Fixed it for you.

I stand corrected. The A-10 isnt 40 year old, it’s 50+ year old airplane technology that congress has on the budget chopping block every time it comes up.

As for the Abrams tank, what is the threat for it? Any potential enemies armor is easier to defeat than it is & there’s cheaper/safer ways to kill them if they do get in the way of something.

I’m old, I admit, but I like technology & see it to be the efficient future to most things. Bigger & heavier just isn’t it anymore

You contradicted yourself by saying it has no threat...and then said they are so easy to kill, even cavemen could do it.

Oh shit, you’re right, I did write it that way. Fingers & head weren’t hooked together. Meant to say there were no threats ‘for’ it, not what I wrote, ‘to’ it.

Good catch!

How cute.  The Panzerkampfwagen M4-748 (a):

It's interesting that when operation Greif was put together for the Ardennes attack, no usable captured Shermans could be obtained from german units and therefore some Panthers were disguised as M-10s.  The supposition is that units with captured american equipment did not want to give them up and did not cooperate when canvassed for american vehicles.

For all the talk, what battles or campaigns were won by the users of Sherman's and the users of Tigers/Panthers?

I would posit that it is closer to 9mm vs .45 win mag. .45 win mag is undoubtedly more powerful but there is a reason it is not standard issue (outside one slightly nutty attempt by the Canadians).

I wonder if there are any reports on their effectiveness from the point of view of German panzer crews who used both tanks. That would be a fascinating report to read.

the better tank won

the better and more plentiful tank won.

There really weren’t any tank only ‘tank battles’ between Sherman’s & late war models of Panthers or Tigers. Sure there some where a few of one went up some of the other, but even in most of those small skirmishes air cover was there. In what’s left it was the M4’s winning because of overwhelming numbers. There just weren’t that many Tigers fielded at one time to a threat to a force of M4’s.

Tigers were too expense, too time consuming to build, too hard to move & too hard to maintain to keep many in the field where they were needed.

Sherman’s, being easy & cheap to build, easy to maintain & pretty much self propelled meant they were everywhere, saturating the battlefields of Europe.

To stay alive, Tigers, usually alone or in small numbers, had to pick where to stick their necks out. Pick what hill to die on, so to speak. Once one was spotted it was Katy bar the door. Tank busting aircraft & M4’s would be coming out of the woodwork at them.

In the big, breakout battles, it was a LOT more than Panzers that were holding up the progress of the allies.

The biggest ‘tank battle’ where Sherman’s were involved would have probably been El Alamein, where Montgomery’s British Sherman’s outnumbered early war Panzers by nearly 2-1. Again, it was quantity over anything & everything.

I’d have to believe spare parts for either were a little tough to come by, for the German mechanics...

Might even be 10 9mm’s vs 1 .45 win mag, given numbers of Sherman’s : Tigers.

I would add the battle of Arracourt in 1944 where you did have the Panther in some numbers.

Well, if you wanted to go there, let's.

In real life Ive served in a tank brigade and an AT company.

In a real war I was an XO of an infantry battalion with about 100 vehicles, supervised evacuation of a couple vehicles we had people killed in, been to memorial ceremonies for a couple of others, and the fielding of MRAPs. Which the troops loved, because of armor. And survivability. We had vehicles literally blown in half and everyone survived, because of ARMOR, and the troops didnt mind pulling maintenance and doing what it took to stay alive.

When you go to heavier vehicles, you have to deal with lack of spare parts, vehicles getting stuck, drivers making mistakes, training issues, and the recovery assets aren't configured for the heavier vehicles.   In fact, when the heavier stuff got fielded Big Army didnt wait for any of that stuff because they didnt have the time, and when Generals came we told them truthfully, the logistics was soup sandwich but  the troops were taking it in stride, because noone wanted to wait to get the heck out of the UAHs.

A couple times we burned 800 man hours with units out in the field, waiting on vehicle recovery assets to pull burned vehicles off the battlefield.

The real soldiers in the real unit in the real war didnt care one lick about any of that, because they knew the new armored vehicles they fielded had a better chance of getting them home then the old ones, and they were deployed anyway, so things that kept them alive were good.

One man cant be two places at the same time but if you're dead you're going to be in the same place for a very very long time.

I dont wish away anything because I know noone really  minds doing the maintenance tasks you think you are lecturing me about.

by that point in the war I'm not sure they'd have an easier time with many German vehicles

Tank Destroyers were purpose built to fight other tanks.  M4s as employed fought tanks as an afterthought (hence the decision to leave the 76 mm-armed M4s in England prior to D-Day due to concerns over the amount of explosive fill in 76 mm HE projectiles), and were instructed to avoid other tanks that possessed armament and armor overmatch, per doctrine.

That would be every German tank from the PzkPfw IV H and up.  In both offense and defense the M4 was doctrinally dependent on Tank Destroyers to be effective.  In actual use, maneuver and numbers were used to make up for an ineffective gun.  Parse words all you want, but the M4 was horribly lacking in employment.

