The Truth about Tanks on the Western Front
April 22, 2018 8:57 PM   Subscribe

To give you a general sense, in April of 1945 the Germans have about 90 tanks on all of the Western Front. All tanks, everything, Panthers, Panzer IV, Tigers. They had a handful of Tigers. They had about 400 other armored vehicles, assault guns, Stug III and things like that. So they had just short of 500 armored vehicles on the entire Western Front, from the North Sea all the way down to Bavaria and Southern Germany. At that point in time the United States had 11,000 tank and tank destroyers, to give you some sense of the disparity in forces. - - Popular historian Stephen Zaloga gives an interview discussing armored warfare in Western Europe during the Second World War for Tank and AFV News.

I will note that Patton's 3rd Army so glowingly referenced as the experienced and unstoppable armored force included the 761st Black Panthers.
posted by Slap*Happy (70 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
Tagging Artw. Tanks aren't my bag, but I vividly remember a childhood 1970s visit to the displayed collection at Fort Knox. The (fascinating) interview states that collection has been deaccessioned to a non-public locale at Fort Benning, in Georgia. That is a shame.
posted by mwhybark at 10:02 PM on April 22, 2018


Best tank museum I’ve ever been to was the one at Munster, Germany, because being Germany everyone’s tanks came to visit for both world wars and the Cold War. The one at Bovington in the UK is pretty great too.

Haven’t really visited any in the US, Seatte’s more of an aerospace town.
posted by Artw at 10:07 PM on April 22, 2018 [2 favorites]


Just swanning about.
posted by unliteral at 10:09 PM on April 22, 2018


No discussion of German tanks is complete without the German Tank Problem. Statistical analysis of serial numbers from captured parts was able to produce much more accurate estimates of German tank production than conventional Allied intelligence. While the practical analysis was more complicated, the basic idea is remarkably elegant.

Say you have nine captured gearboxes, and the serial number for each gearbox corresponds exactly to the order in which it was produced, so that the first gearbox has serial number 1, the 129th gearbox has serial number 129, and so on. We know for certain that there must be at least as many gearboxes as the highest serial number in our sample, but it's very likely that there are more, because it's very unlikely that we've captured the highest serial number in the population. We want a way to estimate just how many more gearboxes there are, i.e. the difference between the highest serial number in the population and the highest serial number in our sample.

Since we have nine serial numbers in the sample, our sample divides the population of all serial numbers into ten intervals, like fenceposts. It is reasonable to assume that the highest serial number in the sample, the ninth one, is roughly nine tenths of the highest serial number in the population. So in order to estimate the size of the population, just add one ninth of the value of the highest serial number to itself (then subtract 1 to correct for the fact that serial numbers start with 1, not 0). For example, if the highest serial number is 180, we would estimate that there were 199 gearboxes produced altogether.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 10:33 PM on April 22, 2018 [52 favorites]


Haven’t really visited any in the US, Seatte’s more of an aerospace town.

I have one you can come see, it is a sad sort of thing really, I made it myself.
Some cruel people would say it is not really a tank at all.
posted by boilermonster at 10:55 PM on April 22, 2018 [22 favorites]


Art, the Paul Allen collection up north has an annual Tankfest. We should hit it sometime.
posted by mwhybark at 11:24 PM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]


Artw: Paul Allen's Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum in Everett not only has 24 airplanes, it has 10 tanks (and other vehicles). On May 26 they have Tankfest NW: Hear the rumble and boom of vintage tanks and artillery at the Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum's seventh annual Tankfest Northwest event!

posted by ShooBoo at 11:27 PM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]


boilermonster, head north with that and Art and I will provide snacks. Well, I'll provide snacks, I can't accurately speak for Art offhand, but I suspect snacks are within his provisioning expertise.
posted by mwhybark at 11:29 PM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]


The US arguably out produced the entire Axis in tanks, fighters, bombers, machine guns, large naval vessels, etc... etc...

