How did the quality and quantity of tanks in WW2 compare

Factual Questions
1

Comparing German, Japanese, Soviet, French, UK, US, etc. tanks in WW2 what were the quality and quantity like?

I"ve heard the Germans had something like 5000 tanks, and they were high quality but broke down constantly. The Soviet tanks were more basic, but they had more and they didn’t break down as much as the German ones.

I also heard the French had more tanks, and better tanks, than the Germans. However that was in 1940, I have no idea how that would compare to the quality and quantity of tanks the Germans had in 1943 by comparison.

Did the USSR get tanks from the US, or were the USSR tanks all domestic made? Did the UK get tanks from the US?

2

Massive differences between the beginning of the war and the end. German tanks at the beginning of the war were pretty basic, and got “better” as the war progressed. They also got more complex and broke down a lot. The Soviets and Americans had crap at the start of the war, and went for the “good enough, make thousands of them” approach.

Japanese tanks were a joke all through the war, and with good reason. Islands aren’t tank territory.

3

I thought the Italians had shit tanks too, it was basically just Germany, USSR and the western allies who had the tanks.

4

One issue for the Germans was they never settled on one tank design. They had eight different models of battle tanks in service during the war. And they used a bunch of other tanks they had confiscated from the countries they occupied. It created a logistic nightmare for Germany because they had to produce and transport a supply of parts for all of these different tanks around Europe and North Africa.

In contrast, the Soviets kept things simple. Virtually all the medium tanks they used were T-34’s. For heavy tanks, they used KV-1’s for the first half of the war and then switched to IS-2’s (Josef Stalins). The Soviets also used American Shermans, Stuarts, and Lees and British Valentines and Matildas.

In terms of numbers, the Soviets built around 85,000 tanks and received around 6000 American and 3000 British tanks.

5

The German Tiger tank was by just about every measure the best tank of the war. It is also often cited as a great example of why having the best weapon isn’t necessarily the best thing. Germany would have been a lot better off if they hadn’t produced it.

If you put a German Tiger against a US Sherman tank face to face, you could let the Sherman fire first if you wanted. It wouldn’t matter. The Sherman couldn’t penetrate the front armor of the Tiger. The Tiger, on the other hand, could put a shell in through the front and out through the back of the Sherman, with the result being fairly unpleasant for the tank crew inside. The Russian tanks were a bit sturdier than the US tanks and fared a bit better against the Tigers, but even the Russians had problems dealing with the Tiger’s huge gun.

The problem with the Tigers was that they were too hard to produce and had a huge cost both in financial and manpower terms. Germany couldn’t make enough of them to have a significant impact on the battlefield, and would have been much better off scrapping the Tiger and producing a lot more of their more “inferior” tanks. The Tigers were also over-engineered and hugely complex, and tended to break down a lot as a result.

The US and the Russians both made much simpler tanks with a great amount of emphasis on produceability, and their so-called “inferior” tanks were produced in such huge numbers that they overwhelmed the Germans. It took on average four Shermans to take out one Tiger, but the US was rolling out 10 Shermans for every Tiger, meaning that they had two and a half times as many tanks as they needed to win that battle.

The Russians had to move their tank producing factories eastward away from Germany after Germany invaded Russia. After that disruption caused by this move, the Russian factories were too far away from Germany for the Germans to attack them, and they just rolled tank after tank after tank over the German border. The Russian tanks were sturdier than the US Sherman and had a better gun than the Sherman. The Russian tanks still had problems against heavy German armor though. The Russian T-60s were famous for occasionally ramming the German tanks. These stories are often exaggerated and it didn’t happen as often as some folks would lead you to believe, but it illustrates how the rugged simplicity of the Russian tanks could be used to defeat the better armor and better guns of the German tanks. The overly complex German tanks would often be knocked apart in the ramming, where the simpler Russian tank would usually survive.

The UK produced their own tanks. Prior to WW2, they had been one of the world leaders in tank designs, but for a variety of reasons their tanks had stagnated and they found themselves lagging behind all throughout the war. UK tanks were rugged and produceable, but they were also under-gunned and under-armored compared to the German tanks and they suffered quite a bit during the African campaigns as a result. The British also received tanks from the US as part of the lend-lease agreements.

