Geoff,
>But did it, REALLY?
Hehe... you have no idea how long I could make a thread regarding WWII
armor and tactics. This has been my 60 hour a week bread and butter job
for the last 4 years, not to mention the 10 or so unpaid ones before that :-)
>So how come they lost so many?
Er... because they were fighting a three front war against forces which
dwarfed it in all respects while being governed by one of the most inept
governments, not to mention one of the worst industrial production plans
ever seen in the 20th Century? That has a wee bit of something to do with
it :-) If you look at relative losses in tank vs. tank battles and the
German tanks come out looking pretty good. Much better in fact than
Allied tanks. Not many Allied tankers were able to do what German
tankers were, regardless of how favorable the circumstances were.
Training can only do so much, so the machines must have something to do
with it too.
Quick test... find a WWII Allied tanker and ask him if he would have
rather been sitting in a Panther or in something like a Sherman or
Cromwell. Then as a WWII German tanker what he would rather be in. I
suspect the answer would be the same and for the same reason. Soviet
stuff is a whole 'nother ball of wax.
>And how did it come to pass
>that your average, pissed-off Commonwealth Lance Corporal with a PIAT
>could have
>Panthers for breakfast if he had the Big Brass Ones to get close enough? :-P
Any tank could be knocked out by someone with Big Brass Ones, so that
proves nothing. On the other hand, a 14 year old German kid could knock
out *any* Allied tank at 100m with a disposable pop gun called a
Panzerfaust while his PIAT counterpart bounced round after round off of
the bigger German tanks like trowing popcorn at a brick wall. German AT
capabilites at all levels were superior to Western Allied ones, and to a
large degree Soviet ones as well.
>The Panther was seriously overrated, IMHO, a legacy which survives to
this day
>for some strange reason. They were far from invincible regardless of
>circumstance.
I totally agree with this, and have tried to beat this into many people's
skulls over the years. But do not confuse being vulnerable with being
inferior or no better than another. The Panther, in many respects, was
the finest tank produced by any nation in WWII. At the same time that
does not mean that all other tanks sucked, because that too would be
wrong to say.
> The simple fact of the
>matter is that if it were THAT good, the Allies would have
>reverse-engineered it
>after the war and continued its manufacture. They didn't.
This is an oversimplification of reality. The truth is that some Allied
thinkers wanted to do exactly that, just as some German thinkers in 1941
wanted to simply copy the T-34 (which was how the Panther started out).
The reasons WHY the Allies didn't build Panther knock offs is realated
to the same reason they didn't reverse engineer/produce things like a
better LMG, disposable AT rocket, improved Bazooka, better AT guns, etc.
Hell, it took the Allies a super long time to upgun and uparmor the
Shermans, even though they knew damned well they could not stand toe to
toe with much of anything the Germans had. Read Belton Cooper's "Death
Traps" for one view of this from the front.
The reasons for this are highly complicated and subject of much debate.
But the fact is that the Western Allies pursued an industrial policy of
"make more of whatever we got" for most of the war. It worked, IMHO, but
it cost many more lives in the end.
>Having said that, it's one hell of an impressive tank viewed close-up, but
>nothing our Lance Corporals can't handle... :-)
Assuming that a Lance Corporal could run 2000m through enemy infantry to
get a shot off at a moving Panther while all his armored support was
going up in flames without being able to score hits. Reality and theory
are two different things :-) In reality VERY few German tanks were
knocked out by PIATs compared to standoff weapons like AT guns, tanks,
TDs, and aircraft.
Steve
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