Posted on 11/24/2014 6:30:37 AM PST by C19fan
On June 22, 1941, Nazi German launched Operation Barbarossa, a massive attack on the Soviet Union that was the largest invasion in history.
More than three million German soldiers, 150 divisions and 3,000 tanks comprised three mammoth army groups that created a front more than 1,800 miles long.
The Germans expected to face an inferior enemy—the Slavs whom Adolph Hitler called untermenschen. Giddy from victories in Poland and France, Hitler and many in his military high command believed it was the destiny of Germany to invade Russia. “The end of the Jewish domination in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state,” Hitler announced in his manifesto Mein Kampf.
(Excerpt) Read more at medium.com ...
The biggest flaw of operation Barbarosa was winter, an over extended sully line, and a constant change of directives from Hitler.
The biggest flaw of Barbarosa was even attempting it. There was no way the Reich was going to win a two front war.
As for the T-34, I guess you could say that it was a war winning tank - but stepping back for a second, there was no way Germany would ever conquer such a large, mineral rich and populous country. If they hadn’t come up with the T-34, they would have come up with something else to overwhelm the Germans with.
And that’s what the T-34 did - over whelm with massive numerical superiority.
Yes, in the T-34/76 the two man turret crippled the tank commander tactically. He had to be the main gunner, tank commander, and sometimes squadron leader, all at the same time. The Soviets bitterly learned their lessons early in the war, but learn they did.
When you consider that this tank, with a 12-cylinder diesel engine, sloped armor, and a 76.2 mm gun, came in to service in 1940, it is amazing.
I play wit (world of tanks) on the Xbox. The T-34 is good in the game.
Wot
How humiliating. Jap tanks stink on ice....
While the T-34 is a decent tank, it is my understanding that it fares poorly against the M1A2 Abrams.
Another flaw was treating the locals as sub-humans when they initially welcomed the Germans as liberators. Had they armed them and proclaimed Ukraine as a liberated country there would have been much less resistance from them.
There was nothing decent about the T-34. It was nothing more than an APC with a larger gun. Sloped armor only worked is there is enough of it to effectively deflect incoming rounds. The Russians learned quickly enough that the only way to defeat German armor was to ram it with their puny tank. Even as much as I hate the Sherman, the T-34 was worse. Only due to the vast numbers did the Russians ever gain superiority. The Soviet philosophy on the T-34 was make it with easily replaceable items such as turret, engine and crew.
I beg to differ: the T-34 was fast, dependable, had a good gun, and was hard to hit. The Germans even tried a prototype turret based on the T-34 size for the Panther. The suspension was based on the US Christie suspension and it was far and away more mobile than any German tank. We would have been far better off - and have saved innumerable tank crews - if we had copied the T-34 instead of sticking to the M-4.
It was simple and basic but it worked when it was needed.
And, by the way, it is easy to produce good tanks if that's all you have to produce. Russians made tanks and guns, we supplied most of their trucks and APCs, all their radio wire, most of their jet engines, sent them 11,000 tanks as well.
The Panther, on the other hand, required that you remove FIVE wheels to change one bad one, and the Tiger had to be towed from the front for repairs.
The T-34 was somewhat in between.
Feel free to differ. The T-34 was fast only because it had no armor. The gun was the only thing good/dependable about it. The Christy suspension was fine but had nothing to do with how well the thing operated except for being so light it could fly across a field. German gunners routinely hit the things due to their superior turrets and optics. The turret was ridiculously small and difficult for the gunner to traverse and could hardly see out of to target, so they maneuvered close to get a shot, which caused the death of many Soviet tank crews.
From what I understand the front line troops, initially at least, tried to maintain goods relations with locals (despite some incidents with poisoned wells and so forth). Then the Einsatzgruppens rolled in behind the troops and irreparably “poisoned the well.”
That’s the gist of what I’ve read also. I’m currently reading Soldaten. It seems the Wehrmacht troops were not big fans of the SS troops. They were even instances of armed confrontation regarding shooting of civilians. The Wehrmacht didn’t condemn the shootings but wanted it to be done where their troops couldn’t see it.
While still at war with the 700-million-strong British Empire, Hitler took on the Soviet Union, which is essentially a continent. A few months later, he declared war on the US, another continent-sized nation. What folk singer Carson Robison said of the Japanese can be applied to the Nazis as well:
So now, they want to fight.
Well, they've bit off quite a bite,
And Uncle Sam is going to make them chew it.
yeah, Uncle Sam did make them chew it, but so did Uncle Joe.....
Don’t forget, the Germans had something like 700-800 T-34’s in use themselves over the course of the war. Both sides used the others captured AFV’s.
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