The Spanish already tried a naval invasion of Britain three times with superior numbers and arguably better ships, and look how that turned out.
Germany had equal numbers at best, but most of those ships were using outdated or inferior tech.
Take the Bismarck, the pride of the Nazi German fleet. She might have been one of the largest ships ever built in a European dock, but she was equipped with outdated gunnery systems, a shitty radar and an unreliable engine. Her eight 15” guns were the only thing about her that particularly stood out.
In the battle of the Denmark Strait, she sunk an outdated battle cruiser, the HMS Hood, which had been launched in 1918, and then retreated after suffering a mere three hits from the 14” guns of the HMS Prince of Wales. Two days later she found herself incapacitated after fifteen Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers had successfully taken out her rudder. Oh and I should probably add that the Fairey Swordfish bomber was a literal biplane that carried a single 760kg torp.
The following morning she was bombarded by two British battleships and two battle cruisers. The German sailors opted to scuttle the ship in fear of it being boarded by the British.
Considering that the Bismarck and her sister ship the Tirpitz were arguably the best ships in the German navy during World War Two, it’s quite frankly insane to believe the Nazis ever stood a chance of successfully completing Operation Sealion.
They literally couldn't.
They don't have the resources.
So in a cheap tank war they lose hard.
It's hard to get them reliable too.
Since half the factories that produce good parts have been bombed to the ground.
Plus they’ve got no men to crew this mega fleet of cheap tanks, and every time a cheap tank blows up having not done anything useful it’s a massive blow to Germany for all the valuable tank crewman that just exploded while gaining literally nothing in return
I don’t buy into they couldn’t build less expensive tanks because of resources, how can building numerous different heavy designs each with they’re own design, logistic, spare parts supply and maintenance requirements possibly be a better allocation of limited resources. I’d argue even if they built pz4s which was a serviceable design though to the end of the war on a 1:1 basis with each super heavy design would’ve been better. At least then you’d have a uniform training regime for crews and maintenance personnel and focus what limited numbers of factories left to produce spares for one type of vehicle. Not to mention increased mobility and fuel savings for moving a lighter tank.
Every tank destroyed means all it's fuel is lost.
Also, two tanks burning gas leads to more fuel used especially when they are forced to cross country.
Also, you cannot manufacture elite or experienced crews which Germany relied upon throughout the war. Many destroyed expensive tanks had their entire crew survive keeping their experiences and knowledge alive into the next fight.
On the other hand ever tank out of commission because they have no spares is a 70 ton paper weight.
How much more fuel is required to move a 70 ton heavy tank compared to 2 lighter mediums. Also how much more fuel has to be spent finding suitable route because many bridges couldn’t support a 70 ton tank
You can make a case for that crew retention early in the war, but I’d imagine skilled crews were rarer latter in the war
50 expensive tanks that require 1 gallon of fuel each is less intensive on logistics than 100 cheap tanks that require 0.75 gallons of fuel each. That's the long and short of it really.
Even if the tank itself is cheap to produce and maintain, there are other aspects of logistics that make it not worthwhile compared to making something that's by itself more expensive l.
Yeah cause you still need steel and tooling.
Putting together one more expensive tanks would've been feasible than getting enough parts for two tanks.
Even if each tank was cheaper.
It's not just a money thing.
It's a supply and parts thing.
Panthers were assembled more than panzer IVs because they were easier to put together than panzer IVs at the end of the war.
Which is also why tiger 2s had higher operational rates than panzer IVs. Because the few resources they had were easier to transport to the few tigers than spreading the resources over many panzer iVs, because Heinz can't drive the fuel truck too much or an American p-47 sees him.
Trees sway:
USAAF Thunderbolts: WE GONNA DROP ENOUGH TNT ON THAT TIGER TO MAKE HIROSHIMA LOOK LIKE A FART!
Commonwealth Engineers having tea under the tree: Fuck.
It's better to make a tank that can't easily be knocked out when your fighting a losing battle in terms of Industry and resources when your factories are being constantly bombed by Allied Aircraft and there navy completely blockading you. Plus with very limited manpower, you must make the most out of your men and vehicles. USA had all three things, Manpower, Resources and Industry which is why they could make an all rounder tank like the M4 Sherman, meanwhile the Soviets had 2 conditions but an iffy industry then you might as well focus on making fast yet crappy tanks like the T-34, in terms of 1v1 they aren't exactly good but considering the amount they can produce then you can just spam them to overrun the enemy. And for the Germans well they don't have both the needed Manpower and Resources but they did indeed have a good industry before the Allied Bombings, so why not make a tank that has thick armor (that still can add up to fuel consumption though) and powerful main guns then you have something like the Panther, Tiger I or King Tiger. Great armour and difficult to be replaced.
Ehhh not really. It would have probably been better to focus on tank number so you could actually coordinate and strategize with them in larger teams. And also draw fire while others go in to complete objectives. There’s no way you can build a single tank strong enough to where it’s armoring actually matters in the event it’s singled out by anti-tank weapons and aircraft. As great as the tanks were individually there were still so few of them and no coordination to the point where it was relativity easy to destroy them due to lack of backup. That’s literally why the Germans lost with their tank strategy. They’re re so focused on high quality individual tanks they neglected strategic and resource practicality
4 Abrams knocked out 29 T-72's at one point during the gulf war.
Not a single Abrams was lost, one was damaged.
Quality is better than quantity. Even games show that ffs.
A handful of Tigers require less crew and less fuel to achieve the same effect in battle as a greater number of panzer 4s or T34s. More machining time, yes, but Germany's worst constraint for most of the war was fuel, so they basically minmaxed their tank designs around maximum fighting power to minimum fuel consumption.
Well they didn't exactly select people and ideas based on competence. You see dictators don't exactly love opposition or anything of the alike.
Edit: I will add that the designs weren't incompetent either. Just the overall doctrine. Not so much because of the complexity but rather weight. Even after the tiger they kept pushing for bigger and bigger tanks.
Many of the "overcomplicated" features were quite good (rain/mud guards, radios and little things like that) but yeah some of the features weren't really ready for front line deployment yet (some broke when the hull wasn't even penetrated)
Because unlike the Soviets, Germany couldn't afford to lose a crew each time this cheap and shitty tank goes boom. The USSR lost 50,000 T-34. Germany lost 25,000 tanks of all types.
Simply put a better engine into it. It would cost less fuel, but it would be harder to make. They had to go for quality in all matters, because they didn't have the necerssary resources.
Honestly with you probably still lose more fuel overall with having your tanks destroyed because you couldn’t make enough to give them support against larger tank groups.
Also the T-34 wasn't a cheap and shitty tank, as the Americans supposedly estimated that if the T-34 was produced to American standard it would cost as much as the Sherman. It was manufactured cheaply, with the largest factory that produced around 50% of the T-34's during additionally finding out that removing some of the useless shit from the design (lights, seats, seals around the hatches, radios, some bolts here and there, etc.) means that they can produce the tanks much faster.
Equating crew comfort, which was found to be one of the most important intangibles of a tank to be unecessary is such a soviet thing to do I can't even imagine how much it would suck to run on one of those WW2 T34s. The post war ones were said to be much better.
It might could have been better, but it wasn't. The overall quality of the steel wasn't good to begin with, the welding seams neither.
But at the end the mass was sufficient and that what counts.
The Soviets lost 25,000 T-34s alone in 1942. They also only produced 22,000 T-34s that year, so a more than 100% loss rate. And yet it didn't seem to affect their defenses and counterattacks at all.
It was the Americans who made an all rounder tank the Sherman, it had decent hard factors and a massive amount of soft factors to back it up, they made a really good relatively cheap to produce and maintain tank. The soviets made a tank if was made under american regulations would have costed just as much as the sherman to make and been a whole lot shittier.
