The Italians built some amazing aircraft; the problem they had was that the Italian aviation industry was completely incapable of putting those bespoke wonders into mass production, and even if they had, where were the pilots, fuel, and everything else going to come from…?

Same-same with the Germans and their tanks; the US had the Sherman and all the rest of its armor manufactured in true mass-production assembly-line format. The Germans never really got past the sort of batch production mode that railway engines are built under. There weren’t assembly lines, per se–Just workshops.

The whole thing boils down to a failure at the national-strategic level, in terms of keeping your ambitions down to what you can actually accomplish. Given the realities, I’m not sure what Germany should have had as a strategic aim in the war, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest that starting WWII the way they did should not have been it. Hell, war was never the damn answer for Germany, due to the balance of forces posed against them. Smartest thing they could have done would have been to take a stab at doing the post-war Wirtschaftswunder without the war. Should Stalin have decided to come West, anyway, we might have the spectacle of the Nazis having “saved civilization” vs. the reputation their actual conduct earned them…

How’s that for a historical counter-factual?

Indeed; many other DLOD constraints beneath the radar in the force mix problem. But the popular debate is always about the d**n gun…

The fuel can issue was known to me: it was acute in the British Western desert campaigns of ’41 / ’42. Ironically, the German design was much better than the contemporary British one and they were widely substituted; the phrase “Jerry Can” passing into English.

I agree with the eponymous YouTuber. The “best tank” depends entirely on the nation using it. T-34 and Sherman were both very good answers for Russia and US profiles respectively for the reasons you outline, plus the other DLOD issues. Perfect? Nawh. But a really good choice given the information available to the decision makers at the time. I’d be happy to take that level of decision quality in a future force mix problem.

As Germany, I’d have put a bit more into the Stugs post-43 at the expense of Panthers/Mk IV, and dropped the Tigers entirely. (I don’t take manpower as that constraining – you still have a lot of infantry divisions! Yet there may be other constraints in training and support.) But it’s a question of fine balance; I don’t think the actual German force mix was miles away from their optimum either.

This is one of those rare issues where I think all sides did reasonably well!

The 76mm gun thing is interesting, as Nick Moran goes into great detail about that as well. Theater commanders were asked if they wanted it for D-Day, and they said no. Both because of the logistics issues Kirk brings up, but also because they had already fought Tigers in North Africa and Italy, and they thought the 75mm was adequate. In HINDSIGHT the decision could be debated once the tactical and strategic differences between the previous locations and the Western European theater became obvious, but even then, it was not as big an issue as has been made out to be.

The British Firefly 17 Pounder variant is extolled as the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it really wasn’t. The compromises required to get the gun to fit made the ergonomics of actually using it a nightmare for the gunner.

The British did so for logistics reasons, NOT because they needed it to “Kill Tigers”. In fact, the 76mm could kill enemy tanks to almost the same range. Given the ACTUAL engagement ranges, and the ACTUAL effective range of ACTUAL fire with the optics involved, the difference was actually negligible.

The so called “Tiger panic” was also overblown. The actual number of Tigers in theater after D-Day was comparatively tiny. Anything that ambushed you and caused casualties was a Tiger, even it it was actually a STUG. As for the kill ratio, the side on the defensive, that can shoot and scoot from ambush, on terrain they know, is of course going to have a high kill ratio. The guy who shoots first usually wins.

I earlier spoke about the Tiger platoon ending up with only one tank, and one of the reasons I cited was running out of ammo. If you were part of one of the scratch Kampfgruppen that the Germans were so good at creating out of leftovers, you might find yourself part of one such, but being one of the few remaining Tigers, the service battalion supporting your group normally worked with their own Regiment, equipped mostly with Stugs and Panzer 4s, so only had 75mm ammo to re-supply you with. Even the 88mm gun you were equipped with used different ammo than the earlier 88mm tank/anti-tank gun, and different again from that of the famous ’88. THAT was why the British made Firefly, not because they absolutely needed the power, but rather for reasons of logistics.

I saw a video made by another youtuber answering the question “what was the best tank?” and his answer was that it depends on who you were. The Sherman was definitely the best tank for the allies, the T-34 definitely the best tank for the Russians.

The Sherman had to be made in huge quantities and shipped everywhere to be used everywhere. Could the design have been better? Absolutely! The silhouette could have been lower with a re-design, (moving the engine or final drive to get rid of the drive shaft having to go through the hull), but the Grant/Lee was already in service, and “good enough”. At some point you have to decide to START mass production.

