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[Il Palazzo]

Ze german tanks are under attack in the following discussion lifted from the sad thread.
Brandish your nerd cred and defend the gorillion-folded pzkpwf VI, V and IV (also known as the Tiger, the Panther, and the No-name workhorse) against the onslaught of innumerable hordes of... mostly just Lord Shonus (for now!).

I've no great interest in the subject, nor an expertise, but would love to see more said about it. So knock yourself out.

Spoiler: discussion starter (click to show/hide)

German tanks were generally garbage

Wait, what? Over-engineered, yes, but garbage? Not that patriotism is appropriate when talking about the Nazi killing machine, but the German tanks from WWII are usually held to be fine examples of German engineering...

That's a popular misconception based on early historians taking SS bragging and official propaganda at face value, a few pop-history books written by people who served behind the lines and got most things wrong, and interviews with veterans that not only had 50-70 years between them and the fighting when interviewed but suffered significantly from the "any gun pointed at you seems a thousand times bigger than it really is". Once you break it down, the closest thing the Germans had to a good tank was the Panzer IV, which was at least able to fight if the crew had decent tactical skill. The I and II were basically glorified armored cars that the Poles and French destroyed with ease (832 out of ~2700 German tanks were knocked out during the invasion of Poland, or 20%! This, mind you, is against an enemy that is outnumbered 3:1, was attacked from two sides at once, and suffered complete strategic and tactical surprise; with ~800 out of ~2500 being lost in the invasion of France), the Panzer III had no room for upgradeability and was thus rendered completely and utterly obsolete soon after production, and the Panzer IV was, at best, a third tier tank (behind the M4 Sherman and the T-34, it is arguable on which of those was the best tank of the war) due to armor that was not only relatively thin but completely unangled, poor strategic performance, and unacceptably large profile.

Those were the "good" German tanks. The Tiger I was probably the worst fighting vehicle ever made - being far heavier than the engine could support, requiring three to four times more logistical support than the Panzer IV, and armor that, while decently thick, was still slab-sided, meaning that even the base model T-34 and Sherman had nearly as much effective armor, all in an extremely easy to spot, easy to hit package. The only good feature of the tank was the monstrous gun, which was usually still a downside - the vast majority of targets could be penetrated just as easily by the 75mm guns in service that were much smaller (which would have required a smaller turret to mount, which would not only have been lighter but made the tank smaller and thus the whole thing lighter) except for extreme-range shots that only occurred with any commonality during one period of the war. For the most part, that massive gun was nothing but a liability, restricting the vehicles movement due to the awkward gun handling, and rendering it more difficult to engage at the close ranges most fighting took place at. The Soviet response to the vehicle (after the laughing stopped) was to cancel all plans for equipping the T-34 upgrade project with the 57mm anti-tank gun instead of the 85mm anti-infantry gun or the IS with a 100mm antitank gun instead of the 122mm anti-infantry gun, as the Tiger was no real threat. Meanwhile, while popular myth states that you needed 5 Shermans to take out a Tiger, the reality was that Tiger vs. Sherman battles (mostly Soviets using Lend-Lease vehicles) ended up with Tigers taking 4 or 5 as many losses. It's true that commanders usually USED 5 Shermans to engage a Tiger because that was the standard platoon size (and thus the fewest tanks that would ever make up a tactical unit) but it wasn't a "quantity vs. quality" reason. They simply always had that many.

The Panther was no better - while the front armor was extremely difficult to penetrate with the ammunition available (high performance ammunition had been relegated to the back burner after US tanks were massacring Tigers and Panthers in the Italian campaign) in France, the side armor was so thin in places that obsolete anti-tank rifles left over from the last war could take them out, and the gunner had a very hard time finding targets because he had no periscope, making the issues of having far too big a gun that the Panther shared with the Tiger even worse, and the engine was even more inadequate compared to the weight of the vehicle (in this case, it was Hitler's personal fault - the Panther started out as a direct copy of the T-34 and evolved into what would have been a superb tank (which exists in World of Tanks as the VK 30.02D), but Hitler ordered more frontal armor (which necessitated thinning out the side armor) and a bigger gun (which needed a bigger turret and added a shitton of weight) to be added) so it was even less reliable even in the ideal versions produced by France after the war (which the French hated and discarded within 5 years).

