Comments by "TheThirdMan" (@thethirdman225) on "Determining the Most Effective Tanks in World War 2 – Discussion of Factors" video.

@Ivane_Maskhulia You are not well informed.
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@Grundy Malone Read Steve Zaloga's book "Armored Champion". Then read about the British operations with the Sherman in North Africa. Then read about the US and British operations in Italy. All of them say basically the exact opposite of what you claim, Wikipedia or not. And please make sure you are quoting in context. There were at least two radically different engines in the Sherman in WWII alone. Which ones do you say burnt out and when? "Or read the book death traps." This is arguably the most discredited book on the subject that has ever been written. Not only does it ignore some basic realities. For example, there were probably no more than 1,300 US tank fatalities in WWII and the US tank regiments had some of the best survival rates of the Allied forces, wet stowage cured the fire problem, etc. Finally, the Sherman remained in service with the Israeli Army until the 1980s and the Chilean army until the 1990s. "Tiger tanks can attack over mountains" What? I mean really: what? The Tiger was more of a liability than an asset. Read anything about the structure of the Heer and you'll immediately see why. And which Tiger variant are you referring to? Which battle did the King Tiger win? It didn't win anything. In fact, its combat introduction was a disaster. Read about the battle of Ogledow. The Tiger II looked like a winner on paper but it achieved virtually nothing.
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@Grundy Malone "You suggest to me to read some modern garbage books, claim that the guy in charge of damage reports on american tanks is discredited," It is not a garbage reference. It is a good reference but you hate being proved wrong. Since you have one reference and can't quote it, I'll show you something you don't know about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH3OGUHy5OI https://tankandafvnews.com/2015/01/27/zaloga_interview/ But remember one thing; Belton Cooper was not a tankie. He was an ordnance officer. "the tigers could attack shermans on terrain virtually impassable to shermans." And vice versa. Listen Moosh, if you're going to make direct spec. sheet comparisons between the Tiger and the Sherman, be prepared to be laughed at, especially if you're going to quote Wikipedia. The Tiger wa a super heavy tank. The Sherman was a medium tank. They fulfilled two completely different roles. I'd suggest you find out what they are but I know you won't. You might also like to know that the Shermans did very well in Italy, despite the presence of Tigers, on top of which is the fact there are only three known occasions when American tanks ran up against Tigers in France. The first was a win for the Sherman, the second was a loss for the Pershing and the third wasn't even a battle because the Tiger was already on a flat bed rail car. "The raw data of Death Traps is incontrovertible" Like hell. This is why his book is so controversial. He talks about losses but just watch that video from Chieftain - a man who is paid to research this stuff - and then tell me the Sherman was a death trap. Fun fact for you: America sent 50,000 tank crewmen overseas in WWII. Not all were in Shermans. What would you say about the M3 Stuart? Of those 50,000, approximately 1,400 were killed, as many as a third of them outside the tank at the time. It even includes people who were killed on sentry duty. In any case, that gives a fatality rate of <3%. "it can't address the raw factual data that says the shermans got stomped on tank on tank battles, struggling even against the panther 4 in spite of material superiority in every way and the fact that most of the german tanks they faced that were lost did so due to lack of fuel." Give me an example where there Shermans got stomped on in tank battles. Go on - a historical example please. No more internet bullshit. Show me where they struggled against the PzKpfw IV. "English put a huge 90 mm cannon on the sherman which gave it much more firepower, but even then it still was terrible off road and not reliable in real world use cases even by the time of korea." They didn't. They put a QF 17-pounder on it and called it the Firefly. The 17-pounder was about 76mm, not 90mm. And they didn't use it in Korea. They used the Centurion. "The biggest flaw of course was it had a mere 50 mm of armor which was totally unsuitable." You left out the fact that it was sloped at 60 degrees. But you would, wouldn't you? "even the late pazer Ivs had 80mm up front." Which was vertical. You left that bit out too. But you would, wouldn't you? "When used by the russians the sherman sank into the mud in the spring, wouldn't start in the winter, and broke down in the summer after light driving." Source?