France actually had some decent tanks at the start of the war, though it can be argued that their heavy armor made them a bit too sluggish. These tanks were all captured or destroyed by the Germans. Many were hidden as France fell to the Germans, but ended up being found and captured by the Germans.

Italy produced fairly crappy tanks, mostly as a result of limited funds and resources. Their tanks were under-gunned and under-armored, and performed fairly poorly as a result. The lack of funds and resources also caused them to lag significantly behind other countries in terms of design.

The Japanese didn’t place much emphasis on tanks, and lagged behind other countries as a result. The Japanese chose to put their production emphasis on their navy and air force, and did not devote a large amount of resources to tank production. Only when they felt that their homeland was threatened towards the end of the war did they throw more resources into tank production, and by then they were way behind in design and couldn’t produce enough tanks to meet their defensive needs.

6

The big issue with the French and British tanks in 1940 was their tactical deployment rather than their quality. They were still intended to support infantry in a war of entrenchment and they weren’t generally in the right place at the right time to oppose the German tactic of piling a lot of armour on a breakthrough point and then causing chaos behind the enemy lines.

Occasionally the Germans ran up against Char Bs and found out how hard it was to make a dent in them - but they were slow, lacked radio communication, and had a one-man turret that made the commander his own loader and gunner, seriously restricting their usefulness.

Similarly there was one famous occasion when a bunch of Matildas set off to trash every German within sight and there wasn’t a panzer or even an anti-tank gun that could seriously inconvenience them. The Matilda’s main gun was only a quick-firing 2-pounder (40mm) but that could shred anything up to a PzKw III and it was more or less impervious in return to the German 37mm that was the principal weapon they were up against. It was only when a detachment of 88mm guns – intended as anti-aircraft weapons – were flung against them that they were forced to call off the attack. (But as anti-personnel tanks the Matildas suffered from having a light-calibre gun that couldn’t fire a meaningful high-explosive round, and just a single light machine-gun.)

AIUI, a lot of the British and American tanks that got shipped to Russia just ended up on garrison duty or in training units anyway as the Russians, with reason, preferred their own armour. On the other hand, if that meant that Lend-Lease freed up a few thousand T-34s for front-line duty then that was a net gain for the good guys.

7

The funny thing is that one month after the war ended, the British rolled out the Centurion, a truly excellent tank and one of the most successful of the early Cold War era.

8

The Sherman M-4 tanks’ original 75mm gun was not up to par against German tanks. The upgraded 76mm gun was much more effective. Post WWII, they went to a 90mm gun that was quite effective in the M-26/46 Pattons.

9

+1
I saw an Indian Centurion as a Gate Guardians outside an Army base once. It took 6/7 hits from Pattons and shrugged them off, Was captured only when abandoned,

10

Keep in mind most of the Japanese Army was in China.

11

There’s a clip on YouTube where a Finnish sound engineer recorded Hitler talking with the Finnish defense minister (notably, the only recording of Hitler speaking normally). He complains they had various reasons why they could not afford to attack Russia right away, then discovered to their surprise that the Soviets had spent the extra time building tanks and had massive factories and an inventory of 35,000 tanks (And the Germans had destroyed 34,000 of them, but the Soviets kept cranking them out fast enough to replace them).

12

British tank philosophy in the thirties was schizophrenic, which hampered both the tactical deployment and technical design of British tanks. There were two competing schools of tank deployment in the British Army interwar - infantry support for, well, supporting infantry, and ‘cruiser’ tanks for exploiting breakthroughs. The Matilda was an infantry tank - slow but thick-armoured, with gun adequate to suppress infantry and engage enemy tanks up close, while the Cruiser Mark I was nippy but fragile - in particular suffering from mechanical problems.

While the Germans pretty much resolved the tank-deployment dilemma thanks to the contributions of the likes of Guderian and Manstein, the British Army couldn’t make a choice either way and so decided to try and accommodate both.

So in the desert campaign, the Germans and Italians generally encountered thickly-armoured tanks that they couldn’t ‘brew up’ easily without artillery or air strike support, or puny-armed, speedy tanks that they simply laughed at.

