"Defending machine guns" Topic

I had a great game yesterday but I have hit an issue. Loike the Platoon commander did my opponent blocked off one of my key MG positions with a vehicle. Whay say you to positiong a small team with RPG's well camoflarged to eliminate AFV's attemting to block the weapon off. I guess they need to be about 250m from the Position and positioned so that the enemy camt get to prevent the flanking fire from the MG. As the Mg is the key weapon then its proably worth having the team their even tough they may not be engaged. Obviously both the MG and the team will be protected from fire from the front.

Proably not a practical soultion in some games as MG's are often one of the worst modeled systems, especially the dire ones with exponential ranges which hobble MG fire completely.

What do you think?

Displace your machine gun?

I think you ran into the "they wouldn't do that in real life" dilemma in gaming. Which is why what we play are called games. Happens all the time in tank games; a vehicle's turret is hit and it's gun is in-operational so the player uses the vehicle as a mobile shield moving it to block the fire of enemy units until it's destroyed. I don't think that would happen in real life.

But unless you have a Judge for your game to make those "they wouldn't do that" decisions or an "I call BS" rule built in, (which will guarantee to slow your games to a crawl) you have to deal with creative gaming.

Trying to prevent these kinds of thngs is why some rulesbooks are 200 pages long…

Sounds like gamer schlock but, depending on the vehicle and the circumstances, it might happen. Make the vehicle crew pass a morale check to do, and then pass a morale check every turn thereafter.

+1 79th PA

Yes, make them pass morale. Shoot the machine gun at them, or move the machine gun forward.

Morale rules prevent a lot of the stupid stuff from happening.

Mike Bunkermeister Creek

Personally, I'm not sure what you are driving at.

Ideally, in a defensive position, you have alternate positions to fall back on as Murvihill stated.

Exactly how did the truck driver coordinate with the friendlies to drive up and position his vehicles to effectively block the enemy MG fire? How long was this truck a threat to the MG team and would they have fired on it and knocked it out, killed the driver, or set it on fire? Inquiring minds want to know.

I have a good friend of mine that was with Chesty Puller at the Chosin Reservoir. He was leading a convoy of deuce-and-a-half trucks along a ridge road with multiple KIA Marines piled up on the hood. He came around a corner and a ChiCom MG was dug into the road and fired at him. He could not go left, right, or reverse so he ducked down behind the dead Marines on the hood and floored the accelerator running over the ChiCom MG position and squashing all of them. His CO was right behind him and he got written up for a Silver Star and an officer commission.

Maybe just have the truck "assault" the MG position and the infantry follow behind in cover. But then only US Marines are stupid enough to assault an enemy MG position with an unarmed truck – and kill everyone!

Stranger stuff has happened on the battlefield.

Wolfhag

Okay, so you blow up the vehicle blocking your MG, doesn't it then remain there permanently blocking the MG's fire…?

" Happens all the time in tank games; a vehicle's turret is hit and it's gun is in-operational so the player uses the vehicle as a mobile shield moving it to block the fire of enemy units until it's destroyed. I don't think that would happen in real life."

I've also heard of players that send a banzai charge of empty trucks & APC's toward the opponent's lines to soak up fire… ;-)

That a "car" run over a mg position happens sometimes. I hear such a story from Madrid in the spanish civil war. That is, what tank obstacles needed for.

It sounds like this situation can only occur when models are out of whack with the ground scale. irl a vehicle will block a miniscule part of the arc of fire of an MG. Vehicles may provide cover to a few men hiding behind it, but it isn't going to block an entire beaten zone.

It can be circumvented by simply moving the LMG to one of its alternate firing positions a few yards away in any case.

As noted above, if your rules allow vehicles to block the fire of area fire weapons, then blowing it up isn't going to help. Instead you now have a burning wreck which is an even bigger obstacle to LOS.

Martin,
It was a Sustained Fire MG (GPMG om a Tripod) and spare barrlets and lots of Ammo. These tend like pill boxes to have a limited capability to move quickly with all of its kit and an alternative may not have terrain capable to allowing grazing fire. Yes the vehicle has to park close to the MG to restrict its fire but with limited risk if its not covered by an RPG team, so it seems a not unreasonable proposition. It will block as much of the position dead or working.

