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 LordofHats wrote:

Blaming Monty

But I love to blame Monty! But not for that. British tank design, in one of my favorite quotes, "bordered on treason." It was atrocious but I think it had more to do with the British not really know how to handle their tank design process. I have a book written by one of the leaders in British tank production during the war that he wrote in the 70's. I'll see if its not buried in one of the boxes in the back of the closet to refresh myself.

I agree with your characterisation of the design process. But Monty was, according to Beevor and others, a big factor in settling on the Sherman and Comet. In the wake of the African Campaign he said that the allies had caught up, with the Sherman, even though he knew of the existence of the TIger. Thereafter, in public, he dismissed complaints about British equipment and said it was the equal of the German, when it was patently not ture.

I think it's in Beevor's D-Day book that he comments that if Monty had asked Churchill, a tank enthusiast, for better tanks in the runup to D-Day, they would have had them - in particular more Fireflies.

Meanwhile, to show the British emphasis on total war, something the Germans never quite managed despite Goebbels giving speeches about it: they even killed their pets.

Tigers weren't really a huge problem on the western front. It was the Panther being a Medium tank instead of a Heavy that caused problems IIRC.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Tigers weren't really a huge problem on the western front. It was the Panther being a Medium tank instead of a Heavy that caused problems IIRC.

I'll also add that Tigers looks a lot like a big Pz IV. From a distance, Allied tank crews likely confused the two vehicles often.

This is an interesting blurb that serves as a good springboard for research:

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/us-economy-and-industry-during-world-war-ii.html

In a similar vein of Soviet tactics and forces, I raise the question, had Hitler not foolishly insisted on a last stand strategy, but given full operation command to his Eastern Front commanders, would the Eastern Front had still been lost?

With phyriic victories for the Soviets like the Battle of Kursk, I don't know.

If there was one nation on earth that could afford to win through phyrric victories, it's Soviet Russia.

feeder wrote:
If there was one nation on earth that could afford to win through phyrric victories, it's Soviet Russia.

Well, really? At Kursk they lost nearly a million men. 6,000 tanks, 1,600 aircraft... The Germans effectively inflicted 4 to 1 losses. That was sustainable at the time, but the further west they went, would it still have been? With longer supply lines, could they have sustainted that level of offensive with such losses? Had Hitler not insisted on throwing away millions of veterans soldiers on his idiotic strategy, the eastern front would have been a much more extreme battle, then the general route it turned out to be.

Well, really? At Kursk they lost nearly a million men. 6,000 tanks, 1,600 aircraft

If you look closely at the Wikipedia article it lists Russia as only having 5,000 tanks but losing 6,000. The Battle of Kursk article is one of WikiProject Military History's problem children. EDIT: The Info Box uses sources that calculated the losses of the battle in bizarre ways. No idea why after three years they still haven't fixed it.

The loss of material resources is about 5-1 in favor of the Germans and the loss of personnel was about 2-1 also in favor of the Germans. Aircraft ratios were 5-2. EDIT: However the key here is that both sides were properly decimated. Both sides left the battle with forces comparative to one another were the same size as when they started. Except Russia just rolled in more guys and Germany had no choice but to back off.

 djones520 wrote:
With longer supply lines, could they have sustainted that level of offensive with such losses?

The fact that the Russians did sustain such high losses and still won really does kind of answer that question. They out produced Germany by a massive margin and for all the complaining done about Hitler's interference in the Eastern Front the generals there didn't really know what to do either. Maybe they'd have done slightly better left to their own devices but once Kursk happened I doubt anything at all could have been done to turn the tide.

EDIT: And its not even just raw production numbers. The Russians had the benefit of almost always taking the field, which meant recovering their equipment. They could just pick up their destroyed tanks and guns, as well as the German's and just send them to be repaired. They even used captured German Tigers after Kursk repainted with Russian stars on their sides.

The Soviets not only built railways as they went (rending the issue of supply length less important. I mean, if the US could maintain a war effort across half the planet, the Soviets could do it across half a continent. Really with enough transportation the length of a supply line is only relevant to its vulnerability to be attacked but by 1943 the Luftwaffe was already in shambles. The Russians even went further and built rail line factories so they could move production up with the troops.

