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The Crushing Debacles of June
Some battles are really close. Many are so close they are essentially inconclusive. Others are decisive victories, but the losing army manages to retreat in good order and pulls itself back together somewhere down the line. And then, there are those monstrous, crushing defeats from which there is no coming back -- defeats so totally cataclysmic, so utterly ruinous, that it seems as if Woden himself has strapped on a pair of steel-toed boots and is stomping on your nation's gonads.
This month's challenge focuses on three of the most decisive beat-downs in military history, three knockout punches so brutal and hard that the loser never really got back up again.
[spoiler=waterloo]#1: Waterloo (June 18, 1815)
After being defeated by an alliance comprising two-thirds of Europe in 1814, Napoleon abdicated and went to Elba for his first exile. Still, the fires of his enormous hubris (fanned no doubt by a number of opportunistic sycophants) continued to smoulder until they burst into open conflagration once again. Napoleon returned to France, put together a new army in some haste, and rushed north. The British were arriving in Flanders, and he wanted to rout them before they could link up with Prussian and Austrian armies.
The resulting Battle of Waterloo was a total catastrophe. For starters, Napoleon at least partially lost his gambit -- although the British and the Prussians were unable to link up prior to the battle, the Prussians were marching fast, and arrived before the end of the day. The heavy rain had turned the soil to mud, making impossible the battle of rapid maneouvre that Napoleon favoured. The French Corps arrived mostly on a single road. Hampered by poor logistics and slogging through the mud, they didn't manage to really get the battle underway until noon, when it should have started at sunrise. The centre reserves were bled off to assist the flanks, and when the attack in the centre finally began, there was almost no infantry and the main attack was pushed forward by cavalry alone. By late afternoon the French Army's energy was spent, and the British while having been badly mauled were not defeated. At that point the Prussians attacked and disaster was complete.
During the night, the French retreat turned into a rout. 30,000 had been killed, wounded, or captured, and another 15,000 deserted during the retreat as organization fell apart. The British cavalry allowed no rest. Every time the retreating French tried to stop to reorganize, the British attacked anew and prevented the reorganization. By the morning of the next day the army had ceased to exist as a fighting force. Napoleon abdicated for the second time only four days after the battle, and his Empire ceased to be.
CC map: Waterloo
[/spoiler][spoiler=The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot]#2 The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot (June 19-20, 1944)
Formally known as the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the battle was nicknamed The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot after American pilots marvelled at the great numbers of Japanese aircraft they shot down.
Numerically inferior to the American Navy right from the opening bell, the Japanese strategy in the Pacific was predicated on hitting hard enough and fast enough to force the Americans to consider peace before their full industrial might could be brought to bear. This gambit had already failed at Pearl Harbour, at Midway, and during the Solomons Campaign. The American advantage was growing rapidly, and if the Japanese were to have the decisive victory they craved, it had to be soon.
wikipedia wrote:From the very start of the conflict in December 1941, the Japanese war plan had been to discourage America by inflicting such severe and painful losses on its military that the public would become war weary and the American government would be convinced to sue for peace and allow Japan to keep her conquests in east and southeast Asia.[7] Though at a numerical disadvantage from the outset, and an industrial disadvantage that would add to that disparity over the course of time, the Japanese high command believed they could fight the U.S. Navy in a single, decisive engagement, known as the Kantai Kessen, which would allow them to defeat the Americans. However, their ability to fight and win such a battle was slipping away. Imperial Navy aircrew losses suffered over the course of the earlier carrier battles at Coral Sea and Midway, and the long Solomon Islands campaign of 1942-43, had greatly weakened the Japanese Navy's ability to project force with its carriers.[8]
On the 12th of June, 1944, the U.S. Navy began bombarding the Marianas, an obvious prelude to invasion, and the Japanese Navy was sent into action. On June 19th, the American ships were discovered and the Japanese dispatched land-based bombers from Guam. The Americans responded with a flight of Hellcats from the carrier Belleau Wood. In the ensuing action, 35 Japanese bombers were shot down versus the loss of 1 American Hellcat. This was a taste of things to come.
