31.10.2010, 16:48
I'll put a couple of airfields up in the next little while. Thanks for the comments.
Yelnya is on the list of stuff to populate. That whole area is basically heavily wooded, small village bush country. Rzhev is far away. Distances get pretty big in Russia.
My impression is that the country as a whole gets pretty rough and sparsely populated north of Smolensk, right up to Leningrad. Essentially just swamp and forest and the occasional town or small city. Doing this map has taught me a lot about Russian history. I can now understand why there were a dozen or so major battles fought at Smolensk and almost as many at Orsha over the last 500 years. This was the only way into Russia until the Twentieth Century. Everybody came through the Dvina-Dnepr watergap - Napoleon, the Poles in the 1600's, Charles XII of Sweden.
Re smaller airfields. I would be happy to put in anything and everything that I can find was in existence at the time. Maybe in the next phase, I'll try and find some better resources. From what I can make out, the LW flew from major bases - Bobruisk, Orsha and Polotsk were their main centres during Bagration. I don't know whether they would have used dispersal and emergency air strips. I suspect that the VVS would have been flying from anywhere that was flat, grassy and more than 200 meters long without bumps or obstacles.
Yelnya is on the list of stuff to populate. That whole area is basically heavily wooded, small village bush country. Rzhev is far away. Distances get pretty big in Russia.
My impression is that the country as a whole gets pretty rough and sparsely populated north of Smolensk, right up to Leningrad. Essentially just swamp and forest and the occasional town or small city. Doing this map has taught me a lot about Russian history. I can now understand why there were a dozen or so major battles fought at Smolensk and almost as many at Orsha over the last 500 years. This was the only way into Russia until the Twentieth Century. Everybody came through the Dvina-Dnepr watergap - Napoleon, the Poles in the 1600's, Charles XII of Sweden.
Re smaller airfields. I would be happy to put in anything and everything that I can find was in existence at the time. Maybe in the next phase, I'll try and find some better resources. From what I can make out, the LW flew from major bases - Bobruisk, Orsha and Polotsk were their main centres during Bagration. I don't know whether they would have used dispersal and emergency air strips. I suspect that the VVS would have been flying from anywhere that was flat, grassy and more than 200 meters long without bumps or obstacles.