Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Military History Visualized" channel.

  1.  @filipmisko9363  There are a few imported from south east asia. And more can be probably be bought from North Korea.
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  2. First of all, the greatest change in warfare was the use of barbed wire which was totally impossible to get through without endless bombardment of high explosive shells, and even with huge bombardment it could be a dangerous project to attack across no mans land. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hQ-otfHZx8 Secondly, the machine gun had dramatically increased the firepower of the infantry so a few machine guns could produce the same wall of bullets flying around in the air as an entire regiment of line infantry. And artillery now had new types of shells and they could hit targets beyond visable range - eventhough that was rarily practical since there was no radio that could be used to direct the fire onto the target. So even if you somehow manage to punch a big hole into the enemy land and take much terrain you would not be able defend yourself that well against an enemy counter-attack. Your artillery don't know where to shoot because they cannot see the enemy. And dragging machine guns into position would take time. And if the enemy act swiftly you will not have the time to dig in and form an organized defence, but the men would rather being scattered just after the breakthrough and vulnerable to a counter-attack. And the lack of communication would be problematic for the men at the front who don't know what to do. And the commander who is sitting miles behind the frontline didn't know what is going on at the front - since there was no radio communication and it took about 8 hours on average for an order from the General headquarters to reach the troops at the frontline, and it took an equal amount of time to get information back to the HQ. So the Commander could not exploit his succeful attack or sending in reinforcements to defend the taken terrain from an enemy counterattack. So with other words, Technology were greatly biased in favour of the defenders. And what retarded Generals did was to attack and attack again over and over, and thinking that just a little more men and guns would make the next attack likely to succed. And all this lack of imagination costed millions of lives for nothing. Cadornas 12 Isonzo offensives are the most clear example of this failure to learn from past mistakes. And accusing the General of incompetence is simply a too mild accusation. They are really more guilty of a criminal waste of their own solidiers lives. And Haig, Hötzendorf, Cadorna and Falkenhayn all deserves to have their names thrown into the mud. I can excuse some gigantic failures on their part because of the huge changes technology and tactics, but at some point those idiots should have learned. And their stupid shit never did anything to bring their own country to victory. The solution then came with the tank that could drive through the barbed wire, the radio that allowed the attackers to call in artillery support and reinforcements, and to get fresh orders that wasn't totally outdated. And the German stormtrooper tactics also gave the solidiers at the frontline much more freedom to make their own decisions instead of following outdated orders that no longer made sense in the actual period of time. So the Germans could act with much more flexibility than their enemies, and the stormtroops also had much more firepower at their disposal in the weapons they carried, so they were much more flexible than the ordinary troops that had to make the trouble of coordinating things with the artillery and wasting time. So the German army had turned everything upside down. Instead of bombarding an area for weeks and alerting the enemy, the Germans instead made a short bombardment and used the element of surprise. And instead of leading men from behind the frontline by a dumbass General who knew nothing about the war, they gave experienced NCOs who knew the war and knew their troops the task of deciding on how the war should be fought. So the Germans could act much faster and their enemies, and the allied orders became more and more outdated as the German rolled up their defensive lines. And they were always a step ahead.
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  3. Well Germany didn't own Austria or Czechoslvakia and had no stolen Czech tanks. And the new German army and air force was just 1 year old..so I guess Germanys chances were pretty bad.
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  4. @stopfear I feel kind of the same way towards the red army. The sacrifices of the Russian people and the men who served in the Russian military are worthy of respect and deep greatfulness. They liberated the death camps in Poland and brought the end to one of the most evil regimes in history. But it is shameful how the Russian government treated its own military, with Stalins purge, and then with all punishment of soviet solidiers who had surrendered. And the blocking detachments, penal batallions, and wasteful incompetence of mens lives for the sake of scoring some political points. And the Red army were never forced into dicipline and prevented from commiting massive amounts of rapes and murder in Germany, and misteating German prisoners of war. It is shameful how the Soviets gave von Paulus the promise of treating his men well if they surrendered. And then von Paulus agreed to sign a capitulation under these conditions because he wanted his young men to be allowed to survive and come back to Germany and see their families again. But the Russians lied and betrayed this trust. Out of 250.000 German solidiers did only 2000 get to see their families again. And most solidiers starved to death within the 1st year of the capitulation. If the Soviets would torture and murder prisoners of war from the SS I wouldn't care - since those evil scum deserved everything coming their way and have no right to complain for how they had murdered innocent people. But killing ordinary German solidiers was unnecessary and barbaric. I admire Russias ability to take heavy blows and keep on fighting, and its ability as a poor country to mass produce weapons and beat Germany in the amount of weapons produced, and also oftentimes in many qualitative aspects. The russian artillery had a longer range than the German one. Many of the Russian tank designs was the best in the world when they came and so on. But the disregard for the safety of the Russian tank crews on the other hand says a lot about the disregard for human lives that the regime had.
