I think that kind of sums it up. What was it with the Allies that we didn’t have a decent tank? Ok, the Russians had the T-34/76 which competes for maybe the best tank of the war alongside the Panzer V but Americans and British weren’t driving any of those. Somewhere else around here (SDMB board) someone commented something to the effect of the Sherman amounting to a coffin on treads.
I’m looking for the cite but I believe British generals felt that on average you needed 5 Shermans against one Panzer V. Four Shermans would die and the fifth would get the kill on the Panzer.
Did we just not care about our troops that much or were our engineers incapable of a good tank design?
Bear in mind also that the Germans were exceptionally good tank designers. I think there may also have been an early trend towards mass production by the British and US to overcome the Germans’ early technical superiority; once this pattern was set, it may be that the Allies simply didn’t feel they could waste time coming up with a particularly good design. Remember this: Germany built 24,630 tanks by the end of 1944, Britain 24,843 – and the US churned out 88,410 (cite: Hastings).
The main problem the British had was that, IMHO, we saw tanks as anti-infantry weapons and couldn’t shake that misconception. Hence the huge numbers of slow, heavily-armoured but poorly-armed monsters (Matildas, Churchills and so on). Max Hastings mentions the extraordinary short-sightedness of British War Office officials, who separated tank design and gun design, leading to geographically separate departments unable to integrate weapons with vehicles. Britain had a very good anti-tank gun in June 1941 (the 17-pounder) but never mounted it in a tank until the limited production of Sherman Fireflies from late 1943. Misleading reports of the ‘success’ of other weapons in North Africa perpetuated the myth that British tanks were just fine.
I’d also speculate – but I have no cites for this – that the US didn’t see the value of tanks until much later than other countries, and hence were at a disadvantage in tank design for the early stages of the war. US armoured doctrine also emphasised reliability and speed (and a higher rate of fire), where German design emphasised armour and killing power. Hence Allied tanks had a better chance of reaching battle, but less chance of surviving it.
Hastings (again) think the poor weapons on US tanks was down to US Army Ordance’s obsession with saving them for the next generation T20 tanks, which entered production far too late to make any difference. He also suggests, less convincingly, that national pride prevented US Army designers from copying captured German 88mm guns (which were tested in the US from November 1942) or British 17-pounders.
Finally, and damningly, nobody wanted to criticise the war effort. Labour MPs in the UK questioned British tank performance, and their concerns were dismissed by Churchill as unpatriotic and “spiteful curiosity”.
Our tanks were junk, that much is clear. However, quantity has a quality all its own. That our guys were told they had superior equipment before they were deployed overseas was pretty sad. Still, I can’t imagine the Army telling them- “Your enemy is much better equipped than you are- better tanks, better infantry weapons, and better trained; You tank drivers are going to get smoked.” Hm…
Anyway, we’ll not make that mistake again, so that’s something, sort of.
Military history is full of examples of poor equipment being put on the front line by folks that ignored the consequences. Someone has to make a choice between keeping the status quo and diverting resources to build a new design that may also have flaws. The early M-16 was a disaster after powder specifications were changed and the M-14 had horrible problems though it was based on a proven and reliable design.
Regarding relative tank strengths, almost all sources I’ve read stated that the Russians actually had the best tanks. One on one, the Russian T-34 and the KV were a match for the best of the German designs. The German success stemmed more from their strategy of massing tanks rather than scattering them for infantry support, and from a better supply of good anti-tank guns and armor-piercing shot.
The western Allies’ problem may have been a strategy of “fighting the last war”, building a tank that would be great for crossing large trenches and crushing infantry who were armed only with light weapons. Good design for WW1, not much use against German heavy tanks and 88mm anti-tank guns. Why the British/American designers didn’t wise up as their tank crews were getting slaughtered is harder to say. Maybe as already suggested a combination of not wanting to admit the previous strategy was wrong and feeling that producing a whole bunch of barely adequate tanks was better than waiting while a good one was designed and production factories switched over. For a good look at questions along these lines (i.e., “what the hell was our side thinking?”), I 'd recommend Len Deighton’s “Blood, Tears, and Folly”. Written by a British author and only covers up through the attack on Pearl Harbor so not a whole lot of info on American wartime policy, but a lot of good insights into decisions that don’t seem to make a lot of sense today.
Germany had finite resources (coal, steel, etc) and went for quality over quantity from the mid-30’s onwards. Britain was late to the design game but after the Battle of the Atlantic had excellent supply lines both in terms of finished products (Spitfires built in Canada come to mind first but there was much else) and raw materials. Even more so after Pearl Harbor.
Also, by the time it mattered in the field to the western Allies (from D-Day onwards), air superiority would have been pretty well sorted (otherwise D-Day would itself not have been attempted) so, again, there was less of a need to match the Germans tank for tank.
I guess the combination of greater resources, untroubled production lines and air superiority rather took the edge of the need to match them. Not great news for the Allies tank crews.
Germany may also have had better designers and tech but I’m not sure there was ever a real competition on design and building tanks.
