In that case the criticism does not apply to this thread, because the big picture has never been lost sight of. Furthermore no big picture can be fully acquired without knowledge of weapon quantity and quality.
French and British tanks were generally worse if lack of speed carries the decisive disadvantage for all models that the Wiki cite says it carried for the Char B1. It appears that only the 243 Souma fielded could keep up with any of the over 2000 German ACV fielded, and only five of seven French armored divisions even had any Souma. As for the Russians I do not believe they had a quality advantage below the level of the T-34. Once the T-34 appeared it probably inflicted enough losses on the Germans to contribute to significantly delaying their schedule. The same applies to the Sherman v Panther (and v Tiger) match-up.
OK, the Char B1 was heavy for its day. I am used to numbers from later in the war when 30+ tons was medium. French intentions regarding weapon design missed the boat in a way which decisively affected the big picture.
When Rommel first encountered Char B1 near Flavion he held them off with artillery and bypassed them. I am confident that that was not Rommel’s only bypass operation, and I am confident he is not the only one who employed the tactic.
German strategy meant to draw the French and British so deeply into Belgium that they could not take action against penetration of the center of their front at Sedan, and the strategy succeeded. However, French tank quality not only contributed to the local success at Hannut, it also allowed the French units to later cover and enable the Dunkirk operation. If as you say the French enjoyed a significant advatage in comparative ACV quality, then this is a good example of weapon quality playing a big role in the big picture.
The point is the minutiae of tank characteristics on paper isn’t as important as how they are used, how many of them there are, etc. Again, the British and French had more and better tanks than the Germans in 1940 yet folded quite quickly.
In looking only at speed you’re ignoring the two other major characteristics of armored vehicles, both of which French and British designs were superior to German models in: firepower and armored protection. Again, the Char B1 was designed as a breakthrough tank; it was the King Tiger of its day. Attributing all of its disadvantages in lack of speed, limited operational range, and mechanical unreliability to all French armor is as silly as attributing all of these characteristics to German tanks in 1945 because of the King Tiger. Regarding the Soviet Union, the T-34 (and KV-1) was around in quantity on the day Barbarossa started and came as quite a nasty shock to the Germans who had no idea the USSR had tanks anywhere near that heavy; By 22 June 1941, the Red Army deployed almost 1,000 T-34 and over 500 KV tanks,[1] concentrated in five[2] of their twenty-nine mechanized corps. Below the level of the T-34, the BT-7, T-26, and T-28 were all (on paper) at least the equal to the Pz-III, Pz-IV, Pz-35(t), and Pz-38(t) models they faced and superior to the Pz-I and Pz-II which still made up a significant fraction of the German tank force.
Just to note, this is exactly what I mean about this being academic. Having Sherman vs. Panther (and vs. Tiger) matchups has little to do with how the war was actually fought. Not only was it not a neat series of 1 on 1 tank vs. tank proving ground match-ups, most tank losses weren’t to other tanks, they were lost to anti-tank guns. This bit on the intial German encounters with the T-34 and KV-1 sums it up pretty well:
He wasn’t. As I said earlier, the Germans were only able to stop the British counterattack at Arras by employing 105mm howitzers and 88mm AA guns in direct fire because their 37mm anti-tank guns proved useless against the British tanks.
It took the Allies some time to figure out how best to take on the hedgerow strongpoints that the Germans had all over Normandy. With modern tactics, they could have avoided bogging down after the landings and dramatically reduced the length of the war. Heck, Berlin might have been in the American-controlled Zone afterwards.
In hindsight from what I understand, strategic bombing was a waste of lives and resources given the inaccuracy of WWII-era carpet/precision bombing. You’d miss most of the industrial/military sites and just hit residential areas or empty fields.
I’d devoted all those resources into building more close support aircraft, which is more like what the Russians did v. the British/Americans/Germans.
You see the US Air Force making the same mistake today, retiring the practical but unsexy A-10 to devote more resources to the ‘sexier’ planes (F-35, F-22, B-2, etc).
A characteristic which gives a weapon or weapon system a decisive advantage over another is not minutiae. If the defenders at Thermopylae had been as lightly armed as their enemy they could not have withstood frontal assault by the ten or more times greater numbers. The much heavier hoplite panoply made them impregnable on a short front with flanks secured. That same panoply was put to decisive use at Marathon and Platea, where the odds were perhaps only 2:1 (including Greek turncoats at Platea).
Similarly the yew bow of the English longbowmen of the late Middle Ages swept all before them from mounted knights to enemy crossbowmen.
Similarly the 20-foot spears of the Swiss Pikemen helped them enjoy about 200 years of virtually uninterrupted success.
In 1940 the situation was a reversal of that of ancient Greece: speed rather than armor was the decisive characteristic. Those big fat Allied slowpokes had no German ACV to shoot at once the Germans ran around them, carving up units in the rear as they went.
What I learned from this thread, and what you were right to mention first, was the also-decisive use by German Pz units of artillery as an anti-tank weapon. The Char B1 bypassed by Rommel at Flavion were eventually wiped out by the artillery of the German division behind Rommel’s. Apparently German Pz division artillery was motor-drawn and otherwise fast, mobile, and easily camouflaged.
Believe me, I am not overlooking any characteristic. On the contrary I created spreadsheet tables to account for every single characteristic listed by Wiki for 15 French and German ACV , and I would have posted them here if I knew how to post tables on this vBulletin crud. Those tables are what brought to my attention the fact that all Allied ACV except the Souma had so much slower road speed than the German ACV that the Germans ought to be able get around them anytime they wanted, easily.
