Thank you for your comments, Andy R and playmofire
Quite an interesting story Andy R, thanks for sharing!
I'm able to bring an update for this thread!
Today I present to you a German Stosstruppe ('stormtrooper'). These were some sort of elite German troops, trained for a specific purpose. Since the stalemate on the Western front couldn't be broken despite heavy artillery fire and massive infantry charges, the German army looked for a solution. They decided to create Stosstruppen, small units which would be able to infiltrate the enemy trenches at their weak points and take out or capture command centres or artillery positions and thus creating a strong position. They would be followed by support crews (armed with machine guns, flamethrowers and mortars) which would destroy any strongposts that remained. After that wave, the regular troops would clean up what was left of resistance.
In order to achieve this, the Stosstruppen were trained for trench warfare. They were trained to cross no-man's-land quickly in an open formation (infantry usually attacked in a large group, making easier targets) and engage the enemy in the trenches with close quarter combat, right after a small but accurate artillery bombardement which usually also contained gas shells. (The enemy trench had to be neutralized, not destroyed.) Although these troops were to be issued with body armour, this was cancelled in order to make them lightweight. Their equipment existed of their Stahlhelm (Stosstruppen began seeing action in the later part of the war), reinforced uniform (padded elbows and knees since they crawled a lot), extra ammunition pouches, two special grenade sacks and they wore light or no backpacks at all.
The standard weapon was the Karabiner 98 which was shorter than the standard infantry rifle (Gewehr 98), although this was rarely used since they only shot when they had to. The two grenade bags were filled with a lot of grenades, so that they could bombard the enemy lines before the melee. Weapons for close quarter combat consisted of trench knives and clubs. (I don't know if standard troops had pistols.) The standard shovel was also a good weapon, but the Stosstruppen took full length spades with them in order to quickly make a fortification of a captured position.
At the end of the war (1918), Germany issued the Stosstruppen with the first mass produced submachine gun that would be used in a war, the MP18. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP18) Only 5000-10000 of these were made but they did terrible damage in the trenches. (32 bullets that spray out vs. a bolt action rifle that requires every shot to be manually reloaded.) The allies were so afraid of this weapon that they put it under forbidden weapons in the treaty of Versailles.
Now for the pictures
:
posing for the camera
Fighting in the trenches (he's holding a club)
I'll add a reference picture aswell:
I'll be adding a regular German infantryman soon (I finally found a way to do the webbing with Playmobil parts!
) and I'm looking for the parts to create a British infantryman.
Enjoy the read and let me know what you guys think!