Even though Shermans were grossly outgunned, outclassed and outmanouvered by German tanks at least the US could produce an insane number of them every year. Hopefully we'd eventually have listened to our allies and produced better tanks if the war had lasted longer. Judging by our failures to absorb any of the hard won lessons the Brits tried to share with us on anti-submarine warfare it'd have taken a while for us to get past our arrogance.
posted by BrotherCaine at 11:56 PM on April 22, 2018 [1 favorite]


I still think, in total war, you'd be better off with loads and loads of OK tanks, than far fewer super-tanks - especially given that the most common use of tanks was to fight infantry, rather than other tanks.
posted by pompomtom at 12:56 AM on April 23, 2018 [3 favorites]


The thing I'm curious about with tanks, and other aspects of modern war, is about how much damage was done to the crew's hearing. I know it's just one small thing in a litany of horrors but confined spaces and guns seems like a nightmare.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 3:16 AM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


Shermans were grossly outgunned, outclassed and outmanouvered by German tanks

Outgunned and inferior in terms of armour, but the Sherman had two things going for it (besides cost) that, to me, indicate it wasn't entirely outclassed - it was faster than any German tank and was very reliable.

When you're driving across Europe, those two things are pretty important.
posted by dazed_one at 3:18 AM on April 23, 2018 [7 favorites]


Hm. Is this surprising? This was basically a German-Russian war.

9 out of 10 German soldiers died on the Eastern Front.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU
posted by yoyo_nyc at 3:32 AM on April 23, 2018 [3 favorites]


9 out of 10 German soldiers died on the Eastern Front.

Very true. Once the allies had landed in Normandy, however, the concentration of units to front line space was somewhat closer to parity.
posted by dazed_one at 3:49 AM on April 23, 2018


It's easier to get away with having an undergunned main battle tank when you have overwhelming air superiority.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 3:57 AM on April 23, 2018 [9 favorites]


Western Allied totals for Axis killed or captured dwarfs the Eastern front totals. Russian insistence on repaying atrocity in kind prolonged the war significantly.
posted by Slap*Happy at 4:59 AM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


Do you have figures on that? That surprises me a bit (unless it includes North Africa and/or Italy).
posted by pompomtom at 5:12 AM on April 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


Metafilter: re-litigating World War II.
posted by SPrintF at 5:31 AM on April 23, 2018 [20 favorites]


My son was just at the tank museum in Danville VA on Saturday, and he was impressed.
posted by COD at 5:52 AM on April 23, 2018


Do you have figures on that?

This essay goes into it, the author finding credible sources for POWs, KIA and Missing and coming up with totals. The Western Allies were staggeringly efficient at neutralizing German forces, not just killing them, especially when you take into account the tiny losses they suffered compared to Russia.

Russia did almost all of the heavy lifting in defeating the Axis in Europe, this is undeniable. It wasn't a solo effort, tho.
posted by Slap*Happy at 5:53 AM on April 23, 2018 [4 favorites]


I was lucky enough to spend a few days with Jacques Littlefield’s insane (100+ tanks) collection in the Bay Area before he passed. Every single yank was in operational order. Incredible resource.
posted by asavage at 5:54 AM on April 23, 2018 [7 favorites]


> Russian insistence on repaying atrocity in kind prolonged the war significantly.

Unless you have a really good argument for this, I'm going to write it off as nonsense.
posted by languagehat at 6:06 AM on April 23, 2018 [5 favorites]


Hastings argues that it took an army willing to counter German brutality with like savagery to win the war, and the Russians were the ones that could do it.
posted by dazed_one at 6:14 AM on April 23, 2018


Although the British and American strategic bombing campaign was similarly savage, I'd postulate.
posted by dazed_one at 6:16 AM on April 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


Currently reading a reprint of a Donald Featherstone tank wargaming book I first read as a kid (I think - he wrote several). It's pretty hardcore tank nerdom.

Oh and the other day I went past the place the first tank was designed and was proud to show it off to visiting Oz friend (It's a hotel in Lincoln)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:22 AM on April 23, 2018


Thanks for the link Slap*Happy. I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion re 'effectiveness'*, given the race to surrender to the Western powers once the war was basically decided (which, when the author considers, shows much higher counts on the Eastern front), but it's still an interesting statistic.


