Researching a Scenario's Units

Continuing my analysis of the scenario possibility of the Red Army's landings near Odessa at Grigor'evka, I'm going to look at the units involved and how a scenario designer can, with a little work, make his/her scenario most historically accurate.

One problem with finding units for a particular action is that accounts are usually based on one side or another.  Certainly first person accounts have information on one side's units but generally lack any kind of detailed information on the other side.  Even operational studies frequently lack details, though it is usually possible to get general information about armies and corps.

A big help in this is Wikipedia.

For big battles, these are not very detailed, but what I like is the ability to drill down and look into the elements that make up these larger formations.  If you are lucky, you will even find an operational map.  If you have some information on one side, these operational maps will allow you to extrapolate who they were facing in that battle.

Here you can see the positions of units in the 1943 battle for Kiev.  It helps to be able to transliterate from the Cyrillic here.  But we can see that, for example, the 136 Cavalry Division was opposed by 5th Regiment of the 167 Infantry Battalion (I think, I'm not an expert in symbols, etc.).  Your mileage may vary, because probably a lot of ASL players don't even read unit designations.  For may, the difference between the 5th Regiment of the 167th or elements of the 4th Panzer Army.

But there is something else within this.  Knowledge that a unit was a cavalry division, for example, may determine what kind of support weapons and support artillery they were likely to have.

Back to Grigor'evka.  We know that the 3rd Naval Infantry Regiment was the group that made the landing, but there were also the 421st and 157th Infantry Divisions which launched the main attack.  There was also a platoon of paratroopers which attacked the implausible Hill 57.3.  However, the Soviet history gives us even more detail about the 3rd NIR:

To conduct the amphibious landing, the Black Sea Fleet headquarters selected the 3rd Naval Infantry Regiment commanded by Captain K. Koren’, which had just been formed in Sevastopol’. The regiment was comprised of 3 naval infantry battalions as well as a single mortar battery (9 82-mm obr 1938 medium mortars), totaling 1,900 men – predominantly fleet reservists and volunteers from ship crews and base personnel. The landing itself was to be facilitated by a parachute landing of a 23-man unit near Hill 57.3 roughly 10 kilometers inland - the parachutists were to disrupt enemy communications and create a panic, hopefully drawing the Axis forces’ attention away from the shoreline.

Now, these are clearly not "marines."  They are mostly sailors.  There may be some justification for calling them volunteers.  The information on the paratroopers is intriguing, but thin.  They were purportedly volunteers from the Red Navy's aviation section--supposedly flight personnel.  This was a special detachment, which would have been named after the leader, Petty officer Kuznetzov.  Their training did not include parachute jumping and they were heavily loaded with equipment.  They did not meet with any much success.

Artillery support was provided by naval units, including the Red sisters, the Krasny Kavkaz and Krasny Krim.  Despite being cruisers, these cruisers had relatively small 5 inch guns.  They also left under cover of darkness, being left destroyers to conduct fire support.  This proved to be pretty wise as Soviet destroyers took a lot of heat from Stuka attacks.

On the opposite side, we don't have much information other than the fact that they were Romanians with long range guns.  We know that the Romanians at Odessa were part of the 4th Army, led by General Constantin Constantinescu-Claps:


With a little drilling down and some educated guesswork, we find that the unit firing on Odessa was most likely the 1st Fortification Brigade, charged with defending the Black Sea shore north of Odessa.

So, a lot of different possibilities and the next step is to pick out what we want to use to create an interesting scenario.