I will differ, thank you. War is all about investment. You have to choose the best tactical and strategic paths and develop technologies to support those paths in parallel. We chose the M4 and even though it was easy to produce and reliable it was also a death trap for hundreds of good allied crews. It was too tall, so it was visible at great distances, the 75mm and the later 76mm guns were far less deadly than the German counterparts. We built hundreds and lost hundreds. Like our miserable torpedoes, we had the wrong people deciding our technological paths for our tanks, particularly since we had a wealth of experience by 1942 available for our use.
The Germans had an undeservedly vaunted reputation for their stuff too. They made stupid design decisions throughout the war. Both the Panther and the Tiger were maintenance nightmares and couldn’t go significant distances without replacing tracks, transmissions, or engines and sometimes all three. They did have fine optics, guns, and ammunition and good frontal armor but they were slow and few in number compared to us and the Soviets. They also had really funny excursions in wasting effort, like their monster siege guns and Porsche’s useless Elefant and Maus.
The T-34 on the other hand, was fast, had good cross-country mobility, reasonably well armored, had excellent guns, and was useful at all temperatures, unlike the Panther whose interleaved road wheels froze together on cold winter mornings.
Remember that the Germans lost, big time, at Kursk and every battle after thanks in part to the T-34 and the dang T-34 was still a problem for us at the Pusan perimeter in Korea, five years later.
You judge a technology on how well it performed its mission. In this case, it was an excellent design and an excellent balance of characteristics. And the silly Nazis lost..
Remember that the Germans lost, big time, at Kursk and every battle after thanks in part to the T-34 The German loss at Kursk had nothing, Nothing, NOTHING to do with the T-34. They were simply out manned. Fielding 900k versus 1.9m Soviets. Germany had less than 3,000 tanks and the Russians had over 5,000. 10k Nazi guns to 25k Soviet guns.
Losses were 198k (KIA/WIA)on the German side compared to over 550k Russians (KIA/WIA). Germany lost 760 tanks to over 6000 Russian tanks.
The battle belonged to Germany for the first 2 days but lost on the 3rd due to massed Soviet forces. The Soviet KV-1 and the brilliance of Zhukov being the deciding factor on more than one occasion. Germans had a kill ration of upwards of 22 to 1. They simply could not sustain their salient.
Buy-in-large, the Germans defeated the Soviets until the Russians massed with their artillery and rifle companies. Typical tank-v-tank engagements ended like this:
