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this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Its arguable that a significant part of the defeat of the Germans on the Eastern Front was due to the Germans loving to over-engineer things. Especially tanks. And had an obsession with having big guns on them. To the point they could only go 5-10 mph and if anything broke on it it would have to go back to Germany because the design was so weird/complex. Cant remember if it was the Rat or not, but there was even a tank where if you wanted to shoot the cannon somebody had to get out and unbolt it from the hull because it was so big it made it unwieldy to drive.
Meanwhile Soviets just said “Haha T-34 factory go brrrr”, and was easy enough to make and use that there are stories of workers completing the tanks and driving them straight to the front. Illiterate farmer Vasily from the Urals could help weld on parts and then go take part in the fight.
A video that I commonly direct people to for a good overview of tank production in WW2 is here.
While the mainstay German tanks like Panzer III and Panzer IVs were not strictly speaking overengineered, they did suffer from the German production pipeline not being properly industrialized or designed for scale.
The Soviets quickly adopted and adapted to copy the American production line concepts, with the modification that factories were centralized rather than relying on very much secondary production. For a nation without a large pre-existing automobile industry, the logistical achievement was impressive.
T-34s, especially wartime production T-34s were not great tanks. They did enough to blunt some of the fighting, but the undersung hero of tank combat in WW2 were old fashioned anti-tank guns, which while far less exciting than tanks battles, took out more tanks than enemy tanks did.
There is really no production choice the Germans could have made in the mid war that would have turned the tide. They simply hadn’t started the war with the appropriate factories and their ability to build those factories continually degraded. There were too many cooks in the kitchen regarding tank production, so even if an individual did come up with a great plan to restructure production, it would be mired in the factional infighting of the German military.
While there are stories of workers T-34s driving straight from sieged factories onto the battlefield, I’ll emphasize the fact that those are stories, and are apocryphal at best. The Soviet Union after WW2 was very eager to spread aggrandizing stories about the great fight.
They were good enough that they completely outclassed the Panzer III and IV that were sent against them at the start.
"The Panzer IV was partially succeeded by the Panther medium tank, which was introduced to counter the Soviet T-34, " https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer_IV
"a direct reaction to the encounters with the Soviet T-34 and KV-1 tanks and against the advice of Wa Prüf 6.[Notes 1][12] The T-34 outclassed the existing models of the Panzer III and IV.[13][14] At the insistence of General Heinz Guderian, a special tank commission was created to assess the T-34"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_tank
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-34?wprov=sfla1
Another fun bit
Meanwhile America questioned whether the crew should even survive firing a shot.
The Sherman had the best crew survivability of any tank in the war.
I mean… stepping out of a molten disabled husk after it is destroyed by a single shot from an enemy too distant to even see is neat, I guess. What a weird cope.
Username checks out.
I am tickled that the perception of Shermans being flimsy death traps can be traced back to a guy who worked at depots of battle damaged Shermans. It’s like, yeah of course that guy only saw the destroyed Sherman tanks, why would he ever see the functional ones?
No, the stories came from Patton who publicly didn't want his troops demoralized but privately reported on how mismatched the Sherman was against the Tiger.
"Even when upgraded to a 76mm, the M4’s armament could not penetrate the frontal armor of the more heavily armored German tanks and assault guns. Therefore, standard tactics for a five-tank platoon engaging German Tiger and Panther tanks required one section to draw the Germans’ fire, while the other section maneuvered to the flank and engaged the German tanks from the side or rear. Such tactics were not morale-builders for tank crews."
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/m4-tiger.htm
It’s not visible to you, but Kbin users can see who downvotes them. They were being sincere.
I'm well aware, on both accounts. They were sincere, and correct, and you have fallen for either Belton Cooper's stories, or stories of people who have fallen for his stories. Shermans did have one of the best safety records of the war, and the laments of Sherman crews have been greatly, and I mean greatly exaggerated.
The Sherman was adequate for the task of defeating the thoroughly mismanaged Germans. It was created to defeat an enemy that had lost the ability to effectively engage in most forms of AA, reconnaissance, and coordination. It was effectively the same as a named boxer fighting nobodies to bolster their record. Was it a bad tank? No. Was it a good one? No. It was adequate. Numerous and adequate.
I’m sincerely not sure what you’re referring to, I was joking about its design philosophy involving tailored solutions to exact specifications.
They sure loved their super weapons.
It was probably a factor, but I don’t think a significant one. You could make the argument that if they made more mass-producible armor that they could have put more on the front, but that would have likely further strained the serious supply line issues they were facing. They also were hurting for industrial materials and fuel, so just building more wasn’t really in the cards.
It was, especially by mid-war a no win scenario for German tank production. They could mass produce only Panzer IIIs and run out of material and importantly crews, or they could swing heavy into making super tanks and not have enough of them to do anything of value.
Both were bad choices that couldn’t be fixed by engineers.