I do appreciate the capitalization.
I’m not splitting hairs. I’m pointing out that what you claimed is the exact opposite of what was true. You said German soldiers had food that was way above what American soldiers had. The truth is that German soldiers had food that was way below what American soldiers had.
If you don’t know what the facts are, don’t pretend you do. Posting “facts” that you just made up is as annoying as your lack of capitalization and admiration for Hitler.
To be clear, I agree, in terms of grand strategy of what should be the main tank of the US army. Eventually, the Germans, Russians and Americans all agreed that the main armor should be a T-34/Panther/Sherman type of weapon, so nobody wanted to make a superheavy tank the main armor of the army. It was a nice supplement that the Red Army was able to make work. For the Germans, it failed partly as a design, partly they had too small production numbers.
The US manufacturing capacity was such, that pulling off the Russian approach of having both types was entirely possible, but could have easily led to the design problem the Germans had: you have two separate unreliable tanks.
Of course, the OP asks about intelligence and surprise, so tank production strategy is all high-jacking 
Can you imagine if the Germans actually had built this thing ? (1500 tons, with a 12" naval gun). It would have consumed its total load of fule to go 10 miles.
All the aricles I’ve read state that the German tanks produced from 1944-on were of poor quality-the alloys for high-strength steel were not obtainable, and the tanks engines failed prematurely, due to sloppy machining and rushed production.
In these discussions so many people focus on the Tiger, the Panther, and other extremely rare heavy armor. But even at the end of the war, most of the German armor was composed of medium tanks that were not so superior to the Sherman – Pz III, IV, StuGs, and the like. Germany did mange to produce a significant number of Panthers, but most of those were sent to the eastern front where they were pretty equally matched against the T-34.
So in the strategic calculus everyone mentions, during the Allied invasion of western Europe it was not 45000 Shermans vs 15000 vastly superior German tanks. Really, it was more like 45000 Shermans vs 13000 German medium tanks, 2000 Panthers, a few hundred Tigers, and a mere handful of super-heavies.
Those numbers are approximate but based on these German production figures. Anyone interested could figure out the actual equipment present. I recall that Germany had just a handful of Panther-equipped divisions towards the end of the war, and most armored divisions were composed of other medium tanks and very few Tigers.
Actually on further reading I was significantly overestimating the number of “superior” German tanks on the Western front. Wiki cites German records that there were no more than 471 Panthers on the Western front at any time, of which 336 were operational. (I haven’t yet found comparable figures for the Tiger).
Well, contrary to this, I saw a program that showed a 65-year-old rusted-out gearbox from a Panther Tank engine and the techs studying it pointed out how carefully it was machined to very high tolerances, whereas the equivalent Allied gearbox would have been assembled from stamped parts, much more quickly and cheaply, at the risk of some wear and tear on the gears later. They blamed overemphasis on technical perfection for the low production rate of German tanks.
I was with you up to the point you gave a specific percentage in GQ (96%) without citation. I’m sure you meant “the vast majority” or some equivalent qualifier.
Whoa there!
History Channel Greatest Ever Tanks ranks the Panther 8th all-time – but the T-34 3rd all-time.
Military Channel’s Top Tens program on tanks rated the T-34 #1 all-time; the Tiger #3, and the Panther #6.
The Panther was partially copied from (the Germans would say “inspired by”) the T-34. Some historians have called the T-34 the single piece of equipment most responsible for defeating Hitler and Naziism.
In addition to having decently thick and (in a groundbreaking advance, sloped) armor, the T-34 had great speed, superior ground-pressure enabling it to perform better in snow and muddy conditions, was ruggedly built, reliable, low in profile, simple to manufacture, simple to operate, performed well at low temperatures, and was an adaptable design. Once upgunned with the 85mm, the T-34-85 was fairly hard-hitting against armor too. And it lacked the extended mechanical teething troubles that caused Hitler to describe the Panther as “That crawling Heinkel…” (a reference to a disappointing experimental aircraft).