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@Grundy Malone Do you have a source for any of those claims about the Sherman? Can you name a battle the King Tiger took part in, much less won?
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NedYarbNexus That was Zaloga’s verdict for the end of the war. He made some very specific choices for other parts of the war. The StuG III and the SOMUA S35 were notable examples. It also depends on the terrain and other conditions in which the tank was expected to fight. Zaloga’s book blows away a lot of internet myth and silliness.
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@alexgeorgescu1843 I tend to agree with pretty much all of this. Not sure American logistics were any better than anyone else's but they were certainly kept at full stretch running Atlantic convoys and yet they still managed. I have wondered how many Shermans are still sitting on the bottom of the Atlantic, having never made it to Europe. One thing though; apply the same thing to the Soviet Union and it looks even worse. A huge amount of that nation was overrun. Factories - 1,500 of them - were transported across the Urals and much of the skilled workforce was in uniform. Work in those factories was frequently carried out by children and elderly people, often in appalling conditions. This is why I tend to cut them a bit of slack when it comes to some of the criticisms of the T-34. I realise we're talking about the Sherman but I'm sure you can see what I mean.
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@alexgeorgescu1843 "Most soldiers had seen the weirmar Republic and had not accepted nazi ideolgy contrary to their youth. This is one of the reason they adapted so well after Ww2." No way.I suggest you read, "After Hitler" by Michael Jones, "The End" by Ian Kershaw and "Savage Continent" by Keith Lowe. They will give you a good appreciation of what life in Germany was like after the war. It is quite poorly understood. Also worth reading is Joachim C. Fest's seminal book "Hitler". In this, Fest explains how about 95% of the German population were happy to go along with Hitler, especially after France in 1940. The German ethos was different from the Soviet but don't get any ideas about it being more humanitarian in outlook. The difference between the Germans and the Soviet Union was that the Soviets were in a state of what has been called Total War. Of all the other combatants in WWII, perhaps only Britain had a similar view. Theirs was an attitude of fight or die fighting.
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+AmurTiger "While the Russians were very good at making an excellent tank in terms of balancing and maximizing the armor/mobility/armament trifecta they didn't have a clear idea of how the tank should be used and made no effort to make it easy to use." This is totally false in every possible respect. No army in the world outside of Germany was more familiar with the tactics of Blitzkrieg than the Red Army. It has even been said that the Red Army was even more wired for that style of mobile warfare than the Wehrmacht. This was because the Red Army commanders trained in Germany and the Luftwaffe trained in the Soviet Union in the pre-war years. Read about the Treaty of Rapallo (1922) and the subsequent strengthening of ties between the two nations. Military co-operation between them was extremely high, right up to 1940. The reasons why the Red Army performed badly in the first few months of the German invasion are widely known: intelligence failure due to Stalin's obstinance, German air supremacy and lack of radios in the Red Army, to name a few.
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AmurTiger I thought I already had. Your claim was that the Red Army didn't know how to use tanks. I have refuted that and added some other issues such as German air supremacy, lack of radios and intel failures as contributory factors in the disastrous defeats they suffered early on. I doubt if anything I could present would meet your criteria for what you call "hard facts" except that everything I have said is verifiable. What further information are you looking for? Pre-war German/Soviet cooperation is very easy to establish. The more relevant point being that they knew how to use tanks. I'd have to look pretty hard to find where I read the bit about the Red Army being arguably more focused on mobility than the Germans. I can't cite chapter and verse on everything I read. That wouldn't be healthy... It could have been any one of half a dozen books I've read in the last couple of years.
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+flo low "The t-34 had no chance in 1 vs 1 or even 1vs 3 fights The only problem the Tiger had, was the enemy air supiriority. The russians had over 1.5 years no real answer to the Tiger." Not true. Not true at all. The Tiger was a grossly overrated tank and ze Germans had air superiority in most places until after Kursk. Its contribution to the German war effort was minimal and the kill claims have been grossly over stated. I suggest you read the last paragraph of this closely: https://tankandafvnews.com/2015/01/27/zaloga_interview/ The technical superiority of the Tiger is cited out of all proportion to its role. The main tanks on the Eastern Front were the StuG III and the PzKpfw IV and they did almost all the work but the Tiger gets all the attention. And what for? Tank v tank engagements which didn't contribute much to the overall situation. Most of a tank's work is infantry support, which might include anti-tank work but in pretty low proportion (like about 10-15%).