As for the rest, it's either irrelevant or already been answered several pages back.  Maybe you should read closer.

And said doctrine was spot on.

Purposely using your tanks to fight enemy tanks is just dumb.

Holy fucking shit

Well, the side that used that doctrine won...

Kill fuel and ammo trucks, the tanks are just as dead.

I guess the U-Boat fleet and US sub drivers in the Pacific should have just driven straight toward the destroyers instead of sinking all those cargo ships too...

Shit!

Teach me to go off my poor memory...

Very, very true!

In the Pacific they called ‘Island hopping’. Sail around anything not worth fighting & dying for unless it was VERY important strategically. In the ETO is was a whole a whole bunch easier, just drive around the damned obsolete tracked thing...

Hammer, meet head of nail...

Because combat operations on land and war at sea is exactly the same.

Sorry we can’t re-write the script of WWII to fit how you think it should have went.

Had the Nazis have put their resources towards quantity & quality instead of so few ‘big’ tanks, the outcome ‘may’ have been drug out. As it was, they didn’t. Damned good thing, don’t you think?

You are wishing away crew fatigue and alertness.  You want to commit material and resources to your pet project, regardless of what has to foregone in order to do so.

You also wish to field a different armor fleet in 1944 which would result in much higher casualties among the infantry.

Infantry lives matter.

Ok Diesel, if you say so....

Sure and that's the proper mindset to have, today. The public is extremely adverse to dead servicemembers.

Well, at least we can agree infantry lives matter.  I did that job for awhile and couldnt agree more.

I doubt I will convince you as to the rest of this, but someone else may be interested.

So an infantry battalion attack in WWII was usually two up, one back, with three rifle companies of about 100 pax.  One would be the base or assault company, one would be on line to its left or rigt as teh supprt company, usually reinforced with the heavy weapons: machine guns and mortars.  The third rifle company is in reserve, ready to pass through the original assault compnay and continue the advance.

A divisional support armor battalion had approx fifty tanks at full strength, and in general a platoon of armor may show up.  They would probably lead the advance for the assault rifle company.

The tanks would often be in the lead, maybe 25-50 meters. Close enough that a rifleman could suppress any infantry with handheld AT weapons, far enough away so any rounds aimed at the tank wouldnt hit the infantry, and out of the way so if a gunner had to make a snap shot he didnt have to wait.

Ideally, if a machine gun nest opened up in the infantry, the tank would knock it out.  This could be a slow process because the target may move, hit and run, and the rifleman that saw the target would have to pass the location so the tank could identify it.

Most of the time, the tank wasnt moving around too much.

It is entirely possible that a US rifleman could protect a tank from a German with a panzerfaust or panzerschreck.  However an antitank gun, like a pak40, would usually be a few hundred meters back, so teh infantry couldnt see it. It would be camoflaged and dug so teh barrel barely cleared the pit.  It would usually get the first shot off. COnsider you are shooting at a target 10-15 times larger then a man, with a 3x sight, and hitting a sherman out to the limits of penteration ability, say, 1000 meters, isnt hard.

Obviously if the tank gets knocked out, infantry losses go way up.  If the tank can defeat the German AT guns, or if they arent there, then the defenders can lose catastrophically.

Also, there is a scene like this in the movie "Fury"...AT Gunners invariably would pace off the distances to known points and built range cards, and their guns were very accurate. More so then tanks, as they knew the distances more precisely.  That scen specifically was very inaccurate in depicting AT guns as far less accurate then they were. ANd in reality infantry had a greater role in spotting for thetanks, who had trouble seing through narrow vision slits.

If you dont have armor, then the best way to defeat ac ouple of AT guns is to oerwhelm them with numbers of tanks, but that means more attacks dont get supported by armor at all.

As an example, in "Company Commander", by CHarles B. MacDonald, his company was attacked in the Battle of the Bulge by infantry supported with armor, his bazookas could not penetrate enemy armor, and his compamny was overrun.

There is a book called "Tanks in Hell" about the USMC tank company on Tarawa, and they did tremendous damage as the Japanese had no real AT weapons to use.

You could also consder Omaha Beach, where one tank company basically sank in the channel, but the other did not.  The tank battalion that did land took very heavy casualties and that had alt, in turn, to do with infantry casualties.

There are a couple of excellent articles here on what happens when US Armor in Iraq ran up against enemy infantry without AT capability.

link

Rauray
The bulge
Arracourt

Definite battles between panthers, panzer 4s, and tigers

Tanks, when in the defense, also used range cards - at least, until laser range finders became more common.  They were also set up to perform indirect fire - at least, as late as the M48A3.

Tank destroyers used the same guns, for the most part, and the same ammunition.  It was the situation of being in the defense, rather than any intrinsic accuracy of being a tank destroyer, that resulted in better accuracy.