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  5. If APCs are useless for the reasons you mention, then why do the Russians use BMP-1, BMP-2 and MTLB? They are even crappier than their western counterparts. Maybe its because they protect against bullets and artillery shell fragments?
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  6. He was not the best, but he was still quite good.
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  7. The Germans attacked dutch airfield in 1940 with huge losses to anti-aircraft guns. And then to ground troops. And the airborne arm would probably not be ready for another such adventure just a few months later after losing half of their transport planes in the Netherlands. And not many people would be happy to repeat this thing another time.
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  8. like Blücher
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  9. A tank school division?
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  10. Things depends on the combat distances. When you fire at targets far away you do want a rifle. While a SMG are better at close ranges. The M1 Garand was a great rifle for its time (in WWII) when combat distances were large. But modern wars have seen a tendency towards much more close combat distances and then have the rifle become more and more unpractical. You rarely got the time to aim for a "one-shot, one kill" in Vietnam, even if you were lucky enough to even actually see the enemy. Now you spray bullets into one direction and hope one of those bullets find its target. And even if you are not able to hit anyone, are you probably at least able to suppress your enemy and force him to take cover in a ditch while your firing is going on. If the modern assault gun is an M16, then could say that M1 garand is the the old WWII rifle. You say that the modern assault rifle, is a combination between a SMG and the "battle rifle". But personally I do not completely agree with that statement. M14 which the Americans used in Vietnam do however fit very well into the description of "a combination between a SMG and a battle rifle". The problem with M14 however was that it unlike the M16 still used old heavy rifle ammunition, because the Americans still liked their old M1 rifle and had a hard time of let go of the old ideas of a one-shot kill. The powerful ammunition of M14 is great when you want send away a shot long distances and kill targets far away. But the problem is that the recoil also becomes greater with rifle ammunition than it does with small cartridges of pistols and SMGs. So if you wanna fire a rapid burst, then will the recoil become so great that you shake so much that you cannot aim properly or hit your target. So the solution for the Americans then became to drop this concept of the M14 completely, and go over to the M16 instead. M16 fired smaller rounds which gave less recoil and therefore also better precision with automatic firing. The bullets smaller size also saved weight. And the plastic material did not swell like wood do after it gets wet. So the old rifle does not have a place on the modern battlefield. The old long range fighting from world war 1 belongs to the past. Now it is instead more important to put as much lead up into the air as possible. But some modern battlefield theorists do however argue that the sniper rifle now have a much larger role to play than ever, and that groups of one or two dozen snipers can paralyze an entire city. So there seem to be some contradictory trends going on, with more snipers on one hand, and in the other hand do you see an insane increase of ammunition consumption per killed soldier, with something like 600.000 shots fired for every enemy soldier killed in Vietnam compared to 400 shots per kill in the Napoleonic wars, 20.000 around WW1, and 200.000 in WWII. I think this video does excellent explain why M1 and M14 does not have any place on a modern battlefield. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mby4hOq-DpI
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  11. "Did they actually volunteer to fight?" I doubt that most did. There was a reason why the Russians had a blocking detachment behind them to shot everyone retreating. "Why didn't the soviet penal battalions simply kill their commanders" Being unarmed and attacking the Germans, would also mean that you are not much armed to fight soviets either. And killing your commander would not solve anything. It would end your chances of getting any forgiveness for your past sins. "try to make a break for it or surrender to the Germans immediately?" Many did just that. A Swedish SS soldier said that Russian penal battalion soldiers came up to him to surrender the first weeks of the war. The Russians had been sending out unarmed men to spearhead their assault. And those unarmed men in the penal battalion was to used as a way to clear minefields by using their own feets. No other large army did unsurprisingly have such a bad fighting morale as the Russian. British and American troops were the least likely to surrender. While German troops were a bit more willing to surrender than their western democratic counterparts. And the Russian army soldiers did struggle with keeping fighting morale up for the entire war.. even as late as in 1945 did hordes of Russian soldiers surrender to the Germans despite the war already had been lost for the Axis.
