Pardon a, at best, dilettante vis a vis groppos (at least I'd heard of the
Wiesbaden, even if I couldn't recall the name), but everything I've read
suggested that Russian armor was at least as good, and generally better than
German, but wasted due to bad tactics and some particularly advantages of the
German tanks.
In the tactics, I'd heard that nobody did combined arms as well as the
Germans, especially early on, and Russians had a number of bad habits, such as
always putting a troop(or whatever they were called) commander in the second
tank, combined with rigid command structure, so that the Germans just picked
off the second tank in ambush, and wasted the rest at their leisure.
The main advantages I heard mentioned were FM radios in almost every German
tank, while only Russians had the inferior AM, and superior optics in the
Germans.
On the American, and perhaps Brit side, I seem to recall a quote of a
surviving panzer commander: I could always kill their tanks 10-to-1, but
they would always come up with an eleventh.
Of course, these are probably oversimplifications, but the discussions seem to
fly in the face of what little I've read in recent posts, though the above was
repeated often enough. Am I a victim of the wartime equivalent of urban
legends?
The_Beast
PS. In the Wiesbaden incident, I think I heard that, before it went down, the
fires got so intense, that parts of the metal glowed; though it could be
explaned as reflection of the fires, somebody seemed pretty certain.
-Douglas J. Evans, curmudgeon
One World, one Web, one Program - Microsoft promotional ad
> devans@uneb.edu wrote:
> The main advantages I heard mentioned were FM radios in almost every
Actually the Germans had very, very good AM radios, while the Russians had
none, except for some poor AM sets and a handful of good lend-lease FM
sets
> On the American, and perhaps Brit side, I seem to recall a quote of a
The truth may be even wierder, the supply problems at the front for the
germans were such that; although they could reliably destroy every sherman
that came
into view, there were more shermans than anti-tank rounds.
The Avalon Hill solitaire game "Patton's Best" teaches a very stern lesson to
M4 (not Firefly) commanders-- Do not fire upon german tanks, it only
draws
> > On the American, and perhaps Brit side, I seem to recall a quote
Not necessarily Mk IV's. Mk V's (Panthers)....I believe _The Longest
Day_ (Cornelius Ryan) mentioned an incident during the Normandy
invasion in which a Mk V--apparently oblivious--drove through an
American tank company, saw on the far side whatever it was looking for, then
turned around and went back through on its way home, with the Americans
firing, ineffectually, the whole time. I don't imagine
On Sat, 06 Jan 2001 12:23:42 -0500, Richard Bell <rlbell@sympatico.ca>
wrote:
> The truth may be even wierder, the supply problems at the front for the
There is something no one has really mentioned yet. One of the primary reasons
the Germans did so poorly in the West was something fairly new: tactical air
support. When the weather was clear, the Germans could not easily move their
forces without Allied aircraft attacking them with impunity.
> The Avalon Hill solitaire game "Patton's Best" teaches a very stern
I saw, during the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, an account by a
Canadian Firefly commander. He said that he and his tank took out several
Panthers from the front! The Panther had a nasty "shot trap". If you hit the
turret just below the gun, your shot did not penetrate, but it bounced down
and into the thin armour covering the driver's area. Very nasty.
> On Sat, 6 Jan 2001 10:25:05 -0600, devans@uneb.edu wrote:
> On the American, and perhaps Brit side, I seem to recall a quote of a
And, as I mention in another post, there were the Allied aircraft. Typhoons,
Tempests, P47s, etc., etc. in numbers and often unharassed by the Luftwaffe,
did a lot to hurt the Germans.
> Of course, these are probably oversimplifications, but the discussions
No, you're not a victim of urban legends. Your reading matches mine.
In general, the Soviet vehicles were very good and far superior to that
available to the Western allies. The T34/85 was a good, even superior,
match
for a Panther. The T34/76 came out in 1941, almost 2 years before the
Panther, and was quite a shock to the Germans (and easily superior to every
German tank at the time). The T34/76 suffered from an inferior gun and
thinner armour than the Panther. However its armour was well sloped and it was
fairly reliable, mechanically. It was better than the Panzer IV (the Germans'
most plentiful tank) and far better than the Panzer III.
The T34, in all versions, was lighter than the Panther -- by about half
in
the case of the T34/76 -- which helped with ground pressure. The T34/85
was, according to my Jane's book, considered the best tank of the war by the
Germans. The T34/85 was STILL being used as a frontline tank in Africa
into the 1980s. The Germans used as many captured T34s as they could get,
though logistics was a big reason for this.
As you and others have mentioned, the problem with the Soviets was their
doctrine, training, and tank-to-tank communications.
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