We rejectyed driving over the position as most positions are made to be relatively tank proof and the MG was in a prepared position. Were it not it would not habe been such a threat.

Just as an interesting note. taking a BMP2 just over 22 ft long, parked about 30 yds away it would block a 30 degree fire arc for a single point weapon. Most weapon pit designs I have seen for tripod mounted systems don't have an immediate alternate position a meer 22 ft away, so relocation takes a significant time at a critical point. Now 30 yds is not insignificant folk argue about RPG ranges some say practicaly about 150 yds so 30 yds is about 20% of range so not that daft in the grand sceem of things. That's about 30mm away in my ground scale so not as unrealistic as some of you seem to imply. Particularly as such NG' often have a restricted fire arc to avoid direct fire from some directions. While not a direct analogy many German MG's on Normandy beaches had no fire arc directly out to sea but fired along the beach making them much more secure against direct frire from the seaward side. There are/were similar defence examples on Cayton Bay (Yourkshire,UK) beach from the same time period.

It parked 30m away from a known enemy position! That is a very brave or foolhardy BMP commander.

I remain unconvinced that this is something a real life BMP would do, unless by accident. I suspect it is a consequence of 200v General syndrome. Your opponent knew there was just an MG in the position so was happy to park the vehicle with impunity just in front of it. Irl, they would be a lot more nervous about close range AT fire.

There is a reason heavy weapons platoons are issued light AT weapons, so in fact, your original solution is the correct one. Cover/protect the MG with some sort of AT weapon.

From the OP I'd imagined it parked a few hundred metres away.

Usha-cha the key point in the situation you are describing is the Human factor. What are the odds of an individual going to almost certain death to block the MG's fire channel. Plus if the MG is tasked with creating a beaten zone it will probably be using a high trajectory that would fire over the blocking vehicle so it's certain death for no tactical gain. I'd say your rules don't have a tactical issue but a morale/motivation one. As others have said morale rules should severely limit such behaviour.

Elenderil _ grazing fire, look up the us machine in gun manual, it is often a last resort fire, often called Final Defensive Fire where the rounds travel 600mm approx. Not exceeding about 2 ft. Elevating thd weapon will expose troops some distantce away but not come to the vehicle that they will still be protected.

There at many instances where tanks have crossed trenches and even stopped across them to fire. In the it's BMP where supposed to escorts the dismounted troops in, that puts them closer than about 300 (about max effective rang of an automatic rifle in all but very competent hands.

Uscha,

I think we're mixing up all sorts of things.

PDF – Principal Direction of Fire. Think of this as the main reason you emplaced a machine gun, I.e., "dig in your gun here and cover that crossroads over there!"
FPF – Final Protective Fire. This is your last ditch effort; you're covering the crossroads but somehow the bad guys have still broken through! Unlock the gun (disengage the Traverse and Elevation, T&E, on the tripod), kick it over to the left or right, and fire across the face of our defenses at the cyclic rate to try and keep the enemy from penetrating our line.

Both use grazing fire, if you've properly sited the gun.
Alternate and Supplementary positions (the former is a ‘fall back,' the latter is to take a different PDF, almost always out to a flank), also use grazing fire, if properly sited.

What you refer to regarding German MGs on Normandy beaches is called a defilade, and firing down the beach is called enfilading fire. An FPF is typically enfilading fire, though not typically from a defiladed position (because the PDF was probably to the front of the position).

And grazing fire is to a height of two meters (6 feet, "the height of a man"), not two feet. It kills with the cone of fire, which is from the muzzle of the gun out to the furthest point grazing fire can be sustained, which in this case will also overlap with the beaten zone.

Plunging fire, by definition, has the cone of fire in a location that cannot affect the target, only affecting the target with the beaten zone.