* ...and it's not like there could be a definitive answer to that, really.
posted by pompomtom at 6:29 AM on April 23, 2018


There’s arguments that Seelow Heights Could have been avoided, but they don’t seem very convincing.

Also Marshal Zhukov is a good Yorkshire lad and I’ll hear nowt said against him.*

* okay, only in one movie.
posted by Artw at 6:31 AM on April 23, 2018 [5 favorites]


Anyway, back to utterly improbable tank battles in the World of Tanks for me...
posted by pompomtom at 6:31 AM on April 23, 2018 [1 favorite]




> Russian insistence on repaying atrocity in kind prolonged the war significantly.

Unless you have a really good argument for this, I'm going to write it off as nonsense.


Look at a map. See what portion of Germany surrendered to the western allies and what portion surrendered to Russia.

Seems like offering better terms of surrender results in more territory being surrendered.
posted by ocschwar at 6:32 AM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


I think a lot of that is the divs just ploughing through open flat bits, a lot of which are around Berlin. If you stand by the Serlow monument and look east it’s all just flat all the way to Poland.
posted by Artw at 6:34 AM on April 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


Outgunned and inferior in terms of armour, but the Sherman had two things going for it (besides cost) that, to me, indicate it wasn't entirely outclassed - it was faster than any German tank and was very reliable.

Fuel efficiency probably also mattered a lot too.
posted by srboisvert at 6:47 AM on April 23, 2018 [5 favorites]


Having fuel, in general.
posted by Artw at 6:48 AM on April 23, 2018 [9 favorites]


I was surprised to find out recently that the Sturmgeschütz III "assault gun" (sort of a tank but without a rotatable turret, similar to some Allied tank destroyers) was the most-produced German fighting vehicle after the Hanomag half-track.

It's an interesting thing; sort of an evolutionary dead-end as a distinct species of armored vehicle, which faded out in favor of self-propelled artillery pieces and modern tanks of various sizes. I suppose this is likely a result of direct-fire artillery for infantry close support becoming largely obsolete with the development of compact man-portable rockets and the decisiveness of CAS from aircraft.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:09 AM on April 23, 2018 [3 favorites]


The US arguably out produced the entire Axis in tanks, fighters, bombers, machine guns, large naval vessels, etc... etc...

The allied powers were much better than the axis at actually re-organising their societies to be war machines. That always surprises people because of our folk legends about German industrial efficiency and total-war mobilisation. In spring 1942: the war in Europe had been going on for three years, the German strike against the Soviet Union had failed, the United States had entered the war... and Germany arms productions was still completely chaotic.

By contrast, the US - which had entered the war only a few months before - was better organised for wartime production than Germany. The UK had been on a war footing for years - the British out-produced the Germans in fighter aircraft during all but one or two weeks of the battle of Britain and by the end of it were consistently building aircraft and training pilots at way above replacement rate while the Germans were way below replacement.

The way the RAF organised air defence was also a masterpiece of organisation and discipline, to be contrasted with the arbitrary and frankly rag-tag organisation of German strikes against them.
posted by atrazine at 7:59 AM on April 23, 2018 [4 favorites]


The thing I'm curious about with tanks, and other aspects of modern war, is about how much damage was done to the crew's hearing. I know it's just one small thing in a litany of horrors but confined spaces and guns seems like a nightmare.

There seems to have been little to no consideration for noise issues across the board in WWII. My father, father-in-law, and just about every WWII vet I ever knew had hearing aids from the VA. It's a multi-faceted issue. They didn't really want to get them but it became a quality of life issue when they could no longer participate in conversations. I'm sure it had pyschological effects as well but that generation didn't talk about such things.
posted by tommasz at 8:00 AM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


There seems to have been little to no consideration for noise issues across the board in WWII. My father, father-in-law, and just about every WWII vet I ever knew had hearing aids from the VA. It's a multi-faceted issue. They didn't really want to get them but it became a quality of life issue when they could no longer participate in conversations. I'm sure it had pyschological effects as well but that generation didn't talk about such things.

