best medium WW2 tank thread

[SergeantPunch]

So let's see, you mean the total number of around 2.2 million Ostfront deaths versus the Soviet 6.8 million death is a 1:4 ratio? Not sure if you can do simple math, given such elemental mistakes I'm seeing.



Tank losses are impossible to compare, since Germany tended to count only irrecoverable losses while the Soviets (and Allies) counted almost any disabling, even if fixable.

http://chris-intel-corner.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/strength-and-loss-data-eastern-front.html

depends on where you get your information from but certainly before 1944 on average soviet losses were at least 3 to every 1 german and probably higher.

They many more tanks than the germans as well and as you claim better even with such disdain it's remarkable isn't it how badly they fared?

 

[keynes2.0]

That website is comparing two different sources of different methodologies. Add up those Soviet numbers and you get 23.7 million casualties between 1941 and 1944. That is to say that the Soviets supposedly had more men killed wounded or missing then served in their entire armed forces and that's not even taking into account the last year of the war. I hope that number alone is enough to convince you that the author of that website didn't understand how Soviet records worked.

While it's a good and laudable thing to bring hard numbers into a conversation we need to be careful that we understand what the numbers are and that the source providing them didn't screw the numbers up.

 

[xthetenth]

http://chris-intel-corner.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/strength-and-loss-data-eastern-front.html

depends on where you get your information from but certainly before 1944 on average soviet losses were at least 3 to every 1 german and probably higher.

They many more tanks than the germans as well and as you claim better even with such disdain it's remarkable isn't it how badly they fared?

That guy turns a citation of Korea experience where the Allies drilled shots into destroyed tanks until they burned causing a 75% mortality rate in T-34-85s into a blanket statement that 75% of T-34 crew died when their tanks were hit, and that the tanks were destroyed in a single shot (actually 32%, less than early Shermans and any model Panzer IV). His methodology is mind-bogglingly awful.

Also, regarding loss rates as an argument: Stating that the side which lost the least of a given type of materiel would indicate that the Germans had the best aircraft carriers of the war and the Chinese the best tanks. It is an awful metric. Just counting generic Soviet losses is also awful considering how badly Germany padded their KDR with crimes against humanity and killing their prisoners.

 

[keynes2.0]

I seem to remember that the casualty rate for tankers was about 1 killed and 1 wounded per tank lost to enemy fire. That's the average, many tanks had all 4 lost or none lost at all.

 

[Novacat]

The casualty rates generally tended to depend on weither the ammo cooked off or not. If the ammo cooked off, chances are the entire crew was dead. If not, the only injuries/deaths will come from any crewmembers in the direct path of a penetrating round.

 

[SergeantPunch]

If you doubt it you can always compare the lada to a bmw.

 

[eleetsdier]

What tank is best is almost purely a matter of opinion, as best clearly has no accepted benchmarks.

I tend to agree with those who think the Panther has a better reputation than it deserves. It's long-range and accurate gun along with strong armor make it great in a defensive role, but the low reliability, weak side armor, and so on really do hurt it in other roles. But that's not really any consolation for the guy who has to actually fight the ones that made it to the battlefield.

 

[frolix42]

Then why are you commenting on its contents? What is wrong with you? Why is your urge to defend the Panther so strong that you just made up reasons to dismiss the French report instead of just not commenting on it or admitting in the first place?

You and podcat are the opposite extreme. You both act like it's the only source that matters and it's some kind of ultimate damnation of the Panther. It's not, it's a Battalion of French tankers who had issues with the final drive.

The French used the Panther from 45 - 49, twice as long as Germany had. Given how quickly tank design evolved in the 1940s, it's not surprising that the Panther wasn't competitive as a Medium/Heavy tank in the late 1940s. Also that the French had maintenance issues with the Panther are not a revelation either given that the factories that produced them, and more significantly their spare parts, were retooled or gone.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Probably Panther G.

T-34 has a much better reputation than it deserves, considering that every year the Soviets lost massive numbers of T-34's both in combat and due to operational losses.

