Kaiserschlacht 1918 - German Assault Regiment

Okay the clock has turned full circle and its time to return to older projects. In this case the great war but we now moving onto the 1918 and the peace offensive. This reverses the roles at Cambrai with the Germans now on the offensive and the British defending

There has been some more thought on how to represent the subunits in the German Infantry Company and its evolution since I last posted on Cambrai.

To summarize as the war developed the Germans added more weapons to each company.  In May 1917, 2 MG08/15 Machine Guns are added  rising to 4 in September and 6 in February 1918. This represents at most a third of all squads are armed with machine guns.In August 1917, 2 Granatwerfer are added to each company by breaking up the battalions Granatwerfer group.

How to represent these developments. Part of this is due to the fact that the Germans do run a large platoon structure. Almost everybody runs a base 250 company usually divided into 4 platoons each of 60 men whereas the Germans run three platoons of 80. So that these additions are lost within these units being outnumbered by riflemen .  With a platoon level game such as command decision the Germans are at a disadvantage. The solution, is the creation of a weapons platoon as a repository of these special weapons. They will appears from May 1917 with the RoF improving as more weapons are being added.

This will also keeps the platoons as pure rifle armed units with a Rof of 1while stationary or close assaulting. This helps to highlight the development of Germans tactics into platoon sized stoss groups. While showing that they are lacking the resources to provide the number of  LMGs to create modern infantry tactics. Remember that veteran and elite troops also get a +1 to their RoF so can move and shoot also some stoss troops maybe armed as SMG stands.

So the battalion looks so

1x Command Stand
1x Minenwerfer
4x Infantry Companies

• 1x Command Rifle Stand
• 2x Rifle Stands
• 1x Weapons Stand

1x MG Company

• 3x MMG stands

Now how does this affect the trench garrison described earlier. Well the two will exist side by side for a while. Primarily this organization will apply only to attack divisions in 1918. Some units will probably be using this 1917 notably in big German attacks such as at Cambrai, Riga and Caporetto.

There thats it for the moment. This might be a good enough excuse to get some figures to do some testing.