Even had it not been produced in vast numbers it would have been considered one of the best compromises between the desirable attributes tank designers struggle to balance.
I’ll accept as a difference of opinion a statement that the Panther is better by some margin than the T-34 [usually given with the caveat that conditions are set up to favor the Panther: late war when its mechanical issues were fixed, but not TOO late when it couldn’t get repaired/resupplied; fight starting at long range over flat ground to allow its superior German optics to come into play; weather not too cold for Panthers; and so on] but dismissing all Allied tanks as not even contenders…no way.
Leaving aside the argument over who ate better, this is the sort of thing you would expect to capture from an enemy who had occupied that country for four years. The Germans had a long time to put some creature comforts in place, loot the local population for anything good, and accumulate souvenirs and valuables.
The Americans and Commonwealth forces CARRIED THAT SHIT WITH THEM. It is difficult to overstate the logistical power of the Allied (and, in the second half of the war, Soviet) forces; they crushed the Axis under a weight of stuff. The forces allayed against the Germans were the first truly modern armies that ever put to the field, and very modern they were, with fully combined arms in its modern sense and the logistical might of First World industries behind them.
The Wehrmacht was comprised of many brilliant officers and dedicated men, and had a lot of solid weapons, but its was never a truly modern army at the level of national, strategic organization. Nazi Germany didn’t even really have a civilian government or cabinet. What they managed to pull off logistically was often the work of the sheer will of a single an given plenipotentiary powers by Hitler, which sometimes worked to solve a particular problem, but never pulled the country’s resources together the way the Americans, British, Canadians, Soviets, Australians et al. were doing, which is ironic given that they were the fascists.
Considet that at the height of their conquest the Germans controlled enough population and resources to match the Soviets and still give the Allies a run for their money. When they held almost all of continental Europe they had lots and lots of people and stuff. Of course Nazi ideology got in the way - people aren’t of much use when you’re killing a lot of them and endlessly pissing off the ones you don’t kill - but that’s part and parcel of the fundamental failure of Hitler and the Nazi leadership to understand how to conduct a global war.
The very nature of the Nazi regime was to start a war that their own nature would force them to lose.
That’s insightful, and, now that I think about it, indeed sounds likely to be the cause.
I submit the words of one of the great analysts of Nazi ideology:
[QUOTE=Jon Lovitz in Rat Race]
Eh, they’re always pissed, Honey. They’re Nazis. It’s like it’s their job.
[/QUOTE]
I wish to be carefull here.
I only mentioned the ratio in respect to US Navy/Marine F4F v. IJN Zero air to air kills. (Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal campaign.)
I don’t know the ratio over New Guinea. (The US Army may have been flying the P-39 Airacobra, which had poor high altitude performance, during the period in question.)
I can only repeat what I recall, based on what was hashed out on special interest websites. Specifically, if you have some time, there were debates on the Matrix Games Forums, “War in the Pacific” [game title] section, sometime from 2004 to 2006. Some poster there had taken the time to go through all the statistics, and posted his results. You can try to search for threads there.
I realise that this method was in no way approaching the level of “historian peer reviewed” level, but at the time it seemed to be a reasonable effort for casual conversation. I also realise the dangers of isolating combat statistics and drawing conclusions based on them, due to the reality that a lot of times, these statistics don’t tell the whole story.
All I’m saying is that in '42, the Americans managed to do reasonably well with equipment that was outmatched in various catagories.
In terms of the OP, I’m not yet convinced that the US was “surprised” by the Tiger. I think the US was “surprised” by the performace of the Japanese [newer model] aircraft, specifically the range and manueverablility. But I admit that is more “opinion”, and less citable fact. I am willing to be educated on this topic. (I have a life long interest in WW2 stuff! I could gab all day long.)
I don’t think it could have crossed a bridge. It would make a neato emplaced gun, but as a tank, meh.
I have to respect posts on heavy tanks from a source named Ogre.
