East German 20th Motor Rifle Division, Part 3

After a lot of faffing about and a multitude of tangets that I've been off on since my last post on this subject, at long last I now have the final chapter. Here is my (more or less) 1:1 battalion of the East German 20th Motor Rifle Division, which was a reserve unit, along with the appropriate support platoons and an armored company of T-34/85M's (which in reality, could quite possibly have been a single platoon), in keeping with their essentially third-line status:

The armor:

Anti-tank platoon (Saggers):

The Plamya platoon:

And the towed 120mm mortars:

And finally, the battalion commander, with a UAZ-69:

I mounted the infantry in BTR-152's and ZIL-157's, but I've made up one alternate company in BTR-40's, so that I can switch them out when the mood seizes me: 

A now for a few purely gratuitous shots of the real things:

That's it for my East German reserve troops. Now, on to other matters which eagerly await my attention. More next time. 

East German 20th Motor Rifle Division, Part 2

I've started to put together a battalion of the NVA's 20th Motor Rifle Division, made up of older, outdated equipment, as would have been the case in reality, so I can swap it out with more up-to-date units or use it as a reinforcement. 

First off, let me say that my family is German and most still live there (in Hessen, SE of Frankfurt a.M., though I was born in and grew up mostly in the US) and although my German sadly isn't as good as it ought to be, I can make my way in the language. Therefore, I am perfectly well aware that the East German Army had "Motorisierte Schützen Divisionen" and not Motor Rifle Divisions, as I am oft times reminded. However, English comes more naturally to me and for you purists, there is a translator on my blog, so we should all be good to go. 

As I've mentioned in a couple of different posts recently, the 20th was a reserve and training division and as such, it would have been fairly low down the pecking order for modern equipment. That having been the case, I've chosen the BTR-152 as the APC for two of the three infantry companies:

The later BTR-152K wasn't open-topped and had an armored roof:

And the BTR-152S was the command version:

O8 makes only the original open-topped model. With a bit of green putty, it's certainly possible to build up a high top to produce the command model, but these things are so small, I'm not sure it's worth the effort, as no one will see it. I may make a few K's and see how it goes. 

For the third company, I'll do two versions. One motorized in ZIL-157's:

and one in BTR-40's:

Again, so I can swap them out. The company mounted in the ZIL's will also get a GAZ-69 command vehicle:

In reality, by the early 80's, very few original GAZ's were left. It would actually be the UAZ-built version, the UAZ-69 or a version built under license by the Romanian company ARO. 

My battalion will get the standard platoons of AGS-17 Plamyas, AT-3 Saggers, and 120mm towed mortars, as well as an attached unit of T-34/85M's:

The early 1980's was a time of severe manpower and vehicle shortages in all WarPac armies. A motor rifle regiment was supposed to have an armored battalion attached, but very often a company was all that could be supplied and occasionally, only a platoon. Likewise, each armored regiment was supposed to have a motor rifle battalion, but often there was only a company. Attached artillery battalions, especially self-propelled ones, were frequently just a single battery. This was the case in many frontline units, so the situation in reserve units would have been worse yet. I'll reflect this with just one company of T-34/85M's for my battalion and here it is:

Had war really happened in the early 80's, I pity the poor bastards that would've crewed these museum pieces. The T-34/85M's potential armored opponents aside, NATO infantry were fairly lavishly supplied with a number of different antitank weapons that would've decimated these geriatric tanks. Even something as outdated as the M72 66mm LAW: 

would've made short work of a Korean War era tank. (Lord, the number of training rounds I've fired from those damned things!)

As my battalion takes shape over the next week or two, I'll let you see the progress. More next time!

East German 20th Motor Rifle Division, Part 1

A few posts ago (Aug. 16, 2014), I gave a general outline of East German, Polish, and Soviet forces that would've been involved in the LANDJUT area of operations in early 1981. In that post, I mentioned the East German 20th Motor Rifle Division, which was headquartered at Bredenfelde, as the reserve unit that would have reinforced the NVA frontline units on the Baltic coast of the North German Plain.

As a reserve division, only a relatively small cadre were "regular army" and the unit served as a nucleus for training reservists, akin to the US National Guard, West German Heimatschütz, and British Territorial Army. Prior to a large training exercise (or the commencement of hostilities), all reserve troops assigned to the 20th would have been called to active duty.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the most up-to-date equipment was never in lavish supply in any WarPac army, and what was available to the East Germans went to the regular NVA units, which then filled in any shortfalls with the most recently superseded vehicles, i.e. the least obsolete. This meant that the five reserve motor rifle divisions were left with vehicles that ranged from "significantly outdated" to "antiquated death-traps". 

The 20th Motor Rifle Division will feature prominently in my LANDJUT campaign, as the bulk of WarPac forces in the area would have been devoted to the attack on Hamburg and the push on to the North Sea. The seizure of the Kiel Canal/River Eider was not as high up the Soviet list of priorities and so it would have had a larger proportion of second line units assigned to capturing it. 

So what vehicles would the 20th have been using? Frontline NVA units were equipped with BTR-60PB's:

and BMP-1's:

for their motor rifles. Where necessary, BTR-60P's:

and BTR-60PA's:

as well as BTR-50PK's:

were used to fill in. Then whatever stocks of these vehicles that were left, went to the reserve divisions. However, this would still have left significant shortages, so APC's that were older yet had to be used. Fairly large numbers of BTR-152's:

and some even older BTR-40's:

would have been pressed into service. There also would've been a number of troops left completely without APC's and they would have been motorized, likely in ZIL-157 trucks:

or ZIL-131's:

For armor, the 20th would have been equipped with T-54's and older models of T-55, but to supply enough tanks, East Germany would have been forced to use a not inconsiderable number of T-34/85M's that had been retired 20 years previously:

Basically a 1944 model T-34/85 that had been built in the 1950's in Poland and Czechoslovakia and had extra armor plating added to the glasis (the "M" stood for "modernized"). The West German and Danish Leopards would have massacred these tanks by the dozens. Another Marianas Turkey Shoot. 

This same general problem with obsolescence would have applied to any WarPac army, though to a lesser extent with the Soviets, who generally tended to have a smaller proportion of seriously outdated equipment. That's not to say that they had none; just proportionally less. 

Today, I made a Picoarmor order so that I can begin getting some of the 20th represented in my East German force. When it arrives, Part 2 of this post will be some of 20th Motor Rifle Division painted and based. More from me next time!