Had Hitler not insisted on throwing away millions of veterans soldiers on his idiotic strategy, the eastern front would have been a much more extreme battle, then the general route it turned out to be.

It was pretty extreme the way it was. Frankly I don't think Hitler's interference mattered. No matter how you cut the Eastern Front Germany just didn't have the resources to maintain a prolonged war effort against Russia. Look at the scale of what they were trying to conquer (2:15):




And that's just the western 3rd of Russia and they didn't even make it half the way there. Beating Russia just wasn't going to happen when most of your army is being pulled around by horses and you your population and material resources are smaller than your opponents.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Tigers weren't really a huge problem on the western front. It was the Panther being a Medium tank instead of a Heavy that caused problems IIRC.

I'll also add that Tigers looks a lot like a big Pz IV. From a distance, Allied tank crews likely confused the two vehicles often.

Indeed. Most reports of Tiger tanks were misidentifications of Panzer IVs. US and British tankers could be quite paranoid. Of course the irony is that the Panther was a greater threat than a Tiger. It had better armor and was faster, avoiding flanking maneuvers more easily.

A Tiger didn't suffer as much if it was flanked by a Sherman, but a Panther had much thinner armor on its side compared to the front.

Hitler's big mistake was in the way he treated theRussian people. Had he not looked at them as animals to be exploited, he would have been hailed as a liberator.

I don't know about that. The Russians hadn't been under Soviet rule long enough to fully realize it was worse than the Bolsheviks before(the Communist Revolution was a popular uprising)

I don't think the German's treatment of the Slavs and other eastern european people groups would have made a difference in the campaign.

 Grey Templar wrote:
I don't know about that. The Russians hadn't been under Soviet rule long enough to fully realize it was worse than the Bolsheviks before(the Communist Revolution was a popular uprising)

I don't think the German's treatment of the Slavs and other eastern european people groups would have made a difference in the campaign.

This. I don't think the Communist party were the most popular guys on the block, but they weren't reviled. Hitler might have been able to use some good PR to get some Russians on his side, but I think how much of an effect would have had is kind of unknowable. I doubt it would have changed the War's outcome. Hitler also had himself in an ideological corner. His plan ultimately was to kill all the people in Russia to create living room for his glorious Aryan super race.

Indeed.

Rule #1 of creating a master race. Unless your Master Race already outnumbers the others, or has actual super powers, don't piss all the others off at the same time.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
I skip commenting on the tank stuff (too much to read ) and reply to your Spitfire stuff.

I would disagree with your spitfire comments. The spitfire and its variants proved to be far superior to the Me109, so I wouldn't say the Brits were behind in the technological curve.

The Spitfire was dominant during its most famous conflict, the Battle of Britain, and so most people assume it was simply the superior plane. However both planes underwent significant upgrade paths during the war and for much of the war the Bf109 was the superior aircraft.

The reason spitfires weren't deployed in number in France, as France was deemed to be 'kost' and the spits were pulled back for the defence of the UK.

Actually, it's because there were too few Spitfires and trained pilots ready to risk losing them on the ground... because the plane had only been available for a very short time when open hostilities broke out. The idea that France would have been considered 'lost' during the planning of its defence its silly.

I hear a lot about the Luftwaffe, but I would put Britain ahead of them.

That's just really simplistic, to be honest. Both airforces had a wide number of elements, most of which changed signficantly over the war, so advantages in one place became disadvantages at another time, and so on. And within that, we can break down performance in to its various parts (the RAF looks a lot better when you look at Fighter Command, and a lot worse when you look at Bomber Command).

 Grey Templar wrote:
I don't know about that. The Russians hadn't been under Soviet rule long enough to fully realize it was worse than the Bolsheviks before(the Communist Revolution was a popular uprising)

I don't think the German's treatment of the Slavs and other eastern european people groups would have made a difference in the campaign.

