I didn't know that. Thanks for the info...Quote:
Originally Posted by Pannonian
Printable View
I didn't know that. Thanks for the info...Quote:
Originally Posted by Pannonian
Actually the Panther had it in itself to be upgraded as well. It could take the 88L71 the Tiger II used, and there was developed an improved turret for this (for the Panther F). So the T34 wasn't alone with that ability (not to mention the Sherman as well).
Also it had inbuilt capabilities for upgrades to the sights and aditions to the sights. And late in the war it did make use of that by carrying IR searchlights. The vaunted T34 didn't have these capabilities (it could make use of an IR searchlight but only for the commander if it was installed without some serious restructuring inside the turret).
Also the Panthers caught fire for no apparent reason only early on with the Panther D. The later Panther A and G didn't have this problem, though they did break down now and then. However they didn't break down more than the T34, but since they were more complex machines they required more time in the shop, and they needed skilled labour to repair. The T34 and Sherman both broke down often enough, but both were simple machines that the crew could often fix themselves in the field.
Actually the Panther was used by a number of smaller nations, but since the factories were destroyed, there were no labour around with the skills forthe Panther and finally the technology had advanced by 1950 to make them fairly obsolete (the Sherman and T34 were also obsolete, but large stocks of them still existed, so why not use them?).
It made no sense to licensebuild Panthers, or just rip them off. The Germans were not allowed to build tanks (no army so why should they?), the Americans had their own tankprogramme, and the British had just sent the Centurion on the market. The French were far too proud to actually copy it and just kept the few survivors they got while they developed a tank of their own. So it is actually reasonable why the Panther was not continued as a production-tank.
The Israelis used Panthers in their early wars against the Arabs.
I thought the Israelis mostly used British tanks... Challengers and such...
The Challenger only came into service in 1983 in the British army, unless you mean the Centurion, which was used in 1967. Israel has been fighting since the day it was created, with Messerschmitts, Spitfires and Panthers - basically anything they could get their hands on.
Okay, and btw I meant Centurion...
Exactly... If they had been given Bren Carriers they would have used them.Quote:
Originally Posted by Grey_Fox
As I argued it was technically a problem of production rather than one of quality, though that certainly did hurt when the Centurion, Pershing and IS III entered service.
“The vaunted T34 didn't have these capabilities (it could make use of an IR searchlight but only for the commander if it was installed without some serious restructuring inside the turret).”
The T34 evolution was carried out in the T44 -1944- but only few 900 units were produced. However, we can considered that the next T54/55 -1950- to the T62 were improvement of the concept.
Yes, but the T54-55 wasn't anything close to a T34. They had the same background, but they were new tanks. Just like th Tiger II was a new tank and not just an upgrade to the Tiger E.
And the T44 was a structurally different machine. Closer to the T34 than the T54-55 were, but still a new tank.
When you have to change the entire chassis and structure of the tank it isn't really an inherent capability for upgrades, is it now?
However the turret is a different matter as you can technically mount different turrets on the same tank if they only fit the ring. And adding more armous is also an upgrade.
I would like to point out that I find the T44 to be a very interesting subject, much like the Panther II project, or the Schmalturm project for the Panther F.
However it is a new beast in the same 'family' as the T34.
I agree here. Tuk' was an especially poignant loss. Without him, the tank-heavy formations developed by the Russians in 1940/1941 didn't have the balance needed for deep operations, they were simply large groupings of tanks to "counter" German armor concentrations.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pannonian
Other points regarding posts prior to this:
T-34's
The T-34 was one of the classic designs of that war. Reliable, good range, good speed, good off-road ability, very nearly idiot-proof in maintenance. Early versions were under-gunned (the Russian 76mm was a superb gun by 1941 standards, but outclassed by late '42/early '43; the 85mm remained an effective choice into the 1950's).
The T-34 had little effect during Barbarossa, however, as it was deployed late and in relatively few numbers (a few to each unit, not massed deployments). It easily outclassed the Pzkw-II's, III's, and -38's which formed the bulk of German armor forces at that time. The later war T-34 outclassed the Pzkw-IV's it faced and proved a tough opponent even for the Pzkw-V's.
Though equally famous, the US Sherman -- even kitted out as a "Firefly" for the British -- was much more prone to burn, slower, less-well armored, and under-gunned compared to a T-34. The Sherman "peaked" as a design at El Alamein. Of course, we did build a snot-load of them (sorry for the technical language) and they were reliable as all get-out unless you were unfortunate enough to be assigned to a "dual-drive" platoon. It was a very versatile hull, lots of variants etc., but never overcame its basic limitations.