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There's a fair bit missing from these criteria: too much to form an accurate assessment of the value of individual tank designs. The first is the suitability for the task. Most people have a pretty poor understanding of what tanks are supposed to do. Even today, the main role of tanks is infantry support but very few people understand that. Video games which have an armour theme are really little more than FPS games with tracks. That means that there is next to no educative value because there is little need to act in concert with infantry and points are scored for blowing up enemy tanks. Invariably, personal prejudices reign supreme and the same old arguments come up about which tank could destroy what tank at what range, kill ratios, quality versus quantity and other spurious arguments. I have always maintained that the Germans went down a rabbit hole of developing tanks which were largely unsuited to infantry support, meaning that the so-called "big cats" were biased the wrong way to be of any real value to the Heer. That meant that while they got all the credit for destruction of Allied tanks, they achieved very little in military terms and at great cost. Without assessing their suitability for the task, a lot of this stuff - but by no means all - is relatively unimportant
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REgamesplayer Breakthrough cannot be achieved by tanks alone. That is the point. It was a notable weakness in the British Army, for example, because they stuck to the armoured division model instead of the more effective combined arms strategy. The main point I was making was that the German tanks which attract so much attention are also the ones which were the most expensive and complicated to build, hardest to transport, least reliable, placed the greatest strain on the supply chain and were least suited to mobile warfare. This is because they were designed by people who did not have to deploy them in combat. A tank doesn’t exist in isolation. The PzKpfw IV was designed from the ground up to work in a mobile warfare scenario. It was designed to work in specific Panzer units which had very specific ratio of men and vehicles. When you build a weapon like that, you commit you army to a certain style of operation and certain demands on supply. To go from the IV to the Tiger, for example, turned all that on its head, not because the army wanted or needed to do it but because they had these behemoths foisted upon them. That committed them to a style of warfare they didn’t want or need. They were unreliable and difficult to field and supply, making the army, on the whole, less efficient.
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Trevor319 Sorry to say ir but this is the kind of thing he’s trying to get away from. He points out that there are many, many other factors in the success of a tank, besides penetration or armour.
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@alexgeorgescu1843 My understanding is that, after the invasion, Stalin had some of the forward commanders shot for failing to take appropriate action but to the best of my knowledge, that was the last time he did it. It was, after all, partly his own fault. After his two week retreat to his Dacha, Stalin recovered and quickly appreciated that he needed all the commanders and all the motivation he could find. It is also true that later on, rather than holding them in an iron grip, he was increasingly flexible, in stark contrast to Hitler. Stalin gave Zhukov full authority for the planning at Kursk and Rokossovsky full authority for the planning of Operation Bagration. I have little doubt that the consequences of failure for both men would have been extreme but he trusted them just enough to let them do what they were good at. It is also significant to me, at least, that the Soviet hierarchy and its attitude to casualties is pretty poorly understood. Zhukov always regretted the numbers of casualties that the Red Army suffered and frequently excoriated junior commanders for rushing headlong into piecemeal attacks on heavily defended positions, suffering catastrophic losses in the process. It was certainly true that they were running to Stalin's timetable but the most obvious thing to do it rarely the best and fable of the tortoise and the hare springs to mind.
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@alexgeorgescu1843 Incidentally, I have never considered the possibility of two or three times as many Tigers and Panthers since Germany was industrially not capable of that level of production, even allowing for Allied bombing. If Germany committed to building a tank that was not able to be produced in significant numbers, more fool them.
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@alexgeorgescu1843 The Soviet evacuation order - the one that moved 1,503 factories - was issued on June 23, 1941 and was underway by early August. It was planned many years ahead but the implementation was very quick and spectacularly successful. It was one of the most successful undertakings of WWII and many factories were back in full production by the end of 1941.
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