This was an issue in the civilian world as well. Part of it is that we went from a generally not loud world to a very loud world pretty quickly and those working in the loud parts tended to not live long enough for hearing loss tended not to be the most pressing issue when you're just trying not to die.

Hearing and hearing loss wasn't really addressed or considered an issue until about the 1970's.
posted by jmauro at 8:07 AM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


"I was surprised to find out recently that the Sturmgeschütz III "assault gun" (sort of a tank but without a rotatable turret, similar to some Allied tank destroyers) was the most-produced German fighting vehicle after the Hanomag half-track."

There were, as I understand, three major factors that contributed to this;

1) It was built on the Panzer III chassis, which was a (continually upgraded) pre-war german design, therefore relatively reliable

2) Building an armoured vehicle without a turret is simpler therefore speeding up production.

3) An armoured vehicle without a turret is better suited as an 'ambush' vehicle. As such it is better suited to fighting a defensive war, which pretty much describes the German war effort from '44 on.
posted by Barticus at 8:09 AM on April 23, 2018 [5 favorites]


Even though Shermans were grossly outgunned, outclassed and outmanouvered by German tanks at least the US could produce an insane number of them every year. Hopefully we'd eventually have listened to our allies and produced better tanks if the war had lasted longer.

In general -- and you can see Zaloga talking about this -- all tanks of roughly the same weight were roughly equivalent. It's possible to get into extreme tank nerd-dom and argue about things like special tank ammunition and millimeters of armor, but basically the Pz IV, M4 Sherman, and T-34 were more or less equivalent. Easy Eight Shermans beat T-34/85's in Korea, etc.

What tends to happen, though, is that people compare Sherman tanks to much heavier tanks like the Panther, or the Tiger and Tiger II. And these tanks of course had much heavier armor and cannon than the lighter Sherman. But as Zaloga points out, well, that's not always the best thing: they were more expensive and less reliable.

The United States did field heavier tanks (M26 Pershing, etc), but each M26 took twice the shipping space of a M4, and again, as the article points out, Germany didn't have that many AFVs in the field.

Postwar operations research concluded that the most important factor in winning a tank battle was shooting first, not armor or cannon size.
posted by Comrade_robot at 8:13 AM on April 23, 2018 [7 favorites]



There seems to have been little to no consideration for noise issues across the board in WWII.


Nor in peacetime. Cumulative hearing damage from machines didn't become a concern for a long time after.
posted by ocschwar at 9:35 AM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


Nothing substantial to contribute, just a line I always liked.

After the war, there was supposedly an interview with a German commander, and they asked him how the tanks compared.

"One of our tanks could take five of yours, no difficulty."

"Then why'd you lose?"

"Because every time we brought in one tank, you brought eight."
posted by Four Ds at 9:39 AM on April 23, 2018 [5 favorites]


I will note that Patton's 3rd Army so glowingly referenced as the experienced and unstoppable armored force included the 761st Black Panthers.

Thanks for including the link to the 761st; great stuff. Patton's pep talk the first time they went into battle:
Men, you're the first Negro tankers to ever fight in the American Army. I would never have asked for you if you weren't good. I have nothing but the best in my Army. I don't care what color you are as long as you go up there and kill those Kraut sonsofbitches. Everyone has their eyes on you and is expecting great things from you. Most of all your race is looking forward to your success. Don't let them down and damn you, don't let me down! They say it is patriotic to die for your country. Well, let’s see how many patriots we can make out of those German sonsofbitches.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote a book about the 761st and "agreed that although Patton was a bigot like most, the fact remains that he did lend his name to the advancement of blacks in the military at the time, unlike most other military officers."
posted by kirkaracha at 9:40 AM on April 23, 2018 [6 favorites]


Re: organization of the war economy, after reading The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze, my understanding is that the allies simply had larger economies that they could redirect to war production, especially the US.

