US armor casualties

We were allied with the Soviets, they killed ~30 million. We also killed about 12 million Indians, that makes us not too different from Germany. Japan killed more civilians in worse ways than Germany did, but they don't get the bad rep. Countries have always done genocide, it's just that Germany got away with it. And I don't see it as a one side reality, it's point of view. It's like your saying it's an infantryman's fault if he shoots a civilian as he's taking fire from everywhere when the Humvee is going as fast as it can out of an ambush. No one knows what can happen in a split second, yet the it's shown that he was reckless and killed an innocent.

And yes the Nazis were horrible, but the Germans can still be admired for their effort to fight for their country.

 

I don't really think that equivalences between various forms of mass death can really be done. But more generally I don't think being willing to kill on order is an inherently admirable quality. It's really a bit silly to admire someone for just trying really hard, and not make the distinction about whether he's trying to save people's lives, trying to get a bonus, trying to keep the Nazi regime and all the bloodshed going for as long as possible so that Hitler could get his gotterdammerung, or trying to kill exterminate as many subhumans as possible so that there would be plenty of living space for the thousand year reich.

But okay, that's departing the topic here.

 

I admire them in the same way that I would admire the skills of a sportsman. That it involves killing, well, the guys that admire the american army them too admire killing.

 

lol admire killing.... tell that to a combat vet!

 

I assume you're talking the Soviet Army? Don't equate sheer numbers for combat power. Had the Soviet Union tried to push the Anglo/American allies too hard in 1945, you would have really seen the most formidable fighting force in the 20th Century. A quote attributed to Stalin "Quantity has a quality all of its own." is true and Stalin's quantitative advantage allowed him to overcome Germany's qualitative advantage. Had the Soviets been foolish enough to press the Western allies they would have experienced a quantitative material advantage that they had no hope of matching. The West also possessed the scientists, engineers, resources and industrialists to produce a qualitative edge even greater than that the Germans enjoyed.

 

It's one thing to admire commitment to training, professionalism, dedication to one's convictions, courage, and a willingness to lay down one's life in the service of others. To revere the German Army because they sported snazzy uniforms and "Looked bad" is simply immature. But to admire killing because it is done ruthlessly and without remorse is perverted. I'll put it even more bluntly; it is sick.

The Wehrmacht had it's share of professionalism, courage, and other traits, but no more so than other Armies. It was generally a good fighting force, but, ultimately, it must be remembered that it lost the majority of it's battles and proved ineffective once it lost the initiative. It most certainly was not composed of "supermen", as some seem to think.

To exaggerate the Wehrmacht's effectiveness to the point of deliberately distorting history serves no good purpose.

 

You might want to pick up a copy of a new book by Gene Salecker titled "Rolling Thunder Against The Rising Sun", subtitled "The Combat History of US Army Tank Battalions in the Pacific in World War II". I'm not sure just how good a historian Salecker is (he has American tankers in the Philippines receiving the news of Pearl Harbor on "their transistor radios"!), but he seems to stick to factual data and interviews of veterans. At least he includes a lot of quoted statements from men who were there. There is a bibliography and 44 pages of notes, so he apparently did fair bit of research.

 

Read that:

- Mythos revisited: American Historians and German Fighting Power in the Second World War.

"The problem with Dupuy's analysis, from the point of view of his critics, is that it demonstrates an average German combat effectiveness superiority factor of about 23 percent. More importantly, the study results indicate that this superiority was manifest not only in the conditions prevalent in Italy, but also in the very different situations presented by the Allied pursuit of the German army in France during the summer and autumn of 1944, and in the Ardennes in December of that year. Yet while the focus Dupuy's critics has been upon the alleged unfairness of the study results, the author and his associates directed their attention instead to the "problems" that the analysis uncovered. One of these "problems" concerned the role of Allied airpower. On the one hand, it was apparent that most deviations from the norm (of German combat superiority) established by the overall study occurred where Allied airpower was either unemployed or inconsequential; on the other, the study results showed that Allied success was only assured (with some exceptions) where their overall power superiority was very great. In cases where the power ratio favored the Allies only marginally, the Germans were usually successful. In situations where the power ratio suggested an indeterminate outcome, the Germans were invariably the "winner", just as they were when the ratio was in their favor."

The German army in WW2 was the best of the 20th century. Only defeated by the blunt numerical superiority of the Red Army, the largest army ever assembled.

(and the American army never was a factor in the defeat of the Wehrmacht, since "as is well known, over the course of the war the Red Army inflicted 90 percent of the casualties suffered by the Wehrmacht, namely 4,900,000 German dead and wounded in the east, as against 580,000 suffered in North-West Europe, Italy and Africa.", I would guess that American forces are responsible for about 250.000-300.000 casualties, or 5% of the total)

 

If this is true, then why do you feel compelled to systematically select only those statistics which tend to support your questionable conclusions, while ignoring strong factual data which supports the opposite conclusion. This deliberate distortion of historical fact implies that you do not wish to let the facts "speak for themselves" and prefer to assert hyperbole in defense of a naked and unwarranted admiration of an unsuccessful (by any objective measure) and short-lived military organization. That you can find revisionist historians who agree with your exaggerated esteem of the German Army comes as no surprise; there seems to be no dearth of such individuals who wish to pursue such an agenda.