Actually I think it would have. I had a Ukranian land lady, Vera Sabo, that lived in the Nazi controlled areas and we would talk quite a bit about this. Stalin had not long before starved several million Ukranians to death.

http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/soviet.exhibit/famine.html

She told me that was fresh on the minds of those who had lost family and that the Germans were initially looked upon as liberators. Hitler could have had an army growing in his wake, but instead sabatogued himself in his treatment of the Slavs.
Vera then told me of watching a close friend of hers crying for help as she was being beaten down the street towards the woods at the end where the Nazis would execute people. It was a daily event, she said to watch men being marched to their deaths along that street.
If the Germans had acted differently she told me, they would have had their pick of recruits.


A little more information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_collaborationism_with_the_Axis_powers

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
That's another misconception about Britain in the run up to world war 2 - that Germany outspent them. Britain spent more cash, but the money went on the Royal Navy, upgrading the defences of Hong Kong and Singapore, upgrading Britain's air defences, and of course, maintain a global empire. There was trouble in Egypt and Palestine (nothing new there) in the 1930s. Germany by contrast, was able to upgrade its panzer divisions to a level above Britain, but of course, the Germans didn't have global commitments.

By 1938 the UK was outspending Germany, but Germany had been sinking considerable resources into new weapons technology for close to a decade. Meanwhile the Royal Navy was attempting to rapidly upgrade an entire fleet of warships as quickly as possible, and modernise its army in just a few short years.

People are critical of the UK when it comes tanks and armoured division, but they forget that the early war doctrine was for the French army to do the bulk of the fighting, the Royal Navy to rule the seas, and the RAF to rule the skies.

Huh? The British had reasonable battle tanks at the outbreak of the war - they were wedded to inferior doctrine (infantry tanks and cruiser tanks...) but the tanks themselves were reliable and reasonably armed - they were certainly a match for the Panzer II and III.

The problem came after that, when the British found themselves thoroughly outmatched. The Germans had been on a much stronger upgrade path with their tanks (increasing the armour and improving the performance of the main gun, while the British kept with the 2 pdr gun on their cruisers, and failed to realise the importance of AT capability in their infantry tanks), and the Germans were also rolling out a heavy tank designs in the Tiger that was conceived before the war. From there the British were forever playing catch up, setting their sights on a tank that was aimed to be good enough to defeat what the Germans had right then, which then had performance reduced to save costs, only to be finally deployed against German tanks that had benefitted from another round of upgrades since then.


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 LordofHats wrote:
This. Stalin was so shocked when Hitler invaded, because he thought he'd outwitted Hitler and would be ready to attack first, he went totally bipolar and spiraled in a 3 day depression. Some of Germany's early success in Barbarossa can be connected to party leaders not issuing orders because Stalin wasn't around.

Yeah. Stalin, realising he'd totally screwed the pooch, assumed that his underlings would now usurp him and have him executed. He likely underestimated how much he'd cowed them into submission, that even after the disaster of the early days of Barbarossa they were still trying to summon up the courage to ask him

But I love to blame Monty! But not for that. British tank design, in one of my favorite quotes, "bordered on treason." It was atrocious but I think it had more to do with the British not really know how to handle their tank design process. I have a book written by one of the leaders in British tank production during the war that he wrote in the 70's. I'll see if its not buried in one of the boxes in the back of the closet to refresh myself.

I'd love to get the name of it, if you can find it. For a nation with such a proud military history, and such a long heritage of weapons design, what happened in British tank design is quite remarkable. I mean, it took them until basically the war was over to build the Comet, and all the pieces, gun, motor, suspension etc were there in 1940.

I don't know about the Mongolian thing, but the T34 was notoriously cramped. The commander didn't even have room to sit up straight. He had to hunch over or hit his head against the hatch.

I knew it was cramped, but I figured that was just due to that strong Russia culture of just not giving a gak about how much the next guy has to suffer. I didn't know it was a necessary element of giving the tank a lower profile, especially when the profile wasn't even that low.

The germans had agreat test bed forweapons and tactics during the Spanish Civil War.

 sebster wrote:


I'd love to get the name of it, if you can find it. For a nation with such a proud military history, and such a long heritage of weapons design, what happened in British tank design is quite remarkable. I mean, it took them until basically the war was over to build the Comet, and all the pieces, gun, motor, suspension etc were there in 1940.