Germany was also at a major disadvantage once the war started, since it lost access to oversea resources, including oil, and it became difficult to find enemy-free airspace to train new pilots. By contrast, Britain was training its pilots in Australia and Canada, far from the enemy threat, and it had access to oil and resources the World over, modulo submarine warfare.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 10:13 AM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


One of my grandpas was in a U.S. Tank Destroyer unit during the war (705th, they supported the 101st Airborne at Bastogne) and so I recently read a book about the Tank Destroyer units and it was especially interesting because Tank Destroyer units had some of the lowest casualty percentages of front-line U.S. units from the war. Part of it was because, often, if the Tank Destroyer got damaged, the crews could bail out before they were killed.
posted by drezdn at 10:51 AM on April 23, 2018


I took my 11-year-old son to The Tank Museum in Bovington, England last month for Spring Break. I was very impressed by the condition and number of all the tanks. He was in heaven! He rattled off all the names and other info.
posted by cherryflute at 11:03 AM on April 23, 2018 [3 favorites]


The allied powers were much better than the axis at actually re-organising their societies to be war machines.


It also helped that the allied powers could locate much of their war production out of reach of enemy action.

Great Britain was able to partly move production of things like the Avro Lancaster and the De Havilland Mosquito to Canada and Australia, and Canada was also cranking out corvettes, destroyers, and merchant shipping in high numbers to help secure the Atlantic supply routes.

The US had been ramping up war production even before Pearl Harbor as part of the "lend-lease" program supporting Britain and Russia. This was simply accelerated in 1942, and few of their production facilities were ever in range of Axis forces.

Even Russia, who faced initial difficulties after Barbarossa, managed to move most of their war production behind the Urals (not without massive disruption and loss of life) and were then able to swamp Germany with things like the incredibly versatile and reliable T-34 tank, or the IL-2, which became the single most produced military aircraft in history.

Germany simply did not have the luxury of moving war production out of harm's way.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:28 PM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


I have a strong amateur's interest in World War II, which has led me to a couple of illuminating insights. One of them is that the popular American conception of the war seems to have been shaped to a remarkable degree by Nazi propaganda. The idea that the Nazis were brilliantly effective, capable of fighting a two-front war against impossible odds due to their military genius, magnificent war machines, and rigorous organization--this all needs has to be regarded with extreme suspicion. The German military went into a modern, mechanized war with an army supplied by horse and transported on foot. The fancy panzers were never nearly as numerous as Hollywood makes it seem. I hadn't encountered the numbers Zaloga provides here, but they are fascinating--90 tanks on the entire Western Front near the end.

The Germans had, for several years, at least nominal control of the industrial capacity and raw materials of the whole of continental Europe, a workforce of millions of slaves--and the Soviet Union outproduced them massively in terms of tanks and aircraft. They kept committing to the production of idiotic superweapons like the Tiger (the admiration so often expressed for this stupidity had me convinced long before our current political moment that a strong current of crypto-fascism runs through American society) while both the Soviets and the Americans built tens of thousands of far more efficient and strategically more rational medium tanks. The Nazis weren't just evil. They were also a pack of fools.

It's almost like an ideology committed to the destruction of intelligence won't help you win a modern war.
posted by a certain Sysoi Pafnut'evich at 12:40 PM on April 23, 2018 [8 favorites]


One of them is that the popular American conception of the war seems to have been shaped to a remarkable degree by Nazi propaganda.

Blame the Cold War for that view. Not only did that mean we never got the Russian view on the war until after the collapse of the USSR, but we suddenly had a need for expertise on how to fight the Russians and who were the experts that we turned to?

NATO always saw itself as the underdog, outnumbered & outgunned by the huge Warsaw Pact tank armies, but with a technical superiority that sort of alleviated that discrepancy, remarkably similar to the situation the nazis on the Eastern Front. So there was that sort of identification with the "heroic" military men of the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS standing firm against the Red Hordes (with a lot of throat clearing about separating the military values from the uncomfortable political side of things of course).

Helped a lot by all of the self serving, me, I was never a nazi, honest guv autobiographies written by all those generals who suddenly discovered the virtues of being apolitical after the war.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:51 PM on April 23, 2018 [6 favorites]


They kept committing to the production of idiotic superweapons like the Tiger (the admiration so often expressed for this stupidity had me convinced long before our current political moment that a strong current of crypto-fascism runs through American society)

The Germans just had better names for their tanks. What Allied soldier wouldn't want to return home and brag about battling some mechanized hell beast called a Tiger.
posted by Beholder at 1:08 PM on April 23, 2018


I was surprised to find out recently that the Sturmgeschütz III "assault gun" (sort of a tank but without a rotatable turret, similar to some Allied tank destroyers) was the most-produced German fighting vehicle after the Hanomag half-track.

