every Pacific naval encounter from late 1943 onward is like the IJN Golden Kirin, Glorious Harbinger of Eternal Imperial Dawn versus six identical copies of the USS We Built This Yesterday supplied by a ship that does nothing but make birthday cakes for the other ships
There is a lot of that in the tank warfare between Germany and the US too...some amazingly impressive difficult to produce German tanks versus a swarm of decent mass-produced, quickly replaceable American tanks.
Wehraboos sometimes like to claim a single Tiger could kill 10 Shermans or T-34s for every 1 lost. Setting aside the fact this number is probably bullshit, and assuming no Tigers are lost to infantry, artillery, airstrikes, mechanical breakdown, etc., that leaves approximately 90,000 M4s and T-34s
I forgot to mention another way Tigers could get wrecked: getting no-scoped by naval artillery for the error of moving around in daylight within 15 miles of the Normandy beaches (bringing this subthread full circle with the OP)
Any honest tank assessment in WW2 gives the nod to the T-34. On an individual basis it was a high quality machine, and the USSR's ability to just crank them out in volume was absolutely devastating. On the US side, the Sherman was a great example of quanity being its own type of quality
I think this underestimates the Sherman a little; it was perfectly capable of dealing with the tanks it was designed to fight, and IIRC its postwar reputation as a death trap isn’t borne out by actual statistics. It struggled with Panthers and Tigers but so did the T-34 with the original 76mm gun.
If I had my pick of advantages and disadvantages I would chose "tanks that are suboptimal against armor but reliable/effective in most roles" over "if the sun's out, our super tanks with their snappily dressed crews are definitely going to get lit up by Thunderbolts/Yak-7s" any day if the week
Yeah ultimately yanking your pud to armor thickness or shell velocity values is video game shit. WWII armored combat was not tanks facing up to have a fair fight like knights in a tournament and it’s not somehow cheating that one side (that didn’t start the war!) had way more men and machines
That argument holds even if you take close air support (whose pilots vastly overestimated their vehicle kill rate in WWII) out of the equation.
Most of war isn't tank-on-tank, and I'd rather have 10x the tanks which do infantry support really well while still being OK against most armor.
The T-34 was based on a design by American engineer J. Walter Christie.
Stalin knew from the start that the US was going to be the Final Boss so he had his people get as much US tech as they could. Factories were built on American blueprints. He focused on the US so much, he underestimated Germany.
You have less than one casualty per disabled Sherman by the time they got the wet ammunition storage. Most suited to its job tank of the war, any wider and rail is a problem, any heavier and ports are, multiple power plants avoid manufacturing limits, fully repairable in the field.
T-34 production was very inconsistent. Soviet QC varied by factory. The quality of the tank you'd get was a luck of the draw. Some were quality machines. Some were lemons. All of them had horrible crew survivability. Drivers sometimes needed mallets to change gears in the earlier models.
Trying to squeeze out of those hatches while the thing was on fire must have been a real treat. That’s one area where the Sherman authentically had it all over the T-34 and I think it’s reflected in the crew casualty percentages
People severely underrate crew survivability. Much easier to replace a tank than a crew. The Sherman was all-around the best tank of the war. Its deficiencies were exaggerated because of a combination of survivor bias and pro-Wehrmacht revisionism.
Not to mention that a destroyed Sherman was much more likely to have a surviving crew that could jump into a new one fresh off the assembly line, whereas the panzers (and even worse the tigers) were practically designed to prevent capture at any cost.
The Germans were so convinced they could just willpower in a supertank, on average every 6th mid-to-late war panzer was a different model
Now imagine attempting to maintain that
Thinking to the talk/math shown by Jon Parshall, that was definitely the case with the Tiger I, but that always seemed like a suspect comparison.
I'd like to know the variations for the Panzer IIIs and IVs, a model more comparable in size and numbers to the Sherman
There's a great talk by Jonathan Parshall on Youtube that underscores this. The Tiger took 300,000 man-hours to produce, apparently according to the maintenance manual.
(about halfway through, though Citino's talk is also good if you have the time: www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6xL... )
The Fordists in charge of both US and USSR tank production got this one exactly right. The Sherman and the T-34 were very different vehicles but the design and production philosophy behind them was the same and the Nazis ultimately had no answer to them
Parshall actually goes into one big difference: the Soviets recognized that a tank is unlikely to move more than 1500 km before it is ultimately destroyed in battle, so, they reasoned, it makes little sense to make parts last much longer than that.
Not just replaceable, but modular. You lose a track? Can get it replaced in hours and you’re back in business. A German tank that broke was out of commission for a while if not totally scrap
Alegedly the Sherman vs Panzer Ratio is a myth. When equipped with the right guns, American tanks were more than capable of exchanging at an even ratio to German ones, in addition to being cheaper and more numerous.
A lot of Sherman bashing seems to come from a single memoir.
‘I will run wild for 6 months, then we’ve had it…’ or summat like that… I must have watched Tora Tora Tora too many times as I have a bit of a soft spot for Yamamoto…
He comes across as a very reasonable man in the things that I've read about him. It was interesting to learn how much he was against the war from the beginning including opposing the invasion of China and the tripartite pact.
I’m not a scholar on him or on the war generally but I’ve thought he might have been reticent because he’d actually been here. It’s hard, sometimes, for people who haven’t visited to really internalize the scale, resources and abilities of this country and its industries. Also we had our own oil.
I just checked the numbers and in 2022, after 40 years of deindustrialization, no major tourist attractions, and no financial services industry to speak of, Michigan’s GDP is still 1/10th of Japan’s. Imagine what it was like in 1943