I can't find my copy but the book I was thinking of is British Tank Production and the War Economy, 1934-1945 by Benjamin Coombs. I might be wrong though cause that's the title I remember but not the author and the publishing date is after I remembering reading it so this might be the moment my mind has snapped from information overload.

EDIT: I might be confusing that book with Death by Design by Peter Baele, but that author isn't familiar to me even though the title is.

 Ketara wrote:
Presuming we're talking about tanks, hardly. Most Russian tanks didn't have radio to allow battlefield communications, and a basic handbook of Russian tank warfare doctrine wasn't even compiled and distributed until the Germans were pushing in on Moscow. The Russians were complete and utter novices when it came to armoured warfare in the field, even if they did have the best tanks of the lot.

That's really got nothing to do with what I said. I said the Russians had sophisticated doctrine - which they simply did. Their understanding of the role of the tank in modern mobile warfare was highly sophisticated. That they lacked the properly trained and prepared troops on the ground is to be expected given the purges, but that doesn't discount that the performance requirements they demanded of their tanks were exactly what was needed for effective deep operations. As equipment and training steadily improved the strong foundation the Soviets had in their doctrine served them extremely well.

From the tactical level right up to the strategical, the Russians were outplayed repeatedly for the first few years of the war. It's a testament to the superiority of their armour initially, the sheer volume of geography, and the vast numbers of men they could sacrifice that the Soviets managed to survive long enough to learn from their mistakes and begin to get a grip on (what was then) modern warfare.

At the outbreak of the war they weren't so much outplayed as so completely unprepared that the army pretty much disintegrated. The rapidly rebuilt army was then vastly outperformed in the Winter Offensives, but after that you see something of a parity begin to establish.

Remember that at the start of the war Soviet officers were frequently overruled or terrified in to submission by political attaches, who knew little of effective command and were more interested in great shows of loyalty to their political masters. But over the course of the war that became less and less the case, military commanders were given much greater freedom. But at the same time it came more and more to describe the operations of the Wehrmacht, as Nazi appointments slowly took power within the army to satisfy an increasingly paranoid Hitler.


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 Grey Templar wrote:
Tigers weren't really a huge problem on the western front. It was the Panther being a Medium tank instead of a Heavy that caused problems IIRC.

Yeah, and that's why its so strange to hear a British commander singled out for tank design. The British were the ones who were concerned about the presence of greater numbers of Panthers, prompting them to design and deploy the Firefly as a makeshift measure until the the Cromwell tank was ready for deployment. The Americans, on the other hand, thought the Panther would just another specialist design like the Tiger, and not needing a specific response.


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 djones520 wrote:
In a similar vein of Soviet tactics and forces, I raise the question, had Hitler not foolishly insisted on a last stand strategy, but given full operation command to his Eastern Front commanders, would the Eastern Front had still been lost?

With phyriic victories for the Soviets like the Battle of Kursk, I don't know.

After the Germans failed to completely destroy the Red Army in Barbarossa, I can't see any plausible series of events that would lead to German victory. Within months the Soviets had mobilised enough forces to be at numerical parity, and from then on in any givern area, at any given time they were out-producing the German by a ratio of at least 2:1.

The issue from there isn't the losses sustained but the inability of the Germans to launch new offensives. It wasn't so much the number of weapons they had, but the ability to deliver sufficient fuel and ammo stockpiles to allow another offensive that mattered. While the Soviets could amass vast reserves for operations like Bagration and when breakthrough was achieved just drive madly forward, the Germans could no longer attempt anything of the sort.

And for the Germans, who's numerical inferiority meant they were dependant on manoeuvre and encirclement, that basically spelled the end.


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 Grey Templar wrote:
I don't know about that. The Russians hadn't been under Soviet rule long enough to fully realize it was worse than the Bolsheviks before(the Communist Revolution was a popular uprising)

I don't think the German's treatment of the Slavs and other eastern european people groups would have made a difference in the campaign.