It's an interesting thing; sort of an evolutionary dead-end as a distinct species of armored vehicle[...]
Not entirely.
posted by kickingtheground at 2:05 PM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


The 90 tank statistic, while true, conceals the fact that the Stug III was a very effective fighting vehicle - with the same armament as a Panzer IV tank, the Stug hit just as hard as the Germans' most common tank and, in a defensive battle, its lack of a turret was less a handicap and more a boon in that it gave the vehicle a very low profile. It carried a similar level of armour protection to the Panzer IV and could move at roughly the same speed over the same terrain. It was basically a tank in every sense of the word but for the lack of a turret.
posted by dazed_one at 2:22 PM on April 23, 2018


The Germans just had better names for their tanks.

But the allies totally had them beat in the air: Spitfire, Mustang, Tempest and Black Widow vs Bf 109 and Fw 190.
posted by dazed_one at 2:32 PM on April 23, 2018 [3 favorites]


It's easier to get away with having an undergunned main battle tank when you have overwhelming air superiority.

Also when the couple of enemy tanks in your way, which your guns can't really penetrate and your armor can't really stop, have no fuel and the engines don't work 60% of the time even if it had fuel.

As others point out the single greatest advantage of the supposedly crappy US tanks was that they actually worked. They worked almost all the time in almost all conditions. A shitty deathbox of a tank which runs is literally infinitely better than the coolest, shiniest, fastest, most upgunned and uparmored nazi wet dream of a tank if that tank's engine is non-functional and it would be stuck in the mud even if it could theoretically move.The other great advantage of course being that there were a metric bazillion of the things. Oh, you just blew up 13 Shermans? Here's 57 more within a kilometer.

but the Sherman had two things going for it (besides cost) that, to me, indicate it wasn't entirely outclassed - it was faster than any German tank and was very reliable

This isn't actually true. One reason the Sherman looks so bad on paper compared to German tanks is that it is quite slow for its weight, armor, and armament. It was roughly as fast as a Tiger, and the Tiger had hugely more armor and a hugely better gun, particularly compared to the early shermans.

But as you say, reliable. 100 working Shermans fighting against an immobile Tiger, well...
posted by Justinian at 2:51 PM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


It occurs to me that you might be conflating "faster" with "more maneuverable" though! The Shermans were actually more maneuverable than the German tanks despite their lack of speed. Because they were a bunch lighter. So they could go quite a few places the German tanks couldn't and move through terrain which the German tanks found impassable. Again, sheer speed didn't help the German tanks as much as it might because you can't use that speed if your tank sinks into the ground and/or destroys the road.
posted by Justinian at 2:56 PM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


It occurs to me that you might be conflating "faster" with "more maneuverable" though!

Yes, I didn't explain myself well. A Sherman was more likely to get from A to B faster than a Tiger if the roads were out, assuming the Tiger even had fuel.
posted by dazed_one at 3:00 PM on April 23, 2018


Tigers were excellent at getting from point A to point A.
posted by Justinian at 3:09 PM on April 23, 2018 [9 favorites]


Without checking the stats, I would guess that German high-velocity anti-tank cannons and 88mm flak cannons were more of a threat to allied tanks on the Western Front than any German tank.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:19 PM on April 23, 2018


Without checking the stats, I would guess that German high-velocity anti-tank cannons and 88mm flak cannons were more of a threat to allied tanks on the Western Front than any German tank.