This analogy fails because it is speed only that puts the 1940 Allied ACV at a critical disadvantage, and because the Char B1 was typically slow rather than exceptionally slow. It was in fact as fast as the H35 (17mph), and faster than the Re35 (12mph).
According to the Wiki link you provide below:
“At the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the Germans were expecting little from their opponent’s tank forces, which were composed of the old T-26 and BTs. While most of the Soviet Union’s armoured forces were composed of such tanks…”
If the German professional military planners were unconcerned about any Soviet model before 6/22/41, and remained unconcerned until discovering the T34 and the KV , then there is no ground for concluding that the other Soviet models were overall any better than the German.
There were enough tank v tank encounters in the East to make the Germans decide to build models capable of surviving such encounters against their betters. Otherwise they could have just built more motor-towed 88s (horse-towed for non-Pz units) to take care of the Soviet heavies, and not even bothered to let the Tiger and Panther get to the prototype stage. A similar if more belated trend was seen in the West with the American development of the 90mm-gunned Pershing tank and M36 tank destroyer. Otherwise just flood the battlefield with 90s and let the Germans waste industrial capacity on the main battle tank hogs.
My point was that Rommel and others had virtually unlimited flanking opportunities due to German ACV relative speed. The same with concentration, although that would not be an appropriate tactic against the Allied heavy Char B1 and Matilda, which had to be dealt with by artillery.
Then what you have learned from this thread are entirely the wrong lessons. Speed without armor is a useless battlefield characteristic. Armored protection combined with speed is what provides battlefield mobility, remove too much of the armored protection and it doesn’t matter how fast a vehicle is, it has no battlefield mobility as it gets chewed to pieces at long ranges by the lightest of anti-tank weapons. The belief that you could substitute speed for armor to produce protection is what produced the battlecruiser, with equally disastrous results at Jutland.
Talking about big, fat Allied slowpokes having no German ACVs to shoot at is yet again missing the point and why this is largely an academic exercise: the main killer of tanks was not other tanks, it was anti-tank guns. Poland knocked out 1/5 of the tanks Germany used against them in 1939 and had very few tanks of their own. Take for example the 4th Panzer Division, bolding mine:
Finally, that the lesson you draw from having to resort to using artillery in direct fire in order to stop tanks is that “apparently German Pz division artillery was motor-drawn and otherwise fast, mobile, and easily camouflaged” is entirely absurd. Not only was it not easy to camouflage, being used as an anti-tank weapon of desperation was far from the best use of indirect fire artillery which was being forced to do the anti-tank guns job because the anti-tank gun couldn’t. This cost the artillery casualties and kept them from doing their actual job of providing indirect fire support. The Germans were forced to do this yet again in the USSR when confronted with the T-34 and KV series, which their anti-tank guns were all but useless against. Finally, I’d like to note two things: 1) it is far, far, far easier to conceal an anti-tank gun which is designed to be low to the ground and easily concealed than it is to conceal a 105mm howitzer or an 88mm AA gun, which are designed for high angle fire, and 2) it’s nice and all for the panzer divisions that they had trucks to tow their artillery and AA guns around when you talk about being fast and mobile, but you’re forgetting about the remaining 85% of the German army that didn’t have this luxury, and still had to deal with enemy tanks that their anti-tank guns couldn’t penetrate even at point-blank ranges. They had to move their artillery around in its ersatz anti-tank gun capacity with horses.
Again, that you’re so concerned with this minutiae misses the bigger picture.
You can’t be serious. That professional German military planners had grossly underestimated the strength of the Soviet Union prior to the invasion isn’t exactly a revelation. They also weren’t expecting the Soviets to have ~20,000 tanks, or to quote Halder from his diary in August(!) “'At the outset of the war, we reckoned with about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360.” Are we to conclude from German estimates prior to 6/22/41 that the USSR could field no more than 200 divisions that there is no ground for concluding that the Soviets had already deployed over 360 against Germany by August?
This analogy fails. 1940 German ACV were not only more lightly armored than their opposite numbers, they were outgunned, except for the Pz IV (11% of the total). Yet the result was no Jutland for the lightweights, but a resounding triumph of historic proportion.
TY for the interesting information about the 1939 Polish campaign, but it does nothing to undercut my argument about speed. The premise “Most combat ACV loss was due to anti-tank weapons” (which I have not contested) does not lead to any conclusion about the importance of ACV speed. Nor does it do anything to address the logic of this earlier statement of mine:
The term is “inference”, which I made reasonably, and I did not intend to set off a lengthy, irrelevant discussion about Pz division artillery camo. And I notice you do not address speed and mobility. Just as well, because because all those Pz divisions needed their artillery to be available at the front pronto, as Rommel did at Flavion and Arras.
You are speaking only of the 88 above- the much smaller 37 probably was probably easy to camo. I agree the 88 would be more difficult to conceal. Otherwise as for the 88 its “actual job” from its first use in combat (in Spain) was to provide an anti-air, anti-tank and anti-personnel triple threat. And even if the 1940 Germans intended to use it only in indirect fire its anti-tank role promoted German success without any significant reduction in Pz unit efficiency or in the outcome of the campaign: enough of those 88 guns and crews of Rommel’s survived Flavion to take the measure of the British at Arras six days later.
I don’t have any issue with this section.
The Germans were wrong about the estimates you mention above, but that does not mean they must have been wrong about anything else, including quality appraisal of Soviet equipment whose existence was known of before 6/22/41.