The fifteen Soviet 4-3-7 Tank brigades are displayed on the CoT countersheet as battalions. Corrected counters are printed below. There is a story that goes with this goof, however, which is probably worth relating. You see, Jason originally wanted to show his conglomerations of three IS-2 regiments, each with 21 tanks, as battalions. In a segment of his Designer's Notes (chopped out by yours truly) he stated his reasoning:

"Soviet tank regiments had between 21 and 45 tanks. This is about the size of one or two German tank companies. Thus I see no reason to show conglomerations of two or three regiments as brigades as would normally be done. They are about the size of German tank battalions and I decided to show them as such. Only the presence of a motor rifle battalion in standard tank brigades dissuades me from doing the same to them."

John Astell, however, in his review of Jason's scenario at Origins '95 noted in the margin that surely when Jason said that "4-3-7 Tank battalions are conglomerations of 3 IS-2 regiments" he really meant "brigades, certainly?!". As is made plain above, however, Jason did indeed mean battalions. Thus it fell upon the poor old Europa editor to make the final call...

Well, the plain truth is that I didn't want to open the can of worms that would result from treating a grouping of three regiments as a battalion. This would revive the debate over the stacking and transportation costs of two-regiment divisions versus three or four (or five?!) regiment divisions and all of the other things that go along with counting rifles to determine how many pieces of cardboard can fit in a hex or pile onto a naval transport.

Furthermore, with the suspicion so strong upon Jason that the Soviets would steamroll the Germans anyway, I saw no reason to give the Allied player what I thought would be an undue capability to conduct overruns: per the Second Front revised stacking being used in Clash of Titans, this would allow the Soviet player to add another 12 strength points to his strongest stacks. It just seemed to add insult to injury. Judge me as you may, but I went with brigades.

Meanwhile, Winston had already created the counters for the scenario based on a draft counter manifest sent in by Jason. These draft counters appeared on the cover of TEM #42. Well, even though I changed these darned rascals to brigades on the final counter manifest, Winston didn't notice the change from battalions to brigades, and I didn't notice in my review that he hadn't noticed-thus, the counters didn't get fixed.

Later, when my brother visited at Christmas and I pulled out the countersheet to show him what I had been up to lately, what should literally leap out at me from the paper but the offending "battalion" unit symbol from the top of each little 4-3-7 Tank unit. I called Winston immediately to see if we could stop the presses, but too late.

Sigh.... so there are the sordid details. And that's how this dirty little secret ends up getting a lot more publicity than I ever intended it to receive.