Considering Omaha beach, a Sherman 75mm could barely swim, under ideal conditions, as a Duplex Drive tank.  No way to swim a Jumbo or a Pershing.  Its base Shermans or nothing.  Since conditions weren't ideal, we lost many of them that day before they ever hit the beach.

afaik the 120mm in the M1 Abrams still has the spot on the breech to put the indirect fire equipment

All were basically settled by allied air power. Arracourt a little less so than the others. The Bulge was at a stalemate till the skies cleared. Tracks aren’t much good in ice, snow & frozen ground regardless who’s tracks they are. Even my steel grouser bulldozers tend to just slide sideways when it’s slick.

I’m not saying there weren’t confrontations involving massed armor, I’m saying the outcome was rarely settled by the armor, making any advantage a big tank had relatively insignificant.

Quite interesting little article you wrote up

Also very good points why good tanks in numbers are better for infantry support than far fewer heavier ones.

Theres a whole lot more to war than tech and 'efficiency.'  And the Abrams has quite a bit of competition from the Sov... Russian armor. Not the monkey model shit that countries like Iraq got either.

Wrong.  The end.  Even the Army manuals said tanks fought tanks and not as an afterhtought.

They left the 76 because they didnt have enough of them and said 'eh the 75 is good enough for now."

FM17-33 paragraph 37
TANK VERSUS TANK ACTION (see FM 17-10).-Attacking tanks frequently encounter hostile tank units unexpectedly.  At other times they may be required to attack hostile tanks deliberately in order to break up an attack or a counterattack. It is therefore necessary that all personnel be carefully trained in recognition of hostile and friendly tanks; characteristics and capabilities of hostile tanks as to armor, armament, and speed; vulnerable parts of hostile tanks upon which fire will be effective; range at which each of our weapons is effective against hostile vehicles; enemy methods of tank employment;and methods of combating hostile tanks, such as the use of speed, defilade and cover, and ambush. In tank versus tank action-
a. Use artillery concentrations on hostile tanks. Concentrations will be especially effective in defiles.
b. Place some tanks (preferably medium tanks) together with assault guns in defiladed or concealed positions to fire upon and slow down the hostile attack when enemy tanks come within effective range.
c. Use mortars to place smoke on the enemy to disorganize his attack. Smoke may also be used to screen maneuver of your own tanks.
d. Maneuver part of the battalion to one or both hostile flanks where they can attack by fire at close range, preferably from defiladed or concealed position.
e. If defiladed or concealed positions are not available use smoke both of mortars and artillery to disorganize the enemy and screen the advance to effective range.
f. When attacking an enemy inferior in armament, advance rapidly to positions beyond the effective range of his weapons,take up stationary position, and fire. If
enemy advances,withdraw and keep beyond range of his guns while still keeping him within effective range of your own guns.
g. When attacked by an enemy whose armament is superior to your own, withdraw and lead him into your own antitank defenses. If there are no antitank defenses backing youup, place smoke on enemy and maneuver rapidly to approach within effective range.
h. Use terrain to aid in maneuver, defilade, and concealment.

With so many experts in residence, can somebody explain to me how an TD like the Stug &/or towed AT guns can get a hit on a moving target when they can’t traverse at all?

They absolute can traverse, just not a lot. 20 degrees.

Also, most turret traverse systems kinda sucked in WWII.  You usually did gross movements with the tracks, and only used the turret or gun traverse for fine-tuning.

PAK 40 had a traverse  arc of 65*
Flak 36/41 had a traverse arc of 360*
PAK 43 traverse arc 56*

Wikipedia says the stug was 25*. Just looks like it’d be terribly hard to hit a moving, zig-zagging target on uneven ground with such limited amount of manual movement.

Topping it off, no matter how well dug in & camoed up, each shot fired would be letting folks who didn’t like what you were doing pinpoint your location.

Edit; fix spelling

Th sherman had an electric traverse giving it yet another advantage in the "shoot first, kill first" war.   Slow turrets dogged german tanks

It also had a stabilized gun, which is said to have given it an advantage when combined with the electrics in getting on target quicker.  The Germans never put that on their tanks.

The interesting concept in the Jagdpanzer was they were to hunt.  They were envisioned as being used from ambush at preselected positions.  hence the low profile and compact design in the originals ones (not the later panther and tiger based attempts).  They were in effect a motorized, armored anti tank gun.  What value they had in offensive roles where pre planned positions for ambush would not be as predictable is open to debate.

I guess I just don’t see the M4 being the setting duck that some in this thread make it out to have been.

It did have to stop to shoot, apparently, but it had the capability to be pretty much on target as it did so, so it wasn’t like the German anti tank equipment that had only those few seconds to get on the target & make the shot before it was rolling again.

I’ve run dozers since I was a kid & I can’t imagine trying to get perfectly lined up to target using the tracks, when fractions of a second count & shit is flying at me. The looking down the gunsight would be calling me all kinds of foul names!

I can see how some would think the M4 was too light, though...

Attached File

A surplus store in Phoenix had one of those when I was a kid.   Wanted it in the worst way.  

Can you even imagine what it’d be worth today?