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  12. I think its a design choice, if it is possible to have a sloped plate without eating up too much internal space then why not have it? I think the S-tank was smart in that way. And if a 1 centimetre steel plate angled at 60 degrees gives the same amount of protection as a 2 centimetre thick steel plate without any angle.. then of course can you reduce armor thickness by half and still get the same amount of protection. I think it was this that made T-34 such a good and feared tank in 1941. It was a bit bigger than most tanks in the world in 1941. But it could still be as fast as other tanks because it was not too heavy because its armor was sloped, and the broad tracks allowed it to drive in thick snow and muddy terrain that even smaller german tanks could not handle. So one can slope a plate in many ways, not just upwards and downwards, but also sideways. The S-tank did get very good safety levels for its time despite unimpressive armor thickness. Its extremely hard slope on the armor more than doubled the road an enemy projectile had to travel before it could drill its way through the armor. The heavy sloping also increased chances of shots just bouncing off the armor and richochet away. The problem with angeled armor however is that it is less reliable than armor thickness. When you got 2 centimetres of steel on a tank you always got 2 centimetres of protection. But if you got 1 centimetre of very well sloped armor, then the protection of that armor can be reduced under certain circumstances. A M4 Sherman tank will not be so well protected if the enemy shots at its well sloped front armor from above - because then will the angle of protection be reduced. Perhaps even reduced down to zero extra protection. So this angled steel plate that was meant to give 8 centimetres of protection under normal circumstances now only gives 4-5 centimetres of protection - which means that it can be penetrated even by pretty weak anti-tank guns.
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  13. The Ukrainians are using them to kill nazis (aka Russians)
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  14. those tanks are sent to ukraine and not to russia you ignorant 🙄
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  15. Russians are forcing Ukrianians to fight for Donetsk and Luhansk peoples republics armies. But I guess you have no problems with that. So don't come here and whine. GKY.
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  16. Musicians were spared from spared from enemy fire, and they often carried special uniforms so the enemy could differentiate them. (middlesex county volunteers carry white uniforms instead of American blue, and colonial williamsburg and the old guard fife and drum carries red uniforms like the british)... There is a wild debate on the internet what exactly dressing up the musicians in an uniform opposite to what the regular troops really means. So me say that it means dressing up in the colour of the enemy - which is the reason why some American fife and drum corps carry british uniforms. While other means that this interpretation of opposite is wrong, and instead means that armies with blue jackets and white shirts should have musicians that carry white jackets instead. Anyways...aside from the American revolution so did armies dress up their musician in special clothes in other ways... the Prussians wore shoulder straps for example. And a nice custom during 18th century was also to let the losing side play a march of the winning side after a battle. But sometimes the losing side were denied this courtesy, as what happened to the British troops surrendering at Yorktown which had to surrender playing a British march instead, and according to legend were they playing "The World Turned Upside Down" as Britain had lost the battle and the war.
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  17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diJpx90p2UE
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  18. Russia is winning so much that they are retreating from Kyiv, and then Sumy, and then Snake island, and then from the western black sea, and then they retreated from Charkiv, and then they lost Kersun. And then Putin decided to mobilize 300.000 men despite he is claiming that his special military operation is going exactly according to plan. What idiot does still believe in this baloney?
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  19. You just make things up. Provide any proofs from a credible western news source or shut up. I am totally disinterested in russian bullcrap, so keep that garbage to yourself. Credible non-russian sources only thanks.