You also have to ship it (by rail and ship and rail again), thousands of miles from it’s factory, (on standard rail cars and standard track, and using existing standard dockyard cranes). Once it gets to Russia (Lend Lease), or the far east, it is never going back to the factory, so it had better be reliable and supportable in theater. The Germans were close enough to home that you could send a tank back to the factory for upgrading/overhaul (c.f. the Elephant upgrade of the Ferdinand), not so for any Sherman, fighting whole continents away from its place of birth.

Same for the T-34. It was NOT the best tank of the war. As Nick Moran explains, the ergonomics were awful, and while routing servicing was OK, long term servicing and overhaul was also a nightmare, BUT, they generally didn’t last long enough to need it! So for the Russians, it was the best tank.

Likewise, the German decision to go with the heavy and complicated tanks of the late war period like Tiger and Panther, was actually the least worst option. It has been suggested that they should have just made more Panzer 4s and Stugs, but by the end, it wasn’t just resources they were running out of, it was manpower. If you could build 2-3 Panzer 4/Stugs for the resources of one Panther, but who would man them? You were going to be fighting on the defensive, outnumbered, and needed to maintain a very high kill ratio, so better the biggest, heaviest tank you could get. (The over-complicated design and low reliability was another matter).

Just getting the ammo for the heavier 76mm gun on the later models across the Atlantic was a bit of a major undertaking. The logistics of it all were not as simple as people talking trash today think they were.

There were things in WWII that could have been done a lot better, but they weren’t the usual suspects the Wehr-a-boos and Allied apologists think they were. Huge issue was in the supply side of things–Nobody thought to back-haul all those five-gallon fuel cans back to the ports where the pipelines ended. Most of the cans were treated as disposable, and because there wasn’t a lot of bulk fuel haul capacity out in the line units, one of the major problems for the Allies was those missing cans–Which wound up being re-purposed for everything but hauling fuel.

I worked with a logistics officer who’d done a paper analyzing a bunch of WWII stuff, and he’d found a bunch of stuff that would have impacted the war effort, things we know now but did not know then. The fuel cans were just the tip of the iceberg… Very interesting reading.

The other one that always gets me is the guys who say “Oh, if only we’d have containerized everything, like we do now…”, and who ignore the follow-on logistics implications of all that technology development which would have had to take place, distracting from the war effort. Just building the containers themselves, ignoring all the necessary Materials Handling Equipment… Dear God, the stupid, the stupid… It burns! Cor-Ten steel, which is a key part of container technology because of its resistance to corrosion in a sea environment, wasn’t developed in economical quantities until the post-WWII era, and indeed, came out of technology developed during the war. Containerization would have been a boon, but the surrounding technological and logistical ecology that make it work today simply was not there, and developing it under wartime conditions…? Might well have lost us the war entirely.

The TRADOC figure is probably high but the answer is also probably > 1.

There’s a censored data issue here: you can’t just count the bullets in dead Jihadi chests, as you don’t know which one stopped him.

Actually, even the bodies aren’t enough to answer this question definitively: you also need to see Jihadi’s who limped off with sucking chest wounds. Had a similar analytical problem with warships once:

Agreed. The Sherman was perfectly fine for allied requirements, and not a death trap by the deaths-per-lost-tank statistic.

Also, yeah, the silly obsession with the Tiger-exchange ratio. The job of the Sherman wasn’t to kill rare Tigers (they fall apart on their own very nicely, thank you, or against AT guns). The job of the Sherman was providing infantry-support against an infantry/armoured vehicle vehicle mix with an operational manoeuvre capability on the side. It had to do this reliably at a cheap production cost.

Tank-on-tank obsession disfigures the WWII armour debate.

Aaaah yes! MILES Gear! It didn’t tell you everything, but it could tell you a lot! When the Company OC launched what he thought was a “good plan”, and everyone got slaughtered! Never mind what the umpires thought, the beeping of the MILES gear told the real story!

I’m curious about HOW the statistic McChuck quoted form TRADOC was derived. Did they actually autopsy dead hadjis, or derived it form “reports”? (See my comments re: Korea and the M2).

One of the things we have been doing in Canada, is that EVERY casualty gets repatriated and autopsied, to see what we can learn about weapons, effects, and kit. Is there something we can improve, like vulnerabilities in our body armour etc.