I think there may be more to it than that. Often, designs are limited by the types of components that are in inventory. For example, aircraft are often designed around available engines rather than the other way around.
It may just be that Germany and the Soviet Union had engines, transmissions, guns, and other parts that could be assembled into very powerful tanks. The U.S. may have started with the assumption that lighter, faster tanks would be superior, and never really developed good hardware to support a much heavier tank.
When designing things like a tank, it can be hard to change the design after you’ve gotten started. You decide you need more armor plating, but that increases weight. Now your suspension won’t cut it, and the engine is underpowered. So you put in a bigger engine, and now you’re blowing transmissions. Put a bigger gun onboard, and now parts start breaking from the recoil. So you usually have to go back to the drawing board. I wouldn’t be surprised if the design of our tanks started around the core of some already-available diesel engine, and the Germans just had a bigger one.
I wonder if our need to ship them overseas had anything to do with it? Big heavy main battle tanks can put a pretty big strain on your resources. Maybe the whole design parameters of our tanks revolved around the lifting capacity of cranes or elevators on our ships or something. There could be a million little details like this behind the scenes which forced our designs in a certain direction.
The German tanks were vastly superior to the Western Allies, yet the Allies win anyway. Why? We are constantly being told that technology rules supreme. The answer is simply that this is not true. Throughout histoy technology has given a great advantage, all other things being equal.
But superior tactics almost always trump superior technology. We used it against the British who had better guns and managed to squeak out a win through hiding and constantly retreating (Washington was a brilliant general, understanding the true nature of his war was organized retreat, hit and run, because he could not beat a superior foe. A man less secure would have lost the nation in pitched battles.) The Vietnamese used it against us to great effect, and we used it against the Germans.
The lesson in warfare is clear: think hard (as if your life depended on it, because it does) about what you want to accomplish and how to accomplish it. If you don’t, you are dead.
German tanks were modern in many senses, chief among them the fact that they were monstrously expensive to make and extremely difficult to repair. They also broke down almost constantly. Allied tanks, mainly the American Shermans, were assembly line products that were reliable and fairly simple to get back into action. Hose them out, patch the hole, and find another crew.
I have been told that the reason for this is simple. Germany turned the manufacture of tanks over to heavy machine manufacturers. They built them big, tough, and complicated. The Americans turned to automobile manufacturers, experienced with mass production.
At the beginning of hostilities, German tanks were far behind German tactics. They had few of the modern monsters that later terrorized Shermans, and nothing even close to the T-34.
Finally, I think an anecdote from Stephen Ambrose sums it up. A German boy, watching a column of American tanks through a captured city, at the extreme end of the war, informed an American soldier that German tanks were better. The soldier countered by asking where, exactly, these superior German tanks were. They were abandoned in their hull-down positions, mobile offensive weapons wasted in a defensive gambit.
Another saying that was so true even at that time, carried over from before WWI was “It is the custom of nations to build tomorrow’s weapons today while the American custom is to build yesterday’s weapons soon”.
Quite true, and comparing Allied tanks throughout the war with the best Panzer is unfair. Most German tanks were underarmored and underarmed (the Panzer III’s main arm was a 37mm cannon in 1940 and it was the main battle tank!) compared to the Allies’ tanks until the Panzer IV. An M3 Lee/Grant, with 75mm AND 37mm guns PLUS three or four .30 MG, was a fairly good weapons system, limited by its height, armor, and limited turret traverse, at the start of the war. The M4a3e8 Sherman, the upgunned version, had the excellent 76mm gun along with the standard Sherman reliability, although it was still too tall with too little armor. The M26 Pershing saw limited action in Europe and was underpowered with the Sherman’s engine, but it addressed most of the other problems with American tanks and had a long career as a fine tank.
FWIW, Shermans had gasoline engines, as dumb as that may seem. Amazingly, they apparently upgraded it to a Ford V-8, but didn’t switch to diesel. I have no idea why they would do this; I would have to assume that neither Detroit nor the Army were very familiar with diesel.
Except, as has been alluded to, Allied technology was BETTER than German technology in most areas.
Yes, the Wehrmacht had better tanks than the Western allies, when the tanks worked, which wasn’t often; Tigers, especially, were notoriously unreliable. But they didn’t have better tanks than the Soviets, and the tanks they did have were hideously hard to keep running. The Tiger was certainly a better tank than the Sherman when it worked, but it often didn’t. Tigers and Panthers blew their engines and trannies out a lot, and the Wehrmacht never had enough spare parts. They were hard as hell to maintain and fix in the field, whereas Allied tanks, especially Societ tanks, were designed with field repairs in mind. At any given time the Germans always had more tanks being fixed than available, often by ludicrous margins. Not to belittle the engineering genius in the Panther, but what good is it if it doesn’t work?
And in other areas the Allies were vastly superior. They had better intelligence owing to their enormous edge in electronic warfare. They had better artillery for the most part, better airplanes, and their armies were mechanized where Germany’s mostly were not - the TRUCK is a pretty big technical edge over the horse, ya know.