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  20. But both Panther and Sherman also had sloped armor
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  21. There was of course disatisfaction in Russia and Germany over all land they had lost in the world war. But a peaceful democratic government would probably not have taken over smaller countries as brutal as the dictators did. And I think the western allies helped to increase the tentions. First by limiting the size of the German army, so Poland could have a stronger force than Germany and go out and bully its neighbours and steal their land and creating bad neighbour relations. And the second foolish thing was the Munich agreement that made the allies look weak in Hitlers eyes so he felt tempted to attack Poland. And this betrayal of Czechioslovakia also meant a lost oppurtunity to stop Hitler while the odds were favourable. And this betrayal meant that the eastern countries lost trust in the west as an ally to rely upon.
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  22. This 1917 assumption was probably based on other factors than the 1941 invasion. Germany had no two-front war on the continent to worry about, and the resources of an entire continent laid at their feet. Russia had lost Finland and Poland. And Russias main power in 1914 laid in her huge manpower reserves of 26 million men. But the problem with Russia was of course that this fear of those 26 million men was overblown. The Russian industry was incapable of supplying the army with what it needed, and many of the Russian solidiers had no rifles and the howitzers and cannons lacked ammunition extremely badly. So if France and Germany felt that they were desperatly short of ammunition for their guns in 1915, then the Russian situation was literarly 30 times worse. The Russian artillery could only fire as many shots per month as a typical german gun would do in half a week. And the Russian infantry often had to attack their enemy with enemy at the gates type of tactics, because they did not have guns for all their men. So the 26 million men the German army feared would be used against them was a threat that never came into being because of the economic backwardness of Russia. So the only way of the allies to help the Russians would be if they would manage to transport all ammunition and weapons to the Russians so they could put all their millions of men to the fight. So Britain and France put togheter a fleet and tried to sail through the Ottoman empire and get to Russia and deliever their cargo. But after the failed amphibious landing on Galliopoli it stood clear that Russia would never get any help. And then the country lost the war against Germany. So as I sees it did Germany have better reasons for being optimistic in 1941, since they knew that the Russian army was far from invincible. And many world war 1 veterans would perhaps have been underestimated their enemies and still thought that the US army and the Russians would be easy to crush for the German army in a 1 vs 1 fight between the countries.
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  23. 60 Bradleys out of the 6000 that the US Army have will not make any difference at all. Look at your own losses Ivan, you have lost 11.000 vehicles in just a single year. They have mostly been destroyed by cheap modern day bazookas. Just go home, or get economically ruined and lose all of your population of young males. The choice is yours. If you choose the latter I will not shed any tears for you. I just added some money for crowd funding for a drone. Killing orchs is a pleasure.
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  24. I don't have any books to offer. But I knew 3 documentary series you can watch. Tanks! is an old Discovery channel documentary from the 1990s about the German tank arm as a summary for dummies. Great tank battles isn't so much of dry documentary with data, numbers maps and such - but rather this documentary is seeing the war from the perspective of the solidier on the ground, and the veterans on both sides talks about the tank battles they fought against each other and what tactics they used. And with computer models one can get a simple understanding on how the many different tank battles was fought. And last but not least we got German war files which is a series for tanknerds and interested people alike.... for an entire hour you will be able to hear about different types of vehicles...SPGs, Tigers, Panthers, Panzer I and II, PanzerII, StuGs, Tank destroyers... you name it. Tanks! https://youtu.be/w1fUuTvsuXA Greatest Tank Battles https://youtu.be/mZefETM57iM German war files https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lw5kcvCKEc
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  25. Excellent video
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  26. No it was easy to win.
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  27. I always have elite replacements for my core units so they get 14-15 strength. And I also use one or two strategic bombers on hight strenght to deal with enemy battleships and cruisers.
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  28. With remote controlled machine guns, I guess it would be possible to fit such modules outside the tank to improve its firepower without giving the enemy and weakspots in the full. Most armies stopped using a hull machine gun on their tanks after world war II. Instead they got rid of this weakspot and start using a machine gun with a higher rate of fire at the commanders turret as a compensation so infantry and aircraft could be fought off. However, to me it seems like this would have led to the problem of not being able to fight off enemies coming from multiple directions.
