Tanks, artillery, and armed vehicles are large and conspicuous and cannot be kept under cover at all times. There have to be motor pools and maintenance pools that will be clearly visible targets for bombing. Workshops cannot be concealed inside houses.Stas Bush wrote:Um... Metro Atlanta has a huge number of housing units and short of blowing up the entire conurbation, how will you ensure war materiel is destroyed? Nukes don't work that way, neither ordinary explosives. The US houses are basically carboard... they will be blown away and inhabitants will die (with the occupying soldiers, but still). It may also work for other towns near Atlanta Metro, as the Germans may likely have more men than these small towns have population.
In which case their forward elements (mechanized and parachute divisions, plus any railmobile detachments) get snapped up in short order. Everything else is encircled and starved out.By leaving most soldiers in the Atlanta conurbation, the Germans have a steady stream of reinforcements. If you nuke them in the open once, they will certainly stick to towns and not get out in the open (something that should be clear to them: even in their universe going out in the open was stupid since the US had thousands of bombers, and it would be dumb in 1940's USA much less now).
Honestly, you'd probably have to fire hundreds of V2s at an airfield to even put a meaningful number of craters in the runway, and craters are easy to fill with modern construction equipment.There aren't that many air force units in Georgia. The rest can be considered lower priority targets. The biggest city is already theirs; other large cities are not within reach. The only thing left is airfields. Not sure if there are many in a 300 km circle outside Atlanta either...
The historical Wehrmacht has lots of horses, but killing them cuts into their ability to move supplies on the tactical level. The napkinwaffe Wehrmacht may or may not have lots of horses- I'm not sure.No, if nukes fly they will likely want to give up, that's true. However, there are some things that may give them enough food during the first month - horses, for example. There's no way they can feasibly feed 2,7 million horses. But they can quickly start killing them to feed themselves.
I didn't mean "run into" literally. The problem here is that these trains are just there and cannot easily be removed from the tracks to allow another train to pass them. It would be comparatively trivial to sabotage tracks in front of advancing German trains just by parking a lot of rolling stock on them.Steam trains don't run faster than 80 kph anyway, and they mostly navigated railways in Eastern Europe where running into something is a minor threat; a bigger is being blown up by the partisans: either the train, or the track, or both.Simon_Jester wrote:It'd suck to be sending a horde of troops down the track on troop trains only for them to run into a massive coal train blocking the tracks.
Field formations I said. As in, "in the field." Attacks on urban centers may not happen, but they don't have to for the US to win this one. Ultimately, there is absolutely no way that the US will win by defeating seventeen million individual riflemen in house to house firefights; they have the population base to do so in theory but it won't happen. What will happen is that the Germans will either get surrounded in Festung Atlanta and surrender for lack of food, or surrender for fear of nuclear attack.Would it? I mean, would the US really accept a dead civilian for each three dead Germans? Warning shots and trying to catch them in the field sure might happen, but going all out?Simon_Jester wrote:With the sheer number of German soldiers involved, this will become obvious fairly quickly. I expect nuclear attacks on the German field formations within two or three days, personally.
The process of surrounding Festung Atlanta (and the speed with which it can be starved out) is greatly improved by using nuclear weapons against the predictable corps and army-sized infantry columns the German foot horde will send out to extend its perimeter.
Well, V-1 attacks occurred over a period of about 1-2 years; even firing at the maximum possible rate with all available trained launch crews, I doubt they could run through more than a few percent of the available stockpile before the launch rails were destroyed. Moreover, those V-1s would be aimed at single, predictable, fixed targets, and would come in one at a time separated by wide intervals... and they fly low and slow enough that you could literally sit on your roof with a Strela and blow them out of the sky as they passed, stopping only when you ran out of rockets or got bored.Simon_Jester wrote:Heh, good point on the rails. I guess they will have to keep them coming during the day.
Thing is, the advancing armored formations will be targeted in the open field; if they fort up they will be encircled, and will wither on the vine rather rapidly, especially because every night the surrounding US forces can basically sneak up to them with impunity and murder them in the dark due to the night vision disparity.Outposts, if anything, should be set up inside urban zones; that will provide them with necessary human shields and make fighting a lot more difficult.
That can be countered in Festung Atlanta by sheer numbers of guard posts and lighting systems, but it can't be countered by a panzer division in the field.
They don't have to; they have one squadron of tanks maneuvering back and forth on the front, kept fully informed of all German movements in the area by overwhelmingly superior reconnaissance. The US units will nearly always be in the right place to counter a German attack, and have such tactical superiority that armored offensives are futile because the attacking tanks will be destroyed from ranges at which the Germans can barely reply with their most accurate weapons.Since we are talking about a lot of manpower but small distances, it will be quite unlike Barbarossa where fighting could happen in the vast open fields 100 km away from any town. And if there is no perimeter, then it is even more dangerous. If the US cannot control its frontline adequately, this means Germans can sneak into places where no US military are present. Spreading all the tanks into a thin encirclement line isn't how the military works, they cannot put an Abrams every kilometer apart on the border of Georgia and leave the rest of the place totally undefended.
Or by helicopters which are just OH GOD NO territory for the Wehrmacht.
This is a relevant concern. I think, given the wording of the OP, we almost have to assume serious Wehrmacht overcrowding in and around Atlanta.Hmm. If formed units are appearing in large enough places, then certainly they would appear both inside and on the border of the Atlanta metro area; they might even fill all of Georgia to the brink and still have a density that barely allows divisions to move together (I have to check that though) due to the formation requirements.
Because things like V1 launch rails and large radar installations fall into that category. Basically, if the Wehrmacht lacks any hardware not conveniently vehicle-portable, that limits them quite a bit in a few areas.Not really. Why? The buildings they do not get.Simon_Jester wrote:I mean, do they have deep bombproof shelters appearing pre-dug out of nothingness?
That was with one thousand missiles fired. 500 of them (roughly) land within a circle roughly 115 square kilometers in area; the other 500 land outside that area, up to eighteen kilometers from the target.4-5 missiles per square km with 5000 missiles? Now I'm sure military installations aren't that big, and 1000 square kilometers is quite a lot of area.Simon_Jester wrote:Actually, with a six kilometer CEP that means half the missiles land within a circle six kilometers in radius around the target, or an average of about four to five missile strikes per square kilometer. This is not enough to deliver a saturation bombardment attack against... well, pretty much anything.
The point is that the actual target is unlikely to be destroyed, and that while there will be some level of random destruction inflicted on everything in the vicinity (such as a large military base), it will be scattered and incomplete. Only by luck would this kind of barrage inflict any decisive damage.
Runways and hangars are vulnerable, but only some hangars will get hit, and a big hole in a runway can be filled surprisingly quickly if you can get a bulldozer into the area. Aircraft may be able to take off anyway; you can't disable a three thousand meter runway with a crater 200 meters from one end. And again, the locations of hits are random, there is no way to ensure that you actually shoot what you want to shoot. You're as likely to hit the latrines as you are to hit the control tower.If runways are damaged, aircraft is useless as it can neither land nor take off. If barracks are hit killing all tanksmen, tanks are useless. So it depends on just what and how is damaged. I am thinking that hangars, airplanes and runways due to their large size and - in case of planes - poor resilience are going to suffer the greatest damage.Simon_Jester wrote: but the target itself is probably untouched.