How do you deal with French tanks
 

Hi

I'm playing a German campaign and I have encounter French armour forces. I have tough time dealing with them.
My tanks with 3.7cm canon can scratch only once in a while and even that only on small distances. Their side armour isn't much thinner then frontal.
4.7cm PaK works good, but only below 500m and are still useless against Char B1 bis.
JPz I the same as above and it can zero on target it's usually destroyed with response.
Sometimes I am able to assault some of them with infantry (if playing against AI), but my infantry lacks any AT weapons.
I can buy a section of those expensive 8.8cm Flaks, but they help only on very open terrain. (And too many of them don't seem realistic as a support of infantry company)

So, any suggestions?

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

To me it was the same. The French tanks are very strong by the Germans in that year. So bought my main fueza infantry AT weapons. Is most effective in wooded areas. A couple of guns of 88 to open areas in France.
Also disabling the option preferences heavy tank. Thereby avoid being attacked by hordes of tanks indestructible.

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

Avoid them.
If you REALLY need to fight them, Jpz is your best chance, move light panzers around to draw fire, then use your Jpz to kill the strongest armour, a good thing is that the french have mostly poor AP rounds, so you can take some long range fire with your panzers...

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

1) Use artillery and/or heavy weapons to suppress and button up the enemy tanks.
2) Destroy all the lighter tanks first.
3) Isolate each heavy tank using smoke and terrain.
4) Mass panzer fire at the heavies, at least 5:1 but more is better. While the german guns may not destroy, they are likely to damage the target.
5) If necessary (crew doesn't abandon or tank is not mobility killed), move a JPz I or a 4.7cm ATG to within 300m and fire into the weakest face (usually rear).
6) All else fails, close assault with troops having grenade bundles or, preferably, engineers with flame throwers or satchel charges.

Hope this helps,
Brian

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

Brian gives very good tips,
Also keep in mind,the Char B-1 is very slow,and the AI tends to be reckless with armour thus they may not fire with accy or as often at higher speeds.
Might make turns a little higher and hide your faster tanks and ambush them to get a mobilty kill, and finish them with infantry that have the G.ladung.

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

To me, the infantry G. Landung never failed me. But I also use JPZ. And obviously some tanks to finish.

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

JPZ's have the higher caliber longer gun,if you keep out of range since they have poor armour.
Still Char's are tough to bust.
Somewhat OT,i'm pretty sure 88's were not commanly used as AT guns in France until the desert war with the Afrika Corps.

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

Depends on what you mean by comman use. Rommel had a battery available at the Battle of Arras. I'm pretty sure batteries were attached to other units as well, expressly for use in the anti-tank role. Problem is, the 88 FlaK is a rather large awkward piece of equipment unlike smaller ATGs. This means good visibility and favorable terrain was required for their use. Nearly impossible to use in the advance, hence the experiment with a small number of truck mounted 'portee' versions in France.

At some point there was a gun carriage for the 88 that allowed for firing without a fully deployed setup, although at lower accuracy and ROF. I don't think that version is in the game though. Anyhow, I find the use in game of the 88 to be highly situational, at best you'll get one or two turns of fire before you'd better pack it up and run just ahead of the arriving artillery shells. Redeploying to use a second time in a battle is difficult.

Brian

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

Rommel i'm sure used 88's in France,he saw thier worth as a big gun against armour but they were mostly not used as an ATG,very hard to get them down to a level firing position,until the gun carriage was redesigned and AP shells replaced the flak shells, that they became a more less dedicated ATG's we know of in No.Africa.
So i agree they were used in France yes,but not "expressly in a ATG role" as you say,more as a last ditch ATG with the inferiour flak rounds and mostly in the AAA role.

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

Hmmm.. I was under the impression that 88's attached to Wehrmacht were for use in the AT role. Be that as it may, even if dual role, Guderian's XIXth Motorized Army Corps had 3 batteries of Luftwaffe 88's attached as well as a company of the portee version.

Looking at the parent organization (Gruppe von Kleist), there was one battery of attached Luftwaffe 88's per division basically. For comparison, there was a platoon of self propelled 47mm ATGs per division. In Gruppe von Kleist, there were at least as many attached Luftwaffe 88's as JPz I's.

Slicing down to the typical battalion level for the game, using Gruppe von Kleist as a model gives about half an 88 or a bit less than half a JPz I per battalion, so yeah uncommon in one way but not any less common than other typically used units.