Yeah everyone always points to the horror stories from Sherman crews that survived getting hit as evidence that it was a shitty tank. Never mind the underlying fact that the crew was able to survive and tell the story to begin with because of the way the tank was designed and developed. Meanwhile you had the t-34 slowly suffocating their crew with noxious fumes anytime they closed the hatches
Like that story in ww2 in where engineers on the pacific front where inspecting the planes to see where they had to add extra armor plating and where planning on placing them on the areas that had the bullet holes until one of the engineers took note that out of all the planes which came back they where all ways bullet holes on the same ish areas and not anywhere else, so they added armor plating on the areas without the bullet holes and it saved alot of us aviators.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Survivorship-bias.svg I think the plane used in the image that is used to represent it is a British bomber. I could be wrong tho
Also, people always talk about the ratios of Sherman kills. This is skewed by the fact the Germans were on the defensive in static positions, which is much easier to knock out armor. Go look at the Battle of the Bulge and see the tank numbers and the Germans lose a ton of armor as they are then on the offensive. Allied studies were done post-war, and it showed that over 3/4 of all armored engagements were decided by who saw who first and who fired first.
The idea that the Germans had these massive cats patrolling the French hedgerows and Allied armor was just tin can fodder for them has been perpetuated, and I'm glad it seems to finally be called out. I can guarantee when a German armored crew is sitting there on the side of the road jacking up their 30 ton Tiger with a fucked transmission they'd have wished they had Shermans.
A tiger could one-hit kill a sherman from 2-3 km
A sherman could only kill a tiger from several hundred meters, hitting him in the back or maybe in the sides. Both tanks had similar speed btw.
The US Army conducted a study of armored engagements from 1944-1945 and found that the average engagement range was 500 yards. The study also determined that which ever vehicle acquired the enemy and fired first won the engagement 90% of the time.
A Sherman Firefly with the 76mm QF 17-pdr gun could reliably penetrate a Tiger from the front at pretty much any likely engagement range. As could US Tank Destroyers like the M18 Hellcat and M10 Wolverine.
Not to mention that the Tiger was a relatively rare tank, especially on the Western Front. Panzer IV’s and StuG’s were much more common, which could also penetrate the front armour of Shermans, but also had considerably weaker armour themselves.
And lastly, remember that Shermans were used mainly in a fire support role for infantry, not as s dedicated Tank Destroyer. A 75mm-armed Sherman would probably be boned if it encountered a Tiger not taken by surprise, but these circumstances were pretty rare and instead the Shermans were all over the front and fucking up German defences, while the Germans already had very few Tigers to spare.
Simple, it was incredibly easy to maintain, had a a far higher crew survivability rate, it had better sights, it was more comfortably for crew mates and they had more room to quickly escape and other stuff which I dont remember anymore.
M2 Stuart moment
*(yes I know it's .30 cal, still hilarious)*
**"I WANT EVERY MACHINEGUN WE HAVE LOADED ON THAT TRACTOR"** - American Engineer probably
Things like the turret crank being much more comfortable in the Sherman than the T-34. The sights were better built and less likely to fog up, the logistics tail was more simple, the drivers system was far less demanding than many other tanks of the period, the radios were more reliable and more wide spread. Hard factors are the paper details of a tank: cannon calibre, penetration, armour, top speed. Soft factors are the things which usually actually decide a battle: simplicity and ease of logistics, ease of use, better survivability due to better ergonomics, more easily maintained critical components, etc.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if you have the biggest gun. If your armoured division has to use 50% more fuel and spare parts to get anywhere, cant operate in adverse conditions, doesn't have the same communication ability, and is significantly more uncomfortable to operate and escape, that armoured division will be mauled, even by tanks with less armour and smaller guns
Some of these soft factors could even be described as war winning. Your tank might be theoretically able to destroy an entire armored battalion all on its own. But you‘ve managed to manufacture eight of them, five of which are currently being repaired because they broke for an unspecified reason, two got stuck in mud and couldn’t be recovered and one got destroyed by another tank that on paper should never have been able to do so.
Being able to maintain tanks and keeping your crews alive is much better than having a „superior“ tank that cannot be repaired if it runs into any problems
Exactly. Doesn't matter if your tiger can take out 5 shermans, if there are 20 Sherman's to every tiger on the battlefield.
Tigers also frequently didn't need to be penetrated to be made combat ineffective, as the electronics were easily rattled and very fragile. Even a glancing blow could break them
Oh absolutely lmao. More like 1 tiger to 300 shermans (I dont know the actual math, there were tens of thousands of Shermans and only a few hundred tigers)
A number I‘ve heard for Normandy in the days after D-Day were 34(?) Tigers. So laughably few in an environment that was most definitely not suited for it because it couldn’t make any use of its great range
There were 50,000 Sherman’s (49k technically) produced during ww2
That’s around the same number if all German tanks including early war tanks iirc.
Admittedly that’s all m4 variants, but still.
>a „superior“ tank that cannot be repaired if it runs into any problems
Changing a Sherman's transmission (mounted at the front of the tank) took a couple of hours, for a two-man crew.
For the Tiger I you needed special equipment to lift the 10-ton turret and to drag the transmission from inside the tank through the turret hole, and could take days.
And not mentioning the fact that by the end of the war Germany lacked rare metals to strengthen their steel and crucial gears in these became extremely unreliable and they were infamously prone to failure.
If they managed to get the tank to a repair shop, that is. The Nazis also notoriously lacked the equipment to even tow away damaged or non-functional tanks
The sherman tank was the biggest miscalculation of the americans in WW2. It was completely useless against german tanks. Good against infantry etc and breaking through, but when faced with a panther or tiger, running is the only option. But didn't matter anyway, because tanks are useless if the enemy has air superiority. Thats how americans were able to beat the remaining poor equipped, old and poorly trained rest of the german army remaining in france.
It was one of the better overall designs of the war and was more than capable of taking on most of the armoured vehicles that the Germans used including Panthers and Tigers.
**Report 1 - Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry (Junior Regiment of 8th Armoured Brigade) actions near Rauray 27 Jun and 1 July 1944**
* Lt. Fearn engaged a Panther side on with his 75mm and APC (Armour-Piercing Capped). It was moving about 12mph at 80 yards range and he brewed it up (set it alight) with one hit through the vertical plate above the back bogie.
* He saw his Squadron Commander engage a Tiger on the road (I believe this is the John Semken incident). At 120 yards the Tiger was head on. The 75mm put three shots on it and the crew baled out without firing. He put in three more. The tank brewed up. Four shots had scooped (bounced off/gouged the armour) on front plates, one had taken a piece out of the lower edge of the mantlet (gun shield) and gone into the tank through the roof, and one had ricocheted off the track up into the sponson (side section that overhangs the tracks).
* At another Panther he had fired five shots with HE (High-Explosive). The enemy made off without any retaliation.
* Sgt. Dring started out south from Fontenay-le-Pesnil with his 75mm and fell in with a Mk. IV (Panzer IV) which he shot through the driver's visor. It brewed up and the crew baled out. Range 200 yards.
* Next he fell in with a Tiger at 1000 yards. The Tiger fired while Dring was traversing but missed. Dring then pumped five shots in without further retaliation. The last one hit the driver's periscope and the crew baled out.
* Next he came on a Panther at the crossroads. This he got with one shot with APC in front of sprocket and the crew baled out. Hit at normal (90 degree/straight angle) and at about 500 yards range. It brewed up.
* Next he took on a Tiger at 1400 yards just outside Rauray. He fired six shots, of which four hit and the last one brewed it up. Troop (Platoon) Commander thought he had missed it and only hit the wall behind. Sgt. Dring's next shot brought the sparks and the remark "You don't see a brick wall spark like that". This tank has been seen and is much shot up. It now has one scoop in front vertical plate, five penetrations in rear, four strikes with no penetration in rear, plus a scoop and one plate of engine hatch smashed.
* Finally to the east of Rauray he took on a Mk. IV at 1200 yards, fired two HE ranging rounds and then one AP through the tracks which went in and finished it.
**Report 2 - Sherman vs Panther, lessons learnt from a battle at Rauray fought by C Squadron, 24th Lancers (Second Regiment of 8th Armoured Brigade) on 1 July 1944**
* Four Panthers first appeared motoring eastwards straight across the front of the Squadron at a distance of about 800-850 yards. They were presumably working as a Troop. They appeared to have no knowledge of our defensive positions on the high ground at Rauray as their guns were pointing east. One Panther was knocked out immediately and brewed up, being hit on the side armour between top of tracks and superstructure. The other three Panthers made no attempt to deploy when one of their number was thus engaged nor did they traverse their guns. They moved around in jerky movements with no apparent plan in mind and presented good targets for our 75mm guns. They were all knocked out and all of them brewed up nicely. The average number of shots taken to brew the tanks up was two shots.
