A friend who has never posted here sent me this in an email today. It is especially the last few lines that are where my head is currently at. I don't mean offense by it but it does seem to sum up my current feeling on the subject..baring and new information. of course...
Ok, I see where your head is at and you've mentioned one point a few times and I haven't picked up on it.
I don't mean to imply that moving a tank through the bocage should be quick, easy or even desirable (though the low bocage does seem to be over modelled in its resistance capabilities, but I'll leave that for now).
If it were included, hypothetically, I wouldn't envision that as a fast movement, like the wooden fence. It is certainly not depicted as such in other games. In ASL, infantry cross hedges at a cost double that of normal hedges while vehicles are prohibited from doing so with the exception of fully tracked AFVs. They do so (in forward motion only, reverse is prohibited) by being subject to under-belly hits, loss of side-skirts, and Bog. It costs them half their movement allotment for the turn, whatever it is (a turn being two minutes in ASL).
What would the CM equivalent be? Bog is bog - a chance of temporary immobilization which could lead to unbogging, or permanent immobilization. Loss of side skirts, underbelly hits, etc. seem like appropriate penalties, and taking one full minute to traverse the berm seems reasonable. If the opposing player saw the tank moving and had time to reposition anti-tank weapons to deal with the threat, well, it probably happened in real life, and yes, that is exactly why the Culin device was invented to begin with. To prevent the necessity of going over and through the hedges.
How often was it done? Yeide and other historians say not often; probably because it became very dangerous very quickly.
But then again, how often did troops race into machine gun fire? It would be a boring game if the program prohibited every poor decision with a message reading "real commanders never did that, try again." I'd much prefer a range of options rooted in reality, and have the game reward good tactics and sound decisions, rather than simply have the game code make those decisions for me, because some of the options are simply missing.
This probably reads harsher than I intend. And it may be a dead horse by now. I just find it interesting, as it is a key component of any treatment of the Battle of Normandy and I'm as curious as anyone as to what "actually" happened, and how close we are getting to seeing a recreation of it.