But you also find the same complaints when you read the brigade commanders accounts. Typically advances would falter when the Shermans came up against the 88 mils left cover the German’s retreat.
Remember also that experienced front line troops are a lot more valuable than than the equipment. Its all well and good saying you can afford 10 shermans to every tiger. But that also meant you are losing more experienced tank crews who must be replaced with raw recruits.
And finally it doesn’t take many tanks at the “tip of the spear” to make a huge difference to an offensive operation. Again, read first-hand accounts of the Ardennes offensive if you don’t believe me.
To me the whole thing smacks on unjustified revisionism. The fact is the allies went to war with inferior equipment. You can talk as much you want about manufacturing priorities, but that doesn’t alter that fact.
Exactly. And the lack of tanks was why the Germans had a hard time launching one offensive. Meanwhile the Americans had enough tanks that they were launching offensives along the entire front. The Shermans would win twenty battles while the Tigers were winning one. And that’s why the American army kept moving forward while the German army moved back.
Reading about tactics is exciting but it has nothing to do with the outcome of the war. Platoon leaders don’t have the perspective to discuss strategy. You get too much “this is the most important foxhole in the war because I’m in it.”
Allow me to rephrase, since there seems to be confusion:
The F4F and P-40 held the line (which I mean to say they were able to achieve a strategic stalemate) against a more manueverable, faster, and longer ranged plane (the A6M). Their ruggedness mattered.
I have seen Wildcat v. Zero debates before on other websites, and I recall it being shown that the USN and IJN (in '42) dogfighters achieved a near 1 to 1 kill ratio against each other (that means NOT counting flak, operational accidents, ground strafing, or loss of fighter aircraft because the ship went and sank from under them). I’m sorry I can’t provide a link at this time.
In actions over the Phillipines, you had 100 Japanese against 20 defenders. Of course the Japanese are going to win. 5 to 1 odds will do that for you. In actions over the Solomons (say… Aug '42 to Feb '43) where the numbers of opposing planes were more even, the USN and USMC pilots held the line.
But anyway, 1 to 1 attrition played to the U.S.'s benefit.
What I wanted to point out is that the “glory” seems to go to the later years (when the Americans not only outnumbered the opponents, had [generally] superior aircraft, but also had a solid core of combat veterans, while the Japanese lost theirs), when the planes and men of mid to late '42 accomplished a tough job using equipment that was… more or less “adequate”. They laid the foundation for what would come later.
Hey! Thanks for a reading recommendation!
However, I would like to tentatively point out that the “review synopsis” of the book does not say that the U.S. Army was “surprised” by the capabilities of the Tiger, only that they thought the Sherman would be “good enough” against it.
Interesting..Gen. Claire Chennault’s “Flying Tigers” did very well, flying P-40 fighters (against the much vaunted Zero).
The reason for their success was that they used the strengths of the aircraft (more robust, faster in dives, and better armor). Instead of engaging in dogfights (in which the P-40’s performance was inferior), they dove into the Zeros, and pulled up sharply to avoid being tailed.
I recently saw some early war footage (IIRC it was from the invasion of Poland), and it showed dog drawn carts loaded with supplies. I’d never seen that before. I know it was serious business but it absolutely tickled my fancy, to see military logistics handled by dog cart.
Though their armoured units had very good support logistics. They had tank carriers that could remove damaged tanks from the field for repair. Earlier in the war at least, the Allies had nothing like that, so in most cases immobilized tanks were as good as destroyed. I’m assuming this got better later in the war, but I was immediately able to see any evidence one way or another (about 50% of the internet seems to be taken up with discussion of WW2 tanks of one sort or another, but I guess this kind of thing isn’t sexy enough to be worth discussing ) .
I believe it. The fact is, only about 30% of the German Army was motorized-the Germans invaded Russia with over 800,000 horses! In fact, the Germans were reduced to hauling supplies with horse-drawn sleds.
Pretty hard to overcome if you are invading the largets country on earth.
Overwhelmingly, Russian roads were appalling or non-existent. Horses were perfectly fine for the purpose in that terrain, had the German had only trucks they would have had the same problem the German tanks did, not being suitable for much of the terrain they were fighting in. The Russians used millions of horses too.
WWII (and indeed modern) combined arms doctrine says that your tanks don’t fight their tanks; tanks fight infantry, infantry fight AT, and your AT take care of their tanks - each arm deployed to its best advantage. Now the Germans did this better than the Allies did, especially the British who seemed to be trapped in this neo-cavalry mindset of dramatic tank charges, which cost them dearly in the Western Desert and Normandy campaigns. Time and again the Germans would lure the British Armour into killing zones dominated by emplaced 88s (not panzers, which were busy running over infantry formations while the British bounced 2pdr squibs off them).
These are the same thing - the 88’s advantages meant nothing without Rommel making good use of their capabilities in the situations he found himself in. Make no mistake - Rommel was brilliant and was the prime cause of the Commonwealth forces taking 3 years to clear North Africa instead of a few months.
Not as good as you might think. To make up for shortfalls in motor vehicles, Germany requisitioned vehicles from all over occupied Europe. As a result they were using hundreds of different models of trucks causing constant maintenance headaches.
Most often they would be facing Ki-27 Nates and Ki-43 Oscars; the Zero wasn’t quite as ubiquitous as it is often made out to be, not helped by the tendency of Allied pilots to call any Japanese fighter a Zero and the fact that they look fairly similar.
i question the 1:1 kill ratio between US fighters and japanese zeros up to the end of 1942. the biggest loss of fighters the japanese incurred was at midway (around 150) and most of those were ditched because their carriers were lost in mid-ocean. in the air war over new guinea, the americans took a severe beating against the lae airwing. most zeros lost were due to bombing attacks. in java, it was even worst for the allies.
It’s indisputably true that the German 8.8 cm gun was an amazing weapon and the Allies would have been better off using an equivalent weapon earlier on. If the Allies were perfect in their war planning it’d have ended earlier.
However,
The OP claims the Tiger was a surprise to the Allies, which is demonstrably nonsense.
While we can quibble about the specifics, the inescapable truth is the Allies did a much better job of building weapons systems and platforms than the Germans did, and on the whole that includes decisions regarding armor, too.
Of course tankers wanted better tanks. Tankers ALWAYS want better tanks; I assure you that a lot of German tank crews probably wished their fancy tanks worked more than they did, too, and didn’t blow their engines out all the time. The Tiger was about as reliable as a meth addict on payday.
The offensive failed. If the best the Germans had was a six week push against an overconfident, surprised enemy’s weak spot, and you end up gaining nothing and losing just as many guys, that isn’t a stirring recommendation for their logistical approach.
It’s fine to have a sharp tip of the spear, but if you only have one spear and the other guy’s got 20, you lose.
) .