The Tiger II was the culmination of this trend. Even MORE overgunned, and even MORE overweight (although since the armor was not only thick but sloped and well distributed, it was actually useful), the only thing that makes this not the Worst Tank In History is that it really was very hard to kill with available weapons, allowing it to do serious damage from the position it broke down in until heavier weapons were brought up or you were able to outflank it.

The genuinely good vehicles that Germany built during the war were the casemated tank destroyers and assault guns - the Jagdpanzer, the Hetzer, the StuG. These were small enough to actually conceal, and carried a gun small enough that it didn't get in the way, all in a package that was decently mobile and had just enough armor to take a badly aimed shot. Not to mention that you could build and support 8 Hetzers for the resources of a single Tiger.


There is one period in the war where the enormous range of the German Tiger and Panther was actually of benefit - the reconquest of France in 1944. In this campaign, the Allies absoultely had to take immobile fixed targets (bridges vital to retaking Paris) and HAD to cross wide-open flat fields to do so, allowing the Germans to use their monstrous guns at extreme range. Of course, the Jagdpanzers or even towed AT guns could have done the same thing much cheaper.

To sum it up (numbers pulled from nowhere, but this is the actual trend:

If you're shooting at 80mm effective armor, it doesn't matter if you have 90mm penetration at a given range or 150mm - you penetrate either way.
If what's being shot at you has 70mm penetration, it doesn't matter if you have 50mm or 70mm effective armor - it won't save you. COnversely, if what's being shot at you has 45mm penetration, it won't penetrate either way.
If you're too heavy to move without breaking down because you're carrying way more armor and gun than you need, you're committing a very expensive form of suicide by going into combat.


There was never ONE period in the war where the Germans had better tanks than the Americans, British, or Soviets. The best they ever managed was a technical parity coupled with better tactical performance.

Sauces, mate? As much as I've never really treated Discovery Channel-type docudramas as good source of information, I'm looking at the battle of Prokhorovka losses and I just don't see the supposed inferiority in armour.
Unless you're telling me all the kills were made by Stukas and jagdpanzers.

1 in 3 of the Soviet tanks at Prokhorovka were T-70 light tanks meant for scouting, not intended to stand up to heavy combat. This is going to boost losses tremendously, just like using Battlecruisers in the main battle line is going to cost you ships. Further, the Soviet forces attacked very stupidly - charging in at full speed while firing, and getting so dispersed that effective command and control was impossible. In other words, you had 800 individual tanks, all fighting alone at the same time. Meanwhile, the German forces fought a coordinated battle that took full advantage of the Soviet's lack of cohesion (three Panzer IVs were able to joint the Soviet formation unnoticed!) If you have a thousand men with AK-47s charge blindly forward at a hundred guys with Moisin-Nagants while firing at the hip, the AK-47 guys will be shot in carload lots - that doesn't mean that the Moisin is a better service rifle.

You lost me the moment you claimed the Panther and the Tiger had the same guns.

No, they have the same problem - too big a gun for their tank.

Looking at the wikipedia article, it's 222 T34s to 80 T70s in losses vs 43 total tank/assault gun losses on the German side. Even taking into account the issue of battlefield control allowing Germans to repair most damaged tanks (as discussed in the article), that still leaves a rather stark disparity.


Anyway, as I said - sources. I'm not inclined to replace a dodgy one (Discovery, History Channel, history books written by Germans) with none at all, which is all you've offered so far.

http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/search/label/Tiger

Dozens of Soviet archive documents cross-referenced with German records to eliminate bias.

Official US Army analysis of tank losses, by cause and number of hits.
http://lmharchive.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/18-Chapter-Ten1.pdf

Also, in and about that discussion, ChairmanPoo linked to this hour-long talk about the reasons for the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Soviets. It is very interesting, although I didn't see how it was relevant to the topic at hand (there's just a brief mention of technology in the Q&A).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zinPbUZUHDE

[Il Palazzo]

@Lord Shonus, your link to the .pdf article clearly suggests superiority of German armour.
Look at the tables of penetration to failure ratios and 'hits to knock out a tank'. These are not terribly flattering for the Sherman tanks.