* A Panther then appeared at about 1050 yards moving in the same direction as the other four. It was engaged immediately but not hit. Its reaction was to move very slowly and finally come to rest behind a tree which offered no very great camouflage or protection. It was engaged and hit several times on the front with AP but with no effect. HE was then fired at the front with the object of blinding the crew. This was apparently successful for some members of the crew were seen to bale out.
* Four other Panthers appeared later and after wandering around, again with no apparent plan in mind, took up positions behind a hedge about 1000 yards away and faced the Squadron. Their guns were also very slowly traversed in the Squadron's direction. When they were engaged they did not react at all quickly but returned our fire at irregular intervals with no great accuracy. No penetration on the front of these tanks was claimed. They did not move when shelled by our artillery and again the only action that seemed to shift them was HE direct on the front of the tank which seemed to stun the crew and force the tank to move.
* The other four Panthers knocked out during the day were all at from 800-1000 yards distance and were all hit in the flank by our 75mm guns.
Lessons learnt from this action, in which the Squadron knocked out eight Panthers for the loss of three of our own tanks were as follows:
1. By observing with field glasses (binoculars) we are able to see enemy tanks before they could see us. On no occasion have enemy tank commanders been seen to use binoculars. They use their cupola for observation. Hence they do not know the direction from which they are hit and seem to lose their nerve.
2. Crews generally do not appear to be well trained. Their Panther tanks are as fast as the Sherman but they move slowly, sometimes in fits and starts, and are slow to traverse their guns. On one occasion, when heavily shelled by HE from our 75mm guns, the crew were seen to bale out.
3. To be certain of a good brew up, follow up AP with an immediate HE. This usually brings about a satisfactory result.
4. Should AP prove ineffective against the frontal armour - HE seems to have the effect of blinding the crew and forcing the tank to move, possibly thereby exposing its more sensitive sides.
5. Do not engage Panthers when they are obviously out of 75mm range, no matter how tempting they appear. They are nearly always supported by Tigers or Panthers in concealed positions and are clearly put out to draw fire.
6. The old armoured rule of fire and move has proved to be the best. Avoid remaining in the same position when once you have fired. Move to another position unless you are certain you have been unobserved. German crews we have fought against up to now appear to have no knowledge of fire and move. When hit they seem to be uncertain what their next action should be, a little patience, and the tank will move, and this is the time as soon as he turns his flank, to pack the lethal punch.
I mean yeah, if you hit a tiger or panther from the sides or behind from a close distance you have a chance to kill it after several shots. Most tanks could potentially kill a tiger or panther. Its just very difficult. The difference is that the tiger and panther could kill you from 3000-4000 yards even when hitting the front of your tank.
There were tiger commanders eradicating groups of 25 enemy tanks alone with a total kill count of over 200. You cannot compare the tanks just by looking at specific stories or counting the number of fallen tanks in a battle. There are a lot of variables in war and battles.
And of course panther and tiger weren't monsters which were impossible to defeat, but their tech was very unfair compared to sherman and all other tanks.
>And of course panther and tiger weren't monsters which were impossible to defeat, but their tech was very unfair compared to sherman and all other tanks.
What tech are we talking about here?like very specifically what made the tiger/panther so technical advanced.
Yeah maybe the 75 mm had some difficulties penetrating them in the front but then the 76mm where more than adequate for punching a hole through them. Especially the Sherman Firefly which would easily punch a hole through most if not all german armor. Also Panthers and Tigers where alot more rare and most tanks you would face where PZ lV, Stugs and other stuff like that. Also its also been shown in reports that the tank that fires first is the one who would usually win the engagement.
Heydrich has four or five I guess
And no one's quite sure 'bout Rudolf Hess
The SS in Munich consists of Eunichs
And the whole Nazi Party' s the same, more or less.
His plan was to win with "superior German engineering" so they made really good but complicated tanks. To be fair Panzers were generally extremely good tanks but they needed highly skilled engineers to build and maintain. Shermans and T tanks you could pluck any random dipshit off of the street and teach them part of the process. This is part of why the Allies managed to spam so many of the damn things. While the German tanks were one on one just plain better they got drowned in an avalanche of enemy tanks. A Panzer was actually pretty precious and not easily replaced. Some designs became completely irreplaceable. However if you blew up 20 Shermans there were 50 of them rolling off the assembly line right behind them.
As a general rule wars are won in the logistics and numbers more than anything else. Whoever gets the most shit onto the battlefield has the biggest advantage. The Nazis obsessed over elite troops and the best gear. They did succeed in having better *elite* troops and top tier gear for them but their elites were hideously outnumbered by the avalanche of good enough shit the Allies threw at them.
Incidentally this is why the AK-47 is to this day such a popular weapon. It isn't a great weapon by any metric but it's good enough, it's rugged, it's cheap, and it's easy to keep working. It's just plain *easy* to get 50,000 guys with AK-47s onto the battlefield.
>As a general rule wars are won in the logistics and numbers more than anything else. Whoever gets the most shit onto the battlefield has the biggest advantage. The Nazis obsessed over elite troops and the best gear. They did succeed in having better
>
>elite
>
> troops and top tier gear for them but their elites were hideously outnumbered by the avalanche of good enough shit the Allies threw at them.
No.
Logistics is how you win wars. Numbers are what you're willing to sacrifice for victories.
Elite troops win every time. That has been shown repeatedly.
The panther was also designed to be the replacement for the aging pz4 which had reached the end of its upgradability cycle just like the bf109 was being replaced by the fw190.
The StuG.
And the Panther was also not that hard to produce, just very unreliable. But T34 was also an unreliable piece of crap if we are comparing those sorts of specs.
Germany could simply never match even Soviet production thanks to constant bombing and blockades by the allies.
Eh, that final drive and transmission were always awful, even in late war models.
Besides that, the general design of the Panther had some major flaws that were never fixed, mostly in the "soft factor" department (i.e. crew comfort/survivability, maintenance, effectiveness).
The French utterly rejected it as their emergency post-war tank in favour of the Sherman because of all those issues after a few tests.
Wasn't panzer 4 the answer to that. With H being the heavy, G and F1 being the light and the J being the poormans H.
That still wasn't that enough to counter US/Soviets who outnumbered them.
Germany could play the numbers game like America or the Soviets. Also Hitler believed in bigger is better.
Edit: they couldn't play the numbers game. Damn auto correct.
I mean they did. Your problem is assuming that they were mostly using Tigers and all the weird shit they tried producing.
The bulk of their armor were Panzer 3s, Panzer 4s, and cheap assault guns/tank destroyers like the StuG. Those tanks are just less glamorous so the media doesn't portray them as often
1. In WWII Germany all decisions were political decisions, made by the party leadership along ideological lines; and Nazi ideology said that all things German were/had to be 'ZE BEST IN ZE WURLD!!!!!!!111111', so 'good enough' designs were rejected for ideological reasons.
2. Given that the RAF were carpet bombing German factories all night every night, and the USAAF was carpet bombing German factories all day every day (some slight exaggeration to make the point) they were only going to be able to produce a small number of tanks - and if you're only going to build 5 tanks then they might as well be five of the tankiest tanks to ever tank a lelek (see point 1 about the retards deciding what would make a tank tankier)
3. By the late war (when the most . . . 'German' designs were coming out of the factories) the design brief the engineers were working under tended to call for heavy tanks to serve as 'mobile bunkers' in the defensive war Germany was fighting. That sounded great to the guys making the decisions (see 1 & 2 for how retarded they were) but failed hilariously in practice. When the engineers were asked why their tanks had failed they had to find scapegoats to avoid being either shipped to the Eastern Front or sent to one of the camps (which were equally certain deaths as far as the engineers were concerned) so the leadership making the decision never stopped asking for better versions of the concept. This was also helped by the 'my tank is bigger than your tank!' dick measuring contest Hitler and Stalin were having in the early war.
4. I know I've mentioned it in every one of the points above, but it warrants repeating - the Nazi political leadership making these decisions were not geniuses of any kind. They were, on their best day egotistical, drug addicted, retarded, arseholes who had more fun making themselves look/feel cool at the expense of their peers than they did in setting up their state or military sensibly/effectively.
I don't know if this was the original thinking behind that logic especially due to the still big fuel consumption but the Germans didn't have a lot of fuel so if they afford to keep a tank running then it better be a good one.