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  29. Turrets are costly and complex, and I think we only build MBTs today because we got peacetime resources. So armies goes for quality instead of quantity. But if wartime needs and big resource constrains came into being I think turretless tanks would become popular again. Since turrets are costly, time consuming to build, adds weight, adds a higher siluette, and it offers many extra weakspots to the enemy. But I think multiple turrets can be useful when armour protection isnt important. I guess one could have a frontal turret and a rear turret on a tank with multiple phalanx machine guns to just make a wall of fire against air and soft targets. Or one could put a six pack of Anti-tank missiles on every turret and kill 12 enemy tanks in one broadside. Or can fit stinger missiles. Or rocket artillery grenades on the turrets and in one broadside deliever tonnes of explosives on top of the enemy. Firepower and mobility would be superior. But perhaps too much overkill and overly complex design.
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  30. The Russian tree is based on earlier practical experience with tank designs that worked in the past: T34→T44→T55→T62→T64→t72→T80→T90 The Nato countries are not so similiar. But because of standardization within Nato have almost all Nato tanks used the British L7 105mm gun (Centurion, AMX30, Leopard1, M60, M1 Ambrams etc) and later on have the 120mm rheinmetall gun become standard (used on for example Leopard2, M1 Abrams) and also other tanks use120mm guns such as Leclerc, Challanger 2, Merkava, C1 Ariete. Priorities have been different for the many armies. British Chieftain was a slow tank with good armor and firepower. French AMX30 and German Leopard had bad armor protection, but their speed and firepower was excellent. And M50 Ontos, Merkava and Stridsvagn-103 could be seen as very odd birds, with very innovative designs. The last generation of MBTs are however much similar in many ways Merkava, M1 Abrams, Leopard2, Leclerk, Ariete, Challanger 2 do look much similar and all have 120mm guns. But there are of course also many differences. Abrams is a heavy tank while Challanger2 is much more lighter. Abrams use uranium ammunition, while German Leopard 2 doesn't and therefore have to get a new gun to be able to kill the newest Russian tanks without using uranium ammunition. Also Merkava could be upgraded and get a bigger gun. But today that is not so important. Using a 15cm gun to kill and old T-72 tank of Israels neighbors would be overkill. Why use a big an expensive shot to kill a cheap garbage tank if you can easily kill it with small shots instead? So it is better to stick with the old 120mm ammunition that is easier and faster to reload, and you can also carry more rounds of ammunition. When Israels neigbours get better tanks, then it can become time to reconsider doing an expensive upgrade of the gun and armor for Merkava. But today that is not so urgent. And Leclerk is a tank that will not be upgunned, because it can't be. Its turret ring is too small to carry a bigger gun, and that means that Leclerk will be unable to penetrate the armor of Russia's new Armata tank. Challanger 2 is a tank with much potential left. But the British government does not want to spend more money on that tank, and have even thought about buying Leopard2 tanks instead. And the Italians have much upgrades to do before their C1 Ariete can play in the same league as the other MBTs. That will of course cost money for the country with economic problems. As it is today however do this tank need better frontal armor, since even a world war 2 T34/85 tank would be able to penetrate the lower front plate. And the precision of the gun is under-performing.
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  31. Weapons they got for free. But Russians do not understand that 🙄
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  32. Hiroshima and Chernobyl are very different places. The latter got a hundred times more radiation and will be uninhabitable for 800 years, while Hiroshima got away with much less radioactivity. They got a big explosion and that was that. This is the reason why I prefer military nuclear energy over civilian.