The Surprise of Barbarossa
I have read that part of the success of Barbarossa can be attributed to the Soviets being positioned way to far forward and with too much of their force pool in an "offensive" formation -- that Hitler started his offensive a few months before the Russians would have been going after Romania. Not sure if anyone has confirmed this with good primary data though.
The forward divisions (First Eschelon) were anywhere from a few kilometres to 150 kilometres in depth from the front and this created a serious problem in command and control in the opening days. David Glantz, for one, has a number of excellent books where he examines the dispositions and make up the Red Army during the opening days of Barbarossa. He reads Russian, has had access to the Russian achives and does an excellent job with chapter note, charts and appendices, clearly referencing the sources.Quote:
Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh
I would suggest "Stumbling Colossus" or "Before Stalingrad".
Cheers.
By all accounts the T-34 was a really, really nice all-around tank for the time. Fast, rugged, reasonably tough for its weight, and well enough armed. And simple enough to be churned out by the thousands especially after the huge factory complexes moved to the Urals got up and running. I understand the early ones suffered a bit from having a two-man turret (a common problem with all early-war tanks - as the tank commander had to double also as loader or gunner he was sort of overwhelmed) but the /85 upgrade apparently included an enlarged turret housing an additional crewman, aside from giving the tank a big enough gun to take on pretty much anything the Germans could wield in any real numbers.
The Panther was by all accounts essentially a more sophisticated and refined copy of the T-34, as such superior in most respects (at least once assorted teething problems were fixed), and often cited as the best all-around tank of the war. It just had a wee bit of a problem given the stage of the war it came to use in - it had something like three times the number of parts the T-34 had, and not a few of those were rather "high tech" by the standards of the time. Basically, it was just plain over-engineered for the ever thinner stretched German war industry that suffered not only from an ever greater shortage of assorted raw materials (many more obscure metals in particular were apparently in short supply) but also from the attentions of the RAF Bomber Command, its American counterpart and various guerillas, partisans and resistance saboteurs wherever appopriate.
Nevermind now having to cope with Adolf's crackpot wonder-weapon projects on the side to boot. I don't know how much resources the V-series rockets consumed, but those could certainly have been employed to address more pressing issues than blowing up a few London city blocks.
By most accounts most American and British line tanks left quite a bit to be desired (Soviet tanks crews apparently considered the lend-lease American stuff to be too slow, vulnerable and under-gunned), but even if Shermans were lukewarm machines there was an essentially endless supply of them available to make up for it; the US was an industrial powerhouse that not only had nothing like a shortage of raw materials, its factories were also well and truly out of the reach of any real interference (it was also able to sink a round billion dollars - an astronomical sum by the currency rates of the day - into the rather blue-sky Manhattan Project on the side...). Plus, unlike the Germans who reputedly were forced to resort to mechanized formation commanders pretty much stealing fuel from each other to be able to mount the Battle of the Bulge, none of the Allies had any real fuel problems as such although as usual actually shipping the supplies to the front might be easier said than done (the solutions could get rather impressive).
But then again their logistics were largely free of partisan, maquis and enemy air force attention too.
I think my signature sort of sums up why the T-34 and Shermans were better allround tanks than most of the German ones.
Heh. I've heard a story about some senior officer at one point reporting to Hitler that intelligence estimates placed monthly Soviet tank production at 1200. "Absolut unmöglich!" or something similarly analytical was Adolf's comment.
Unusually enough, he was correct in a way. The rate was 2200...
A certain tendency to presuppose reality was what you wanted it to be, as well as chronic underestimation of one's enemies (whether due to them being "soft and degenerate democrats" or "Bolshevik subhumans"), and that enough will could overcome issues such as bad supply, poor preparations, mind-boggling distances and truly absurdly gross disparities in sheer material resources, seem to have been recurring problems for Die Reich. But then again it was ruled by a vulgar-Nietzschean ideology that sneered at rationalism and intellectualism and glorified emotion and will...
I think the numbers Hitler balked at was actually planes (and more of course), but the point comes across pretty well anyway.
I remember reading in max Hasting's "Armageddon: The Battle For Germany 1944-45" that the amount of resources put into the producution of the V weapons would have been able to build something in the region of 40,000 planes (the number could easily be higher, it's been a while since I read it and my memory is hazy).
Ugh. Well, it's not like they'd had the fuel for all those planes anyway...
As I said, it's hazy, the number could also be a lot lower.