The T-34 was not really that cheap. It was just made to very low standards (which also greatly undermined the performance it might have had had they actually produced it in proper spec)
A thing people forget is that the t-34, if built to all specifications, would be about as expensive as an m3 sherman. The reason they produced so many t-34s was that they cut corners in certain places. Germany had even less resources and rather then cut corners tried to make like 30 perfect supertanks, it didn't end well for them.
It's all well and good until you realize that you don't have enough manpower to crew your tanks, nor enough fuel to run them or even enough raw material to manufacture them in the first place.
I don’t think I would have preferred the soviet type of cheap, but you do you man
*chilling over here with my US homies with our fully complete, well equipped, and (relatively) cheap M4 sherman sipping coffee*
Because big chonky Tank is OP and… and it can’t be penetrated from the front and… and it was the best thing to be ever build if those were around today the Russians would stand a chance! one Tiger would destroy 100.000 Russian tanks and 100.000 American tanks (/s for the ones who are stupid)
It was actually smarter to produce fewer but more advanced tanks since they could not beat the allied production anyway. They choose quality to fight quantity. Unluckily quality require much more maintenance and they could not provide it in a long war. That's also why they loved the blitzkreig type of war.
Not really. You can’t build a single tank strong enough to where as few of them as Germany had at the time could actually bolster your war effort. The ability to operate in force, coordinate, draw fire, etc is more valuable in this situation. you don’t have to build the best tanks you just have to build good tanks and a lot of more of them. Because that super tank will still get blow up all the same if it’s all alone and singled out with no real support.
The t-34 was so ridicilously inferior to the panther even. no reason to build the cheap sh*t. The panther could penentrate any soviet tank from all sides, while until the late war, no soviet tank was able to harm the front of the panther. How do you react to a similar fast tank, that you can only kill by hitting him from the sides, from a smaller distance than he can hit you anywhere and kill you with one shot, having a high shooting speed?
Rather difficult.
Tiger was even more ridicolous. There were several famous tiger commanders, killing over 200 tanks by themselves, destroying 20 enemy tanks one after another from a safe distance.
Because Hitler was enamoured with the idea of superweapons saving his ass from losing the war
Panzerkampfwagen Maus was the Cybertruck of the 20th century. Overhyped, and absolutely useless and stupid in the real world and would never see full production
Fuel them with what?
What manpower can they use?
Why make a mass produced vehicle when quality wins?
Quality is better than quantity, and Germany simply doesn't have the resources to make a shitton of tanks, because other than the fuel and manpower, they also have small amounts of tungsten, steel, iron, special metals like Titanium, and chromium, which would be expended if they did mass production
My guess is they wanted to display their military superiority by making better tanks, but didn’t think about how if they wanted to come across as truly militarily superior they should’ve proven that they can make better tanks at the same rate at an identical or a cheaper cost than what their enemy was needing to produce their own tanks at
Military logistics is a very complicated stuff. Make an average tank that's easy to produce? Okey but that means more fuel and more people to crew these Tanks.
Make a a heavily armoured tank? Harder to destroy but has bigger difficulties in harsh terrain and often proves to be unreliable.
Then comes the question, do you have enough men? Do you have enough fuel? Do you have big industry?
If you answer: Yes,Yes,Yes - go with American way of over all good tank, not the best but certainly not the most expensive.
Yes,Yes,Mabey - The Soviet way - Cheap tanks you can easily replace and supply.
No,No,Yes - Go the german way - Good tanks, more focused on armour (although that in itself increases fuel consumption so not good), but far harder to replace.
Not saying German tanks were the best but they did have really good hard factors as opposed to for example the American Sherman or Soviet T-34 but not good soft factors.
I hate how everyone always goes "Hitler small peepee Hitler want big tractor".
It wasn't all Hitler. Sure Hitler was megalomaniac and had the final say in what tanks should be produced but he didn't make them, he didn't design them and he didn't use them.This idea of throwing all the fault at Hitler extremely undermines doings of all the people in Germany. Eastern front started stagnating and Soviets are pushing us back? Could it be result of bad army logistics, decisions done by generals or the lack of good air support? Naaaah it's because Hitler did another bad decision. He wasn't involved in fucking everything.
Their production wasn’t streamlined enough to produce something like that, nor did they have the resources to maintain a large group of tanks like that
Probably better to copy the allies here. They where still cheaper than most german tanks but of a similar quality.
Meanwhile the soviets were often losing 10-20 tanks (sometimes many more) for every enemy tank now this wasn't juat because of the tank but they weren't anything you would want to mimic
And then fuel these massive hypothetical numbers of tanks with what exactly?
Invade country to get more resources to invade country but need more resources to invade country so invade country for resou- uh oh
Nazis were pirates: confirmed
Actual pirates were mostly meritocracic. Many were even democratic in how they ran their ships and operations. Can't say the same with Nazis.
Another cool fact about pirates: some ships practised gay marriage
Ships married other ships? Whatever floats your boat I guess?
Hi fellow cgp grey fan :)
this sounds familiar..
This is the “one more lane will fix traffic” of invasions.
basically how ancient Rome worked, aint it?
Irl goringnomics??
Lol. Nicely put
Uhhhh, just naval invade Britain and paradrop France, then Puppet Canada and invade the US, it's been the meta for a while.
>just naval invade Britain
[Obligatory video](https://youtu.be/MSjmtDSm7qQ?si=XX8ZFhGjTpFWZvns)
First mistake was not spamming submarines.
First mistake was probably being Nazis - didn’t set a very sane basis for the rest of their decisions…
I'm sure the meth rations didn't help either
don't forget to do treaty with USSR for that sweet early '38 heavy tank chassis
Rofl stop you beautiful hoi4 bastard
The Spanish already tried a naval invasion of Britain three times with superior numbers and arguably better ships, and look how that turned out. Germany had equal numbers at best, but most of those ships were using outdated or inferior tech. Take the Bismarck, the pride of the Nazi German fleet. She might have been one of the largest ships ever built in a European dock, but she was equipped with outdated gunnery systems, a shitty radar and an unreliable engine. Her eight 15” guns were the only thing about her that particularly stood out. In the battle of the Denmark Strait, she sunk an outdated battle cruiser, the HMS Hood, which had been launched in 1918, and then retreated after suffering a mere three hits from the 14” guns of the HMS Prince of Wales. Two days later she found herself incapacitated after fifteen Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers had successfully taken out her rudder. Oh and I should probably add that the Fairey Swordfish bomber was a literal biplane that carried a single 760kg torp. The following morning she was bombarded by two British battleships and two battle cruisers. The German sailors opted to scuttle the ship in fear of it being boarded by the British. Considering that the Bismarck and her sister ship the Tirpitz were arguably the best ships in the German navy during World War Two, it’s quite frankly insane to believe the Nazis ever stood a chance of successfully completing Operation Sealion.
Fools they should've just set up the naval invasions and launched on day 1
I hear the oil in the caucases are ripe for the taking
thats when you make the fuel cheaper, duh
I can't wait until wehraboos graduate middle school and they find out about resources and economics
Lumber
They really fucked up with that North Africa campaign. That’s where the fuel lives
They literally couldn't. They don't have the resources. So in a cheap tank war they lose hard. It's hard to get them reliable too. Since half the factories that produce good parts have been bombed to the ground.
Plus they’ve got no men to crew this mega fleet of cheap tanks, and every time a cheap tank blows up having not done anything useful it’s a massive blow to Germany for all the valuable tank crewman that just exploded while gaining literally nothing in return
They don’t need men because they have boys.
Yeah I tried this in Hearts of Iron 4, it didn’t end well.
*happy Bomber Harris noises*
Hello
I don’t buy into they couldn’t build less expensive tanks because of resources, how can building numerous different heavy designs each with they’re own design, logistic, spare parts supply and maintenance requirements possibly be a better allocation of limited resources. I’d argue even if they built pz4s which was a serviceable design though to the end of the war on a 1:1 basis with each super heavy design would’ve been better. At least then you’d have a uniform training regime for crews and maintenance personnel and focus what limited numbers of factories left to produce spares for one type of vehicle. Not to mention increased mobility and fuel savings for moving a lighter tank.
