Any thoughts?
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.