"ww2 Infantry Platoon assests" Topic
4 Posts
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| The Hound | 25 Apr 2016 7:15 p.m. PST |
coulds a ww2 infantry platoon really call on tank support of about 1 tank from armoured regiments, or is it just in wargames and movies? |
| zoneofcontrol | 25 Apr 2016 9:04 p.m. PST |
My recollection is that for the US, a tank platoon was attached to an infantry battalion in and around the time of the D-Day landings and thereafter. I think there was some teething issues with deployment, tactics, etc. but they eventually got things worked out. |
| williamb | 26 Apr 2016 5:10 a.m. PST |
Standard practice in the Bocage was to have a tank supported by a squad of infantry. The tanks were equipped with a handset in a box at the rear of the tanks to allow the infantry to talk to the tank crew. Armored divisions would create mixed combat teams of tanks and infantry. Almost all infantry divisions had a tank battalion and a tank destroyer battalion attached. Both could be used to support infantry units. The amount and type of support would depend on the mission. Support was allocated at higher levels and not actually on call by the individual company/platoon/squad. |
| christot | 26 Apr 2016 6:57 a.m. PST |
"Standard practice in the Bocage was to have a tank supported by a squad of infantry. The tanks were equipped with a handset in a box at the rear of the tanks to allow the infantry to talk to the tank crew" Far from standard practice for most of the campaign, what you describe above is very much the ideal situation achieved by a few units by the time of Cobra and becoming more commonplace, but by no means universal by autumn 44, Tank/infantry co-operation was fairly abysmal at the start of the Normandy campaign, and only really became effective through trial and error in July…The "1 tank 1 squad,1 field" practice only gets into popular usage a good 5 or 6 weeks after the landings in a few infantry divisions (4th, 1st, 2nd, 29th) the majority of the time a tank company would be attached to an infantry battalion, but it took them a very long time to work out how to break the tanks down further. Often 1 platoon would end up fighting with the infantry while the rest of the company milled around doing not a lot. |
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