Profile of coh2player

I take this back, it's not as good as the witcher 3 or does it look like it. It's not that good graphically or detail- in fact it looks dated for 2015. The story/gameplay hopefully will compensate.

The Witcher 3 looks ALOT like Fallout 4. I think the tech is not too different. The Witcher 3 is amazing, but the gameplay is repetitive.

^
Ah, there goes your couch. The book is 13 pounds- that's a big shipping fee.

I would also recommend Zhitomir-Berdichev. It's very COH2-era ish.

The Armored Campaign in Normandy (Napier) is a good compilation of all major armored actions in one book. I wish it was more detailed, though.

I read Tomb of the PzWaffe- it was pretty good but too short of details.

What I'm really fatigued of is the whole dick measuring contest caused by professional sports (lol.) and the scattershot nature of the literature- I find that people's conceptions based generally based around theorycrafting/biases (pro-allied or axis, their own biases or the authors) as people use the same sources they downloaded from the internet..there are entire forums of tank heads that are so narrowly focused on armor and generalized sources that it resembles autism to me.

The whole 'Duel' series is an attempt to profit off of this, and is rather patronizing.

Zaloga, for instance, has an rather attritionist (as opposed to, systematic) mindset in his thinking and this leads to many questionable conclusions. His chapters about the Eastern Front in his 'top tanks' are pretty bad and blatantly shows that he is not well read on the subject.

Certain things like war experience cannot be easy theorized- eventually one has to get down to reading EVERYTHING operational on the subject in order to get general opinion statements and even these are liable to change as new things are read. It actually defies the theories being tossed around by Osprey & co.. about kill ratios, operational readiness, and such.

Frankly, by way of NARA, its been available even a good deal earlier. If people had taken the time to actually read up on the Panzerlage, they would have seen that the Panther was not on average less (or more) reliable than either the Tiger or the PIV after the teething issues had been worked out.
In general, its quite astounding just how underused (or selectively used) even the completely open German archives still are even in Western historiography, not to mention just about everything that came out of the Soviet Union/Russia until not long ago.

Roughly speaking, the Panther was around 20-25% in 1.PzA, 4.PzA during the defeats in the Ukraine 1943/44. The Tiger Is in the two armies were not much better. PzIV were @ ~45% and Stug were @ 55%.

The german doctrinal methods up to the end of 42 were heavily biased/optimized towards maneuver warfare (and operational/tactical approaches), short ranged thinking, and fighting "on the fly". The German military was very biased towards developing operations/tactics but not developing strategic capabilities. The training of their general staff reflected this. It was a critical weakness among some strengths.

The mature soviets were very strategically/command oriented and had some of their own (quite disturbing) defects as well, partly due to the excesses of soviet communism. They were very biased towards optimizing strategy and operations while neglecting tactics. I find the distinction between the two opponents very interesting.

What has always stood out for me in 44/45 was the noticeable mismatch between allied material resources/equipping and their ability to generate military power. There were likely to have been tactical/operational defects in US/UK methods that were smoothed over by vastly superior force deployments and victory. Basically the allies were not resource efficient either in the air or on the ground. Their system was biased towards reducing short-term casualties which also bore noticeable disadvantages in operations and tactics. (throwing the baby out with the bathwater)

The biggest ?? with such an alt history is the how the Allied infantry would try to advance against much stronger enemy ground forces than the wehr.