This source claims that self-propelled guns (including the Stug) and AT guns destroyed the lion's share of British tanks. The mean values for SPGs and Bazookas (Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck) are skewed because neither was in use in the North African campaigns, but where they were used, they were highly effective.
posted by dazed_one at 4:42 PM on April 23, 2018


I was lucky enough to spend a few days with Jacques Littlefield’s insane (100+ tanks) collection in the Bay Area before he passed. Every single yank was in operational order. Incredible resource.
For folks who were curious about what happened to the collection after Littlefield passed, the entirety of it was willed to the Collings Foundation of Stow, MA and then the foundation wound up auctioning much of it off and shipping what it kept to New England. The proceeds are being used to build a proper museum for the vehicles in Massachusetts. It's not Bovington or Saumur, but it does have the only working Panther in North America. For anyone who is interested in seeing these tanks in operation, the foundation hosts an annual "Battle For the Airfield" with Allied and Axis re-enactors. Sadly, while there's a number of Shermans showcased in the event, I don't think we'll ever see the Panther take the field.
posted by bl1nk at 6:21 PM on April 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


The Nazis were employing 88 anti-aircraft cannon in desperation against the French Char B1, as that was about the only thing that could crack them apart. So, they mounted it in a turret and hoped to hell it could tackle the KV and IS tanks, or worse, the ISU assault guns.

This is where I note that an M8 Greyhound armored car with a measly 37mm cannon beat the shit out of one of the very few Tigers left on the Western Front with speed and maneuver... and the Greyhound sucked. Hellcats were in the field by 1945, and they did not suck.

Nazi super-weapons are myths. V1's were regularly intercepted and destroyed by prop-planes, V2's couldn't hit shit. Yeah, the ME-262 is nice, tho slaughtered on the regular by hot-rod Jugs whenever they needed to, you know, land and refuel and stuff, but! The Horten HO 229 was science fiction made fact! Proof of superior German super-science! Buckle up, buddy, this is what the Allies had on tap around the same time.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:17 PM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


yes, I dunno shit about ground armor, but Jugs done did it in the air. The history of air combat appears to reflect the ground history: cheap and easy to maintain beats refined and amazing to drive. Again, not a ground armor nerd, but I thought T-34s fit that profile too. Am I wrong? As an air sim nerd, I rarely check out a Jug as I find them to be not a lot of fun if you dig piston flight. But there's no question about their effectiveness.
posted by mwhybark at 7:45 PM on April 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


Speaking of Hortens, my biosis worked at the NASM sheds in suburban DC the year we met and the NASM Horten was being prepped for transport. Plywood and jet engines, wrapped in dusty plastic. Yes, I took pics.
posted by mwhybark at 7:48 PM on April 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


Something Dan Carlin points out, and I’m sure it’s right, is that there was a high premium placed on Nazi beliefs among the Nazi military leadership; and a less high premium put on military competence. This led to some very dumb decisions. Of course, the paradigm case of this was Hitler setting military strategy.
posted by persona au gratin at 12:18 AM on April 24, 2018


The Pz. IV, the one nazi tank in production throughout the war, had a final production run of ~8800.

The T-34/76 had a production run of ~35,000.

Its successor, the T34/85? 55,000.[1]

Quantity over quality but the T-34 had quality where it mattered too.

Similar comparisons could be made between US and Nazi production as well and even between UK/Commonwealth tank production and Nazi Germany.

The British could afford to throw away an entire generation of tanks (Covenanter) as training tanks just because they weren't quite up to snuff.

(In a way it's a pity the Sherman was so successful, because it meant that a lot of the British/Commonwealth potentially better tank designs got passed over or produced in much lesser numbers because the Sherman was good enough. I quite like the Canadian Ram tank frex, which took the M3 Grant chassis and made a proper tank out of it, but which in the end mostly saw service as improvished APCs as the Sherman was cheaper. Didn't stop the post-war Dutch army from using them until the fifties though, the Canadians having left them behind as not worth shipping home.)

[1] Granted, these totals inflated by post-war production, but still.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:38 AM on April 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Look at a map. See what portion of Germany surrendered to the western allies and what portion surrendered to Russia.

I suggest that you'd rather look at a map of Europe in early June, 1944, just before D-Day and the start of Operation Bagration and then look again at the finish line on May 8, 1945 and see who liberated the most territory.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:43 AM on April 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Quantity over quality but the T-34 had quality where it mattered too.