Where is this French report that was often mentioned on the first two pages? I'm very curious.

 

[xthetenth]

The casualty rates generally tended to depend on weither the ammo cooked off or not. If the ammo cooked off, chances are the entire crew was dead. If not, the only injuries/deaths will come from any crewmembers in the direct path of a penetrating round.

And the desantniki were in trouble either way, but that's what it takes to encircle and destroy army groups in one offensive.

Probably Panther G.

T-34 has a much better reputation than it deserves, considering that every year the Soviets lost massive numbers of T-34's both in combat and due to operational losses.

And the Japanese and Americans lost a huge fraction of their carriers at the start of the war and nobody says they were awful. You know who didn't lose carriers? The Germans, that's who.

Seriously though, if you're considering using a metric to determine whether or not something was an effective weapon of war, try to think through how effective at war a nation that tried their best to maximize that one metric would be. For things like loss rates, a nation which builds no tanks or doesn't send them to battle would have the most effective tanks which is kind of hilarious when you think about it that way.

 

[plasticpanzers]

British tanks are quite underrated and the Churchill should have mention. Folks think of it as a big box leftover from WWI but the later
marks were well armored and had a good gun and could go where other tanks could not. Cromwell good but too late in war and the
Centurion too late.

And thanks Alexey for the mention of your favorite the PZIV. It spent its entire career playing catchup to modern tanks and ended up
just about even with the Sherman short 75 and it could kill one and be killed by one at all ranges. Yeah, its number one alright
They hung all those tracks all over em for looks...

It does not matter the kill ratio as that is very nebulous on tank vs tank nor overall losses in a war. The ability to move cross country,
to kill enemy tanks, and to survive enemy fire is what counts. reliability for all tanks is iffy. Most US M4s by Dec 1, 44 were in terrible
condition from just moving across France into Germany. Engines shot, tracks worn down, trannys broken. More units had losses from
being in the shop at that time then enemy fire.

Actually MY favorite and my vote for best WW2 tank is the US M4A3E2 Jumbo. Just about impervious to 75 and even 88 fire at most
ranges, fair speed, and upgunned with a 76mm with HVAP borrowed from M18s was a good tank killer.

But I think the Panther, overall, is best from 43-44 and I seldom count 45 as German forces were in such disarray that repair/mait. was
almost impossible so giving figures for 45 is wildly out of balance. Best for 41-43 would be the T34/76. Best overall tank for the buck
would be M4 Sherman, numbers and reliability.

 

[xthetenth]

What exactly did the Panther bring for all the extra weight and related problems that it had, though? It was a decent tank in one specific role, and pretty subpar in most of the rest. Panthers weighed as much as an IS-2 and didn't get nearly as much as the IS-2 did for that weight. They didn't even perform well on the attack by the standards of other nations' mediums.

Heck, the Panzer IV outperformed it at Arracourt, where the one real German success was a bunch of Pz IVs and Shermans running into each other, and instead of Panthers dying miserably, the two sides traded pretty evenly. Or Panzer Lehr's experience, where they held the Panthers out of the fighting in Normandy as long as possible because the Panzer IVs were so much more capable in that terrain.

 

[balmung60]

Well, my call would surprise nobody who has seen me post here before: the M4 "Sherman" tank. The Sherman was one of the most advanced tanks in the world when it was introduced and updates kept it among the most advanced (note that "most advanced" does not necessarily mean "thickest armor" or "biggest gun"), with features such as vertical stabilization of the gun (which gave it improved accuracy on the move and allowed it to more quickly take proper aim after coming to a stop), wet ammo racks (which gave it the highest survivability of any tank in the war), and the HVSS. Additionally, its generous suspension and enormous turret ring gave it incredible room for upgrades, including the M4A3E2 "Sherman Jumbo" (and I maintain that if someone had mounted a 17-pdr or KwK42 in one, you'd have a better "Panther" than the actual Panther). However, even the base model had an excellent gun for the time that was easily able to deal with known threats (Pz3 and Pz4) from nearly any range and was excellent for supporting infantry, and prove good enough to give better than it took in Italy and France, with the shortcomings of the gun relative to newer enemy armor only really coming into play as the army pushed into Germany. Additionally, the Sherman was well known for both its reliability and ease of maintenance, two things that helped make certain that Sherman availability rates remained high (and do remember that having tanks available is always preferable to not having them available) and that the infantry would have access to armor support.