Actually the Pershing could have reached Europe much earlier than it did historically. The reason that it didn’t can be resumed in one word : shipping. After examining the situation, the Army decided not to ship the Pershing oversea and stay with the Sherman, because it required less shipping to send 10 Sherman than 10 Preshings. It is also the same reason why the U.S. Army was not 100 % motorized in Europe, they didn’t have the ships to send the vehicles and their logistical needs.
To be fair I suppose a couple of things should be laid out.
The German Tiger II was a pain in the ass for both the Germans and the Allies. The tank was hideously expensive to build (less than 500 total ever produced), broke down a lot, was slow as hell (relatively) and ate fuel like there was no tomorrow. These limitations are serious and kept the tank from holding a ‘best of’ title.
That said if the damn thing ever made it to a battlefield in working condition it was a terror as my quote in the OP suggests. I read of Allied commanders inspecting the remains of tanks nailed by Tigers and noted there were almost no gouges in the tank. That meant nearly every shot that hit the tank penetrated the tank instead of being deflected. You’d expect at least occasionally to get a deflected shot but that never seemed to happen when a Tiger hit. Worse, they noted some tanks that had both entry AND exit holes! The gun on the Tiger was so strong that it could actually shoot shells ALL the way through Allied tanks. Add to that the Tiger’s incredible range (3,000+ meters) and you have one badass tank for its day if it actually worked and could be deployed in reasonable numbers. In the Battle of Kursk (the largest single tank battle of WWII) Some Russian tankers were so put out by the Tiger that they actually crashed their tanks into the Tigers as the only reliable means of stopping them that they could find.
For ‘best overall tank’ I think it comes down to the Russian T-34/76 vs. the Panzer V. The T-34 came earlier than the Panzer V. Indeed, the Germans were getting smacked around by the T-34 and the Panzer V was designed as a direct response to that tank. Not surprisingly the Panzer had better performance statistics than the T-34 although not by much.
From everything I’ve read the Panzer was the ‘better’ tank in that it was more refined (better fit and finish as it were). It also was more complicated and cost a helluva lot more than a T-34. T-34’s had better reliability (Russians seem to have a knack for building cheap and ugly stuff that is durable as hell).
So, which was the better tank? Mano-y-mano the Panzer V seems to beat the T-34. However, as some have pointed out, numbers have a quality all their own and there were a LOT more T-34’s than Panzer V’s built. In the final analysis I guess the Russians had the better design since it aided their war effort more successfully. Still, the Panzer V was a better tank taken as a single item without looking at the larger picture of where it fit into the whole war.
As for Shermans vs. the Panzer V it was almost always a losing proposition for the Sherman. The one saving grace for the Sherman was it was more nimble than the Panzer V or especially the Tiger. Apparently fighting among the hedgerows of Normandy and other parts of Europe helped level the playing field a bit for the Sherman. The Panzers were better on open ground and would wipe the floor with the Sherman tank.
Again, numbers have a quality all their own (can you tell I like that phrase?) but I am surprised that Americans would be so cavalier with their troops lives. Attrition tactics seemed more a thing for Russia and China. Not that American generals haven’t resorted to such tactics (usually bad generals) but overall I thought America had a ‘quality over quantity’ mindset that doesn’t seem to jibe with throwing thousands of lives down the tubes in crappy equipment.
I’m not quie clear on what “hull down” means. Does it mean that the tank is angled so that the thickest possible armor is presented to the enemy, making it harder to kill but also immabile?
Hull down means that only the turret of the tank is exposed, hence limiting the target area. It doesn’t necessary means immobile, for example, you can be hull down behind a ridge.
Actually, it’s not even entirely that. A fellow by the name of J. Walter Christie had approached the US Army in 1928 with a new tank suspension design, that radically increased stability while moving at high speed, even on rough terrain, which made those higher speeds easier to attain and easier on the crew and accuracy (although firing on the move was still a dicey proposition, and would remain so until automatic stabilization over 40 years later)
The US Army, for a variety of reasons, never twigged on Christie’s idea, and didn’t get along very well with the man himself, and went different routes. Russia, on the other hand, was very interested in his work. The Christie Suspension eventually ended up as an integral part of the T-34, one of the best tanks of the war (although I’d say the Panther is better )
Basically, we just didn’t really have much of a clue where tank development was going, and seriously underestimated the opposition we’d be facing. We told our tankers that the Sherman outclassed the enemy because we thought it actually did. In 1939, it would have. In 1943, not hardly.
But as was proven, quantity works just as well as, if not better than quality, albeit with a potentially greater human cost. This is a lesson many people forget, especially after Desert Storm. It’s not necessarily what you have, but how you use it.
Here’s another angle: The Western Allies didn’t need a better tank. Towards the end of the war in Normandy, the Allies had air superiority. Any German tank that moved in the daytime was destroyed by aircraft. Anybody who has played Panzer General can attest to that. Why need to build better tanks when your aircraft can blast their tanks to smithereens.
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