Mounted infantry shooting

[duff]

Would it be hard to add a flag to vehicles allowing the main weapon of a mounted infantry unit shoot?
The main use here would be to better capture cavalry - rifles fire and they move at speed when they are mounted, little or no shooting from the mounts when they dismount.
also, some APCs specifically allow mounted infantry to fire through loopholes which would be nice to include as well.

[Mobhack]

Mounted infantry that get shot at, are effectively dead meat, as with cavalry. The only purpose one may have for mounts, is to quickly move some infantry to a dismounting zone while under cover of woods, or perhaps darkness.

So adding rifles to the mounts is not going to affect them since the infantry will fall off the mounts on receiving fire. Now that is how they use their rifles - ie from the ground, where its safer, not sitting up on a great big lump of (soon to be) dog food.

As for APC firing ports - just shout "Pew! Pew!" to yourself, if your APC are within a hex or so of the enemy. That will have the same sort of effect that ports had in real life.

[troopie]

Koevoet used to do that all the time. They would rush up to the Swaps, weapons blazing, horns blaring, music thumping (at least Frans Conradie die) and terrify the terrs. They frightened the Swaps, but didn't kill very many. They burned off more ammunition than anything else.

troopie

[scorpio_rocks]

I believe that the only troops ever trained to fight from their vehicles were early war panzergrenadiers - they quickly stopped doing it and emphasised quick transition between travelling in vehicles and fighting on foot.

Many vehicles, to this day, are provided with "firing ports" although most forces do not use them - the British always remove the ports and add extra armour (eg mastiff) as they believe there is NO tactical benefit of passengers firing from the vehicle.

[duff]

So why have the cavalry units as they are?
If the best representation of WWII cav is the Dismounted cav unit and mounts to move them around, why have cav at all?
If the "shooting from horseback" units do have a place in the game, my question stands - would it be hard to have either mounts get more shooting when the troops mount up or let the mounted unit shoot?

[Mobhack]

Originally Posted by duff

So why have the cavalry units as they are?
If the best representation of WWII cav is the Dismounted cav unit and mounts to move them around, why have cav at all?
If the "shooting from horseback" units do have a place in the game, my question stands - would it be hard to have either mounts get more shooting when the troops mount up or let the mounted unit shoot?

There is mounted cavalry because SSI did it that way, many moons ago.

There is dismounted cavalry because we gave the OOB designers the option, probably a decade back or so.

Some folk probably like them the original way, others will like the mounted infantry + mounts. Same with the motorcyclists - there is now the same choice. So some OOB designers have given the end user the choice by providing both sorts of formation.

Me - I use neither of them, unless I want to buy a cheap unit to find enemy MGs when in the attack. Since they are hard to hide, large tempting targets.

If I want to shift infantry, I buy some APC, trucks even - if you can get a covered approach to the debussing point - or just let them ride on tanks.

The only time I would see myself using animal transport really, especially for guns, is if it is a scenario that was made with them. Cavalry was quite obsolete by the end of WW1.

[duff]

Fair call about them being a "niche" item, and that's probably a good enough reason to leave them alone. I'm playing a Russian long campaign which brought cav for recon to the front of my mind.

[Imp]

Strangely enough I have rarely used Cavalry till recently but have being playing a campaign where I have used them a lot.
Germans dismountable type & decided at the start I would buy an infantry company every battle with my support points.
As also decided I would be short on transport vehicles tried the Cavalry in the second battle & have used them 5 times now.
They can be very effective in European type terrain.
Can risk a quick run forward as scouts, pull them back though don't engage.
Move your force to intercept & cautiously try flanking with cavalry once engaged.
Main use is to close escape route & slaughter routed enemy infantry making for quick engagements.
Be wary of MGs & be ready to place smoke behind them if needed.
Had surprisingly few losses & very high kill ratios.
Slight cheat vs poles I sent one ATR rifle with them to be dropped in ambush position firing at range of 2-3, it had 18 kills in 3 battles!! Normally I am lucky if I kill anything with them.
They also proved very effective in a visibility 450m (9 hex) game sweeping in to add firepower to an area,
400m would have been easier as they don't have LMGs.
I have become quite fond of them.
Do not like using wagons though for transporting artillery they are so slow, that coupled with the short range of German mortars makes life very difficult when advancing.

[Suhiir]

I like mounted cavalry as scouts.
They're a bit slower then trucks/APCs but don't need to embark/disembark and can handle any passable terrain type.

[cbo]

Originally Posted by scorpio_rocks

I believe that the only troops ever trained to fight from their vehicles were early war panzergrenadiers - they quickly stopped doing it and emphasised quick transition between travelling in vehicles and fighting on foot.

I think it is the other way around. When the Panzergrenadiers aquired APCs, it was seen as transport only. Hence its early designation as "Gepanzerte Mannschaftkraftwagen" (litt. armoured motorvehicle for troops).
Combat experience from France in 1940 caused a re-evaluation of the armoured transport, initially resulting in the vehicle being re-named to "Schützenpanzerwagen" (SPW) and at the same time introducing mounted combat as one way of using the SPW ; in particular the ability to change between mounted and dismounted combat. By 1942, this had become doctrine and you will still see mounted combat performed in training films as late as 1944 with 1944 organization and 1944 equipment.

Just like tanks could dominate the battlefield in encounters against infantry with little or no anti-tank weaponry, so could the SPW. In particular when it followed up on a tank attack, where the tanks had engaged and destroyed the heavy weapons of the enemy and forced the infantry to the ground.

I think anyone familiar with German armoured tactics would recognize the focus on speed and firepower on which this SPW doctrine was based: Mounted infantry in SPWs and tanks working together, in some situations with the armour at the front and the mounted infantry following, in others the mounted infantry leading and the tanks following and in yet others dismounted infantry fighting with support from tanks and the weaponry on the SPWs.

It is also obvious, just as it is with German tactics in general, that this emphasis on speed and firepower could cause grievious losses when bumping into a solid defense supported by massive enemy firepower.
I suppose that the fighting in Italy and NW Europe rarely allowed the Germans to use their armoured formations to fight the way they were used to in the east and I only recall one incident during the fighting in the Ardennes were tanks, followed by mounted infantry tried to conduct such an attack - succumbing to US artillery fire (IIRC using airbursts, possibly by means of proximity fuzes).

But the fighting in the east more often allowed for the type of fluent fighting the SPW mounted infantry was intended to do.

But I think you are probably right in assuming that as the war progressed from mid-1943 onwards and particularily as it moved into more built-up areas and the more intensively cultivated farmland of central Europe, such methods became more difficult to use. And against the Western allies, it was probably even more difficult. But mounted combat stayed part of the Panzergrenadier curriculum to end, as far as I can tell.

What is perhaps surprising, is that the modern German Panzergrenadiers seems to follow the tactics of their ancestors to some degree, as German manuals even in the 2000s emphazise the ability to fight mounted as well as dismounted and the change between the two forms of combat as the charactertic of the arm.

There is a good write-up on this here: http://fkpg.de/wp-content/uploads/PzGren-ab-1945.pdf