 

1- It is not and agenda: The facts are that the German army was extremely effective. The battle of France in 1940 was a victory of epic proportions: The defeat of 4 countries and 4 million men in 40 days with only 140,000 casualties is a feat never equaled in military history.

2- Revisionist historians? All good historians know that the Wehrmacht was the best armed forces in the world. Defeated only by blunt attrition of its rather incompetent opponents. Any decent commander of the western allies could have reached Berlin before the Red Army. In fact, the american participation in the european theater was only a sideshow.

3- So do you think that the american army was better man per man than the german army? Them why the Americans only won a battle with overwhelming superiority in manpower, matériel and airpower.

4- You that are blinded by your excessive patriotism and cannot see things objectively. I have no emotional connections with WW2, since I have no relatives that fought there and I don't have any feelings of patriotism for any country. I admire the feats of the German army for the same reasons that I would admire the feats of Alexander the Great, Hannibal or Napoleon. Like Hannibal and Napoleon, the Germans were eventually defeated by overwhelming odds.

5- Interesting that the western allies lost 12.500 tanks to kill about 130.000 germans (the average KIA rate in the western front was 10.000 per month, plus 3.000 soldiers that died of wounds). The soviet union lost 24.000 tanks in 1944 and managed to kill 500.000 germans, a better ratio of loss/kills.

 

One wonders then why you lie and distort figures in order to prove your 'point' if you are objective.
You are even at it over on AHF and have been caught out there claiming that Germany built more shipping than the UK!
Axis History Forum • View topic - German vs. Allied technology

 

Can we get this back to my OP, please? I don't give a good G*DD**N about your take on political c**p on any side in the war. Not in THIS thread, which, as the OP, I hereby claim ownership of.

I am very curious as to the effectiveness of the IJA's AT weapons, and what sort they were. I seem to remember something along the lines of a US Civil War naval torpedo with some lucky shmoo using a high explosive shaped charge on a stick lunging out from the underbrush and slamming the bomb against the hull or track of the tank. Bye bye tread, Bye bye Lucky Shmoo, I guess.
Did the IJA have any good AT GUNS, though? I know there are threads and threads about the "best" AT gun of the war (another way of saying your *favorite* AT gun of the war, lol) all over the place. But what sort did the Japanese have? I gather that their tank tech was, as someone posted, "stuck in the 1930's". Was their AT tech in the same place? Did they have any effective tank busting aircraft? Didn't at least one IJA fighter have a cannon or two mounted in weapon bays under the wing roots? That would make for an unhappy Sherman for sure, no?

On a somewhat related topic, can anyone tell me what US tanks were the most deployed in the PTO? Was it the Sherman with the torch or a lighter tank or the Sherman with the GI cannon or the heavy assault gun (was that a 105mm gun?).

Okay, look, I KNOW this is rambling, but my entry wound is bothering me so I loaded up on vicodin ES and when I do that I tend to type faster than my brain bothers to filter. At least I don't have a migraine. And for those curious, I have taken 37.5 mg of Hydrocodone. Yes, I am looped. Thanks Moderator, btw, for threatening to shut down the thread. It really lost it in there. I don't like talking political stuff too much as it generates incredibly vicious and vituperative comments that I don't need in my life -- and especially NOT on this board that I come to for fun and relaxation.

Ciao one and all.
Hummel.

 

AFAIK the IJA had very poor A/T guns, IIRC there were a 37mm inspired from the Rheinmetall Pak 36 "doorknocker" and a 47mm weapon, introduced after the beginning of the war,
Japanese 47-mm AT Gun, WWII Tactical and Technical Trends, No. 43, January 27, 1944 (Lone Sentry) that probably compares favourably with the Italian 47 or Soviet 45 but was inferior to the Pak 38 and so so totally inadequate against late war armour.

They partly made up the deficiency with improvised weapon systems, made up of whatever was available, explosives on a pole were just one of them, AFAIK the, elsewhere pervasive, "Moltov" petrol bomb was not a favorite probably due to gasoline not being as readily available to the troops as in other more motor oriented armies.

This basically meant that any Allied tank in PTO or Burma use except the M2/M3/M5 light was practically immune to Japanes A/T guns under most circumstances, even a 1940 vintage Matilda was a "500 lb gorilla" as long as it found a way to get in range in the horrible tank country most of IJA battles took place in.

BTW always wondered why the Panzerfaust was not copied by the Japanese, it would have been more effective than 90% of the contraptions they used and did nor require a huge industrial effort to produce, lucky for US tankers it was not. The Germans sent some advanced weapon designs to Japan but apparently the PF was not one of them.