[Lord Shonus]

@Lord Shonus, your link to the .pdf article clearly suggests superiority of German armour.
Look at the tables of penetration to failure ratios and 'hits to knock out a tank'. These are not terribly flattering for the Sherman tanks.

If you read the entire thing, it's explained that the analysis is based on vehicles recovered from the battlefield after the Germans left, and that it only consists of equipment damaged beyond the possibility of salvage.

More importantly, apart from the wholly inadequate 75mm on the Sherman, every tank gun in service penetrated German armor with great reliability - even the 6-pounder that the British started the war with had a 69% success rate. On page 13 of the PDF there is a table of hit locations on Panthers compared to penetration which is extremely important for this discussion - 33 out of 42 of the hits examined were in the sides of the hull or turret. Meanwhile, despite doing all of the attacking and thus being much less able to control where the enemy are going to be firing from, the Shermans took a roughly equal percentage between hull and sides. This clearly means that most of the vehicles destroyed were outflanked (requiring, at the time, the Allied tanks to run through a perfect killing ground) without being able to retreat successfully - proof positive that the lack of mobility was a fatal Achilles Heel.

Further, note that all German vehicles burned at roughly the same rate as the M4 (which should be a stake in the heart of the "Tommycooker" myth forever) , and that it was standard practice at the time (page 5) to return vehicles that had caught on fire but were repairable to service - resulting in the armor on said vehicles to be far softer and less resistant to penetration than normal.

Finally, note that there were 45 M4 Shermans in the destroyed survey, lost between 6/6/44 and 10/7/44 (a one month period) which represents the total losses, while the survey of German armor over the two month period shows 110 German tanks knocked out. Even dividing that in half to represent it being twice as long a period, you get 55 per month, the majority to tank fire. Assuming that those 110 were the entirety of the German casualties and all other vehicles got off without a scratch, the "Wunderwaffen" managed, under tactical conditions that make a firing range look difficult, managed to kill a full 90% of their own losses (the rule of thumb is 2 defenders should be able to kill 3 attackers of equal capability under normal conditions) while still giving up every single position. In actuality, of course, the Germans salvaged anything that they could, and those 110 tanks probably represented the 25%-50% that they weren't able to - meaning actual losses were more likely to be 220-440. Truly an impressive accomplishment.

[mainiac]

Armor comparisons and hits to knock out tanks are rubbish that dont matter.  The 1st and 3rd Armored Divisions in Europe were the American armored divisions that faced the most German tanks.  They faced them mostly with Sherman M4A1/3 with 75mm guns, aka your basic Sherman not changed a huge amount from the original design.  Not fireflies.  Not Easy-Eights.  Just normal Shermans.  Do you know how many Shermans the 1st and 3rd Armored Divisions lost to Tiger tanks?  ZERO.  Not one.  Nada.  Not too surprising of course because they only faced 3 Tiger tanks in all of Europe.  Cuz the Tiger was a piece of crap that broke down before the battlefield.  But the armor looked great sitting in a museum! Or how about the Panther?  They dealt about 3 casualties for each 2 casualties that Panthers did.

The myth of the WunderPanzer mostly traces back to these three facts:
Fact 1: Sacrificing T-34s saves lives Soviet lives.  Suppose you are a Soviet General.  You have 200 tanks at your disposal and are going to fight Germans with 200 tanks.  How many of your tanks will you use?  200.  Suppose the Germans have 1 tank.  How many are you going to use?  200.  The soviets use every tank they have because they'd be idiots not to.  And that means that German indirect and AT guns blow up a lot of tanks and a lot of tanks hit landmines even if no German tanks are present.  And the Soviets have a lot more tanks then the Germans.  This means that in all battles everywhere, Soviets are taking a lot more losses then Germans because they are losing more tanks to things like AT guns and landmines then Germans have present!

The Soviets had a horrible time of it because the Germans had more materials at the start and consistantly could throw twice as many artillery shells at the Soviets as the Soviets could throw back.  On top of that, German artillery could be used effectively for the first two years because they had air superiority which meant they knew what to shoot at.  That killed a lot of Soviets.  Artillery killed more soldiers then all other causes combined.  They had no desire getting even more soldiers killed by not using tanks when they had them.