Beaten zones/plunging fire are used when the terrain is not suitable for grazing fire, or the PDF is to a target area that is beyond the capability of the gun's ability to conduct grazing fire (I.e., the gun can hit the targeted area but the round, and thus the cone of fire, must rise more than 2m above the ground in order to do so). For instance, you have a gun that can fire out to 1200m, but can only do grazing fire out to 700m (due to muzzle velocity/ballistics of the round), and your PDF is to a choke point 900m away, you're only option to engage the target is going to be via the beaten zone, manipulating the T&E on the tripod up to where the gun is spitting bullets up into the air and raining them down on the choke point. You can observe the fire and adjust the beaten zone by manipulating the T&E, or you can walk the beaten zone around in pre-planned patterns via further manipulation of the T&E (see "traversing fire," moving left/right, "searching fire," moving forward/backward, and "searching and traversing fire," moving the beaten zone forward/backward and left/right, in designated increments, which are ‘clicks' of three mils, if I remember correctly?).

In any case, doctrinally machine guns are supposed to be used (at range, on their PDFs) to break up enemy formations, forcing them to deploy and seek cover into areas pre-registered for indirect fire to pound them into oblivion, while riflemen protect the guns, so a rifle squad should be there and have dispatched a fire team to go handle the BMP that had broken through (probably before they got within 30m of the MG position!).

Hopefully this helps set some things on machine gun gunnery ;)

V/R,
Jack

Just Jack- Better put than me and sorry about the 2ft should be 6 ft.

Just jack.
It may not be as daft as it sounds. Russians deploy either side of the BMP. If the artillery has done its job they dismount the BMP close. No real threat from LAW types untill 250m possibly less depending on who is talking. Some service men say closer to 150m for accuracy on a moving target. So you have troops under fire from lots of BMP's and troops, may not be that easy to get all the BMP's so getting up close and personal with a LAD while under fire and threatened with infantry may not be fun or that practical.

It does assume that the Russiams have artillery supremacy, whether that was ever a possibility even in the cold war must now be for some consideration. In the Ukraine wat Russian artilley is no lomger the dominant threat it was at the start of the war and the Ukraines are only getting some limited decent stuff.

With NATO in play would the same happen earlier in the 80's situation. Without the Artillery advantage the Russian BMP tactics would be suicidal potentially even then.

Uscha,

Happy to help on machine gun employment. I'm yet to see a set of rules that models them accurately; even worse, I don't know how to make a rules mechanism that would accurately model them, despite many hours of pondering the issue and discussing with other gamers…

And I wasn't suggesting the BMP's actions were daft, just that doctrinally the MGs support the rifleman but the rifleman are responsible to protect the MGs, so it would fall to the riflemen to deal with any AFVs that made it through the AT screen (in accordance with the company/battalion's fire plan).

Quite the opposite actually; I have no issue with the BMP getting up close and personal, again, it's doctrine. The enemy mech commander has a job to do and, assuming it was to clear this defensive line, he's probably going to have the known strongpoints thrashed by supporting fires and use his armored taxis to deliver his dismounts directly onto the objective, or at least as close as possible. Lots of folks nowadays look at things from a very risk-averse perspective, but the old training (for peer adversaries in the high intensity fight) was to use the vehicles to get onto the objective if at all possible, that you were going to take casualties but the lowest risk option was to traverse the MLR/battle zone as quickly as possible, while defensive operations were exactly the opposite, always trading space to keep the enemy at arm's length, continuing to whittle down his combat power while avoiding becoming decisively engaged.

V/R,
Jack

Proably not a practical soultion in some games as MG's are often one of the worst modeled systems, especially the dire ones with exponential ranges which hobble MG fire completely.

What do you think?

Are there any real-life accounts of that?

Happens all the time in tank games; a vehicle's turret is hit and it's gun is in-operational so the player uses the vehicle as a mobile shield moving it to block the fire of enemy units until it's destroyed. I don't think that would happen in real life.

Probably not. The crew would most likely bail out if the gun was ineffective or the vehicle immobile.

I'm sure Just Jack can enlighten us on this one regarding MG operations, tactics and deploymnet: link

Wolfhag