Posted on 09/27/2013 11:33:36 PM PDT by JerseyanExile
The Shermans in North Africa had bolted armor, instead of welded. Not a good idea. Also, the relative advantages of the Panther tank were magnified in desert warfare.
Loved that article. Great post! ;)
Sauron
Thanks.
I had a buddy who was a tank crew member in the invasion of Normandy. He related to me that, while he was told his tank was the best in the world, it did not compare to the Panther. Well, yes and no. If you were up against a Panther, one on one, in a Sherman, especially in the open field and at a distance, the Panther was definitely superior. But, given its costliness, weight, maintenance requirements, and other factors, how many Panthers were available to the Germans at the times and places when they would be decisive? When there were tank battles, the differences in sheer numbers, maneuverability and dependability of the Shermans were its advantage.
As to which overall strategy was better - larger numbers of medium tanks (M4s) or smaller numbers of a mix of heavy tanks (Panthers) and medium tanks (Mark IIIs and IVs), I’ll leave for others. However, in the attack, the sacrifice of numbers for having some heavy tanks in the mix has its argument. On the eastern front, when the Germans were on the offense, they would use the Panthers very well as the spearhead of an attack, with Mark IIIs and IVs coming in the second wave for the purpose of penetration and exploitation of the breach of the enemy’s front line.
All things considered, I think the T-34 was the best tank of WWII.
“When UK and US tanks can go long distances and the Panther can cover 150 km before something breaks down”
Yeah man, but if you were within those 95 or so miles. :-)
A really interesting read. Thanks for posting.
If the thing had AC, maybe that would make the difference. lol
That's one of the many reasons why Germany lost the war. They were always tinkering with brand new designs. Meanwhile, the Soviets were building huge numbers of their very capable T 34 tank. Soviet quantity beat German quality.
Jersey, thank you for posting this article
Germans made their stuff like Swiss watchmakers. Very complicated and needed a lot of maintaining.
Russian and US stuff was very solider friendly.
Thanks for the ping. I didn’t know this.
Interesting. I wonder why that was? Just faster manufacturing?
The M4 was a relatively inexpensive tank. The U.S. had a massive automobile and truck industry going into the war, all of which was re-directed to war production. Indeed, we supplied more M4s to Russia than they built T-34s. And, the Germany industry was subjected to massive bombing during the war.
We used Grants through much of North Africa. Germans relied on AT guns after they lost vast amounts of armor. The Allies had tons of units pouring into Africa while Rommel was limited because the Med was a British lake. My dad was in North Africa in the war.
Shermans were greatly improved by adding the 76mm but tank destroyers were the hammer.
The 90mm AT was a boss.
The Tank Museum in Danville Va is worth the trip.
Tank Destroyers. Yes! Concept was light-skinned but up-gunned tank destroyers would be fast to where needed to deal with enemy tanks. During my time in the army, the tank destroyer was supposedly succeeded by the TOW anti-tank missile. In the constant leap-frogging of tank design, modern tanks used composite armor and stand-off to defeat the shape-charge in missiles. So, today, it’s just about the case that it takes a tank to beat a tank. From what I can tell from a youtube video, the tank museum at Danville is quite impressive.
One fine article.
The 2nd and 3 rd Armored Divisions were heavy divisions and had 60 or 70 more tanks than the other divisions and did a great amount of the fighting after the invasion which I reckon is the reason Ike queried their CGs.
Any thoughts?
bookmark for later, thanks.
Yeah, my first thought is you and I need to sit down with a few beers to chat about this. I can type a lot but this article was so packed with info I’m overwhelmed.
I don’t believe I’ve seen this article before but I’ve seen a lot of the info contained in it elsewhere. A couple of tidbits to contrast. First, the Panther was Joachim Peiper’s favorite tank. He knew something about German tanks. On the other hand, the top panzer aces, Michael Wittman and Otto Carius, were in Tigers. Finally, Creighton Abrams’ combat command encountered a full strength brigade of Panthers in the meeting engagement at Arracourt in September 44. His supposedly inferior Shermans shot up the Panthers. In all fairness, Abrams was a hell of a tanker and he had a crack unit. The Germans were a green unit withou experience. So training and experience were at least as important as equipment.
My final thought on this article is that the Germans were desperate to come up with an effective answer to the T34 and rushed the design and production of the Panther. Their problems at Kursk are well-known. Only the most glaring ones were resolved. They just didn’t or couldn’t give themselves the time to solve all of them so they wound up with a flawed tank described in the article. Really, the PzIVH in greater quantity would have sufficed. In the hands of experienced troops it was more than a match for the T34/43. That would have avoided the headaches of trying to field panzer divisions with one battalion of Panthers and one of PzIV. Of course, the T34/85 would have been a problem for the PzIv, but it too was the Soviet answer to the Panther.
Too bad the PzIV never got a cool nickname.
Of course, you could solve the maintenance problem the way the Russians did - abandon the broke tank and give the crew (if they survived) another. But by this time in the war the Germans did not have that option.
Our men, in general, realize that the Sherman is not capable of standing up in a ding-dong, head-on fight with a Panther. Neither in gun power nor in armor is the present Sherman justified in undertaking such a contest. On the other hand, most of them realize that we ... do not want unwieldy monsters; that our tank has great reliability, good mobility, and that the gun in it has been vastly improved. Most of them feel also that they have developed tactics that allow them to employ their superior numbers to defeat the Panther tank as long as they are not surprised and can discover the Panther before it has gotten in three or four good shots.The Sherman was narrow and powered by gasoline, as a consequence of having been designed to be mass-produced on automobile assembly lines, and as a consequence were ideal in the European countryside with its narrow lanes between banked hedgerows and medieval-origin village streets.
The problem, of course, is that Panthers only became available starting in mid-1943. From this point on, the Germans were less and less frequently on the offense.
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