Confusingly, at Arras, the 88's Rommel employed probably came from PzAbwAbt 525 which was a Werhmacht unit with 88mm FlaK guns *not* a Luftwaffe attachment although there were also Luftwaffe 88's attached to his parent organization :confused:.

Another part of the picture I'm missing is the number of towed 4.7cm ATGs available. From the data I've been looking at it seems the towed ATG battalions of Panzer divisions in 1940 may have had some but most infantry divisions had only 3.7cm ATGs. I'm not sure if it would be something like one platoon of 4.7cm ATGs per towed ATG company in a Panzer division or ???

I guess the suprising part of this is that the JPz I's were as rare as the 88's.

Brian

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

In your earlier WiKi reference it clearly states that Rommel in the battle of Arras, was forced to bring 88's to deal with heavier British tanks,what ammo did those 88's have?
Not AT but Flak rounds most likley:)

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

AP. The first use of the 88 as an ATG was in the Spanish Civil War.

However, they were generally specialist AA weapons under their own command. Their commanders did not like letting them go for ATG purposes, since they got stripped of superfluous stuff like the AAA director kit, etc. And since they were great big things, they were dug into pits for protection and concealment that made them impossible to recover when the defended positions got overrun.

In any case - once the 75L48 and the captured 76.2mm ex-Russian ATG (towed or mobile on the Marders etc) started appearing, then the requirement to use 88s as dedicated anti tank guns more or less disappeared. Those guns did the same job, but were less high profile in the towed variant.

As for France 1940, not very hard really. Drench the French infantry with HE fires, also covering the tanks to button them up, break tracks etc. "Force Broken" is based on all the elements on table - so if the majority of the enemy infantry are doing a runner, then the armour will be getting unhappy too.

Deal with any of the lighter tanks first, if you can - the only ones to look out for are those with the long 37mm. Char Bs are extremely slow - so if they are somewhere you don't need to go, you can generally ignore them for now. The Somua is the French tank to treat with most respect.

If you have to deal with a pesky tank or two - keep it suppressed under mortar fire, or smoked off as your mobile AT assets stalk it. Your 15CM SiG should be the weapons of choice for dropping presents on French heavy armour when detected away from your troops. Big bangers that are quite likely to break track, and which have large blast areas that sweep escorting infantry away, and that make craters that slow the things down even more, or can drop a wooden bridge out from under them - a very satisfying trick to pull off :)!

Since they are so slow then you often have them trundling up to retake V-hexes, eventually. So you can prepare a reception committee for these. Keep them under a hail of indirect fire - to button them up, and to drive off any accompanying infantry, since you want them to be blind and so less likely to spot or hit your tank killers, if they actually did manage to spot them.

If close assaulting with infantry - hose any unbuttoned tank down with rifle, LMG, MMG fires as preparation. The heavy infantry with 50mm direct fire mortars are useful for rattling their cages too - they have a decent warhead size - a few plinks with these can make an uneasy tank change to "retreating" status (hover your mouse over the target), which greatly increases its vulnerability to close assault. Only once fully prepared (and any companions that might give covering fire to the target also suppressed) - do your inf-assault teams go in.

Even if your infantry have no specific AT weaponry bar hand grenades, an assault can make a tank's status go to retreating. It does not matter then if the riflemen are in retreat if you have another asset able to take advantage of that - another inf-assault, or you can motor an AFV up close to pot the retreater "up the kilt" at point-blank range (if there is no other armour able to cover the target). The 37mm tank guns are fine at dealing with a retreating Char, since even if they do not penetrate a side shot can get a track break result, and when that happens a demoralised crew will usually bail, either immediately or in the morale phase at the end of his turn - or even surrender to anyone within 1 hex.

Cheers
Andy

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

The French tanks had more armor, but they were too heavy and slow. What they had was against the tactics used. Tanks used only for support. Had few armored units.
With respect to sp option is to disable the Heavy Tank AI because if not come over a Char bis herd and become unstoppable. A combination of Pz III medium tanks, tank destroyers and infantry AT ammunition enough. In cases of defense can appeal to the 88.
Speaking of Rommel, he used them enough to destroy bunkers.

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

Roman heavy tank makes little diffrence AFAIK do alawys play with it off as AI seems to buy better that way. All it does in last few passes is make the AI favour buying armour over its other choices so you might get a few extra tanks instead of it using those points on something else. And I do mean a few will make little diffrence to total no of tanks but seems in my view to give a more piecemeal setup than tank heavy off.

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

AI tank heavy tries to buy a tank company more often - which means that the AI requires to have the points available to do so. It will sometimes then buy platoons of grunts, when it would normally buy companies of them. That does not really save that many points though. Therefore, it is really only noticeably different when points are rather high. It is not going to make any real difference on a thousand or so points battle. It may do on a 10000+ points AI buy.

In any case, the regular AI buy is rather "tank heavy" for most real WW2 situations..

Cheers
Andy

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

Long time no start a long campaign with Germany. I'm playing more PBEM. But remember that once I tried it and if there was a difference.
I'll try again a long campaign. Perhaps with the experience I gained at this time do not be afraid to Char bis.:D

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

I started a long campaign with Germany. I activated the option in preferences IA heavy tank. I put 3000 points of purchase for me and xxx for the IA.
So now I've counted more than 15 tanks 9TP and 7TP Polish, not counting tanks tksm and tks. I'm on turn 10 (of 40). I have 7 panzer III, 5 panzer II and 5 panzer Ib.
All tanks from Poland are in my battle:D.
Tomorrow I will try but I'm sure if I put out the option heavy tank, do not appear so many tanks.
9TP and 7TP tanks equal or exceed the PZ III 1 vs 1 battle. So were in reality. I read a few 7TP put out of action for more than 20 panzer :cold:. They had no decisive action because they were not numerous. That is a separate chapter.
Good night

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

The things that can be exploited is their fairly mediocre morale ratings and the fact that they tend not to get as many main gun shots off as your crews will.

Shell them mercilessly. If you can get them near dense terrain, infantry assault works fine. It might take a few attempts, but it's doable. Gebalte Ladung help a bit. Engineers help a lot.

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

Don't forget anti-tank rifles, if you have some around - they seem to be excellent for making tanks button up. Just don't expect them to do lots of damage on French tanks (except the very lightest ones) though every now and then they can manage to immobilise the odd tank with a lucky shot.

Speaking of immobilisation, sufficient artillery pounding can also cause a tank here and there to get immobilised, meaning that you can leave dealing with it until later (unless the crew decides to bail out first). And the slow speed of many of the French tanks makes them relatively easy targets for artillery, once you get your forward observer on a good spot.

If you are playing with the German paras, then take advantage of their recoilless rifles. The 7.5 cm version (available from early 1940) might not be particularly impressive, but the 10.5 cm model (available from June 1940 onwards) has a very nasty HEAT round available - though the ammo supply itself is rather limited, so you probably want to have them engaging the enemy at range and then falling back to reload.

Very good advice,however still i don't believe 88's had much effect in France,remember Gerry used used Blitzkrieg tactics against the French,who had the mindset of a "static" warfare,and spread thier slow armour, doubt they could field a few Chars,where mostly scattered. with better odds,the nod should go to the germans.
In Africa it was a different situation with the Brits.

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

I recently played a campaign game against france and they actually had two of those super heavy tanks (Char 2C I think?). I immobilised one with artillery, but the other one just kept driving and killed one PII. However, being so damn slow it didn't reach any objective before the round ended ;)

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

In a recent campaign as the french, i had some of these in as support, i just drove them around until the game ended as german shells bounced off it's armor :)
There are some nice toys to play around with in the french OOB.

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

You may find this post useful my attempt at taking on the French AAR starts with them straight off skipped over Poland. Mobhack gave some very useful advice in it which allowed me to prevail. Found they were surprisingly hard guys to get to route if remember correctly. Chars were not the biggest worry as a rule was those Somanas or whtever there called.
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=41834

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

I've been having some fun in France lately with a company of light panzers from 2nd PzDiv. The company is composed of 6 Pz Ib's, 9 Pz IIc's, and 7 Pz IIIe's. Infantry suppport is provided by a kradschutzen platoon and a pair of spaehtruppe. Needless to say the Somua's are hairy and even the H-35's aren't exactly easy

Using smoke and terrain to set ambushes, infantry close assault to suppress, and point blank fire from PzII's and PzIII's seven Somua's and five H-35's were destroyed at a cost of two PzII's. Didn't run into any Char's this battle but if necessary would deal with them the same general way, would just take longer.