To begin with, the engine would start in the coldest Winter of the twentieth century. Not something that German tanks could boast about.
posted by pompomtom at 4:21 AM on April 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


Also: what is it with the British naming their tanks after awful people? Crusader, Covenanter, Cromwell...
posted by pompomtom at 4:27 AM on April 24, 2018


Churchill!
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 6:37 AM on April 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


You want your tank to evoke the image of a real mean sumbitch!
posted by mikeh at 2:36 PM on April 24, 2018


I suggest that you'd rather look at a map of Europe in early June, 1944, just before D-Day and the start of Operation Bagration and then look again at the finish line on May 8, 1945 and see who liberated the most territory.

From Casablanca to Milan, please, let's. (Go fo broke, 442!) The Desert Fox got the everliving shit kicked out of him by Patton and Monty and de Gaulle. (You magnificent bastard, I read your book!) And then seasoned troops from Africa and Italy arrived in France on D-Day.

Stalin prolonged the war. He just did. Torture his best generals ahead of it for dingbat reasons? Yup. Totally believe Adolph Hitler in making a deal on partitioning Eastern Europe? Yeah, he did. Get the everloving fuck kicked out of your best and brightest in a worthless war with Finland, which Russia "won..."

And when it came time to shovel the Nazis out of the European North, the Finns still did it better. They also pretended to be in the Soviet sphere, with free, top-end Iron Curtain hardware throughout the cold war, while being the archetypal capitalist-socialist Democracy.

There will be some historian or other who pretends that Mannerheim was an absolute autocrat and not a figurehead while defeating both the Russians and the Germans. They're wrong, and will have a thick Russian accent. Finland was a democratic Axis member, because Stalin was dumb and Russia needs more land for reasons and such. As usual. Finland was with the Allies as when the worm turned, and the democratic, modern society turned with all of its fury. The Nazis didn't know what hit them.

Yeah, that happened. Meanwhile, in Russia, oh, it gets stupider, still.

Joe Steel demands his troops keep a "revenge journal", and demands they act out every act in it... it's a wonder why the Germans just don't surrender, considering what's going on in East Prussia. Whah hoppen? It's a mystery...

Most of Germany surrenders to the West, and Berlin becomes the line between, way out into where we got there first because we weren't stupid and no-kidding evil, but Uncle Joe pretends he was there first. Mostly because the Western Allies were too busy winning a fucking war and shit and not doing whatever it was the Red Army was doing to civilians.

Also, the Finns were able to shoot out of the sky pretty much anything the Nazis or Russians sent at them with the Brewster Buffalo. American aircraft designers are trying to figure out how that happened to this very day.

Shall we talk about the most successful Soviet foe redeemed into a resolute ally? I don't think there's any. Kind of telling. Russia can't keep Ukraine down on the farm, and Estonia is a trip-wire NATO state these days.

Patton didn't have his teeth kicked out by political functionaries and replaced with steel ones to remind him of who's boss ahead of the war. Patton would never order his troops to drown in a river because the maps were wrong. Just an observation.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:03 PM on April 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


> Stalin prolonged the war. He just did. Torture his best generals ahead of it for dingbat reasons? Yup. Totally believe Adolph Hitler in making a deal on partitioning Eastern Europe? Yeah, he did. Get the everloving fuck kicked out of your best and brightest in a worthless war with Finland, which Russia "won..."

Jesus Christ, you have no idea what you're talking about. He executed some of his best generals because he thought they were traitors, but that had little effect on the progress of the war, since he wound up recalling from exile the ones he hadn't executed and promoting many excellent officers. He certainly did not "believe" Hitler; he was desperately trying to buy time to get ready for the invasion he knew was coming—he just had the misfortune of being a year off in his estimate (he thought it was going to be '42). The Soviet Union did in fact win the war with Finland, though it took longer than it should have because of the overconfidence with which it began. If you'd like to know something about the Eastern Front, I have books to suggest by Richard Overy, John Erickson, David Stahel, and others, but I'm pretty sure you'd rather just shoot your mouth off unburdened by actual facts.
posted by languagehat at 11:32 AM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


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