The German “Job shop” format of manufacturing, compared to the US/Soviet “continuous line” can work competitively, assuming a different product. The Gerries managed to crank out a lot of very good armored fighting vehicles and “tank killer” variants, which were much easier to make than full blown tanks.
When did tanks start getting diesels?
I would think superior torque and fuel efficiency would be a must in a slow, heavy vehicle (not to mention diesel, compared to gasoline, is relatively non-flammable).
And of course, they didn’t have any steel so they could only produce a few hundred.
However, the Chinese didn’t have tanks, other than some from the Soviets, so the Japanese never needed to upgrade theirs.
I may have seen the same presentation. If not, something similar.
The Germans prided themselves on tinkering with the design to handle requests from the field, even through production. This was also a reason for slow production as well as adding to the service headaches out in the field.
They also took pride in the complexity of their machines, boasting that the Tiger required 300,000 man-hours for completion. Unfortunately for them, the T-34 was something like 20,000.
The different countries had different approaches. Germany, Britain and the US went with gasoline and the Soviets went with diesels starting with the T-34, IIRC. The Japanese also used diesels in their poorly designed beasts.
Germany had the most overrated tanks - people have gone over their shortcomings here. There is also a tendency to only focus on the neat German tanks - the 1300 Tigers get a lot of focus, but the 20,000 PzIII and PzIV variants get mostly ignored in comparisons. The unupgraded Sherman was simply better than the PzIVs that made up the bulk of German tank forces in France, but that tends to get glossed over in talk of single tanks dueling.
One that hasn’t really been mentioned - Italy spent quite a bit to build the most state of the art, modern military including tanks, and succeeded at building a sophisticated fighting force. The problem was that they did this in the early 1930s, then couldn’t afford to upgrade to keep pace with everyone else. This meant that when they did take the field, a lot of their equipment was badly out of date.
That’s really dependent on WHICH PzIV variants you’re talking about. Ausf F or later had 75mm long guns which were roughly equivalent to the 76mm that the Shermans got later in the war.
I do agree that the Shermans weren’t nearly as worthless as they’re made out to be though. They were pretty damned good at what they were designed to do- exploit breakthroughs. They weren’t good at fighting other tanks, but then again, they weren’t really ever intended to do that. Some late-war models had some upgrades that made them better at that, but that just brought them up to snuff, rather than making them actually good at it.
The Germans, OTOH, had realized that tank v. tank battles were the way things were going, and had up-gunned their PzIV models much earlier- the 75mm gun was on the PzIV Ausf F2/G in 1942. This meant that the German PzIV tanks were armed with a gun roughly equivalent to the 76mm M1 from the M4A3E8, two years earlier.
What this translated to was the German tanks having a slightly longer range than the American ones, as within a certain distance, both tanks could destroy the other.
(FWIW, the Sherman M4A3E8 was found to be more or less equivalent to the T-34/85 in Korea)
Another astonishing factor is that Germany never went to twenty four hour production. Throughout the war, German factories closed each evening and reopened the next morning. It’s amazing that in the middle of a world war, nobody thought it might be a good idea to build military supplies around the clock.
Germany also mostly refused to mobilize its women. Other countries encouraged women to work in factories or do other work to free up men for the armed forces. Hitler and the other Nazis clung to the old-fashioned belief that women shouldn’t work outside the home.
The German tank destroyers were more a result of ‘What are we going to do with all these obsolete tank hulls’ rather than any production method. Scrapping the hulls would have been a waste and trying to converted them into an actual modern tank was impossible. So conversion to a no-turret-but-a-big-gun was done. Tank Destroyer doctrine worked out much better for Germany than the US, but that might have been because they were on the defensive a lot of the time.
The Germans did move tanks on railcars but these were easy targets for airstrikes and sabatuers.
The later 76mm gun was actually only a small (around 5%) improvement in armor penetration over the 75mm gun, the real problem for armor penetration with the Sherman’s 75mm gun was that the US didn’t issue up to date armor piercing ammunition for it until later in the war. I regard that as an issue with leadership decisions, not an issue with the tank itself.
This page has some good info, and item 2 on it specificially talks about the ammunition and armor penetration issues: http://knowledgeglue.com/dispelling-myths-surrounding-m4-sherman/
The Sherman ended up with the nickname “the Ronson”, which was a brand of cigarette lighters at the time. Ronson’s advertising slogan was “lights the first time, every time”.
Interestingly, if you look at Wikipedia’s production figures:
Tiger I - 1350*
M-4 Sherman - 33,403
M-4/76 Sherman - 10,883 (the upgunned version)
…you’ll find there were 32.8 Shermans made for every Tiger, not 10.
*I did not count the 18 “Sturmtigers,” as they were built on the chassis of damaged Tiger tanks, and thus likely do not constitute additional production).
That article is a bit off; the 76mm gun and 75mm gun were pretty close… IF firing the same type of ammunition (APCBC). But the thing was, the 76mm guns were ideally supposed to be firing 76mm HVAP, which was quite a bit more effective than the APCBC ammunition.
The fact that the 75mm armed Shermans rarely had the APCBC ammunition only made it worse.
HVAP performance = about 208 mm @ 500 m and 175 @ 1000 m, which is quite a bit more than the 95 mm @ 500 m and 86 mm @ 1000 m of the 75mm M3 firing the M61 APCBC.
Which of the tanks had the highest kill-to-loss ratio? I know that doesn’t tell the whole story but it’s certainly a data point.
Here’s an interesting video on myths of American armor by a former tanker:
A lot of it is also mentioned in Pantastic’s link, but here’s a few interesting points:
While there were a lot of pictures of Shermans on fire, many had been set on fire after the crew bailed out, so that they couldn’t be repaired after the battle.
Shermans were pretty easy to bail out from compared to contemporary tanks like Tigers or T-34s. Sherman crew’s actually had a much lower casualty rate than the infantry.
American tanks actually only fought Tigers a handful of times, most of the time they went against Panzer IIIs and IVs, and some Panthers. Shermans actually did quite well against the Panthers.
Arracorte being one the better examples.
Those attitudes began to change after Stalingrad. Goebbels pushed for a “Total War” economy (and he would oversee it, of course).
I don’t know if that’s a very good indicator at all- it’s going to be highly dependent on who’s defending and who’s attacking, as well as surprise, fortification, etc…
I wouldn’t be surprised if the highest kill-to-loss ratio was something totally un-sexy like the Sturmgeschutz-III assault guns, which were very effective in defense, but not terribly helpful in the attack, due to the lack of a turret.
I was told that German tanks were actually not that advanced-that the guns had to be aimed by a hand crank-while the Shermans had electrically driven servo motor controls-is this correct?
Yes and no. The Sherman, for example, had an electrically-driven turret, while the Panther had a hydraulically-driven one with a hand crank for fine adjustments.
Electric was much faster and could operate independent of the engine, while the German design required careful coordination between the driver and gunner to get max speed out of the turret.
For one example, the late-war J variant of the Pz IV was dramatically simplified. It replaced the hydraulic turret of earlier variants with completely hand-cranked turret. A lot of other things were stripped too: it was given an undersized transmission, armor skirts were removed, various ports and bells and whistles all stripped away. All this put it at a significant disadvantage. However, by this point Germany was on the defensive and the biggest fraction of their armor was turretless StuG assault guns. These, like the Pz IV J, were adequate for the endless ambush and delay tactics that Germany resorted to.