German favour Mark IV as main battle tank?

The effect of the Red Army was a slower version of the same thing!

 

Titter ye not Kommisar!

They seem to have been quite surprised/impressed by the results. 'fixed mounting' seems a handier term than recoilless. Pz.II chassis with a Fi(?) and a panzer IV with a 75mm StuK40 (and a 75mm/L48 later). Forces on the vehicles worked out at c.130t during firing and they seem to have taken it well. Very little movement and crews reporting it tolerable.
On the IV only by round 78 was a crack in the gearbox housing noted. As interest grew a 75mm/L48 was mounted on a pz.II chassis, 67 rounds fired with the only problem being a weakening of the rear suspension. An 88/L71 was then tried on a mark IV & a stug with a 75/L48, 97 rounds fired from the stug broke the sights and radiator.
11/07/44 1000 rounds were fired from all the vehicles (and 2 others) at Kummersdorf, most (600) from the IV. Led to approval of fitting such guns in future Panther & Jagdpanther production, and a new version of the PzJgr38t but 'the course of the war' prevented work from completion. Biggest problem seems to have been sight/gun connections but this was apparently solved. (all culled from a few pages in Spielberger's Panther book, so more info would be nice).
Blah blah, etc.

Wait! There is a point relating to this thread in all this rambling!!

Remove all the 'twiddly bits' and associated processes/rare materials from the gun and that may start to make the 'base steel' available slightly more relevant to how many more tanks can be produced?

Cheers,
Adam.

 

Or we might have seen some nice confrontations between the King Tigers and the IS-3's

 

Ah, firing range figures, where all is nice and quiet. More tea, Vicar?

Nice and dandy, but what about traverse and elevation mechanisms? Are we talking Swedish S-Tanks with that pretty hydro suspension or good old Pz IVs &c.?

 

No, they appear to have been fully functioning turret mounts, even some advantages in elevation due to the greatly reduced bulk of the piece.
Objectively we can't really dismiss these engineers so easily just because they were on the ranges mate, many more less peculiar/conventional designs enjoyed far less auspicious first testings & trials.
This appears to have been serious work that convinced serious men that in view of the materials shortage it was well worth taking forward. If it was many other authors I might raise an eyebrow too, but as it's Spielberger the account is somewhat more intriguing.

Cheers,
Adam.

 

I never said it was a tank but a tank destroyer, and i said that had the Panther, Tiger and King Tiger had not eventuated and they used their weights of materials it could release in a hypothetical senario of having 6,000 Nashorns not 500 (actually it was 494 but who's counting), but imagine that the German Army having say 20 to 30 battalions of Nashorns.

 

My source also stated 494 but I like round figures

The Red Army had more than enough artillery (122mm, 152mm, katyusha and 82 and 120 mortars) to counter that threat. Against anti-tank guns (and the N. was just a sexyfied one, with tracks) artillery is the best reponse.



"Come to the Dark Side, Luke"

 

Um... Za the Dark Side loses in the next episode.

 

I still like my senario though.

Oh i have tried to come to the Dark Side but my flashlight broke. hahahahahah

 

See? I told you it was dark.

 

Germany needed Tigers and Panthers to stay ahead of their enemies also and the allies were catching up, the T-54/55 tanks for the russians and the british Centurion wouldve posed problems for the Panzerweapon even if mass producing the Mark IV couldve delayed the war, and even that's to be doubted given the air superiority of the allies. Maybe using Diesel engines couldve had a bigger impact on the war...

 

Actually your hypothesis is flawed in one regard and that is that Germany would then begin to waste valuable material on the MAUS and E-100 and they did, how many of these 150 tonne monsters could a wrecked German panzer industry produce, even after two years in development the MAUS did not have one working prototype, and the E-100 had a couple of gutted hulls.
No the question would be a massed produced medium tank in the 30 to 40 tonne range with a high velocity tapered 75mm gun, and then supply and adequate tank destroyer with the mighty 88. I'll concede that while the Panther, Tiger and King Tiger were impressive weapons they were over engineered, and because they were over engineered they were prone to massive problem that dogged them the rest of the war, while the Panzer Mk IV to many crews that operated them loved them and they were easier to maintain.

 

Well off the mark IV topic but relevant to something that cropped up on this thread, it seems the British also did some testing postwar with rigidly mounted guns:
The Tank Museum - Bovington - Library

Cheers,
Adam.

 

This is from a post early in this resurrected thread.

It brought up an interesting pic from achtungpanzer.com

http://www.achtungpanzer.com/images/pz4_pz5.jpg


tom

 

Hmmm... side & top armor under 25mm thick, sounds like one of the "soft" vehicals the aircraft trashed so often. I do know such vehicals are about as vulnerable to artillery HE/fragmentation fires as any light armor & a hit within a meter or so is trouble and a direct hit anywhere is doom, unlike medium tanks which can survive one or maybe two such hits.

 

Tom, the later Pz IVs were already way overweight with the bigger gun, 80mm armour, schurzen. Suspensions and transmissions were overloaded, and as a consequence mobility and reliability suffered. Do you want to overload the poor donkey even more?

Please explain why 25mm top armour is unsufficient, comparable to soft-skin vehicles, and why "medium tanks" are so different. Do you have any firing range figures for us?

 

Okay, I will respond to this without reading any other replies here so if I repeat whats already been said then please bear with me. I have spent endless hours at work daydreaming about this very topic when I was supposed to be doing actual work and I have to say that if you erase both the tiger and the panther as well as Hitler's ridiculous elefant tanks and the like and fielded a mark IV with the high velocity 75mm gun then the germans would have been able to put at least 5 times as many tanks into battle than they did. would this have turned the tide of the war? I doubt it, in the end, they simply had bitten off far more than they could chew.

 

In the West, the Germans could get away with just having Mk IVs but in the East, the Tiger wrecked havoc and in my opinion was the tank of choice since the Germans were already on the defensive. The Tiger could bring down the numbers before having to move and the more mobile Panthers can deal with the rest along with anti-tank guns and of course the almighty Stugs.

 

PzJr is on the money here. It would have been even better had the Tiger been perfected. Had it been more reliable/durable it would have had a bigger impact than 5,000 - 10,000 more Mark IVs IMO.

 

agreed with all but what if the germans had fielded the up-gunned mark IV in the early stages of the war? I know they used every tiger to the utmost advantage but still...one wonders what could have been...*sigh*