The Grumman F6F Hellcat was the replacement for the Navy's F4F Wildcats. It was powered by the same Pratt&Whitney 2800 power plant that drove the Army's P-47 Thunderbolt and the Marines' F4U Corsairs. Unlike the Thunderbolt and the Corsair, however, the Hellcat was designed from top-down to be a carrier-launched aircraft, and it executed naval operations flawlessly. The Wildcat had equaled most Japanese aircraft, but the Hellcat outclassed them totally.
During the day, the story was repeated over and over again. Twenty planes here, forty planes there. Always the same carnage. Three quarters of each Japanese squadron was shot down, with the loss of one or two Hellcats. When the Hellcats didn't get them, the anti-aircraft fire from the American ships did, using the new top-secret proximity-fused shells. What few Japanese planes managed to get through were not particularly accurate with their bombs. The battleship South Dakota was struck, but suffered only minor damage. No American ships were sunk. Meanwhile three Japanese carriers were sunk and three others damaged. Not all were sunk by aircraft -- two of the biggest kills were made by submarines. The Shokaku, proud veteran of the raid on Ceylon and the Battle of the Coral Sea went down, with the loss of 2,000 lives. The Taiho, Japan's newest and most advanced carrier, with an armoured flight deck almost impregnable to bombs, was sunk from below by the submarine Albacore.
After 36 hours of lopsided encounters, the Japanese had lost 5 ships, 600 aircraft, and 3,000 men. The Americans had lost no ships, 130 aircraft, and 150 men. 3,000 men lost seems like a small number of casualties for a major battle, but almost half of those were pilots or bombardiers, with the huge time investment required for their training. Essentially, Japanese Naval air power ceased to exist. Japan no longer had any realistic prospect for contesting American control of the Pacific. It was no longer a question of if Japan would be forced into a humiliating surrender, but when.
CC map: Oceania
[/spoiler][spoiler=operation bagration]#3: Operation Bagration (Initial operations June 22 to 28, 1944. Follow-up operations into late August)
Operation Bagration was a major Russian Offensive against the German Army. It is often subtitled "the destruction of Army Group Centre." Indeed, so brutal was the beating administered to the Germans that their single largest remaining element, Army Group Centre, ceased to exist as a fighting force.
By the summer of 1944, Germany was under siege. Italy had capitulated to the Allies, Romania and Hungary were on the way out, distant Japan was of no use whatsoever. Despite a massive outpouring of blood, the Germans had failed to secure all three of the three largest Russian cities -- Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Moscow -- and were on the defensive everywhere in the East. Meanwhile, the Western Allies had landed at Normandy. Nor were the war at sea or in the air going any better. The Allies ruled the skies and bombed Germany without mercy, and the one bright spot in the war, the submarine war in the Atlantic, wasn't so bright any more.
There were no longer enough planes or tanks to give any Army Group a decent offensive capability. More and more reliance was being put on static defenses manned only by infantry. Anticipating that the next great Russian offensive would be in the south, Hitler had ordered the lion's share of Army Group Centre's armour transferred to Army Group South. As always, Hitler was hopelessly inept at judging Allied plans. While his tanks rolled south, the Russians ignored the south and struck at the centre. With 7,000 Russian tanks arrayed against 200 German tanks, the mobile war was almost instantly lost. The Germans had to go to the now-common expedient of depending on fortified towns held by infantry alone.
The offensive began on June 22nd. This was a symbolically important date. It was exactly three years after Hitler had invaded Russia. The Red Army of 1944 was not the dispirited mob that it had been in 1941. The 1944 version of the Red Army was an efficient fighting machine, well-trained, well-equipped, well-supplied, well-motivated. Within the first week, the Russians had broken through the German line, not just in a few places, but at every single significant pressure point. By June 28 the first phase of the operation was complete. The German "line" was no longer a line, but really a series of dots: desperate groups of unsupported, unsupplied infantry holding out in their little fortified towns. The infantry fought courageously, but encircled and with no possibility of maneouvre it was only a matter of time before they succumbed.
