Favourite German tank ?

So you think the Sherman is superior to the Tiger, King Tiger and Panthers? Vow, I am speechless, you must know something I don't. Perhaps you can enlighten us?

 

Oh no, don't make him do it again... Phelps we can all understand that you like the Sherman, and that you are convinced that it wasn't as bad as we all think it was, please don't get into a fight with anyone over the obvious.

Liang, you shouldn't do this to Danyel, it could ruin the mood.

 

Tiger I, just because it's closest to the coolest mortar around! the Tiger-Morser (38cm RW61 auf Sturmmorser Tiger)
It fired rocket-assisted ammunition man!

(could only find model pic)

 

Here's one. Check out the shell!!

This isn't a real tank though, it's an assault gun and it was never effective. Only 18 were ever made.

 

Hmmmmmm but they weren't still making King Tigers after the war,and few examples were left in working condition.They couldn't really do much with the few King Tigers left. Imagine if there were thousands of Panthers left over and still being made as was the case with Shermans and T34/85s. You'll note that some Panzer IVs were used in the Middle East conflicts and I don't think anybody can say a Panzer IV was superior to a King Tiger. :lol:

By the way,I voted for the Tiger I in the poll. :smok:

 

Oooh, Lyndon beware! You're making enemies.

 

Yes, you could say it was the most advanced tank of WWII, but it would look out of place: its profile was very high. The modern MBT's are all low slung

 

after the war the french press in to service tigers I and panthers

 

A development made after the IS and Pershing series. It is funny that because the Allies continued their own best designs of late-war tank warfare, the ultimately most influential pre-WW2 design was the KV1 rather than any other WW2 tank. Sloped armour was incorporated into this basic design to make it as well-shaped as the T34, but the chassis for one thing and the hull remained largely recognisable.
The advance of German armour technology was more or less wasted when the Allies started reaching these conclusions themselves, years later and probably inspired by German work but no by German tanks.

 

Well there you go then. The few that were left over were soon made good use of. They weren't discarded if they could be used. It's also true to say that the French post war AMX 13 based it's gun on the Panther.

The only reason why Shermans and T34s lasted into following decades was because they were cheap to produce, bog standard and there were MILLIONS of them left over( ). No way on earth can anybody seriously compare either of these tanks to the masterpiece that was the Panther or the awesome power that was the King Tiger. Imagine the King Tiger with an upgraded post war engine as well as all those other sophisticated features that were on the drawing board and would have been implimented later on in 1945. :smok:

 

That's alright. When the shooting starts I'll make like a Sherman and get the hell out of here!

(Only joking about the Sherman. I like them really.)

 

Did you know that pretty much every German tank had a higher top speed than the Sherman? I'll zoom by in my Panther then...

 

Pff, yeah, on road. Then you go offroad and not many German tanks could keep up with the Sherman.

 

So they shoot in the bacl while runnign off. Cowardly but effective up to about three kiloneters.

 

If I recall, it was the Germans doing most of the retreating by the time the Sherman came into service.

 

A 'fighting retreat' I would call it.The Germans in the west were outnumbered with no air cover by that time.Take all those Panthers,Tigers,King Tigers,Jagdpanthers,Jagdpanzers,Stugs and Pz IVs away from the Eastern Front and put them in the defence of Western Germany and lets see what would have happened.It took the western Allies nearly SEVEN months after Normandy to get across the Rhine and this was against comparatively weak opposition.

Whatever the dispicable politics of the Third Reich were,you cannot deny the excellence of the German ground forces throughout the entire war.

 

Yeah, sorry. How stupid of me. I was thinking that supply shortages and other logistical problems are what was holding the western allies back, but I see clearly now. Theres no way that could have been the case.

 

Supply problems? Logistical problems ?? Have you any idea how small the area from Paris to the Rhine is? About 200 miles. 250 max. 7 months to do that??? Now compare it to Russia! How come the German army managed to cover all that gound from the Polish border to deep within the heart of Russia in a couple of months in 1941, mostly without any decent roads and mainly with horse drawn supply? You are talking almost three times that distance.

How come the Soviets took back all that gound from Bobruysk to the gates of Warsaw within a couple of months in the summer of 1944? That was about 400 miles. The Soviets were fighting FAR superior German units and numbers there than the western Allies did from Sept 1944 to Feb/March 1945 (Ardennes apart).

Granted, both of these advances took place in the summertime so lets look at this then. In 3 months from Feb to May 1944 the Soviets advanced 400 miles from Cherkassy in the Ukraine to Tirgu-Frumos in Romania. This was in the worst conditions possible, with snow followed by mud and slush, again with some of the bitterest fighting of the war.

How come all of the above was achieved yet the comparatively 'modern' roads and railways of western Europe presented so many supply and logistical problems to the western Allies? It's something I have never quite grasped.

By the way, my grandfather was a British para during Normandy so I'm not biased towards the Germans/ Soviets.

 

Never mind the fact that the Western Allies powered their advance souly by supplies that had to spend weeks on ships to even get to Europe, with German U-boats parked in the gulf of Mexico and off the U.S. East coast messing up supply routs. The Russians had entire fleets of 2 1/2 ton trucks (lend leased I might add) to transport all their supplies by land to the front.

 

No, that doesn't count. The only problem the Allies encountered when it came to supply was the sloppy transport from the beaches to the front, as it was continuously arriving in Normandy. I think it is a very good point made by Lyndon that the Russians had far greater stretches of land to cover and still did better. However it needs to be added that most Soviet offensives also petered out after a while beause the logistics were all fouled up. Never more than a few months though.
The Allies were held up at the German border, by the Siegfried line, for more than a reasonable time. The fact that the Germans beat back at them caused another two month's delay, but this was made good by the eased later progress because of weakened German forces.