People may talk about how the Sherman could have been better and will no doubt do so until the cows come home, leave again, return again, and then die of starvation because everyone was talking about tanks instead of feeding the livestock, but do not forget that "better" is all too often the enemy of "good". A solution that is good enough should not be considered bad simply because a better one might be possible.

Probably Panther G.

T-34 has a much better reputation than it deserves, considering that every year the Soviets lost massive numbers of T-34's both in combat and due to operational losses.

Where is this French report that was often mentioned on the first two pages? I'm very curious.

Likely this article from the Chieftain's Hatch: http://worldoftanks.com/en/news/21/chieftains-hatch-french-panthers/

 

[Zinegata]

The racially arrogant fiction that the French somehow were bad at maintaining their Panthers is not borne out when one considers the mountains of evidence showing the Panthers suffered from the exact same problems even with German drivers - only 15% of Panthers for instance were ready for use during Kursk and none were working by the end of two weeks, its overall availability rate was less than 50% or worse than Allied training vehicles, and half of captured Panthers in Normandy were found to have broken final drives - a component the French identified as a key weakpoint with an average service life of less than 150km, or less than half the Panther's gas tank.

The Panther is bluntly terribly overrated. They never won any major tank vs tank engagement against American armored Divisions, and most of their "successes" were in fact draws at best. At Arracourt it took three Panthers to kill every Sherman even though the US 4th Armored - in its first major tank-vs-tank battle ever - faced Panthers led by East Front veterans without support from aircraft.

 

[Zinegata]

That website is comparing two different sources of different methodologies. Add up those Soviet numbers and you get 23.7 million casualties between 1941 and 1944. That is to say that the Soviets supposedly had more men killed wounded or missing then served in their entire armed forces and that's not even taking into account the last year of the war. I hope that number alone is enough to convince you that the author of that website didn't understand how Soviet records worked.

While it's a good and laudable thing to bring hard numbers into a conversation we need to be careful that we understand what the numbers are and that the source providing them didn't screw the numbers up.

Chris intel is a terrible source; he's been caught numerous times trying to form correlations out of half-truths.

The biggest error in the chris intel's very flawed analysis of the T-34 is that he clearly has no idea that the T-34 did not form the majority of the Soviet tank forces until late in 1943.

In 1941, there were only a few hundred T-34s - and while this number is still significant compared to the 3,000 Panzers earmarked for Barbarossa, the reality is that most of these T-34s were not fit for service because they were in the midst of repairs and overhauls. That the Germans encountered so few of them in actual battles - and that each of these encounters led to a lot of panicked reports - should clue people in on how many T-34s actually saw combat in 1941.

In 1942 and 1943 we saw T-34 production increase, but it was not enough for it to become the most common Soviet tank because the Soviets were forced to produce light tanks - particularly the T-60 and T-70 - instead. Indeed, in 1943 as much as 40% of the Soviet tank park was still made up of the T-60 and T-70; not counting the Su-76 assault guns based on the T-70 chassis.

Hence, when he makes all of these Panzer III vs T-34 comparisons, he fails to realize that this wasn't the norm in 1941 or 1942, and wasn't even all that common in 1943. In 1941 a tank vs tank engagement in the East was almost certainy a BT tank vs a 38 (t). In 1942, it was the T-70 vs the Mk III. In 1943, it was the T-70 or the T-34 against a Mk IV or Stug III. And these tank vs tank engagements would be rarities compared to the far more common "tanks vs anti-tank gun" combats.

