Since a Mark III w/ a long barreled 50mm cannon can run rings around the Brits, and outshoot them Alan Clark in his book about Operation Barbarossa makes the point about the Pz III Panzer that after the campaign in France was over Hitler had ordered that the 37-mm. gun in the Pz III tank be replaced with a 50-mm. L 60 but for reasons never made clear the specification was altered to 50-mm. L 42 (short barreled)The result was that one of the most successful tanks of the war was equipped with a gun of markedly lower range and muzzle velocity than Hitler had ordered, which if fitted would have preserved its technical ascendancy for another year at least.
Also at almost the same moment Hitler was directing that the number of Panzer divisions in the Army was to be doubled and tank production raised to a level of eight hundred to a thousand units per month the Ordnance Office intervened, with a report that an expansion of this kind would cost over two billion marks, and would require an additional one hundred thousand skilled workers and specialists. Hitler agreed to its postponement "for the time being," but the reorganisation of the Panzer divisions had gone ahead, so that the net effect was that the tank strength of each division was halved. In the result there was some compensation in their increased fire power and the gradual substitution of the heavier PzKw III for the PzKw II, but the Panzer divisions were never to recover the numerical strength and mobility with which they had begun the battle of France.
Hitler had also directed that the number of motorised divisions be doubled, but without making any provision for an increase in the production of the vehicle industry. The result was that many of the new formations had to equip themselves with captured or requisitioned trucks, which were to prove unreliable and difficult to service under severe conditions. It makes one wonder what the effect of Germany producing nearly a thousand tanks a month would have been in the first 18 months of the war in Russia.
