DAR: GE Long campaign - small core

[Brian61]

Originally Posted by Roman

Hello Brian. I'm a little late with this story. I'll be back at the beginning because I am interested in starting a long campaign with a force similar to yours.
It is admittedly difficult to achieve order of battle at the battalion and company.
What do you think of changing the panzer III by those of 38t and less Panzer IV.
As I write this I got an order of battle of the 3rd panzer division with the number of tanks per regiment. It is in Spanish.
http://www.panzertruppen.org/heer/panzer/3org.html
I had no panzer 38t.
Well. I'm still investigating

The only 38t's fielded in 1939 were with the 3rd Leichte Division and it had no PzI's, PzIII's or PzIV's. It did have one platoon of PzII's per company. If you wanted a bit more of a challenge perhaps try one of the light companies of the 1st Leichte Division or the 11th Panzer Regiment, both of which had PzII's and 35t's. I believe the 3rd Leichte became the 8th Panzer Division in 1940 and the 1st Leichte became the 6th Panzer Division at about the same time. I haven't done the research on the 11th Panzer Regiment, it probably was taken into one of the new 1940 panzer divisions. (just did a quick check, the 11th Panzer Regiment also became part of the 6th Panzer Division)

A good reference I've found for at least the early part of the war is http://niehorster.orbat.com/index.htm. Dr Niehorster keeps the site updated and slowly adds new data over the years. With Niehorster's data you have to do a bit of extrapolation and use it with other sources to get a tank platoon breakdown. One thing I find really nice about that site is the data on the other elements of a division, like how many and what size of artillery batteries were organic, the makeup of its recon forces, etc.

Hope this helps! Have fun and thanks for reading, hope to read of your experience