Most of my time in Il2 has been as an Air-to-Air oriented pilot. During my time in TUSA, particularly as an operational and tactical level planner,
my appreciation and interest in ground attack or "Strike" increased significantly. Maps without ground-orientated strike objectives become stale and repetitive,
losing their military focus.
In the past year, I have spent some time on servers improving my ground attack skills, particularly Jabo/Fighter-Bomber close-air
battlefield support oriented missions.
As a military professional and avid student of military history and operations, I've come to notice discontinuities in the construction
of "historical maps" and the expectations of some members of the community in the construction and layout of ground attack
objectives.
Over the last several years their has been increased interest in "historically exact" map construction and "reinactment" style events.
Many of these efforts have fallen short of their intended purpose and resulted in varying degrees of frustration with Il2 flyers. It is my
intent here to explore the limits of the Il2 simulation in recreating believable and accurate ground battles which are the basis for the aircraft interactions
that we experience, both in ground attack and air-to-air.
Many map builders, will go to great lengths to replicate their understanding of historical battles and engagments, with respect to
aircraft types and models, bases and even loadouts (which can be controlled to a degree by Il2-Server Commander). Details as
seemingly small as which grade aviation gas was deployed to a theatre (controlling availablity of aircraft models such as P-38L Late/
P-47D late and 25lb Spitfire IX) are commonly addressed and inspected by both map designers and users.
On the other hand, the location, selection and disposition of ground objects is very rarely inspected or compared to historical reality.
This is the purpose of this thread.
Have you ever noticed that on many maps that you can achieve very high scores by completing certain ground-attack objectives,
particularly when compared to an Air-to-Air sortie?
Take a flight on a typical dogfight server in which you are focused on air-to-air objectives. If you are skilled and very successfull, you
might return to base with a "bag" of three fighters. This will yield a score of 300. Now, take the same server and fly a successful
ground attack mission and your score may be over 1000. Case in point:
That score is from just one ground attack sortie on a server that I love to fly on. Now let's
examine the target placement in that mission:
We can see a column of trucks, half-tracks and other vehicles proceeding in close-spacing
down a paved road with Sherman tanks deployed at a spacing of 5 to 10 meters apart,
to either side of the road.
More detail:
We notice from this view that some of the half-tracks are towing artillary. We can also see
in the distance, the attack objective for the Red (U.S.) forces - the small town up ahead
(in this case north east).
Along another road (unpaved) just to the east of the first U.S. column, and due south
of the objective, is a similar formation of vehicles, bearing down on the town, to the
north of these units.
In the town, examining the defending German forces, we see a truck, some artillary,
mobile AA and assault guns looking in the direction of the second U.S. column in the
distance. The 2nd U.S. column is visible along the dirt road to the south of the town,
about 2,200 meters from the head of the American Column
A little further back in the town are a variety of "soft" German units, trucks,
ambulances, SdKfz 6/10 and towed artillary, all very closely spaced,
at 5 to perhaps 10 meters.
In attacking enemy vehicles at such close spacings, multiple-bomb drops - executed
rapidly down the road, in the direction the column is traveling will produce
results like this FW-190F8 attack (same as A5/A6 U17):
Then guns and cannons can clean up the rest.
Producing:
Subsequent attacks on formation like these should be accomplished by choosing
targets aligned perpendicular to the road as depicited in this sequence:
So now that we've illustrated how to achieve 700, 800, 1000+ point per ground attack
sortie with respect to current generation online maps - let's now ask the question.
Is this realistic? Is this the type of target that would typically be encountered in WWII?
How were armor, transport and artillary deployed by different nations during WWII?
We will examine these issues in future posts.
S~
Gunny
Black 2 TX Flight Leader
