"Skirmish Battles Kotluban 1942" Topic

To the wise Magi of TMP:

I'm looking for information on the brutal battles just north of Stalingrad on the steppes around the village of Kotluban between the Don and Volga rivers. I want to put together a series of WWII skirmish/tactical battles in 15mm involving platoon or under-strength company sized units that capture the flavour of the Kotluban operations and are as historically accurate as I can manage. My budget is limited so I don't want to blow $120.00 USD on the excellent books by David M. Glantz concerning the Battle of Stalingrad. No library near me has the Glantz books so they are not an option even by inter-library loan. I have perused the mighty interweb but have come up rather short. I've dug through my own sources (books which I all ready own) and have found only passing references to the region and its fierce battles.

Does anyone know of a cheap paper source or a good internet source which covers these pivotal battles between late August and early October 1942? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for any guidance you can offer.

Cheers and good gaming.
Rod Robertson.

In any case to be accurate you would have to get Russian sources.

Jcfrog:

You're right about that. I don't speak, read or write Russian so I have to depend upon other sources. That's why the works of David M. Glantz and a few others like Robert Forczyk are so useful. They went through many of the Russian sources which became available after the collapse of the USSR and greatly widened the understanding of the Soviet experience in the Great Patriotic War, triumphs and failings alike.

Alas, the Glantz books are just too expensive these days. My budget does not have room right now for both books and minis so I face a sort of economically imposed Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. I can have the minis but not know enough about them or I can know about them but not have the minis! Minis are mass/knowledge quanta and I can only observe one facet of the quanta! It's very annoying but also unavoidable at this time! C'est tellement triste, mais ca c'est la conditione humane, je pense.

Cheers and thanks for your thoughts.
Rod Robertson.

You can look on the internet for many ru stuff. Use google translate. It is not 100%, somtimes right funny, but it will get you a good deal of the main ideas.
Can't help, widely disconnected from ww2 now unless a bit of going to vist a place whre" something happened" like last year Voronejh.

I doubt you will find detailed descriptions at skirmish level.
Personally, i'd settle for kit and oob that's OK for periodine. So long as this is not for external commercial use.

Did you try Google books though?
You can often find chunks of books online.

In the UK, inter library loan is across the entire country. If you'require OK waiting then you can eventually get many books.

I assume you've considered friends. Maybe you could borrow from someone and offer a deposit.

Jcfrog:

I am in the process of searching for sources. And some folks in the wargame community have put me onto some good stuff. I will keep searching but I was hoping to save some time by picking the TMP hive-mind. I will keep at it.

Andy ONeill:

You'd be surprised how much detail there is in the literature and primary source material. By way of example Robert Forczyc's "Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front" books often have wonderful nuggets in amidst the operational and strategic level narrative and analysis.

The inter-library loan system in Quebec is not very good unless you go through a university level library. I'm out in the boondocks so I have to rely on a small municipal library which has limited resources.

My gaming friends do not have the interest in research that I do, nor do they have the personal libraries. I lend them my books!

I'll just keep hoping that I'll eventually turn up something golden or that someone will give me a lead which pans out. Thanks for your counsel. It is appreciated.

Cheers.
Rod Robertson.

Send me a prompt in Late July, I'll be back there, can have my best half lok on internet at least find the places if any on this.
You can also go there…
I went on some battlefields where teutons and Hungarians fought, local,museum guy showed me all the stuff incl, non official storage. Still gun emplacements, the place where the heroic defenders of the motherland attacked and lots of stories. Beats every remotely written book.