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  33.  @Kieselmeister  "becoming carbon neutral" As if "carbon neutral" matters when nuclear reactors contributes massively to global warming through other ways - only the tiny amount of Swedish nuclear plants creates over 200 Terawatts of waste heat, which is more than the amount of energy we spent to heat every home in cold Sweden for 1 year. So when you release all that waste heat into the ocean you contribute massively to global warming. And this heat also stimulates the growth of algae - and all algae growth sucks up all oxygen from the water so that all fish dies from lack of oxygen. "No other reactor design before or since has ever been as dangerous" According to IAEA are Swedish nuclear reactors even more unreliable than those 4 nuclear plants of Chernobyl type that are stationed outside St. Petersburg. On an average year are our old plants closed down more days for repairs than theirs. And there have also been incidents that were close to becoming nuclear disasters, but were stopped in the last moment. So therefore are they not much talked about in the news. "the only reason fukushima happened" Fukushima reactors are not safe in my opinion. Almost all (if not all) nuclear reactors in the world use an old analog technology instead of digital ones. In my opinion is that retarded. I have done some PLC programming myself, and I do not agree with the idea that analog is superior to digital. I would say it is the other way around. "The technology to make reactors which fail "safe" instead of failing "deadly" has existed for over 40 years" Nuclear energy have existed for so long, and still people market it as something "new" and "high tech" when it in fact is an old technology invented by a Swedish guy a hundred years ago. Meanwhile have seen disaster after disaster happen Sellafield, Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Tokaimura, Fukushima. And every time nuclear fanboys says its only "a one time event" "so unlikely that it would never happen". And yet they keep on happening. And people blame earth quakes, Communism, greedy Japanese companies and all kinds of things... except nuclear power itself. A dangerous energy source we have not yet learned to master, and yet we put the survival of the entire planet in danger. No one in the nuclear lobby gives an answer how we can safely store nuclear fuel safely for hundreds of thousands of years. Instead I usually only get a bullsh*t answer: "technology will solve this". But what if technology doesn't solve every problem in the world? What is plan B? If I was optimistic about technology solving every human problem, then I would rather drive my car on lingonberry juice than nuclear energy. "and are still operating dangerous 50 year old reactors instead of replacing them" And still there is no plan what to do with all the toxic radioactive plutonium, uranium, cesium. 75 years have passed since Hiroshima was bombed, and this problem have not been solved yet. Well I have lost my patience with the nuclear lobby. This problem should be fixed before more money is spent on nuclear power. There was enough nuclear waste located at Chernobyl to kill all life in Europe - and there was a high chance that a second nuclear explosion nearly did just that. In Fukushima there was even more spent fuel stored - and fuel which were even more dangerous than the one stored at Chernobyl. And if that fuel leaks out into the environment, it is enough to kill all life on this planet. We are with other words playing Russian roulette with all life on this planet. What happens the next time a disaster happen? Maybe we aren't that lucky. And once all nuclear waste leaks out there is no way you could get the genie back into the bottle. It is GAME OVER for the planet. And it doesn't matter if it happens because the Japanese were foolish to build nuclear plants in a land prone to earthquakes, or it happened because of an ISIS terrorist attack, or a meteorite falling down from the sky and blowing a hole into the metal container at Fukushima containing all spent fuel. We will all die. "But the USA's schizophrenic environmental lobby has demanded that all spent nuclear fuel be buried in the desert, while also refusing to allow the waste to be transported TO that desert because it would have to go past their houses, so it just sits forever in cans in swimming pools at the reactor sites." I think the world should come together and solve this problem once and for all. We should pump in money into USA so we can finish this storage facility in Arizona. And the "not in my backyard" club and their hypocritical governor should be thrown under the bus.
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  34. It is an APC and not a battleship or tank 🙄 You seem totally clueless about armored vehicles so I suspect that you are a journalist
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  35. you are only rude to me coz is black
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  36.  @CardMagicish  go and watch some war movies
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  37. Russian tech sucks and is inferior so they better just stop wasting their time on an unwinnable war.
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  38. https://youtu.be/owM9rVYgl_o?t=1946
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  39. His obsession with his petrol-electric engine on the Elephant tank was overly complex and it performed shitty on the battlefield... but that didn't matter, because Porsche liked to engineer and do overly complex designs instead of making practical economic things and winning wars. He also lost the competition of making the turret for the Tiger II tank, but he still would deliver many such turrets to the German army which had to accept his junk the same way as they got the Elephant tank.
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  40. If Germany had limited their war goals to just steal western Russia and then make peace, well then that might perhaps been a realistic goal. But conquering all of Russia? No, no, no..... that's probably not realistic even if Germany somehow managed to get the oil fields in Baku running again.
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  41. Then the question becomes, then how do you knockout Russia and get them to sign a peace deal? The capture of Stalingrad and an economic collapse is a big step in that direction. But what would really happen if all of Caucausus fell into German hands? I guess that is the big question.
