Don’t worry mate, you’re getting there — I just like to challenge your creative muscles a bit. I think the end result shows that it’s worth the frustration.
You are bringing up a lot of thought and rationalisation that I believe needs to make it into the text a lot more explicitly.
I'm enjoying the challenge!
I’m not sure that after “merely” three years of war, attrition will have taken all that heavy a toll on either units or the officer cadre. As a point of comparison, it is generally estimated that after three years of war on the eastern front, the German army had lost about 2/3rds of its armoured combat vehicles — tanks, tank destroyers, self-propelled artillery, etc. I would contend that the conditions for the Swedish army in 2000 should be nowhere near as catastrophic as those for the German army in 1945.
Besides, I’m used to thinking along the lines that a unit that has been reduced from brigade to battalion strength would usually be regarded as being rendered combat inefficient some ways before that point.
Fair points, but, unlike WWII, the Twilight War is a nuclear war. Entire divisions were vaporized, and the capacity to produce replacement vehicles has pretty much ceased altogether. For comparison, German war production of tanks and aircraft increased every year during WW2, despite increasingly intense allied strategic bombing, until 1945, so replacement AFVs (never enough!) were reaching units up until the last months of the war. That would not be the case in the Twilight War. It's been two years or so since factories could produce new AFVs. By 2000, total AFV kills could only be replaced with captured vehicles.
It would be difficult for a unit that have been equipped with Leopards to rearm with older tanks. If the 103’s and 104’s hadn’t been scrapped as they were IRL, they would have been handed over to other units — the 103 for instance would have seen its role redefined from MBT to tank destroyer, and would have been used to replace the IKV 91. It’s not common practice in Sweden to stockpile obsolete equipment.
I just meant that I'm surprised any of Sweden's front-line MBTs survived the first three years of the war (see my last point). It's more likely that deep reserve vehicles would still be around by mid-2000. That said, I love me some Leopard IIs, so I'm not going to fiddle with that piece of FL lore.
I’ll take you up on [the American TF commander issuing the order]!
You called my bluff. I guess I'll have to change it now.
Check the kind of forest road involved. A wide motorway through lightly wooded terrain may offer quite long ranges and plenty of space to manoeuvre, while a narrow gravel track in dense forest of course is an entirely different proposition. With plenty of shades of grey in between.
An inferior unit can of course bring a vastly superior one to a dead halt, by exploiting choke points or just by taking advantage of the fog of war. The scenario you describe seems supremely likely to accomplish precisely that. Actual damage … not quite so much, as you say, but for the delay it causes, which certainly can be devastating enough.
I zoomed in. The forest road is paved, but only two lanes wide (one lane going in either direction), with the tree-line around 10m from the roadbed. Tanks would have a little room to maneuver, but even just a couple of mobility kills could stop the column in its tracks and make it difficult for the surviving vehicles to maneuver freely. Sprinkle a few AT mines on the verges, and it becomes that much tighter confines for the surviving tanks. Again, the Soviet paras just have to halt the column, not destroy it completely. I can clarify this in the narrative.
The historical examples you point to are of course entirely valid. What I’d like to see however is that whenever tanks are brought into urban terrain or dense forest, this is done because there really is no other viable alternative. If you do so anyway, there needs to be some explicit reason why the CO is off his rails.
Fair. One conceivably
could use the E18 to get north of Arboga, and then use local roads to move around the city, but that adds kilometers to the route (meaning more time, and more fuel expended), and leaving a Soviet force in Arboga to threaten the TF's rear/MSR wouldn't be a great idea. One could also move south of the lake, but that would increase the possibility of a clash with Soviet 12th Tank Battalion. That leaves the option of trying to make a Thunder Run into Arboga, counting on speed, surprise, and firepower to overwhelm the Soviet defenders. A commander could conceivably consider that the least bad option.
The problem with the K3 units is that K3 — and Livregementets Husarer — isn’t a war organisation unit. It’s part of the peacetime training organisation. It trains three or so battalions of jägare. (I suppose Ligan’s research failed a bit.) That’s why I’m surmising that the designation equals three battalions.
Given the terrain, I wouldn’t surmise you need more than a company of them to blow a bridge and keep the combat engineers at bay. What are the rest of them up to in the meanwhile?
Again, though, why would that unit be at full strength in 2000? Aren't the jagare formations considered "elite"? After three years of war, are there really going to be that many fit, hard-charging young men and women left in the regular Swedish army- that it can spare- to cycle through the jagare training process and take to the field? In WW2, all of the "elite" airborne formations, Allied and German, reported that the quality of their replacement troops was markedly lower as the war went on. Heck, by 1945, fresh German paratroopers hadn't even made a training parachute drop yet! Some of them were only 15 or 16! And that's without the massive die offs that would most likely come with a nuclear war. I imagine that, by mid-2000, the jagare battalions would not be what they once were, both in terms of quantity and quality.
Bad plans happen. But usually there is a reason why a plan that turns out to be bad in 20/20 hindsight seemed reasonable at the time…
I must respectfully disagree with this conclusion. In the case of Market Garden, there were plenty as SHAEF and even on Monty's own staff (and certainly among the airborne commanders) that loudly pointed out the foolishness of trying to make and sustain a quick advance down a single highway, in wooded country. In other words, many realized it was bad at the time. There were also pletny of alternatives, like giving the supplies to Patton's army, in the Mozelle. Also, many in the OKW, including Rundstedt, warned Hitler that a large armored offensive through a forest (in winter), relying on just a couple of main roads, was doomed to fail. In both cases, the doomsayers were overruled. At the time, however, there were plenty of people in the know that realized that the plan was bad from the get-go.
In this scenario- Operation RESET- I'm sure some Swedish and American officers privy to the plan pointed out the flaws, for whatever reasons- politics, logistics, poor intelligence, hubris,
all of the above- they were overruled and the plan described in the SH was approved. It happens, IRL. It could happen in Twilight 2000 4e Sweden.
You are bringing up a lot of thought and rationalisation that I believe needs to make it into the text a lot more explicitly.
I can definitely do that in the narrative. The main reason I didn't do so in the first draft, is that the original v1 Death of a Division doesn't delve into that kind of stuff- there's no mention of the operation's objectives, no judgment regarding the US 5th ID's commander's decision-making as the battle unfolded. As a critical reader, I would have appreciated that sort of commentary, so there's certainly merit in adding it here.
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