Finally, Chris' German tank loss figures are based on very innacurate tabulations and incomplete records. If you subtract the losses form the total German tanks produced, you'd find that Germany would have ended the war with nearly 20,000 tanks still operational! Clearly, there is a massive number of losses that were not counted; which isn't surprising given that the Germans weren't particularly better at record-keeping than any of the other warring powers. If anything, German records are hugely inaccurate because so many records were destroyed or never filed to begin with as the war turned decisively against them and no one had time to make these reports anymore.

 

[xthetenth]

The Panther is bluntly terribly overrated. They never won any major tank vs tank engagement against American armored Divisions, and most of their "successes" were in fact draws at best. At Arracourt it took three Panthers to kill every Sherman even though the US 4th Armored - in its first major tank-vs-tank battle ever - faced Panthers led by East Front veterans without support from aircraft.

How are you accounting for the Pz IVs doing the majority of the work at Arracourt out of curiosity?

 

[frolix42]

The racially arrogant fiction that the French somehow were bad at maintaining their Panthers is not borne out when one considers the mountains of evidence showing the Panthers suffered from the exact same problems even with German drivers - only 15% of Panthers for instance were ready for use during Kursk and none were working by the end of two weeks, its overall availability rate was less than 50% or worse than Allied training vehicles, and half of captured Panthers in Normandy were found to have broken final drives - a component the French identified as a key weakpoint with an average service life of less than 150km, or less than half the Panther's gas tank.

Rushed into production before it was ready for prime-time, we know after the failure at Kursk Hitler considered scrapping the Panther program. What if we, like Hitler was prone to do, judged all military combatants solely by their first major battle in which they took part? The United States would never live down Kasserine Pass and the Soviet Union would never live down the Barbarossa. And most relevantly, the Panzer 4 would never live down the Polish Campaign where they suffered maintenance and breakdown issues comparable to the Panthers at Kursk, which goes to show that strategic success whitewashes specific technical deficiencies.

The Panther is bluntly terribly overrated. They never won any major tank vs tank engagement against American armored Divisions, and most of their "successes" were in fact draws at best. At Arracourt it took three Panthers to kill every Sherman even though the US 4th Armored - in its first major tank-vs-tank battle ever - faced Panthers led by East Front veterans without support from aircraft.

Darkreknown pointed to this engagement, along with another engagement where the US forces were commanded by Lt. Col Creighton Abrams at the Battalion level. Unlike you and he, I do not think that typically US Armored Battalion were commanded by future 4-star generals. And then he talks about other people buying into whitewashed narratives about the war, which is pretty rich.

The Germans fielded the Panther at a time their empire was collapsing, the Panther couldn't single-handedly turn the tide of World War 2 so it is damned. I don't buy this. People who have suggested an alternative to the Panther claim that further development of the Pz4 or a tank with similar characteristics would've been more logical, but I'm skeptical of adoration of the Pz4 because it was the flagship tank of Germany while it enjoyed it's greatest success from 1939 - 1942. This does not prove that it was a brilliant tank as late as 1944 - 1945.

And by the logic of this flawed equation, 1940 French tanks are revealed to be some of the worst in the world.

 

[keynes2.0]

Additionally, its generous suspension and enormous turret ring gave it incredible room for upgrades, including the M4A3E2 "Sherman Jumbo" (and I maintain that if someone had mounted a 17-pdr or KwK42 in one, you'd have a better "Panther" than the actual Panther).

Well the Brits fitted Shermans with 17-pdrs for a while but the urgency died after the Americans shifted towards M4(76) and phased out M10 production.

The Sherman was a generalist vehicle. The impression I have is that the Jumbo sacrificed general performance towards specific aims. Another 12 tons of armor strained the suspension and sacrificed the Sherman's vaunted mobility. Reliability probably suffered too but with only 300 some built I cant say for sure. AFAIK this tank was to serve two roles:
1) Put it at the head of a column so that it's more likely to survive nasty surprises.
2) Lob shells at concrete fortifications head on

In the second role you'd probably prefer the 75 mm over the 76 mm because you want big boom, not tank armor penetration. In the first role you probably want the 75mm and if you dont the tanks behind you have the 76 mm.