Regarding the German rations: I have read several accounts of GIs who remembered consuming captured German rations. Most said that they were pretty good.
Which meant that the German Army had first dibs on German (declining) meat production-I believe that the German civilians were making do with beans and potatoes.
I’ld like to appologise using the “some guy on the internet says” in regards to the F4F v. zero kill ratio. It’s just not up to GQ standards.
But I hope that does not take any credibility away from the assertion that the Americans seemed to make do with somewhat outclassed equipment, and still did well (in '42 for the Pacific, and in the Sherman v. Tiger debate).
Heh.
So what do you guys think of the German Entwicklung tanks? I know they were a too-little-too-late attempt to standardize tank production and make it cheaper and more efficient. But what if they had started to produce these a year or two earlier? Would it have made any difference? They were only supposed to offer a few modest upgrades to the tanks they would replace (E-50 for Tiger and Panther, E-75 for King Tiger and Jagdtiger, plus other weight classes to replace scout tanks, light tank destroyers, etc.), but they were supposed to be quite a bit more reliable and mechanically sound.
Oh, and I’m sure everyone has seen it, but James Bates’s famous footage of the Cologne tank duel is on Youtube. In it, a Panther takes out a Sherman with one shot, and then itself is destroyed by one of the few M26 Pershings that made it to the war. Fascinating footage, but somewhat disturbing, as you see several people mangled and dying on camera, so I won’t link to it.
Its other drawback was that its controls became heavy at speeds over 200mph and almost immovable by 300mph, so even though it was capable of flying at higher speeds it was trading away its most killing advantage if it did so. Once this filtered through to Allied tacticians, it was easy to work out how to best engage Zeros: boom ‘n’ zoom, and keep the speed up no matter what.
If I may ask a slightly hijacking question: how did American and Soviet tank design priorities change (or not) after the war? My ignorant assumption is that Soviets kept to their larger quantity of less quality tanks, while Americans went with a higher quality and smaller quantity. How did tanks fit into the plans for a non-nuclear war in Europe?
Kind of hard to judge. The Soviets made tougher and bigger gunned tanks, but not tanks that were technically advanced in other ways. By comparison, the US played the same game with a few more technical advances but nothing to make up for the sheer volume of tanks the Soviets had. I really wouldn’t have too much faith in Patton tanks, M60 tanks and the other models vs. their contemporary Soviet counterparts. We did have somewhat better tank & battle doctrine but it was prone to decay. The M1 was game-changer.
The M46/48/60 Patton series was just an evolution from the late-war M26 Pershing. The conventional forces the US fielded in that era were never really designed to stop the Soviet swarm, so to speak. That was the age of trip-wire defense, so we had cheaper, easier to produce tanks that could fight in proxy wars against export quality Soviet material or survive long enough in West Germany for the nukes to be rolled out. In the 70s and 80s the doctrine began to shift to flexible response. The army began seriously considering fighting the Soviets in a conventional battle. It was realized we could never catch up to the USSR’s vast advantage in quantity of material, so the empathize shifted to quality. The M1 was the result of that in the United States.
Wasn’t the production of Pz 2s and Pz 3s later in the war, for use as the mountings for SP guns such as Stg.setc, mobile field artillery, and flak carriers rather then as tanks?
I say this because even a Pz 3 as a tank would have been pretty much useless in combat at that time, also I don’t think I’ve actually read any accounts of actions in the later war using these products as actual tanks.
I’ll just throw my two pennorth into the general argument, Tigers were a retrospective step in tank design (non sloping armour etc.) as a panic measure against Russian KVs, King Tigers were really speaking a joke made to appeal to Hitlers love of big toys, they were too slow and too heavy.
Once its mechanical problems had been sorted out the Panther IMO was the best tank of the war, tank for tank, but the best workhorses were definitely the T34s, and the up gunned Pz 4 was still a very effective tank (particulary against the western allies) right up to the end of the war.
I think that when we describe the W.A.s tank production policy as being tactially motivated we’re turning a necessity into a virtue.