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  42. I have heard that they mobilized 40 million men... but I guess that this high number was only possible thanks to American food imports and the liberation of Ukraine and such factors. So it is hard to tell if it would be suffiecent to drive all the way to Berlin.. I mean after all did Russia start to run low on manpower by 1945. But on the other hand could I guess that Stalin would be less wasteful with his mens lives if they were in short supply. Glantz did for example talk about how Russia could have ended the war early in 1945 by capturing Berling if they wanted to do so... but Stalin rather captured Austria and Czechoslovakia first even when it came at a huge cost of human lives. I think low fighting morale and anti-stalinist revolutions are perhaps a more likely option. But it is difficult for me to imagine what such a post-Stalinist regime would looklike. Hitler wanted to occupy western Russia and let Russia have the rest, but being a pro-German fascist puppet state. But I think this Quisling regime option is hard to imagine for me, since it supposes that Germany would occupy everything west of the Ural mountains - which seems logistically to be an overambitious task to do, plus maintaining an occupation force to police huge areas.
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  43. Its bullet could knock through 2 meters of concrete and its explosive power must have been greater than even a heavy artillery shell. So heavily fortified bunker would be trashed. And a room on a building would become completly destroyed... and I wonder if not such a big shell would not be able to even take out an entire multiple floor building in a city with one such big shot. I guess this thing would be used to take out bunkers and buildings like this things:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/280_mm_mortar_M1939_(Br-5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/203_mm_howitzer_M1931_(B-4) But the difference would be that the sturmtiger would have lots of armour to protect its crew until they could get their job done. The huge thick frontal plate would probably make anything the enemy fired at it bounce off, so they would be in a hopeless situation against this monster... and their comfort would mostly be that this beast had little ammo and a low rate of fire. I am not impressed with this tank. Maybe it was just an exprimental tank build just for fun to see what they could do with a big naval shell, rather than a serious project planned to start serial production. In my opinion should the Brummbär have been enough for the Germans if they really insisted on having one this type of vehicle. Wasting a tiger tank seems increadibly stupid to me given the dire situation Germany was in in 1943 when this project was started. I also think this type of machine seems increadible inflexible since it doesn't seem to fill other types of roles on the battlefield. ISU-152 and SU-152 seems smarter constructions seems they seem good at both knocking out buildings and killing tanks and playing the role of artillery.
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  44. Tracked vehicles are better than vehicles that uses wheels when it comes to driving in the Ukrainian mud, indeed last autumn was tracked vehicles the only thing that could move at all. And from World War 2 we know that weight is not so important. What you want is a vehicle with wide tracks. The little Panzer IV got easily stuck in the mud or in deep snow, while the 12 tonnes heavier tank T-34 had excellent cross-country performance in such terrain despite being heavier. And the reason for this was its wide tracks. Heck, even the very heavy Panther tank that was twice as heavy as Panzer IV had it easier to move across mud and snow. It had excellent cross country ability thanks to its very broad tracks. And BMP vehicles have super narrow tracks, which makes me doubt their usefulness in mud. Marder isn't exactly super broadly tracked either. But I believe that one can get around that problem. I think of the extra wide tracks that the Germans added to their StuGs fighting on the eastern front in World war 2 which gave them much better performance in wet and muddy terrain
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  45. baseless claim by rusbot
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  46. We sit here with hindsight knowledge. But the Germans in 1942 could not know what the war would be like in 1944. And neighter could the they know what tanks the allies would use in 1944. And the Germans did not know how good the panther tank would be, or if the King Tiger would be ready for service before the war was over. So from their point of view it made sense to develop the Tiger tank. 1942 when the Tiger was in its final stage of development it seemed like it was a very smart choice for Germany. The T-34/76 tanks had taken Germany with surprise and the German military desperatly needed a tank that was atleast as powerful as the T-34, if not even better. So in desperation to get guns that reliably could kill KV1 and T34 tanks they developed tank destroyers like Marder and Nashorn that had powerful guns but no armour protection until Germany could start building a new real tank that was powerful enough to take on the Russian tanks at good terms. And in early 1942 Germany tried different solutions, and they were lucky enough to fit a bigger gun on the PzIV and on StuG. But they also built the Tiger I tank so they could be sure that they would dominate the battlefield. Furthermore was there also other good reasons to build the Tiger. The Tiger was a breakthrough tank (a "durchbrachwagen") intended as a battering ram into heavily defended enemy positions when Germany was making an offensive war. And no one in Germany could imagine what the war would looklike a few years later when Germany was not the attacker and had no control over the skies. So the Tiger had to fight a type of war it was never designed for - it was used for a strategic defensive war, when the tank had been designed to fight a war where Germany was the attacker. And finally did no one know when the panther or king tiger tanks would be ready for service, or how they would be perform on the battlefield so it could be wise to build the tiger tank just in case the other tanks were a dissapointment. The Tiger was also a way of being proactive in tank development when you are fighting a world war and the enemy might be developing the next generation of super tanks, so if you have a tiger then you atleast have a chance to deal with those new allied tanks, while even an upgraded Panzer III with maximum upgrades would be an easy prey for new allied tanks such as Comet, Centurion, and T-34/85. But the Tiger on the other hand would have no problems with knocking out any of those new better allied tanks.
