Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "MAUS! Was Hitler right to build the super-heavy tanks of WW2?" video.

  1. A one hundred tonne tank, is senseless too. It presents many more logistical and tactical nightmares before it even moves; how can it cross most road bridges, most which could carry that weight. How do you load it onto railcars, if the tank is too heavy for the railcars and too wide for most rail bridges and tunnels, and so on.
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  2. Normally rational people can and do make irrational decisions. To think otherwise, this is chop-logic; i'm blue therefore i'm not red.
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  3. Well, Gudarian the technocratic expert on armoured warfare himself, either makes a grossly absurd argument (meaning that he's lying badly) or is genuinely and shockingly stupid about this; You need a force of numbers in the immediate battlefield to prevail, so producing more tanks (and yes this requires an even larger and more robust logistics train to deploy them) makes more sense than worrying much about their technical capabilities, if they are not too obselete. Further, if you worry about being overwhelmed by enemy armoured counterattacks, deploy more anti-tank guns, or redesign their range and armour-piercing effectiveness. Easier and cheaper to mass-produce this than design a new tank.
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  4. While Hitlers political-economic desires make some sense, like the Reich needs oil for economic and mobility reasons, his goals were absurd. Even if the Nazies took Astrakhan and Maykop, how would they get the oil underground there (we presume the Soviets would have taken or burnt their stocks at the refineries), can he ship or freight it far towards a locale where the Reich could refine and redistribute it? The Reich struggled to get sufficient food and manufactured stocks of it's own mainly from Germany to the front line-troops. Pure fantasy, even for the time.
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