Comments by "TheThirdMan" (@thethirdman225) on "Flak 88: One-Shot Kill? How Effective was it really?" video.

  1. Chris_Wooden_Eye So you support the notion that the 88mm was a one-shot-one-kill weapon? Because what you are saying there is that circumstances don’t matter. That is the whole point of this video.
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  2. One of the biggest mistakes - and I have been guilty of this in the past - is people latching onto a comment and holding it up as irrefutable. A notable example of this is one which comes from the war diaries of a New Zealand tank unit in Italy which claimed that one of their tanks was destroyed by a Tiger from a range of three kilometres. This is an extremely popular claim among Tiger and 88 fanbois. Now, while this can’t be completely disproved, there are so many obvious flaws that it is impossible to take seriously. I have tried to find data on extreme range claims - anything over 2,000 metres - and have found next to nothing. So the reliability of such a shot - “one shot; one kill”, to use that rather worn out post-war Americanism - must be considered extremely low, especially in the light of Zaloga’s figures which are quoted here. The second point that gamers and spec sheet warriors never talk about is the confusion and emotional stress of being in combat. This can cause problems with judgement of range and even type of enemy vehicle. It can also mean that the unit saw a vehicle oh a hill a couple of kilometres away but missed the PaK 40 crew hidden in the hedgerow 400 metres away. What with all the other noise and explosions going on concurrently, those understandable mistakes have a cumulative effect on reliability.
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  3. Don’t forget the differences in the way kills were counted. Zaloga goes into a bit of detail on this using Kursk as an example.
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