I'd have loved to have used air and arty to go after the French tanks but with a core force drawn from a panzer division, those assets were needed to deal with enemy infantry.

I thought I'd throw this in because most of the ancedotes I see are for infantry heavy forces (3 : 1, infantry : armor), but in the schwerepunkt of an armor offensive that ratio is reversed. Another word for infantry heavy is 'penny packeting', as Guderian would put it, wasting the armor by dispersing it amongst the infantry rather than using it in concentration.

Brian

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

You have to do what the Germans did, using French ATG, the 47mm ATG of the German OOB is french and teh Germans quicly learned how to use it..

Planes, can wipe the French tanks, a German player should always be allowed to have tons of planes and the French very few AA.
You can also use 88mm guns or 105mm field guns.
this is how the German did.
An infantry assault is near useless if you are attacking, as a German you are supposed to attack.


To give you an idea I am playing a pbem battle with 11500 points of French Vs 20000 points of Germans, the German side can have up to 30 planes!!! and i have only 6 AA gun for a max size map.
I am doomed. :D

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

As the ROF of tanks now seem to be standardised across all the OBs all french (and all other) tanks with 37mm and 47mm guns now have a ROF of 8. Combined with their heavy armour and now having one-man turrets that operate just as well as two/three-man ones this makes them virtually unstoppable, + they are much cheaper than the german ones aswell. Try advancing a german armoured column against a french one, good luck trying to get close enough for the germans to get kills unless in woods or limited terrain, the germans will get machinecannoned to death at long range by the french 37mm and 47mm guns.:(

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

Oh Really........??



Tony........ what is this "now have a ROF of 8" nonsense ?. The change to ROF 8 for those tanks goes back AT LEAST 7 years and was implimented some time between DOS v5 and DOS v7 ( between 2002 and 2004 ).


These comments are a BIT strange given EVERYTHING you are complaining about has been EXACTLY the same way for at least 7 years and you were part of the playtesting team at the time. You're making it sound like this is a recent change and it most certainly is not.

IDK how many players have managed to make it though the French Campaign as the Germans in the last 7 years and managed to advance but I'll bet it's quite a lot. If they were stopped cold by the French "Invicibles" we'd have heard about it before now


Don

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

Hi all,

I've been skulking this thread for some time as France 1940 is of great interest to me.
In the past I've been hesitant to play many games in this theater because the earlier panzers are not very enticing nor are the strange allied counterparts. However, this thread has motivated me to do some experimenting.

The French tanks seem to be historically accurate. I am not a historian nor am I an expert so you may dismiss my opinion at will. Basically, as previously discussed, the German tanks (PzMk I, II, III and the IV support version) were not capable of destroying the Char b1 bis or Somua. The Germans succeeded in France through superior combined arms tactics. For the most part they simply bypassed the French armor. France fell in about six weeks with the operation lasting from May 10, 1940 until June 22, 1940.

A great documentary about the early tanks can be found on youtube at:

http://youtu.be/4aNKw3dbwoM

That being said I would like to mention a curiosity that I discovered in the Crescendo of Doom rulebook. Those familiar with Steel Panthers are likely knowledgeable about this board game.
In a special section governing the usage of French tanks:

"Although easily the most heavily armored tank of its time, the Char B had an Achilles heel in the form of an engine grill on the left side which was easily penetrated by AP."
The game allows for critical hits diced against all shots traced through the LOS of this engine grill hexside.

The game also penalized the French tanks because of the aforementioned single man turret and the fact that these were radio-less vehicles.

I realize that this is not the Avalon Hill forum but this was just too interesting not to mention.

I had an absolute blast playing a mini-campaign against the French using Andy's suggestions. For those of you like me who've scoffed at the "primitive" early war tanks remember the ancient saying:

"A poor craftsman blames his tools.";)

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

Note: The Char B and Somua DID have radios. I read a table backwards.

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

the myth re the engine grille 'vulnerability' was based on a single action (see the wiki article on the Char B http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Char_B1).

If it really was a vulnerability then there would have been multiple reports of the tactic being used. As for example the Allied bouncing of a round off a Panther mantlet, down into the top of the driver compartment. That (rather desperate) tactic was used, and did work, and several documented examples do exist of its success - but we don't have too many reports of those who tried it and failed....

(The game's critical hit code covers the micro-details of such special situations well enough. There is therefore no need for a "Char B engine cover" rule or a "panther glacis ricochet vulnerability" one).