Actually the Germans were hailed as liberators in much of their drive across Russia. Then they did what Nazis did... and you started to see partisan groups rise up very quickly. A lot of those groups were fairly ineffective (often hamstrung by demands from Soviet high command) but they certainly more problematic than the French Resistance, and a thorn in the side of the war effort that just didn't need to be there.


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 LordofHats wrote:
I can't find my copy but the book I was thinking of is British Tank Production and the War Economy, 1934-1945 by Benjamin Coombs. I might be wrong though cause that's the title I remember but not the author and the publishing date is after I remembering reading it so this might be the moment my mind has snapped from information overload.

EDIT: I might be confusing that book with Death by Design by Peter Baele, but that author isn't familiar to me even though the title is.

Okay, I'll look in to it. Thanks.

After the Germans failed to completely destroy the Red Army in Barbarossa, I can't see any plausible series of events that would lead to German victory. Within months the Soviets had mobilised enough forces to be at numerical parity, and from then on in any givern area, at any given time they were out-producing the German by a ratio of at least 2:1.

The issue from there isn't the losses sustained but the inability of the Germans to launch new offensives. It wasn't so much the number of weapons they had, but the ability to deliver sufficient fuel and ammo stockpiles to allow another offensive that mattered. While the Soviets could amass vast reserves for operations like Bagration and when breakthrough was achieved just drive madly forward, the Germans could no longer attempt anything of the sort.

And for the Germans, who's numerical inferiority meant they were dependant on manoeuvre and encirclement, that basically spelled the end.

I'll certainly agree that Barbarossa's failure probably spelled the end for the Germans there and then, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say there is no plausible series of events that could have led to victory for the Nazis. The summer offensive of '42, had it been successful in capturing the oilfields in the Caucasus and cutting off the Volga, could have seriously shifted the balance of power. I'm not sure if the Soviets had sufficient oil reserves elsewhere, but if they didn't (and I suspect that they did not, based on what I've read), losing the Caucasus would have grounded the Red Air Force and seriously diminished the country's ability to wage war regarless of their industrial output.

Barbarossa was definitely their best shot though, I'll agree with you there.

 creeping-deth87 wrote:
I'll certainly agree that Barbarossa's failure probably spelled the end for the Germans there and then, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say there is no plausible series of events that could have led to victory for the Nazis. The summer offensive of '42, had it been successful in capturing the oilfields in the Caucasus and cutting off the Volga, could have seriously shifted the balance of power. I'm not sure if the Soviets had sufficient oil reserves elsewhere, but if they didn't (and I suspect that they did not, based on what I've read), losing the Caucasus would have grounded the Red Air Force and seriously diminished the country's ability to wage war regarless of their industrial output.

Barbarossa was definitely their best shot though, I'll agree with you there.

Yes, but how do you plausibly argue for a more successful Case Blue? The only way it might have been better handled is by being less ambitious, lightening the logistics strain and drawing in less assets from elsewhere (and we can then declare that's enough to prevent any effect Soviet counter attacks). But if that's the case, then you certainly don't have them reaching the oil fields.

Some good arguments here about a lot of things, but what in the name of God has German tactics during Barbarossa, and the combat capabilities of the T-34 got to do with American production during WW2?

I was guilty myself of sending this thread into a tangent, but if anybody wants to talk 1941 or T34s, I'm happy to talk about them in another thread! This thread has been hijacked!!

The relevant tangent is that Soviet arms were heavily supported by western supplies brought in through Murmansk. The UK and US supplied large numbers of vehicles as well as food, which allowed the Soviets to concentrate their productive capability on churning out T34s and so on.

This would hardly have been possible without the west, particularly the USA, having the industry to re-arm itself and produce enough surplus to give to allies.

With reference to the UK tanks and so on, it should be borne in mind that the UK nearly got kicked out of the war in 1940 and spent the next two years working to rebuild and expand the army while fighting in north Africa, defending against the Luftwaffe and building up the navy. There was a necessity of carrying on with existing designs rather than tooling up for a currently non-existent super tank.

One of Hitler's biggest mistakes was not listening to Admiral Doenitz about building enough U Boats.

