actually gone through the data base and created from it 192 division-level engagements. This covers every single combat action by every single division during the two week offensive around Belgorod. Furthermore, I have listed each and every one of these as an “engagement sheet’ in my book on Kursk. The 192 engagement sheets are a half-page or page-long tabulation of the strengths and losses for each engagement for all units involved. Most sheets cover one day of battle. It took considerable work to assemble these. First one had to figure out who was opposing whom (especially as unit boundaries never match) and then work from there. So, if someone wants to test a model or model combat or do historical analysis, one could simply assemble a database from these 192 engagements. If one wanted more details on the engagements, there are detailed breakdowns of the equipment in the Kursk Data Base and detailed descriptions of the engagements in my Kursk book. My new Prokhorovka book (release date 1 June), which only covers the part of the southern offensive around Prokhorovka from the 9th of July, has 76 of those engagements sheets. Needless to say, these Kursk engagements also make up 192 of the 752 engagements in our DLEDB (Division Level Engagement Data Base).  A picture of that database is shown at the top of this post.

So, if you are conducting a validation to the campaign, take a moment and check the results to each division to each day. In the KDB there were 17 divisions on the German side, and 37 rifle divisions and 10 tank and mechanized corps (a division-sized unit) on the Soviet side. The data base covers 15 days of fighting. So….there are around 900 points of daily division level results to check the results to. I drawn your attention to this graph:

There are a number of these charts in Chapter 19 of my book War by Numbers. Also see:

Validating Attrition

The Ardennes database is even bigger. There was one validation done by CAA (Center for Army Analysis) of its CEM model (Concepts Evaluation Model) using the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Bases (ACSDB). They did this as an overall comparison to the campaign. So they tracked the front line trace at the end of the battle, and the total tank losses during the battle, ammunition consumption and other events like that. They got a fairly good result. What they did not do was go into the weeds and compare the results of the engagements. CEM relies on inputs from ATCAL (Attrition Calculator) which are created from COSAGE model runs. So while they tested the overall top-level model, they really did not test ATCAL or COSAGE, the models that feed into it. ATCAL and COSAGE I gather are still in use. In the case of Ardennes you have 36 U.S. and UK divisions and 32 German divisions and brigades over 32 days, so over 2,000 division days of combat. That is a lot of data points to test to.

Now we have not systematically gone through the ACSDB and assembled a record for every single engagement there. There would probably be more than 400 such engagements. We have assembled 57 engagements from the Battle of the Bulge for our division-level database (DLEDB). More could be done.

Finally, during our Battle of Britain Data Base effort, we recommended developing an air combat engagement database of 120 air-to-air engagements from the Battle of Britain. We did examine some additional mission specific data for the British side derived from the “Form F” Combat Reports for the period 8-12 August 1940. This was to demonstrate the viability of developing an engagement database from the dataset. So we wanted to do something similar for the air combat that we had done with division-level combat. An air-to-air engagement database would be very useful if you are developing any air campaign wargame. This unfortunately was never done by us as the project (read: funding) ended.

As it is we actually have three air campaign databases to work from, the Battle of Britain data base, the air component of the Kursk Data Base, and the air component of the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base. There is a lot of material to work from. All it takes it a little time and effort.

I will discuss the division-level data base in more depth in my next post.

The Battle of Britain Data Base

The Battle of Britain data base came into existence at the request of OSD PA&E (Office of the Secretary of Defense, Program Analysis and Evaluation). They contacted us. They were working with LMI (Logistics Management Institute, on of a dozen FFRDCs) to develop an air combat model. They felt that the Battle of Britain would be perfect for helping to develop, test and validate their model. The effort was led by a retired Air Force colonel who had the misfortune of spending part of his career in North Vietnam.

The problem with developing any air campaign database is that, unlike the German army, the Luftwaffe actually followed their orders late in the war to destroy their records. I understand from conversations with Trevor Dupuy that Luftwaffe records were stored in a train and had been moved to the German countryside (to get them away from the bombing and/or advancing armies). They then burned all the records there at the rail siding.

So, when HERO (Trevor Dupuy’s Historical Evaluation Research Organization) did their work on the Italian Campaign (which was funded by the Air Force), they had to find records on the German air activity with the Luftwaffe liaison officers of the German armies involved. The same with Kursk, where one of the few air records we had was with the air liaison officer to the German Second Army. This was the army on the tip of the bulge that was simply holding in place during the battle. It was the only source that gave us a daily count of sorties, German losses, etc. Of the eight or so full wings that were involved in the battle from the VIII Air Corps, we had records for one group of He-111s (there were usually three groups to a wing). We did have good records from the Soviet archives. But it hard to assemble a good picture of the German side of the battle with records from only 1/24th of the units involved. So the very limited surviving files of the Luftwaffe air liaison officers was all we had to work with for Italy and Kursk. We did not even have that for the Ardennes. Luckily the German air force simplified things by flying almost no missions until the disastrous Operation Bodenplatte on 1 January 1945. Of course, we had great records from the U.S. and the UK, but….hard to develop a good database without records from both sides. Therefore, one is left with few well-documented air battles anywhere for use in developing, evaluating and validating an air campaign model.

The exception is the Battle of Britain, which has been so well researched, and extensively written about, that it is possible to assemble an accurate and detailed daily account for both sides for every day of the battle. There are also a few surviving records that can be tapped, including the personal kill records of the pilots, the aircraft loss reports of the quartermaster, and the ULTRA reports of intercepted German radio messages. Therefore, we (mostly Richard Anderson) assembled the Battle of Britain data base from British unit records and the surviving records and the extensive secondary sources for the German side. We have already done considerable preliminary research covering 15 August to 19 September 1940 as a result of our work on DACM (Dupuy Air Combat Model)

The Dupuy Air Campaign Model (DACM)

The database covered the period from 8 August to 30 September 1940. It was programmed in Access by Jay Karamales.  From April to July 2004 we did a feasibility study for LMI. We were awarded a contract from OSD PA&E on 1 September to start work on the database. We sent a two-person research team to the British National Archives in Kew Gardens, London. There we examined 249 document files and copied 4,443 pages. The completed database and supporting documentation was delivered to OSD PA&E in August 2005. It was certainly the easiest of our campaign databases to do.

We do not know if OSD PA&E or LMI ever used the data base, but we think not. The database was ordered while they were still working on the model. After we delivered the database to them, we do not know what happened. We suspect the model was never completed and the effort was halted. The database has never been publically available. PA&E became defunct in 2009 and was replaced by CAPE (Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation). We may be the only people who still have (or can find) a copy of this database.

I will provide a more detailed description of this database in a later post.