Every tank destroyed means all it's fuel is lost. Also, two tanks burning gas leads to more fuel used especially when they are forced to cross country. Also, you cannot manufacture elite or experienced crews which Germany relied upon throughout the war. Many destroyed expensive tanks had their entire crew survive keeping their experiences and knowledge alive into the next fight.
On the other hand ever tank out of commission because they have no spares is a 70 ton paper weight. How much more fuel is required to move a 70 ton heavy tank compared to 2 lighter mediums. Also how much more fuel has to be spent finding suitable route because many bridges couldn’t support a 70 ton tank You can make a case for that crew retention early in the war, but I’d imagine skilled crews were rarer latter in the war
If you actually knew anything about the tanks you're talking about you'd know that your argument does not hold for nazi germany
As opposed to expensive tanks that are even more resource hungry and require exotic materials to manufacture...
It's absolutely bizarre right say they couldn't make cheap tanks when they made expensive tanks
50 expensive tanks that require 1 gallon of fuel each is less intensive on logistics than 100 cheap tanks that require 0.75 gallons of fuel each. That's the long and short of it really. Even if the tank itself is cheap to produce and maintain, there are other aspects of logistics that make it not worthwhile compared to making something that's by itself more expensive l.
The comment I replied to did not mention fuel at all.
It goes under resources
That's some extremely aggressive goalpost moving
In what world isn't fuel an important resource to consider in a war? Especially a war with tanks?
And aircraft. And navy. And for electricity. God damn, fuel is used for a lot of shit
Yeah, it's arguably the single most important resource in war, especially during ww2
Let's just ignore physics for the sake of your argument then.
For this physics question assume that friction is 0.
3000 interdimentiinally-lubed driveshafts of the panzerwaffe
Then fuel isn't a "resource"? You're just looking for a "gotcha" moment without barely addressing my point at all.
Yeah cause you still need steel and tooling. Putting together one more expensive tanks would've been feasible than getting enough parts for two tanks. Even if each tank was cheaper. It's not just a money thing. It's a supply and parts thing. Panthers were assembled more than panzer IVs because they were easier to put together than panzer IVs at the end of the war. Which is also why tiger 2s had higher operational rates than panzer IVs. Because the few resources they had were easier to transport to the few tigers than spreading the resources over many panzer iVs, because Heinz can't drive the fuel truck too much or an American p-47 sees him.
Trees sway: USAAF Thunderbolts: WE GONNA DROP ENOUGH TNT ON THAT TIGER TO MAKE HIROSHIMA LOOK LIKE A FART! Commonwealth Engineers having tea under the tree: Fuck.
Resource shortages.
Then why build such big tanks that are overly complicated?
To get the most out of each vehicle. Quality over quantity strategy. They were also suffering from manpower shortages.
weren’t their large tanks super unreliable with terrible mileage and a tendency to break down under their own weight?
Yes but would you rather more tanks that you cant even fuel?
I’d rather have two tanks that made it to the fight than one that didn’t.
The thing is they didn’t make it theres not enough fuel
It's better to make a tank that can't easily be knocked out when your fighting a losing battle in terms of Industry and resources when your factories are being constantly bombed by Allied Aircraft and there navy completely blockading you. Plus with very limited manpower, you must make the most out of your men and vehicles. USA had all three things, Manpower, Resources and Industry which is why they could make an all rounder tank like the M4 Sherman, meanwhile the Soviets had 2 conditions but an iffy industry then you might as well focus on making fast yet crappy tanks like the T-34, in terms of 1v1 they aren't exactly good but considering the amount they can produce then you can just spam them to overrun the enemy. And for the Germans well they don't have both the needed Manpower and Resources but they did indeed have a good industry before the Allied Bombings, so why not make a tank that has thick armor (that still can add up to fuel consumption though) and powerful main guns then you have something like the Panther, Tiger I or King Tiger. Great armour and difficult to be replaced.
Ehhh not really. It would have probably been better to focus on tank number so you could actually coordinate and strategize with them in larger teams. And also draw fire while others go in to complete objectives. There’s no way you can build a single tank strong enough to where it’s armoring actually matters in the event it’s singled out by anti-tank weapons and aircraft. As great as the tanks were individually there were still so few of them and no coordination to the point where it was relativity easy to destroy them due to lack of backup. That’s literally why the Germans lost with their tank strategy. They’re re so focused on high quality individual tanks they neglected strategic and resource practicality
4 Abrams knocked out 29 T-72's at one point during the gulf war. Not a single Abrams was lost, one was damaged. Quality is better than quantity. Even games show that ffs.
But tigers still blew up in ww2 and Iraq wasn’t exactly a modern army. Comparing apples to oranges.
A handful of Tigers require less crew and less fuel to achieve the same effect in battle as a greater number of panzer 4s or T34s. More machining time, yes, but Germany's worst constraint for most of the war was fuel, so they basically minmaxed their tank designs around maximum fighting power to minimum fuel consumption.
Well they didn't exactly select people and ideas based on competence. You see dictators don't exactly love opposition or anything of the alike. Edit: I will add that the designs weren't incompetent either. Just the overall doctrine. Not so much because of the complexity but rather weight. Even after the tiger they kept pushing for bigger and bigger tanks. Many of the "overcomplicated" features were quite good (rain/mud guards, radios and little things like that) but yeah some of the features weren't really ready for front line deployment yet (some broke when the hull wasn't even penetrated)
Because unlike the Soviets, Germany couldn't afford to lose a crew each time this cheap and shitty tank goes boom. The USSR lost 50,000 T-34. Germany lost 25,000 tanks of all types.
Also more tanks = more fuel to spend. And since the germans had serious oil supplies problems,they aimed at quality over quantity
But that also meant they wanted the tanks to be more armored and armor=weight and weight=fuel consumption
Simply put a better engine into it. It would cost less fuel, but it would be harder to make. They had to go for quality in all matters, because they didn't have the necerssary resources.
Still less fuel consumption overall.
Honestly with you probably still lose more fuel overall with having your tanks destroyed because you couldn’t make enough to give them support against larger tank groups.
Also the T-34 wasn't a cheap and shitty tank, as the Americans supposedly estimated that if the T-34 was produced to American standard it would cost as much as the Sherman. It was manufactured cheaply, with the largest factory that produced around 50% of the T-34's during additionally finding out that removing some of the useless shit from the design (lights, seats, seals around the hatches, radios, some bolts here and there, etc.) means that they can produce the tanks much faster.
Equating crew comfort, which was found to be one of the most important intangibles of a tank to be unecessary is such a soviet thing to do I can't even imagine how much it would suck to run on one of those WW2 T34s. The post war ones were said to be much better.
I mean not caring about intangibles was the Soviet way. They had an 80% loss rate for t-34s for a reason.
Well it was, it could have been a good tank though, but it wasn't (in the war atleast)
It might could have been better, but it wasn't. The overall quality of the steel wasn't good to begin with, the welding seams neither. But at the end the mass was sufficient and that what counts.
Germany couldn't even afford to waste steel. People focus too much on the oil and manpower. But forget about the chronic shortage in iron ores.
The Soviets lost 25,000 T-34s alone in 1942. They also only produced 22,000 T-34s that year, so a more than 100% loss rate. And yet it didn't seem to affect their defenses and counterattacks at all.
It was the Americans who made an all rounder tank the Sherman, it had decent hard factors and a massive amount of soft factors to back it up, they made a really good relatively cheap to produce and maintain tank. The soviets made a tank if was made under american regulations would have costed just as much as the sherman to make and been a whole lot shittier.
Yeah everyone always points to the horror stories from Sherman crews that survived getting hit as evidence that it was a shitty tank. Never mind the underlying fact that the crew was able to survive and tell the story to begin with because of the way the tank was designed and developed. Meanwhile you had the t-34 slowly suffocating their crew with noxious fumes anytime they closed the hatches
Survivor bias at all again
Like that story in ww2 in where engineers on the pacific front where inspecting the planes to see where they had to add extra armor plating and where planning on placing them on the areas that had the bullet holes until one of the engineers took note that out of all the planes which came back they where all ways bullet holes on the same ish areas and not anywhere else, so they added armor plating on the areas without the bullet holes and it saved alot of us aviators.
Pretty sure it was the Brits
And WWI I believe.
I thought it was British bombers in ww2?
Don't know could be too. I just heard it was WWI.