In reality, Char B formations were defeated by the Germans operationally rather than tactically - the panzer units bypassed head to head tactical (SP level) combat and got into the rear of formations where they obliterated the soft vehicles, especially the refuelling vehicles. If they tried to fight head to head vs the B1, they could get severely mauled (as detailed in that wiki article, with the example of a Char b killing 16 odds panzers in a short space of time).

If the game was operational level (division/corps counters) then the German panzers of 1940 running free round the French logistics zone could be seen as an early version (analogue) of the later Allied fighter-bombers, killing the effect of armour by cutting it's jugular (fuel). Panzer 2s do the truck-bashing role just as well as say, panthers would have. Actually, P2s are probably better at that job.

But the game is tactical, and any adverse fuel and ammo logistics situation is not modelled in any way. Fuel is unlimited, ditto ammo. So you have to fight against the enemy that is present, and every unit is full of bullets and beans.

IF something like that were modelled (and how?) then the German player would be laughing in France 40, or in the opening of Barbarossa (where the disorganised Soviet war machine basically had done it to itself - tanks stored in one city, their ammo in another, pre-war mechanical maintenance at pathetic levels, let's purge all the officers, etc).

But just imagine the situation for that same German player in 1944. Say he had spent a gazillion points on shiny Panther companies, then turns up for the game only to be told "As Allied Player I spent the same points on pre-game fighter-bomber interdiction, so of your 17 shiny panthers in each company, 6 will not appear on table due to interdiction, the remainder have only half the ammo, and fuel for just 10 turns movement, and my 3000 points spent on pre-game SEAD have deleted half your AAA assets too" ...

The early war German armour (including Barbarossa) was light armour, and it acted rather like land-based fighter bombers to get loose in the enemy rear. The good (for that era) command and control of these tanks (radios etc) allowed this sort of thing against a static adversary who was still in a WW1 linear fighting mentality. After all - the 'blitzkreig' was based on Fuller's 'Plan 1919', which was designed as a method to rupture WW1 trench lines.

But the 'blitz' needed this static-passive adversary to allow it to dance around such a sluggish opponent. By the later war, even the Russians had enough radio/C&C etc to nip off such thrusts. Then the Germans went for heavy tanks to slug it out head-to-head, not the little "tracked fighter bombers" that specialised more in getting into the transport & logistical area and shooting the heck out of supply troops and rear HQs.

NB - the Sherman was also a design that was doctrinally aimed at the "tracked fighter bomber" role. It was highly reliable on long moves on its own tracks - by design. It was not designed to be a toe-to-toe slugger. The USA saw the Tank Destroyer arm as the boys who would deal with enemy armour in thier doctrine, while the shermans and mech infantry did a 'blitz' into the enemy end zone after the infantry and arty had blasted a hole. But by the time they arrived, bar rare occasions (race across France after the breakout for example, and perhaps some actions in Tunisia) - the front was not amenable to 'blitz' since the opponent was no longer passive-static (WW1 trench mentality) as in 40/41. Note also that the SU tended to use its Sherman formations in this deep exploitation role (the vehicles inherent reliability was a major factor in such use).


Cheers
Andy

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

I hope that I'm not kicking a dead horse here but I have a question.

From the manual:
"France really was not in a good state for the fight in terms of national morale, especially so after the outflanking of the Maginot Line, it is best to have their Troop Quality low, 65 or so if you are using 75 or 80 for Germany (1940 national characteristics reflect this). However some units were significantly better than average, so you may prefer to play against elites, such as De Gaulle's 4e DCR, or the excellent Colonial troops such as the Chasseurs Afriques."

Does this mean that when the campaign generator is set to 1940 that the French Troop Quality is set to the levels listed above automatically? Thanks.

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

This all i know,when setting a campaign,all prefs should be set at 100% or default for both sides, to simulate forces that would be used in that time period,ie: morale air points ect.
Other adjustments gets way too gamey IMO.

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

So long as have training on & troop quality at 100% yes.

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

Ok, I think I understand:


So basically the low French troop quality will be applied automatically as long as country training is on and troop quality shows XXX.

Additional Question:
Can each individual nations troop quality info be found somewhere and reviewed/edited? How about its AI purchasing habits?

Re: How do you deal with French tanks
 

No

and

No.

SPWW2 picklists are hardcoded as are the troop quality ratings which are actually two sets of numbers


Don