Fact 2: German statistics under count losses by a lot, Soviet statistics over count them.  (Compared to Americans who do everything perfectly )  Although it's true that the Soviets took the worst losses of the war by far, the numbers you have probably seen are complete and utter shit.  For instance a soviet AAR will record a soldier as wounded in action even if he was wounded by non combat causes and rejoined his unit half an hour later after getting treated.  A German record wont count a tank as lost until it is completely written off.  A tank could catch on fire, have the whole crew die, be put on a train, taken back to Germany and it still is counted as part of it's division!  The Soviets however might "lose" a tank three or four times in the same month in a few extreme cases.  So while Soviet tank losses were worst for a variety of reasons, they are no where as bad as you have probably heard.

Fact 3: The Soviets had a lot of obsolete equipment at the start of the war.  These pre-war stocks were mostly destroyed but were counted as battle losses.  Compare:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-34
^^ Yeah, the Panzer III does look like a wunderwaffen compared to that.

Put these three facts together and you get battle where the Soviets lose 1000s of tanks and the Germans lose hundreds.  While attacking!  In the snow!  Uphill both ways!  It makes people think that German tanks were great.  They weren't.  They were mostly shit.  The Panzer IV eventually was a good tank and the StugIII was a fantastic AFV but the early Panzer III and Panzer IV were sub-par, the Panther was the worst tank of the war and the Tiger sucked compared to the IS tanks.

Further, note that all German vehicles burned at roughly the same rate as the M4 (which should be a stake in the heart of the "Tommycooker" myth forever) , and that it was standard practice at the time (page 5) to return vehicles that had caught on fire but were repairable to service - resulting in the armor on said vehicles to be far softer and less resistant to penetration than normal.

Also: The Sherman had the fastest evacuation time of all WWII tanks.  The Sherman had 5 hatches for 5 crewmembers.  Hence why Americans actually had a much higher crew survival rank then the Germans or Soviets where you need to wait for the guy in front of you to move before you can get out the hatch.
Also Also: Almost all lost tanks burned for all sides because once a tank is immobalized you keep shooting at it!  It's an easy target!  You shoot it until the ammo catches on fire and the tank burns so your enemies can't recover it.

[Lord Shonus]

The myth of the WunderPanzer mostly traces back to these three facts:

You missed one - the Germans lied. A lot. The famous examples are claims of 1 Tiger destroying 15+ Shermans on a day when none of Allied Powers (all of which used the Sherman) had a single one within a hundred miles of where the fictitious battle supposedly took place. It was part of the constant attempts of the "elite" SS units trying to establish dominance over the Whermacht, and it was fairly common for these stories to be broadcast as official propaganda (after all, the German in the streets isn't going to have a clue what actually happened, and it's important to keep up morale), but the German command never took most of these things seriously - it's why I tend to take any report that doesn't cross-reference both side's loss records or are explicitly based on wrecks with grain of salt the size of Mount Everest.


Edit: I'm quite aware that most tanks burned - I'm referencing a certain myth that just won't die (largely propagated by Belton Cooper's Death Traps and the History Channel show based on it) that the Sherman was so flammable that it was commonly referred to as a "Tommycooker" or a "Ronson" (in refrence to the Ronson company that made very expensive (and thus probably would not be an immediately familiar name to most dogfaces) table lighters and used "lights on the first strike" as an advertising slogan (after the war, so the odds of it being an inspiration for a nickname are ...slim). There was a variant of the Sherman nicknamed the Ronson (by the rich British guy who designed the variant) - it carried a flamethrower.

[mainiac]

The first AAR on the link actually has a great example of the different loss statistics that I was talking about.
http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/2015/08/ogledow-combat-diary.html

Regiment losses:
IS-122 tanks burned: 3
IS-122 tanks knocked out: 7. Of those 3 were repaired at the regiment and 4 sent to a repair base.

A soviet tank regiment is not a huge formation.  Anything that can be fixed with regimental resources isn't serious damage.  But 3 of them could be fixed by the regiment.  And the other 4 could be repaired at a local repair station.  According to German losses counting, this is somewhere between three and seven losses.  According to Soviet counting, it's ten.