Follow-up operations exploiting the breakthroughs continued for another two months, but the decisive blow had come in that first week. Army Group Centre was broken. So complete was the chaos that many records were not kept. It is not completely certain which units suffered how many casualties. Historians have variously estimated German casualties between 300,000 and 700,000 men. The latest and most exhaustive study completed pegs it at 400,000. The 400,000 were among the most experienced veterans of earlier battles, a catastrophic loss of not only manpower but accumulated experience. Thirty-four German generals were lost -- 9 killed, 22 captured, 1 vanished without explanation, 2 committed suicide.
All of Byelorussia was back in Soviet hands, and a good part of Poland as well. The great Army Groups North and South had a 600 kilometer gap between them, and the only thing stopping the Russians from rolling right to Berlin that summer was logistics. The loss was catastrophic in every sense and meaning of the word -- the loss of territory, the loss of strategic initiative, the loss of equipment, the loss of morale, and above all the loss of life. That fall, the Russians finally turned their attention to the now-isolated Army Group South, chasing it out of the Ukraine and forcing the surrender of Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary shortly thereafter.
The German war machine could not replace the losses. Another 320 days would pass before the final surrender, but they were 320 days without hope, days of mechanistically throwing more blood into the fray without any real chance of victory.
CC map: WWII Eastern Front
[/spoiler]WARNING! Read the rules completely before joining any games.
THE RULES
One win is all it takes for a medal, BUT, you may only make one attempt on each map. That's right. One attempt at each map, or three total. These are cataclysmic defeats from which empires did not recover. Neither will you. Once you lose, you've lost all hope forever. On that map, anyway. Join a second game on the same map and you've just disqualified yourself on that map.
Sometimes we have spam-a-thons where you can play hundreds of games to qualify. This month, you cannot. This is a choose carefully, play your best, and accept when you're defeated kind of Challenge.
Because we know that people have unavoidable commitments to Tourney, Clan, Tribe, or Usergroup games, none of those will count. Only games in the public pool are available for this Challenge. Any games with these settings started as a "random map" will also not count this month.
JOIN A MAXIMUM OF ONE GAME ON EACH OF THE DESIGNATED MAPS!
Click here to join Waterloo Games
Click here to join Oceania Games
Click here to join WWII Eastern Front Games
NO SIGN-UPS REQUIRED -- EVERYONE IS ELIGIBLE
Games must start between June 1st and June 30th, 2017.
SETTINGS
Maps: Waterloo, Oceania, WWII Eastern Front
Players per game: 6 or more
Game Type: Standard or Terminator
Initial Troops: ANY
Play Order: ANY
Spoils: Escalating or Nuclear
Reinforcements: Unlimited
FOG: ANY
TRENCH: NO
Round Limit: 30
Round Length: Casual [24 Hour]
Joinability: Public Only
Medal Criteria
One Gold, Silver, or Bronze token is sufficient to complete this Challenge and qualify for the Challenge Achievement medal.
In other words, one win = CA medal.
- Gold Token - Waterloo Win: +25 points
- Silver Token - Oceania Win: +22 points
- Bronze Token - WWII Eastern Front Win: +20 points
------------------------------ - Orange Token - Waterloo Join: -1 for first one, -75 for the second.
- Blue Token - Oceania Join: -1 for first one, -75 for the second.
- Red Token - WWII Eastern Front Join: -1 for first one, -75 for the second.
JUNE SCOREBOARD
Notes
- Games must start between CC Time: 2017-06-01 00:00:00 and CC Time: 2017-06-30 23:59:59 to be considered for the challenge.
- Wins will count until CC Time: 2017-07-31 23:59:59
- Any issues will be solved by me, [player]Dukasaur[/player], and my word is final.
if I choose to participate in this.