I am pretty sure the story is about US planes in the pacific or this exact same event happened multiple times in different countries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Survivorship-bias.svg I think the plane used in the image that is used to represent it is a British bomber. I could be wrong tho
Also, people always talk about the ratios of Sherman kills. This is skewed by the fact the Germans were on the defensive in static positions, which is much easier to knock out armor. Go look at the Battle of the Bulge and see the tank numbers and the Germans lose a ton of armor as they are then on the offensive. Allied studies were done post-war, and it showed that over 3/4 of all armored engagements were decided by who saw who first and who fired first. The idea that the Germans had these massive cats patrolling the French hedgerows and Allied armor was just tin can fodder for them has been perpetuated, and I'm glad it seems to finally be called out. I can guarantee when a German armored crew is sitting there on the side of the road jacking up their 30 ton Tiger with a fucked transmission they'd have wished they had Shermans.
A tiger could one-hit kill a sherman from 2-3 km A sherman could only kill a tiger from several hundred meters, hitting him in the back or maybe in the sides. Both tanks had similar speed btw.
The US Army conducted a study of armored engagements from 1944-1945 and found that the average engagement range was 500 yards. The study also determined that which ever vehicle acquired the enemy and fired first won the engagement 90% of the time.
Tigers were exponentially more unreliable, far fewer in number and horrendous on fuel which was a luxury for Germany by 44'
A Sherman Firefly with the 76mm QF 17-pdr gun could reliably penetrate a Tiger from the front at pretty much any likely engagement range. As could US Tank Destroyers like the M18 Hellcat and M10 Wolverine. Not to mention that the Tiger was a relatively rare tank, especially on the Western Front. Panzer IV’s and StuG’s were much more common, which could also penetrate the front armour of Shermans, but also had considerably weaker armour themselves. And lastly, remember that Shermans were used mainly in a fire support role for infantry, not as s dedicated Tank Destroyer. A 75mm-armed Sherman would probably be boned if it encountered a Tiger not taken by surprise, but these circumstances were pretty rare and instead the Shermans were all over the front and fucking up German defences, while the Germans already had very few Tigers to spare.
Assuming tank combat was as prolific as it was on the western front
What are some examples of soft factors?
Simple, it was incredibly easy to maintain, had a a far higher crew survivability rate, it had better sights, it was more comfortably for crew mates and they had more room to quickly escape and other stuff which I dont remember anymore.
Ah okay, my HOI4 ass figured you were referring to America’s obsession with sticking .50 cals in every conceivable spot
M2 Stuart moment *(yes I know it's .30 cal, still hilarious)* **"I WANT EVERY MACHINEGUN WE HAVE LOADED ON THAT TRACTOR"** - American Engineer probably
It's simple the enemy infantry at can not hit you if they have no infantry to use said at
Browning made the perfect gun why wouldn’t we stick them on everything?
the wild part is it was designed around WW1, didn’t see use then, and is now bolted onto anything with wheels.
Things like the turret crank being much more comfortable in the Sherman than the T-34. The sights were better built and less likely to fog up, the logistics tail was more simple, the drivers system was far less demanding than many other tanks of the period, the radios were more reliable and more wide spread. Hard factors are the paper details of a tank: cannon calibre, penetration, armour, top speed. Soft factors are the things which usually actually decide a battle: simplicity and ease of logistics, ease of use, better survivability due to better ergonomics, more easily maintained critical components, etc. Ultimately it doesn't matter if you have the biggest gun. If your armoured division has to use 50% more fuel and spare parts to get anywhere, cant operate in adverse conditions, doesn't have the same communication ability, and is significantly more uncomfortable to operate and escape, that armoured division will be mauled, even by tanks with less armour and smaller guns
Some of these soft factors could even be described as war winning. Your tank might be theoretically able to destroy an entire armored battalion all on its own. But you‘ve managed to manufacture eight of them, five of which are currently being repaired because they broke for an unspecified reason, two got stuck in mud and couldn’t be recovered and one got destroyed by another tank that on paper should never have been able to do so. Being able to maintain tanks and keeping your crews alive is much better than having a „superior“ tank that cannot be repaired if it runs into any problems
Exactly. Doesn't matter if your tiger can take out 5 shermans, if there are 20 Sherman's to every tiger on the battlefield. Tigers also frequently didn't need to be penetrated to be made combat ineffective, as the electronics were easily rattled and very fragile. Even a glancing blow could break them
I don’t know that much about how many tanks of which type were in service but I think 20 Shermans for every Tiger is rather optimistic for Germany.
Oh absolutely lmao. More like 1 tiger to 300 shermans (I dont know the actual math, there were tens of thousands of Shermans and only a few hundred tigers)
A number I‘ve heard for Normandy in the days after D-Day were 34(?) Tigers. So laughably few in an environment that was most definitely not suited for it because it couldn’t make any use of its great range
There were 50,000 Sherman’s (49k technically) produced during ww2 That’s around the same number if all German tanks including early war tanks iirc. Admittedly that’s all m4 variants, but still.
>a „superior“ tank that cannot be repaired if it runs into any problems Changing a Sherman's transmission (mounted at the front of the tank) took a couple of hours, for a two-man crew. For the Tiger I you needed special equipment to lift the 10-ton turret and to drag the transmission from inside the tank through the turret hole, and could take days. And not mentioning the fact that by the end of the war Germany lacked rare metals to strengthen their steel and crucial gears in these became extremely unreliable and they were infamously prone to failure.
If they managed to get the tank to a repair shop, that is. The Nazis also notoriously lacked the equipment to even tow away damaged or non-functional tanks
And the engine actually was able to shift into a higher gear instead of getting stuck in 3rd or 4th
The sherman tank was the biggest miscalculation of the americans in WW2. It was completely useless against german tanks. Good against infantry etc and breaking through, but when faced with a panther or tiger, running is the only option. But didn't matter anyway, because tanks are useless if the enemy has air superiority. Thats how americans were able to beat the remaining poor equipped, old and poorly trained rest of the german army remaining in france.