Further note that according to Soviet losses if those tanks got repaired at a factory, that would be 4 more tanks in the factory production totals.  So take Soviet production numbers with a grain of salt as well.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Ptw

[SirQuiamus]

You missed one - the Germans lied. A lot. The famous examples are claims of 1 Tiger destroying 15+ Shermans on a day when none of Allied Powers (all of which used the Sherman) had a single one within a hundred miles of where the fictitious battle supposedly took place. It was part of the constant attempts of the "elite" SS units trying to establish dominance over the Whermacht, and it was fairly common for these stories to be broadcast as official propaganda (after all, the German in the streets isn't going to have a clue what actually happened, and it's important to keep up morale), but the German command never took most of these things seriously - it's why I tend to take any report that doesn't cross-reference both side's loss records or are explicitly based on wrecks with grain of salt the size of Mount Everest.

But vat about mein SS-Hauptsturmführer Michael Wittmann? If you vant to dizrespekt ze glory of mein Vaterland, you are goink to neet solit evidenz!

...

Seriously though, it would be very interesting to read some well-substantiated debunking of Nazi war myths because most internet sources are just repeating all the crap we've learned from Discovery Channel.

[Worldmaster27]

Ptw

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Not sure it got brought up yet but what about the reports of German tanks (A tiger variant I believe) that were able to take tremendous amounts of damage and still operate. The account I am referencing is one where the tank took several hits to it's armor and the tracks on one side being nearly destroyed but the crew was fine and the tank was able to be repaired and put back onto the battle field soon after (I think that's what it was at least, been awhile since I've been into WW2 tanks :p )

[Strife26]

That wouldn't be a Tiger, I'd guess. They were super finicky things at best and never rolled out in real numbers.

Maybe one of the assault guns (the Stum3 was the *best* vehicle of the war)  but that's somewhat iffy too.


Any tank can still fight on if it's in a good place when it gets mobility killed, but the Soviet KV2 was especially claimed to be over armored, from my recollection

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

It was a German tank, heavily armored, and it's gun was (reportedly) able to take out Sherman's in one or two shots

[mainiac]

Not sure it got brought up yet but what about the reports of German tanks (A tiger variant I believe) that were able to take tremendous amounts of damage and still operate. The account I am referencing is one where the tank took several hits to it's armor and the tracks on one side being nearly destroyed but the crew was fine and the tank was able to be repaired and put back onto the battle field soon after (I think that's what it was at least, been awhile since I've been into WW2 tanks :p )

Yeah, that's what you get when you combine comfirmation bias with random events.  Here's a guy who got shot 7 times. http://www.standard.net/stories/2013/01/13/kaysville-man-who-survived-7-bullets-credits-god-police-and-2-armed-citizens
Does that mean humans can survive bullets?
http://albumwar2.com/panther-destroyed-by-russian-light-tank-t-70/
Here's two panthers that got ambushed by a single T-70 light tank.  The Russians controlled the field afterwards so it's actually a credible account, unlike Witman.

Armor is great to have a lot but once you have a fairly basic amount it's just improving your chances, not making you invulnerable.  Panther tanks were still somewhat vulnerable to man carried anti-tank rifles!  This is why soon after their first campaign in North Africa, American and British troops started phasing out their 76mm AT guns and putting more emphasis on their 75mm guns for their HE ability.  At the end of the day it's a lot easier to make a gun to penetrate armor then make armor to resist a gun.

It was a German tank, heavily armored, and it's gun was (reportedly) able to take out Sherman's in one or two shots

Any tank could take out any tank in one or two shots.

Maybe one of the assault guns (the Stum3 was the *best* vehicle of the war)  but that's somewhat iffy too.

StugIII was good for what it was but it lacked visibility and was vulnerable from the sides.  Sherman was the best tank of the war.  Good gun, decent armor, best crew survivability, best mobility and most crucial by far, fastest target acquisition.  That last matters more then the other factors put together.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Adding to that last part (as I am fairly uneducated in this conversation).

The tank was said to be able to dispatch a Sherman with one or two shots but be able to take several shots from a Sherman and still keep on moving like nothing happened. At this point I'm guessing this was more propaganda than truth

[mainiac]

Like a deflecting blow off the front plate?  Sure, having an an absurdly over armored front plate was good for that.  But it's mostly post-war embellishment.  Most hits to tanks were on the side (more side then front) and there weren't exactly a huge number of cases of Tigers and Shermans duking it out.