German favour Mark IV as main battle tank?

Sounds entirely reasonable to me, not unlike France in 1940 where the popular perception is often one of mark III's and IV's but the reality is more like I's & II's, each not much less laughable than the British Mk VI's, A9's etc.

Cheers,
Adam.

 

Did the Germans conduct a battle of manoeuvre after the Kharkov counterstroke of early 1943? I doubt it, they seem to have substituted terrain for numbers, limiting Allied advantages in mobility by defending on ground suited to frontal defence - river lines in Russia and hill/bocage country in Italy and France.

Keep schtum but I have a sneaking regard for the Valentine!

 

Shhhh! people will think we're weirdos... Lovely amphibious one comes to Beltring, here's two little films of Bov's old beauty I grabbed at last years tankfest... she smokes a bit much for some peoples taste though.:
YouTube - Valentine tank starting up. Smoke...
YouTube - Sherman and Valentine set off

Err... ummm...
Oh yes, Panzers! That's what we were talking about wasn't it. Great big things with guns all over 'em... Manufacturing/fuel/manpower etc. etc.

Cheers,
Adam.

 

Thanks for the "special stuff".

 

Yes you mentioned the materials, and i have stated that had the Germans just concentrated on the Pz MkIV and Nashorns as primary panzer and panzerjeagers, they could have had those materials, i.e in smelting and reusing captured war materiels, obsolete panzers and the like and issuing lisences to other Axis nations on a 20 to 1 basis, Italy for example although limited say she was able to produce say 2,000 Pz MkIV and 500 Nashorns, but the main problem for the Germans is that they had almost all of their production centralized in Germany, had the Germans decentralized their factories this also could have alieviated their situation.

 

The Germans were making a lot of war machines in 1935-1939, then slowed down for a period, and in spring-summer 1942 speeded up again and after Stalingrad started "total war".

I guess the period in-between left Germany totally behind of the other nations , and although Germany could never match the Allied production and especially the US production figures, they certainly would have needed the planes and tanks they left unmade in 1940-1942.

 

Adam Tooze has dipped his toe in this debate and concludes that what used to be called the 'era of egotism and incompetence' 1940-42 was actually more of a changing of gear, the time when resources were shifted substantially from army to Luftwaffe and to a lesser extent Kriegsmarine production.

He demonstrates that bearing in mind the extensive retooling and labour changes necessary and the huge investment boom of these years what has been represented as stagnant productivity was the time when the new priority was showing up statistically as input but not output. He also points out that Todt's death came at a time when any successor would reap the credit for the maturing of the investment decisions in favour of the Luftwaffe in the form of a big rise in production.

Tank production was a spectacular item but never absorbed more than 7% of military spending unlike the Luftwaffe which was more than 50% or mundane items like ammunition manufacture.

 

Personally I think Hitler truly believed he could win in Russia and then get Britain out of war, all of which would happen in autumn-winter 1941. So there was no need for any gear changing for battles in Europe, I think, in the first place. Once the war in the East continued Hitler had to think twice about production figures but I´m not sure if that was only after Typhoon failed or later/earlier.

 

'Britain' after autumn 1940 = Britain and the USA. For Hitler the USA was decidedly un-neutral. Rearming since 1938, Cash and Carry, Lend-Lease, anti-submarine warfare in the Western Atlantic . . .

How would Hitler defeat Britain? not with the Heer of 1940 or 1941 but with the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine once they had been reequipped for strategic operations. The change of production priorities was intended to produce the means to defeat the UK-US air-sea war looming in the west.

This went up in smoke after Barbarossa failed (which was on Hitler's mind within a month of the invasion). The quick win would provide the foodstuffs and raw materials the German war economy lacked - oil, coal, metals, grain, fodder, slave labour etc which would be the foundation of the economic growth that would produce the strategic bombers, ships and submarines to defeat the UK-US coalition.

 

Squeeth,

I am sure you are aware of Hitler´s idea that once the USSR was out of the picture , at least in his talks with the staff, he believed that Britain was forced to negotiate with Germany about peace because there would be nobody in Europe they could count on anymore.