Hitler could have afforded to do a lot more listening to the Kreigzmarine. Some of the men in that branch were some of the most brilliant and underappreciated military leaders of the war.

 sebster wrote:

 creeping-deth87 wrote:
I'll certainly agree that Barbarossa's failure probably spelled the end for the Germans there and then, but I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say there is no plausible series of events that could have led to victory for the Nazis. The summer offensive of '42, had it been successful in capturing the oilfields in the Caucasus and cutting off the Volga, could have seriously shifted the balance of power. I'm not sure if the Soviets had sufficient oil reserves elsewhere, but if they didn't (and I suspect that they did not, based on what I've read), losing the Caucasus would have grounded the Red Air Force and seriously diminished the country's ability to wage war regarless of their industrial output.

Barbarossa was definitely their best shot though, I'll agree with you there.

Yes, but how do you plausibly argue for a more successful Case Blue? The only way it might have been better handled is by being less ambitious, lightening the logistics strain and drawing in less assets from elsewhere (and we can then declare that's enough to prevent any effect Soviet counter attacks). But if that's the case, then you certainly don't have them reaching the oil fields.

Less ambitious was exactly what I was thinking. By insisting on taking Stalingrad AND the Caucasus, after the Wehrmacht was considerably weakened the previous year, Hitler destroyed any chance for a successful summer offensive in 1942.

I certainly wont go so far as to say that if they did this, victory would have been assured, I just have a lot of fun with what if questions

 LordofHats wrote:
Hitler could have afforded to do a lot more listening to the Kreigzmarine. Some of the men in that branch were some of the most brilliant and underappreciated military leaders of the war.

He could have afforded to listen to ANY of his military leaders. They were pretty much all brilliant to some degree. Unfortunately for them, Hitler was far too paranoid.

 sebster wrote:


That's really got nothing to do with what I said. I said the Russians had sophisticated doctrine - which they simply did. Their understanding of the role of the tank in modern mobile warfare was highly sophisticated....

I'm sorry, I'll have to completely disagree on this one. I'll be plain, I can't remember the ins and outs, but whilst I was at uni(undergrad), I took a term long module of the development of armoured warfare theory. In that module, I got graded on a paper I wrote on the evolution of Russian tank doctrine,

Unfortunately, I've now lost that paper/file (was three years ago), so I can't pull it up to reference.

The ins and outs that I recall though? Britain pioneered it, and lead a series of experiments and maneuvres out in Africa in the thirties. They didn't quite have the tank numbers to pull off as much as they'd like, and the doctrinal debate over their structure and use was still raging when the Second World War hit. The Germans meanwhile, sent plenty of observers out to watch these tests, and seized on all the available British publications on the subject voraciously (the sheer number of them translated into German was vast in comparison to other military subjects).

The Russians? Not so much. When it came to tank design, they had some excellent people working for them. They'd had some initial idea of the progress of things when they were co-operating with the Germans at Kazan. But then the purges came, and Tukhachevsky (the most senior fellow who'd had any real idea on that side of things) got nailed, and Russian tank doctrine more or less got thrown out of the window. Most of the proponents of his school of thought went to the firing line along with him, and as a result, there was quite simply nobody to train newer officers in such ideas, and no handbooks or military manuals available to educate themselves.

Come Barbarossa, you had many Russian commanders deploying tanks penny packeted in very small units for point defence, as infantry support, in light mobile units, and so on. Virtually none of the Russian tanks had any kind of wireless, making any kind of co-ordinated tank action incredibly difficult even when it was attempted, and the vast majority of Russian officers point blank had no idea how to use a tank unit regardless. Co-operation between tanks and infantry/other branches of the service was exceedingly poor in general. In short, there was a doctrinal void at the heart of the Red Army when it came to tank warfare specifically (and in many cases, the battlefield generally).

I forget it's exact Russian name, but there was a Russian handbook published and widely distributed to all officers a year or so into the war. It contained more or less everything the Russians had learnt from observing German tactics/strategy, and combined it with what fragments they could pull up from pre-purge theory. They also started pulling in tanks and trying to fit them with radio. It took a good year or so of fumbling, and a few more publications before they seriously got a grip on it though.