I have recently spent a bunch of time watching the Youtube channel (Inside the Chieftain’s hatch)of Major (now LtCol.?) Nick Moran, the World of Tanks video game in house historian.

He has some fascinating stuff about the actual statistics related to tank combat in WWII, filtered through his experience as a tanker in Iraq and a Bradley boss in Afghanistan. The real world experience makes the academic work much better.

The so called “death trap” Sherman tank was nothing of the kind. The total loss of tankers in all theaters was less than 2,000, and the total tank losses were several times higher. The so called “Ronson, lights first time everytime” quote didn’t appear in their marketing until AFTER the war, and a bunch of other things. Everyone except the Russians used Petrol/Gasoline in their tanks, and it was cooking ammo that caused the fires, and it was much easier to escape a knocked out Sherman than any other type.

One of the regular features of his videos is a visit to a museum with tanks, and a profile of each one, with an outside overview of each tank, remarks about the design, ergonomics and ease of use/servicing, FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A SERVING TANKER. He then gets in the tank, and gives a critique of the ergonomics and usability of each tank from each crew position. The last thing he usually does is the “Oh bugger, the tank is on fire!” test, which involves him trying to get out (usually from the driver’s position), against the clock.

The “It takes 5 Shermans to kill a Tiger” was likely correct, but was because a standard platoon of American tanks WAS 5 Shermans, and the lone Tiger was likely alone because his compatriots had broken down, run out of gas, or run out of ammo, whereas the Sherman platoon had no such issues.

I highly recommend his videos if you get a chance.

That’s the theory, all right. The question is, is it a valid one?

I think that it can be, but that it only works if that’s how you’re using the guns and ammo tactically and operationally. Which I would submit, we are not.

If you’re going to build a professional army, and then train it to deliver single shot deliberate aimed fire, and you chose to equip it with a weapon that was designed as a mass-fire bullet hose predicated upon putting a large volume of somewhat aimed fire downrange…? I think you might just be suffering from a cognitive disorder. You are giving your exquisitely trained troops a weapon which is geared towards a totally different paradigm than the one you’re actually using to plan, train, and conduct combat.

I would submit that in today’s environment, that it’s not at all conducive to the mass-fire weapons-free mentality embodied in the M16/M4/M249 weapons suite, particularly with regards to the ROE that restrict fires to that which can be identified as enemy vs. “let’s spray bullets all over the surrounding terrain and let God know his own…”. As such, perhaps we ought to be issuing a weapon that is a bit more in alignment with how we’re planning, training, and conducting warfare at the squad level…?

I’ve been saying this for years: Tell me how you mean to fight, and I’ll tell you what your weapons ought to look like. How you make war needs to be reflected back at you in your weapons procurement choices, or you’re going to be in a world of hurt when it comes to the actual reality of it all.

And, while good professional soldiers can get you results with about anything, if you’re going to spend the money to recruit, train, and equip them… Why the hell not give them optimal weapons for what you’re asking them to do?

The problem of the vehicle stop is one that still mystifies me: WTF do these idiots think, that the M16 is a magical death ray that can stop anything short of a tank…? For the love of God, even back in the dark ages of yore, when I was a private soldier during the 1980s, we had the great good sense to listen to our elders who were Vietnam veterans, and put friggin’ recoilless rifles at the traffic control points… Something the Marines in Beirut seemed to have rather forgotten the point of. Frankly, if you’re not backing up a TCP with something at least in the class of an M67 90mm, you’re smoking crack. Minimum? You should have a ready-to-fire AT-4 at those points, and be ready to use it. Also, a straight TCP with no chicane built into it is not a smart TTP.

Some of the crap I watched otherwise seemingly intelligent people do with regards to these things just left me shaking my head in bafflement. The gate guard at Beirut? No ammo in his rifle, and only an M16 to use in stopping a truck bomb, a weapon that had been utilized rather extensively in Beirut before that point. As well, the gate leading to that building targeted by the bomb pretty much gave the attacker a straight shot at the lobby. WTF? We did better planning and prep on training exercises in the middle of Oklahoma around that time frame, and my friggin’ unit could have won the Olympics if general incompetence were an event…

I still haven’t figured that one out. I remember reading the report on that incident as a junior NCO, and going “Jeezus… This is an elite unit of an elite branch…? Not so much, by performance…”.