The Sherman (and the predecessor, the Grant) were a bit better at marrying the two concepts although still had its problems. One of the things the Brits did with the Sherman though which was pretty cool was replacing the 76mm main gun with their own 17-pounder anti-tank gun. It was immensely dangerous!

13

Indeed-the Char 1B had almost 3" thick frontal armor. In one encounter (Arras), a Char 1B destroyed 13 German tanks, with its 75 MM cannon. Had tyhe French tanks been dployed properly, they could have stopped the german advance cold.

14

Pretty much none of that is true, except for the fact that the Germans would have been better off without the Tiger.

The Panther, which was basically the tank built with the lessons learned after 3 years of war and with the example of the T-34, was widely considered the best tank of the war. Fast, powerful gun, well armored- it pretty much had everything going for it, save mechanical reliability. The Tiger merely had a powerful gun and thick armor- it was slow as hell, and not reliable either. And, in late 1944/early 1945, the 76mm gun on the new production Shermans could penetrate the frontal armor of the Tiger at combat ranges using HVAP rounds. In a sense, the Panther was one of the grandfathers of modern Main Battle Tanks, being one of the first to combine a high powered gun, effective armor protection and good mobility in one hull.

The thing with the Western Allies tanks wasn’t so much that they accepted the idea of “they may be cruddy, but we have 5:1 on the battlefield” as the doctrines were totally different. Fairly early on in Russia, both sides realized that the best weapon against a tank is another tank, and started engineing, arming and armoring their tanks accordingly. The Western Allies didn’t really realize this until late in the war- look at Gen. McNair’s tank destroyer doctrine, or the British idea of cruiser vs infantry tanks to see what I’m talking about. The US tank destroyers weren’t ever really undergunned, while the US Shermans were, but they weren’t ever intended to square up against enemy tanks in the first place.

By the time that the Western Allies came around to the realization that they needed better tanks, as they were fighting German armor themselves, the war was mostly won, and industrial changes like that wouldn’t have been seen until too late anyway, so they opted for the next best thing, which was to upgun the existing ones as best they could, and just build more of them.

US tanks in particular were known for their mechanical reliability- they didn’t break down as often as others, and were easily repaired when they did- this meant that the numeric difference was even more amplified, as the German tanks suffered mechanical breakdowns more often.

So it’s not really a matter of looking at gun bore diameter, armor thickness and feeding it into some formula to determine the best- you have to look at more intangible things like reliability, and even ergonomics- the US tanks were more comfortable than say… the Soviet tanks, which makes a difference over the long haul when it comes to fighting.

15

The United States did begin producing M26 Pershings very late in the war and a few of them were used in combat.

One often overlooked factor was the use of tank carriers. The British and Americans build special vehicles that they could load a tank on to and then deliver the tank as cargo to the vicinity of the battle. The Germans didn’t use these; they simply drove the tanks themselves from one battlefield to another. The result was that German tanks had a lot more mileage and suffered more breakdowns.

16

It’s somewhat a matter of perspective, isn’t it - am I thinking about this as a tank commander wanting to see tomorrow, or am I expected to lead an armored division through a campaign?

17

Besides overly complex and more in-need-of-maintenance tanks, the Germans suffered because fewer of their population either drove automobiles or had experience working on them.

18

AFAIK, the only two countries capable of mass producing tank turrets, bodies, and armor sheaths through casting were the US and USSR. The others basically fabricated the tank around a chassis through welding and riveting. That’s a generalization, of course, but the difference between the German and Soviet tanks in this respect was glaring.

19

I watched a Youtube presentation of WWII weapons and tactics.

For tanks, the slideshow was:

US Factory: Production line ala car maker - one right behind the other on a conveyor belt

USSR Factory: Production line, but a bit more spacing; where the US had 10 tanks in view, the USSR had 7. Still a moving belt.

German: Two tanks visible, only the first is seen from front to back. There are bleacher-seat type stairs around it and chalk notes on its side recording the steps completed. Not an efficient way to produce anything. Did they even have true interchangeability of parts?

20

One big/negative issue For the crews of our Shermans was fuel…gasoline. Relatively thin armor combined with the flammability of the gasoline was devastating.