I would say that the Jumbo couldn't out Panther the Panther on account of the insufficient suspension but there were a handful of HVSS Jumbos that wouldn't have had that problem. There were also a minority of Jumbo's refitted with 76mm late in the war. These refits seem to have cropped up mostly in a few gung-ho organizations in France. So if we are talking about 100 tanks out of 10,000 each time that means statistically there was probably one M4e2e8(76) somewhere in Germany or France in 1945 or 1946.

And that one M4e2e8(76) would be the best tank of WWII.

Darkreknown pointed to this engagement, along with another engagement where the US forces were commanded by Lt. Col Creighton Abrams at the Battalion level. Unlike you and he, I do not think that every US Armored Battalion was commanded by a future 4-star general. And then he talks about other people buying into whitewashed narratives about the war, which is pretty rich.

So is Abrams like Chuck Norris or something? He could have rode into battle on a bicycle with a wobbly wheel and crushed Tigers?

 

[Zinegata]

Rushed into production before it was ready for prime-time, we know after the failure at Kursk

Read again. Kursk was just the start of an utterly miserable service in the German army. The 50% availability rate of the Panther was for the period of '44, and again this is worse than Allied training vehicles. The 50% of Panthers captured with broken final drives? That happened in Normandy.

Pretending that this information doesn't exist - when it's been published in books in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and the 2000s - is called "intellectual dishonesty" or "the willful ignorance of facts presented to you because they contradict your position". I was not talking about Kursk alone. I was talking about the Panther's entire service life in the German army, and agian on the whole it was utterly miserable in terms of availability because - as the French CORRECTLY pointed out - the final drive was hugely unreliable. The Germans reported this too. The Americans who captured Panthers found shoddy final drives too. What other evidence do you need to prove that the final drive was indeed faulty?

That you then try to excuse this with "collapsing empire" excuse just adds further icing to this intellectually dishonest cake. German steel problems pre-dated the war. It was exacerbated certainly by the bombing and further shortages, but the reality is that Germany had very little access to high quality steel since 1936 because it had become a pariah state even before WW2 started. That's why the Germans started the war with Mk IIIs when the French already had Char Bs and the Soviets had KV tanks in the first place - they were literally incapable of producing 45+ ton tanks reliably from 1936 onwards. They just tried to force their shoddy steel into situations wherein breakdowns were inevitable.

Lt. Col Creighton Abrams at the Battalion level. Unlike you and he, I do not think that every US Armored Battalion was commanded by a future 4-star general.

Which is not a valid line of argumentation, because again there are ZERO major tank vs tank battles where the Panther won against the US Army Armored Divisions to begin with. Seriously, name one. You will find zero victories to the Panther's name and only a tiny handful of draws

The examples shown to you merely demonstrate how the Panther was in fact getting consistently massacred every time it fought enemy tanks. Arracourt was not an exception. It was the norm. This fact has simply been ignored by intellectually dishonest Panther fanboys who can't even come up with a list of actual battles where the Panther fought in.

And by the logic of this flawed equation, 1940 French tanks are revealed to be some of the worst in the world

No, your entire line of reasoning is flawed because you're promoting the use of the flawed Panther tank which dies to its own obesity by just participating in a road march. French tanks in 1940 had flaws, but this was due to their doctrinal place in the French army and not any particular issue with their engineering.

French tanks actually worked as designed, the problem was with the design requirements. The Panther never worked as designed; how can you consider a design whose final drive on average breaks down BEFORE it uses up its entire gas tank be a working tank???

 

[Zinegata]

How are you accounting for the Pz IVs doing the majority of the work at Arracourt out of curiosity?

I'm being nice and letting the Panthers leech off the Mk IV kills. But yes if we're gonna be strict about it the Panzer IVs actually killed more Shermans at Arracourt if you do the careful step-by-step accounting of the battle; which again is easily available to anyone who has any real interest in studying armor-vs-armor engagements as opposed to wanking over the Panther without knowing what battles they actually fought in.