Whether it was just to keep himself warm or not, Hitler did say this as one of the reasons for his Barbarossa plan.

 

The 'European sword' idea was one of many. 'Britain' had succeeded where France failed. For the moment Hitler had the chance of a one front war (nearly) before the latent coalition in the west made itself felt militarily.

The Russian war was far more than realpolitik.

 

Not if they were confronted with a Nashorn with it's mighty 88, that would negate the above mentioned allied countermeasures.

Also one of the main eventual failure of the German Panzerwaffe was that eventually the Luftwaffe lost air control and that allied aircraft began shooting up as many German Panzers as they could, eventually the Tiger and King Tiger as impressive as they were were no match for a Thunderbolt and Stormoviks and the like armed to the teeth with anti-armour rockets. Also one thing with the Soviet Union out of the way either having surrendered of being fatally crippled as to pose no threat, Germany would have by say 1943 have concentrated everything it had to subduing England.

 

Roddoss, remember the stone-scissors-paper game. Your Nashorn is not an ideal weapon, it isn't even a tank.

It's not a tank, it's an anti-tank gun on tracks for mobility. It carries a big punch, but has an open top and paper thin armour. It's vulnerable to any mortar battery in range, not to mention HE artillery.

So the Allies can drop their expensive tanks behind and lead with infantry heavy weapons, and your übersexy Nashorns will have to defend themselves with their MG-42s

Won't do. A tank will have to have a more or less balanced mix of firepower-protection-mobility.

For curiosity's sake, some trivia: slightly less than 500 were made, in a total of 6 battallions.

 

I would have thought StugIII or IV would have worked better. In Normandy as far as I know 2/3 of German AT guns were self-propelled - harder to hide but much less vulnerable than wheeled ones.

 

Maybe. The Jgpz IV L/70 had very good armour and protection plus a rather low silhouette, but mobility suffered; if they got careless (that is, drive slowy) they kept ruining suspensions and sticking that skewer of a low slung gun in the ground...

Compromises, compromises all the time.

 

For the 11,567th time...
Air power did not destroy the panzers directly.
It denied them mobility, shredded their comms and cut their supplies, it ravaged softskins and forced vehicles to constantly take cover, it sewed confusion and fear & generally throttled the panzers freedom of action, but it simply didn't destroy the armoured vehicles to as great an extent as legend has it. The execution was performed by ground forces (and mechanical failure).
Sorry, It's becoming like a Pavlovian response... I'll try to ignore the bee in my bonnet on that subject.

I don't know why but the Jgpzr IV/70, is a current favourite vehicle, just looks right (though it still suffered from some of the more conventional mark IV's problems).

Been reading about testing recoilless guns fitted to German tanks, not in the conventional sense of a counter charge or blast going backwards but 'standard' guns solidly mounted to the chassis with no recoil system at all, the entire firing shock going through the trunnions. If this was the way they'd have had to go in an effort to save materials it seems that Mk. IV's suffered rather badly on testing (edit: apparently not, curse my memory) and heavier vehicles were (obviously) far better at taking the strain. Got more reading to do on that though.
I know we could refer to the '67 Syrians as an exception but If the war had continued I suspect the mark IV would have looked a bit of a white elephant by late '45/46 anyway. obsolescence was building and if you stand too still in military development you get run over.

Hmmm... rambling again...
Cheers,
Adam.

 

Had the German war lasted any longer the much vaunted Tiger II, Panther etc would have disappeared in a mushroom shaped cloud. Surendering in May was a good career move.

 

Of course,

for 'run over' please substitute 'burnt to a crisp/melted'.

 

Holy shoot, you have 4 rep squares while I still have 3. Who's boots have you been licking?

Again? groan...

Plus the muzzle in the mud and busted front suspensions syndrome

Now that I'd like to see! Weld joints cracking open, bolts shaking loose, gun mount cracked up. Do you believe you would even be able to spend one single vehicle ammunition load before the thing just shook itslef all loose?

Those were glorified pillboxes only.

We're used to them, carry on!

 

Why? weren't the Russians working weel enough for your taste already?