It’s not drifting into Hitler Channel territory; all of the examples I gave are true, none of them are wildly exaggerated. That the KV-1 (and the T-34) could bounce 37m AT shells off of it consistently from any angle wasn’t something the Germans could shrug off during Barbarossa; 37mm was all the Germans had as an AT gun. Most losses of KVs and T-34s were from mechanical dropouts during Barbarossa; the only effective means of defeating them the majority of the German army possessed was using field artillery in direct fire, which wasn’t a very satisfactory answer as it was horse-drawn, it meant the field artillery wasn’t doing its actual job, and usually resulted in at best a 1:1 loss rate. From Ziemke, Moscow to Stalingrad: Decision in the East:
Regarding the Sherman being perfectly capable of killing a Panther while it probably couldn’t kill a Tiger from the front: the Panther was more heavily armored frontally than the Tiger at 5.5in vs 4.72in, what it lacked was the substantial side and rear protection on the Tiger. The performance of the Sherman as being perfectly capable of killing a Panther was rather underwhelming:
Perhaps the tanks were not so bad, perhaps its because they faced a superior enemy to be judged against. To wit, at the battle of Bardia. In two days of fighting (January 3–4, 1941), the Australians suffered 456 casualties while the Italians lost 45,000 men captured.
Don’t forget Italy was the first of the major (well, major-ish) powers to re-arm and mechanise after WWI. When they first designed and built those tanks (and planes, BTW, where similar factors applied) they were as good as anyone’s.
But Italy, having just a weak economy, simply couldn’t afford to rebuild that whole army of tanks every few years, as required. They had to fight with the army they could afford, not the one they wanted. It was a full 17 years between Mussolini coming to power and WWII starting.
Germany also suffered from this, to some degree. They invaded Russia with a fleet of tanks including Panzer II and Czech T38, well outdated by then even if the Russians hadn’t had T34s. They never managed to replace the Me109 design with enough of anything else newer and better to make a difference (eg FW190) so were fighting with obsolete planes when the 1,000 bomber raids started in 1943.
I think you are right-Italy had a modern air force in 1933-but by WWII, they still were flying biplane fighters. late in the war, italy made some very good fighters (like the Macchi), but never in large enough numbers.
Well, yeah, but they did have the FW-190 and substantially improved it as the war went on, just as the British kept using the Spitfire but made it better. They didn’t just stop building Spitfires the day they invented the Tempest.
Continuing to produce some models made economic sense. The British continued building the Halifax bomber even when they preferred the Lancaster because it was just way, way more economical to produce Halifaxes in the facilities, and with the parts suppliers set up and dies cast and all that, than it was to convert those facilities to producing Lancasters. There is a tradeoff in converting entirely to a new vehicle or system whereby a full switch may not actually be sensible.
Pretty much every nation still fielded some biplane fighters right at the start of WWII, with the exception of Germany. Italian aero designers were well-regarded, but the problem was their beautiful, well-machined products could not be mass-produced sufficiently quickly to keep up with the pace of combat, let alone the productivity of their enemies.
Well, since they were up against marvels like the Amiot 143, they would do just fine.
The German Heinkel He 50 and the Soviet Polikarpov Po-2 served until the end of the war, doing night harassment and recon. The Soviet *Nočnye Ved’my *(Night Witches) were flown by female pilots, who were rather notorious.
The North Koreans still used them as late as 1953, the infamous Bedcheck Charlie.
The Fairey Swordfish was mostly responsible for the eventual sinking of the Bismark.
Here’s something I’ve never really understood; if the 57mm rocket fired by the M9 Bazooka could penetrate 4"/102mm of armor, it seems like a 75mm HEAT round ought to be able to penetrate about 5.25"/134mm of armor, since HEAT performance is primarily due to the diameter of the shaped charge.
Why didn’t the US arm them with HEAT rounds? Seems like they would have been more effective in that era versus APBC or HVAP rounds. Was it just bureaucratic inertia and production priority, or were there technical difficulties?
After reading the wiki on HEAT rounds I’m getting the impression it was a technical issue.
Apparently HEAT rounds are less effective when rapidly spinning because the centrifugal force will disperse the jet, so they can’t be used, or at least not easily, with a rifled barrel, which is what I assume the tanks in that era had.
Bingo. Workarounds like twisted shape charge liners, slipping obturators and sabots came later. Finally a switch as most main battle tanks now use smooth-bore guns.
Indeed, the Rotkopf ammunition that Hitler finally (re-)released after daily pleading by his Army and Army Group commanders on December 22, 1941 to cope with Soviet armor was for field artillery and support tanks such as the Pz-IV with a short barreled 75mm howitzer, not for rifled AT guns or tanks armed with them. The 37mm continued to remain useless against the T-34 and KV until the introduction of some tungsten ammunition, at which point it merely became suicidal:
An interesting work-around was developed in 1941, the Stielgranate 41, which was basically a oversized shaped charge round fired from the 37mm like a rifle grenade. It wasn’t very accurate, and reloading it required someone to expose themselves and place another in the barrel.
As A J Baime’s book “Arsenal of Democracy” relates, when an American P-51 Mustang fighter was shot down over Aachen, Germany Hermann Goering refused to believe it-and don’t try to confuse him by saying you have the wreckage.