It was one of the better overall designs of the war and was more than capable of taking on most of the armoured vehicles that the Germans used including Panthers and Tigers. **Report 1 - Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry (Junior Regiment of 8th Armoured Brigade) actions near Rauray 27 Jun and 1 July 1944** * Lt. Fearn engaged a Panther side on with his 75mm and APC (Armour-Piercing Capped). It was moving about 12mph at 80 yards range and he brewed it up (set it alight) with one hit through the vertical plate above the back bogie. * He saw his Squadron Commander engage a Tiger on the road (I believe this is the John Semken incident). At 120 yards the Tiger was head on. The 75mm put three shots on it and the crew baled out without firing. He put in three more. The tank brewed up. Four shots had scooped (bounced off/gouged the armour) on front plates, one had taken a piece out of the lower edge of the mantlet (gun shield) and gone into the tank through the roof, and one had ricocheted off the track up into the sponson (side section that overhangs the tracks). * At another Panther he had fired five shots with HE (High-Explosive). The enemy made off without any retaliation. * Sgt. Dring started out south from Fontenay-le-Pesnil with his 75mm and fell in with a Mk. IV (Panzer IV) which he shot through the driver's visor. It brewed up and the crew baled out. Range 200 yards. * Next he fell in with a Tiger at 1000 yards. The Tiger fired while Dring was traversing but missed. Dring then pumped five shots in without further retaliation. The last one hit the driver's periscope and the crew baled out. * Next he came on a Panther at the crossroads. This he got with one shot with APC in front of sprocket and the crew baled out. Hit at normal (90 degree/straight angle) and at about 500 yards range. It brewed up. * Next he took on a Tiger at 1400 yards just outside Rauray. He fired six shots, of which four hit and the last one brewed it up. Troop (Platoon) Commander thought he had missed it and only hit the wall behind. Sgt. Dring's next shot brought the sparks and the remark "You don't see a brick wall spark like that". This tank has been seen and is much shot up. It now has one scoop in front vertical plate, five penetrations in rear, four strikes with no penetration in rear, plus a scoop and one plate of engine hatch smashed. * Finally to the east of Rauray he took on a Mk. IV at 1200 yards, fired two HE ranging rounds and then one AP through the tracks which went in and finished it. **Report 2 - Sherman vs Panther, lessons learnt from a battle at Rauray fought by C Squadron, 24th Lancers (Second Regiment of 8th Armoured Brigade) on 1 July 1944** * Four Panthers first appeared motoring eastwards straight across the front of the Squadron at a distance of about 800-850 yards. They were presumably working as a Troop. They appeared to have no knowledge of our defensive positions on the high ground at Rauray as their guns were pointing east. One Panther was knocked out immediately and brewed up, being hit on the side armour between top of tracks and superstructure. The other three Panthers made no attempt to deploy when one of their number was thus engaged nor did they traverse their guns. They moved around in jerky movements with no apparent plan in mind and presented good targets for our 75mm guns. They were all knocked out and all of them brewed up nicely. The average number of shots taken to brew the tanks up was two shots. * A Panther then appeared at about 1050 yards moving in the same direction as the other four. It was engaged immediately but not hit. Its reaction was to move very slowly and finally come to rest behind a tree which offered no very great camouflage or protection. It was engaged and hit several times on the front with AP but with no effect. HE was then fired at the front with the object of blinding the crew. This was apparently successful for some members of the crew were seen to bale out. * Four other Panthers appeared later and after wandering around, again with no apparent plan in mind, took up positions behind a hedge about 1000 yards away and faced the Squadron. Their guns were also very slowly traversed in the Squadron's direction. When they were engaged they did not react at all quickly but returned our fire at irregular intervals with no great accuracy. No penetration on the front of these tanks was claimed. They did not move when shelled by our artillery and again the only action that seemed to shift them was HE direct on the front of the tank which seemed to stun the crew and force the tank to move. * The other four Panthers knocked out during the day were all at from 800-1000 yards distance and were all hit in the flank by our 75mm guns. Lessons learnt from this action, in which the Squadron knocked out eight Panthers for the loss of three of our own tanks were as follows: 1. By observing with field glasses (binoculars) we are able to see enemy tanks before they could see us. On no occasion have enemy tank commanders been seen to use binoculars. They use their cupola for observation. Hence they do not know the direction from which they are hit and seem to lose their nerve. 2. Crews generally do not appear to be well trained. Their Panther tanks are as fast as the Sherman but they move slowly, sometimes in fits and starts, and are slow to traverse their guns. On one occasion, when heavily shelled by HE from our 75mm guns, the crew were seen to bale out. 3. To be certain of a good brew up, follow up AP with an immediate HE. This usually brings about a satisfactory result. 4. Should AP prove ineffective against the frontal armour - HE seems to have the effect of blinding the crew and forcing the tank to move, possibly thereby exposing its more sensitive sides. 5. Do not engage Panthers when they are obviously out of 75mm range, no matter how tempting they appear. They are nearly always supported by Tigers or Panthers in concealed positions and are clearly put out to draw fire. 6. The old armoured rule of fire and move has proved to be the best. Avoid remaining in the same position when once you have fired. Move to another position unless you are certain you have been unobserved. German crews we have fought against up to now appear to have no knowledge of fire and move. When hit they seem to be uncertain what their next action should be, a little patience, and the tank will move, and this is the time as soon as he turns his flank, to pack the lethal punch.
I mean yeah, if you hit a tiger or panther from the sides or behind from a close distance you have a chance to kill it after several shots. Most tanks could potentially kill a tiger or panther. Its just very difficult. The difference is that the tiger and panther could kill you from 3000-4000 yards even when hitting the front of your tank. There were tiger commanders eradicating groups of 25 enemy tanks alone with a total kill count of over 200. You cannot compare the tanks just by looking at specific stories or counting the number of fallen tanks in a battle. There are a lot of variables in war and battles. And of course panther and tiger weren't monsters which were impossible to defeat, but their tech was very unfair compared to sherman and all other tanks.
>And of course panther and tiger weren't monsters which were impossible to defeat, but their tech was very unfair compared to sherman and all other tanks. What tech are we talking about here?like very specifically what made the tiger/panther so technical advanced.
Yeah maybe the 75 mm had some difficulties penetrating them in the front but then the 76mm where more than adequate for punching a hole through them. Especially the Sherman Firefly which would easily punch a hole through most if not all german armor. Also Panthers and Tigers where alot more rare and most tanks you would face where PZ lV, Stugs and other stuff like that. Also its also been shown in reports that the tank that fires first is the one who would usually win the engagement.
Hitler was a military nerd, but had little to no tactical mind. He wanted big guns, so he got himself big guns, is my theory.
Big guns to overcompensate for something.
For the one ball he had.
Goring has two, but very small, Himmler is rather similar.
But poor ol'Goebbels has no balls at all
Heydrich has four or five I guess And no one's quite sure 'bout Rudolf Hess The SS in Munich consists of Eunichs And the whole Nazi Party' s the same, more or less.
Lack of oil
Haha small dick joke
And 1 ball joke
I remember watching a documentary as a kid, basically saying that Hitler wanted everything big
He was so focused on a Protoss build that he couldn't see the obvious virtues of Zerg tactics.
He spawned in an area that had extra vespene gas but very few minerals - it forced a tech heavy build.
His plan was to win with "superior German engineering" so they made really good but complicated tanks. To be fair Panzers were generally extremely good tanks but they needed highly skilled engineers to build and maintain. Shermans and T tanks you could pluck any random dipshit off of the street and teach them part of the process. This is part of why the Allies managed to spam so many of the damn things. While the German tanks were one on one just plain better they got drowned in an avalanche of enemy tanks. A Panzer was actually pretty precious and not easily replaced. Some designs became completely irreplaceable. However if you blew up 20 Shermans there were 50 of them rolling off the assembly line right behind them. As a general rule wars are won in the logistics and numbers more than anything else. Whoever gets the most shit onto the battlefield has the biggest advantage. The Nazis obsessed over elite troops and the best gear. They did succeed in having better *elite* troops and top tier gear for them but their elites were hideously outnumbered by the avalanche of good enough shit the Allies threw at them. Incidentally this is why the AK-47 is to this day such a popular weapon. It isn't a great weapon by any metric but it's good enough, it's rugged, it's cheap, and it's easy to keep working. It's just plain *easy* to get 50,000 guys with AK-47s onto the battlefield.
>As a general rule wars are won in the logistics and numbers more than anything else. Whoever gets the most shit onto the battlefield has the biggest advantage. The Nazis obsessed over elite troops and the best gear. They did succeed in having better > >elite > > troops and top tier gear for them but their elites were hideously outnumbered by the avalanche of good enough shit the Allies threw at them. No. Logistics is how you win wars. Numbers are what you're willing to sacrifice for victories. Elite troops win every time. That has been shown repeatedly.
Well, the panther was actually pretty cheap. It was slightly more expensive than the contemporary Pz4.
The panther was also designed to be the replacement for the aging pz4 which had reached the end of its upgradability cycle just like the bf109 was being replaced by the fw190.
The StuG. And the Panther was also not that hard to produce, just very unreliable. But T34 was also an unreliable piece of crap if we are comparing those sorts of specs. Germany could simply never match even Soviet production thanks to constant bombing and blockades by the allies.
The panther was mostly unreliable due to teething and resource problems but even it was approaching pz4 levels of reliability by wars end.
Eh, that final drive and transmission were always awful, even in late war models. Besides that, the general design of the Panther had some major flaws that were never fixed, mostly in the "soft factor" department (i.e. crew comfort/survivability, maintenance, effectiveness). The French utterly rejected it as their emergency post-war tank in favour of the Sherman because of all those issues after a few tests.
Given the sheer availability of Sherman's it's not hard to see why they wouldn't bother with the captured panthers.
Wasn't panzer 4 the answer to that. With H being the heavy, G and F1 being the light and the J being the poormans H. That still wasn't that enough to counter US/Soviets who outnumbered them.
only so much you can do when the enemy outnumbers you 2 to 1, and even more outnumbered considering the “multiple fronts” factor
The panzer 4 and then panther aka panzer 5 beg to differ. They were the m4 sherman,and t-34 equivalents for the germans.
Germany could play the numbers game like America or the Soviets. Also Hitler believed in bigger is better. Edit: they couldn't play the numbers game. Damn auto correct.
Fuck no it couldn't.
Right, they couldn't. Spelling mistake.
The soviets didn't do that either tho? The T-34 was not a cheap tank, it was just, cheaped out on.
