Pieces of Airborne
Part One: The U.S. Army
By Mike Bennighof, PhD
October 2007

Airborne is intended as the "gateway game" to our wildly popular Panzer Grenadier series. It's a relatively small game, just one mapboard (as opposed to eight of them in Eastern Front or Road to Berlin) and 165 playing pieces including markers.

Its theme is the American airborne landings behind the Normandy beaches in June 1944. There are 20 separate scenarios, or game situations, based on the battles waged by troopers of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions against the German occupation forces. Today we have a look at the pieces included in the game, and the troops or weapons they represent.

United States Army
Foot Soldiers

Compensating for the lack of automatic firepower was the M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle. Considered by many to be the best such weapon of World War II, it could fire eight shots in rapid succession, without the need to work a bolt action. Some soldiers found they could modify the weapon to fire on full automatic, but this tended to use up magazines very quickly.

Three rifle platoons made up a rifle company, along with a heavy weapons platoon. This platoon had three 60mm mortars, two Browning .30-caliber M1917 light machine guns and one jeep-mounted .50-caliber machine gun, supposedly for anti-aircraft defense. The M2 60mm mortar was a licensed French design by Edgar Brandt, with a good rate of fire and range but launching a lightweight bomb. The Browning .30 caliber machine gun was issued at the very end of World War One, and had a definitely anachronistic appearance. It was water-cooled, with a heavy jacket around the barrel, and at 45 pounds was not easy to maneuver. Yet it was a very reliable design, and proved popular with the troops.

The .50 caliber machine gun was an awesome weapon, still in use today. The hydrostatic shock alone could blow the limbs off an unfortunate victim shot in the abdomen. American veterans would later describe Germans hardened by years of combat on the Eastern Front fleeing at its distinctive sound. Officially it was not for infantry use and could only be targeted against aircraft, vehicles and equipment; most gunners broadened their definition of "equipment" to include German infantry uniforms.

Soon after the D-Day landings, the Army began to issue more automatic weapons, with each platoon receiving two more BARs and each company two more .30 caliber machine guns. Rifle companies also had unusually large headquarters platoons, with the extra manpower intended to serve as ready replacements for losses in the platoons. In the Panzer Grenadier series games these extra men and weapons are reflected in the strengths of the American rifle platoons, which usually have greater firepower than those of other nations.

Each American infantry battalion also included a Heavy Weapons Company with two machine gun platoons. Each of these had four .30 caliber Browning M1917 heavy machine guns; during the game design phase we rejected showing two kinds of HMG platoon as this would be confusing to players and scenario designers and the firepower difference would be very small.

Fighting Soldiers From the Sky

By the nature, paratroopers have to travel light, taking only the weapons that can be dropped with them out of airplanes. The American parachute rifle platoon was much smaller than its infantry counterpart, but included one 60mm mortar and two .30 caliber Browning M1919 light machine guns - an air-cooled variant of the M1917. Paratroopers carried the same M1 Garand rifle as the infantry, but almost all of them supplemented it with a .45 caliber automatic pistol. The Browning Automatic Rifle was not on the official table of organization and equipment, but many of them made their way into paratroopers' hands anyway.

Because the parachute platoon is considerably smaller than most infantry platoons in the Panzer Grenadier series and derives its firepower from its automatic weapons, when at reduced strength it drops from 5 to 2. Most platoons with a strength of 5 (for example, German early war troops, Italian Bersaglieri or Polish infantry) drop from 5 to 3.

The parachute machine gun platoon had eight M1919 Browning light machine guns, divided into two sections each with four weapons. Our playing pieces represent a section or "half platoon" and cannot delivery the same firepower as the infantry's heavy machine gun platoons with four M1919 weapons.

Armor

The US Army brings its ubiquitous Sherman tank to the cardboard battlefield. All of the tank units present represent M4A1 or M4A3 models - the different engines that distinguished these versions did not yield enough of a difference in performance to show up in game terms. These are all early models with a 75mm low-velocity gun, a weapon built to artillery specifications and designed to fire thousands of rounds before needing replacement. A higher-velocity gun could not deliver that sort of reliability; the fact that no tank could be expected to survive in combat long enough to fire several thousand rounds seems to have escaped the U.S. Army's ordnance officials who issued the original requirement.

The Sherman was no match for German tanks, nor was it intended to be one. Under American doctrine, the job of armored units was to punch through enemy lines and exploit the gaps thus created, not to fight enemy tanks. That was the job of dedicated tank destroyer units, with either towed or self-propelled high-velocity guns. While the Shermans lack the firepower and armor of some of the German vehicles, given the lightweight firepower of the U.S. paratroopers, the American player will be very glad when these tanks enter play.

By the time of the D-Day landings, the American Armored Force was starting to question the utility of light tanks. Most other nations had already gone through this thought process and phased the vehicles out of their orders of battle. But they continued to pour out of American factories, and the M5 Light Tank (known as the "Stuart" to the British but never officially carrying this name in American service) landed in Normandy.

The Americans had reorganized their tank battalion structure and each now included three companies of medium tanks and one of light tanks. The light tanks were given secondary duties - evacuating wounded, bringing up supplies, guarding rear areas and sometimes reconnaissance. The American player won't have this luxury - he or she needs all available help, and even light tanks are better than nothing against German fortifications.

The M5 had a 37mm gun, totally useless against enemy armor by 1944 but unlike similar weapons used by other armies the American version had a deadly canister round. This and its three machine guns account for a relatively high infantry firepower rating. It's also one of the fastest vehicles in the game system.

Weapons

There's not a lot on the table for the American player in terms of support weapons. The 81mm mortar is the same 81mm Brandt design fielded by Germany, Romania, France, the Soviet Union, Japan, Italy and more. It's a very useful weapon, but the Americans only have one of them and it's not present in every scenario.

The 57mm anti-tank gun is a licensed copy of the British six-pounder. First used in April 1942 in North Africa, the Americans at first intended to produce it solely for Lend-Lease distribution but issued it to their own units by mid-1943. The M1 57mm gun had reasonably good penetration but was not really suitable for the battlefields of 1944, as German armor developments had surpassed it. The gun crews disliked it because unlike the 37mm gun it had replaced there was no canister round available (these showed up only in the war's last weeks) and high explosive rounds were not manufactured until 1944.

Airborne and mountain units used the M1 75mm "pack howitzer," designed for ease of transport by aircraft or mule. It could be quickly broken down for transportation and re-assembled, and had surprisingly good performance for such a weapon.

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