Remember that at the start of the war Soviet officers were frequently overruled or terrified in to submission by political attaches, who knew little of effective command and were more interested in great shows of loyalty to their political masters. But over the course of the war that became less and less the case, military commanders were given much greater freedom.

I'm presuming you're referring to the incompetence of the Soviet High Command and it's subservience to Stalin generally. I'm afraid that does nothing to cover for the fact though that there was a general lack of education amongst the officers of the Red Army, and they simply did not know how to use tanks effectively. Anyone publicly espousing ideas of people purged tended to follow them, there was no appropriate training done, and there were no suitable manuals widely available on the subject for officers to consult.

To summarise, there was a doctrinal void with regards to armoured warfare in the Red Army during the first part of the war. So I'm really quite unsure as to why you consider them to possess 'sophisticated doctrine'.

 LordofHats wrote:


I can't find my copy but the book I was thinking of is British Tank Production and the War Economy, 1934-1945 by Benjamin Coombs.

Curiously enough, this was the fellow who graded me on Russian tank theory. He was doing his PHD on the subject at the time.

I don't know about the Mongolian thing, but the T34 was notoriously cramped. The commander didn't even have room to sit up straight. He had to hunch over or hit his head against the hatch.

I knew it was cramped, but I figured that was just due to that strong Russia culture of just not giving a gak about how much the next guy has to suffer. I didn't know it was a necessary element of giving the tank a lower profile, especially when the profile wasn't even that low.

 Ketara wrote:

Interestingly, I attended a postgraduate lecture from the above fellow last year on the subject of American/British tanks sent to Russia, and got set the task of evaluating it. Whilst digging around in the library, I came across some amusing accounts of those tanks by the Russian soldiery, who almost all as one loved how comfortable the Western tanks were in comparison to their own. The fact that they had a spot for a kettle in the British ones thoroughly enchanted them.

Thanks for the interesting post... and the snippet about the kettles. How bloody British!

Without banging on too much about Monty and British tank design; at Bovington there is a perfectly preserved Tiger which the Brits captured early in 1943, due to a lucky shot which jammed the turret. Monty knew of that beast, and even a year later reckoned Cromwells were fine. Indeed the Panther was an all round better vehicle, but that Tiger was an early indicatin the Brits were falling well behind, well before D-Day, about which they did nothing bar the stopgap Firefly.

For anyone looking at the economies in general, I'd really recommend Cry Havoc which is very good on the run up to war, the arms race, and the concept of autarky.

What the book does point out is how in many ways the Soviet Union started the obsession with the arms race, simply because they had so many tanks. It made everyone else paranoid.

I presume Ketara, you were talking about the Salisbury Plain exercises and the theories of Liddel-Hart? AS you'll probably know better than me, he claimed to have influenced Guderian and others, tho' that's by no means certain.

Re the Nazis and Russia; the consensus is his policy of using Gauleiters, all with ad hoc policies and no understanding of economics, and alienating all local populations, was incredibly wasteful. A good book on this is Hitler's EMpire by Mark Mazower: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/hitlers-empire-by-mark-mazower-836313.html

I think perhaps Marshal Zhukov (and his staff) understood Tank Doctrine perfectly. You could see it during the previous Russo-Japanese war in 1939(?) when he decesively smashed the Japanese and put the fear of Russia into them.

Hivefleet Oblivion wrote:

For anyone looking at the economies in general, I'd really recommend Cry Havoc which is very good on the run up to war, the arms race, and the concept of autarky.

Having spoken to Professor Maiolo on his book, I'm not entirely convinced by it. However, being well enough educated to know when I'm not well enough educated on the subject, and knowing I'll be part of his faculty shortly, I'll decline on commenting why.

I presume Ketara, you were talking about the Salisbury Plain exercises and the theories of Liddel-Hart? AS you'll probably know better than me, he claimed to have influenced Guderian and others, tho' that's by no means certain.

From what I recall, Mr Liddell-Hart was one of the most shameless self-promoters to walk the face of the planet, and undertook all kinds of attempts to inveigle his name into Guderian's history. But I'm going off some fairly fragmentary reading on that one, so I'll be prepared to be proven wrong if it turned out to be so much academic hogwash.