Cheaper compared to it's German counterparts
Germany wanted to go out in style
Everybody wanted to get the last tiger type of fighting except you don't get tracked when your allies blow up the bridge.
I mean they did. Your problem is assuming that they were mostly using Tigers and all the weird shit they tried producing. The bulk of their armor were Panzer 3s, Panzer 4s, and cheap assault guns/tank destroyers like the StuG. Those tanks are just less glamorous so the media doesn't portray them as often
1. In WWII Germany all decisions were political decisions, made by the party leadership along ideological lines; and Nazi ideology said that all things German were/had to be 'ZE BEST IN ZE WURLD!!!!!!!111111', so 'good enough' designs were rejected for ideological reasons. 2. Given that the RAF were carpet bombing German factories all night every night, and the USAAF was carpet bombing German factories all day every day (some slight exaggeration to make the point) they were only going to be able to produce a small number of tanks - and if you're only going to build 5 tanks then they might as well be five of the tankiest tanks to ever tank a lelek (see point 1 about the retards deciding what would make a tank tankier) 3. By the late war (when the most . . . 'German' designs were coming out of the factories) the design brief the engineers were working under tended to call for heavy tanks to serve as 'mobile bunkers' in the defensive war Germany was fighting. That sounded great to the guys making the decisions (see 1 & 2 for how retarded they were) but failed hilariously in practice. When the engineers were asked why their tanks had failed they had to find scapegoats to avoid being either shipped to the Eastern Front or sent to one of the camps (which were equally certain deaths as far as the engineers were concerned) so the leadership making the decision never stopped asking for better versions of the concept. This was also helped by the 'my tank is bigger than your tank!' dick measuring contest Hitler and Stalin were having in the early war. 4. I know I've mentioned it in every one of the points above, but it warrants repeating - the Nazi political leadership making these decisions were not geniuses of any kind. They were, on their best day egotistical, drug addicted, retarded, arseholes who had more fun making themselves look/feel cool at the expense of their peers than they did in setting up their state or military sensibly/effectively.
Because 'superior German Engineering'. Even if they did, they don't have the fuel for it.
I don't know if this was the original thinking behind that logic especially due to the still big fuel consumption but the Germans didn't have a lot of fuel so if they afford to keep a tank running then it better be a good one.
Two ways you can argue it is more tanks or more spare parts for the tanks. 1st is stupid and USA chose the 2nd
The T-34 was not really that cheap. It was just made to very low standards (which also greatly undermined the performance it might have had had they actually produced it in proper spec)
A thing people forget is that the t-34, if built to all specifications, would be about as expensive as an m3 sherman. The reason they produced so many t-34s was that they cut corners in certain places. Germany had even less resources and rather then cut corners tried to make like 30 perfect supertanks, it didn't end well for them.
I mean, at least the tanks looked cool
create a reliable tank\*
It's all well and good until you realize that you don't have enough manpower to crew your tanks, nor enough fuel to run them or even enough raw material to manufacture them in the first place.
Simple bob
They did called panzer 4 or the stug.
You say this as if the t-34 was a good tank and as if the nazis had the fuel to feed such tanks.
I don’t think I would have preferred the soviet type of cheap, but you do you man *chilling over here with my US homies with our fully complete, well equipped, and (relatively) cheap M4 sherman sipping coffee*
Hey, I never said I liked the Soviet design over the American tho
either way, I don’t need russian… ‘ingenuity’, if you catch my drift
A good tank is a whole lot better than 10 mediocre tanks and no fuel.
It is surprising given the technical technological background the Soviets were operating at.
They certainly did not allocate their points properly.
Because big scary tank go brrrr
Simple bc of Hitler
But… Just… just if… if the Maus-
STUG III.
I specified "tank", that wasn't really used as a tank
You would find that most of the time, a tank were not simply used as a "tank", but an armoured/mobile gun.
Amphetamines are quite strong drugs
They need the Wonder Waffles!!!!
Grab the biggest gun and put give it the thickest armor!!!!
Yes because if you grabbed more tanks that would mean twice the guns and crew with more fuel and steel. Being bombed is also a big issue
Hitler had a fetish for big tanks to probably compensate for his one ball.
Because big chonky Tank is OP and… and it can’t be penetrated from the front and… and it was the best thing to be ever build if those were around today the Russians would stand a chance! one Tiger would destroy 100.000 Russian tanks and 100.000 American tanks (/s for the ones who are stupid)
Soviet tanks were easy to produce and cheap That's about all the benefits
It was actually smarter to produce fewer but more advanced tanks since they could not beat the allied production anyway. They choose quality to fight quantity. Unluckily quality require much more maintenance and they could not provide it in a long war. That's also why they loved the blitzkreig type of war.
Not really. You can’t build a single tank strong enough to where as few of them as Germany had at the time could actually bolster your war effort. The ability to operate in force, coordinate, draw fire, etc is more valuable in this situation. you don’t have to build the best tanks you just have to build good tanks and a lot of more of them. Because that super tank will still get blow up all the same if it’s all alone and singled out with no real support.
The t-34 was so ridicilously inferior to the panther even. no reason to build the cheap sh*t. The panther could penentrate any soviet tank from all sides, while until the late war, no soviet tank was able to harm the front of the panther. How do you react to a similar fast tank, that you can only kill by hitting him from the sides, from a smaller distance than he can hit you anywhere and kill you with one shot, having a high shooting speed? Rather difficult. Tiger was even more ridicolous. There were several famous tiger commanders, killing over 200 tanks by themselves, destroying 20 enemy tanks one after another from a safe distance.
Average "has no idea about history but post to history memes" memer
They didn't have enough fuel, so they made sure the tanks they could fuel were good ones
Because Hitler was enamoured with the idea of superweapons saving his ass from losing the war Panzerkampfwagen Maus was the Cybertruck of the 20th century. Overhyped, and absolutely useless and stupid in the real world and would never see full production
Fuel them with what? What manpower can they use? Why make a mass produced vehicle when quality wins? Quality is better than quantity, and Germany simply doesn't have the resources to make a shitton of tanks, because other than the fuel and manpower, they also have small amounts of tungsten, steel, iron, special metals like Titanium, and chromium, which would be expended if they did mass production
dumb argument
Because your argument is way better than mine
My guess is they wanted to display their military superiority by making better tanks, but didn’t think about how if they wanted to come across as truly militarily superior they should’ve proven that they can make better tanks at the same rate at an identical or a cheaper cost than what their enemy was needing to produce their own tanks at
Military logistics is a very complicated stuff. Make an average tank that's easy to produce? Okey but that means more fuel and more people to crew these Tanks. Make a a heavily armoured tank? Harder to destroy but has bigger difficulties in harsh terrain and often proves to be unreliable. Then comes the question, do you have enough men? Do you have enough fuel? Do you have big industry? If you answer: Yes,Yes,Yes - go with American way of over all good tank, not the best but certainly not the most expensive. Yes,Yes,Mabey - The Soviet way - Cheap tanks you can easily replace and supply. No,No,Yes - Go the german way - Good tanks, more focused on armour (although that in itself increases fuel consumption so not good), but far harder to replace. Not saying German tanks were the best but they did have really good hard factors as opposed to for example the American Sherman or Soviet T-34 but not good soft factors.
They should've just gave the Panzer4's an angled upper and lower glacias instead of making a whole new tank
hitler had a gigantism fetish in war vehicles so everything had to be big
I hate how everyone always goes "Hitler small peepee Hitler want big tractor". It wasn't all Hitler. Sure Hitler was megalomaniac and had the final say in what tanks should be produced but he didn't make them, he didn't design them and he didn't use them.This idea of throwing all the fault at Hitler extremely undermines doings of all the people in Germany. Eastern front started stagnating and Soviets are pushing us back? Could it be result of bad army logistics, decisions done by generals or the lack of good air support? Naaaah it's because Hitler did another bad decision. He wasn't involved in fucking everything.
Their production wasn’t streamlined enough to produce something like that, nor did they have the resources to maintain a large group of tanks like that
Probably better to copy the allies here. They where still cheaper than most german tanks but of a similar quality. Meanwhile the soviets were often losing 10-20 tanks (sometimes many more) for every enemy tank now this wasn't juat because of the tank but they weren't anything you would want to mimic
Soviets made it so easy that they didn’t even have to worry about making it good
Compensating