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  47. If you are a frontline solidier you do not get drunk or high on drugs because then you will get easily killed by the enemy. Some Russian frontline troops did of course plunder liquor and the consequences became twofold - much rapes and high Russian losses when they came into contact with the German army. Overall have international studies pointed out that solidiers in the frontline often have more respect for their enemies than troops in the rear. Zetterling mentions for example an Israeli study in his book about the battle of Kursk, and in this study it was concluded that Israeli solidiers and their enemies who were serving in the frontline had more respect for their enemy than the 2nd echelon. And the people in the 2nd line scored higher levels of hatred towards the enemy than troops in the 1st line. Also the behavior in World war 1 also seems to prove this point. The only people who knew the hell that French and British troops had to endure at the front was their German solidiers who had to live in the same hell and see death and live in fear. Fritz on the other side was just doing what he could to survive just like us guys on the other side, so there was a kind of mutual understanding of the men fighting on both sides of the frontline. And only the men in the rear could keep their overly patriotic illusions and romantic views of the war intact and keep on hating their opponents and have unfavourable views upon them. Hitlers strong hatred of the western powers can then perhaps be understood as a typical second echelon solidier opinion. And if you hate your enemy, bought into propaganda, and are filled with racist stereotypes... then of course it is easier to commit warcrimes. Many good Soviet men and veterans had died during 4 years of war and formations were now filled with men of lesser quality and with solidiers from places like Ukraine where the Germans had commit atrocities, and many solidiers could therefore have a lust for revenge. Many solidiers had seen many of their best friends die and the war had exhausted them. And Berians nasty propaganda endorsed all warcrime behaviour one could think of. So I think there are many reasons why things went out of control in the Russian army. The rapid advance into Germany created a shortage of time to punish crimes and restore dicipline. And dealing with armed drunken men with shitty ethics would not be a funny buisness I imagine. And besides, the Soviet army was running low on manpower so killing rapists was perhaps not so practical. Regardless do I still think that the Russian army could have done more to stop those crimes. And it is disgusting that even the Russian women in the Soviet army was making rape jokes despite being well aware of the huge scale of the Russian rape epidemic. And after Germany had surrendered and the war was over was mass rapes still happening every day for many weeks after the war. And then Europe suffered from shortages of food and power to heat peoples homes, and German women started to prostitute themselves to survive... and that in turn ended the rape wave as a way to get sex for Russian solidiers. General Westmooreland did also say in his memoirs that it was usally US troops which were not in combat that were doing drugs in Vietnam, because troops who were at the front would not take the risk of becoming easy prey to their enemy.
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  48. Think it is fair to say that the S-tank was the best tank in the world when it entered service. But sadly would this revolutionary tank not remain so for long. New possibilities had opened itself up with new technologies, so the old classic turreted tank design could survive thanks to vertical stabilizers, chobham armor and such.
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  49. I believe Ukraine will win. The goal is pre 2014 borders and nothing less. Therefore should the support for Ukraine be stepped up. No money is wasted in Ukraine. Every destroyed Russian tank is one less that can threaten the rest of the free world as well. Russia is my countrys arch-enemy so of course will I support the opposing team regardless if it wins or loses. The more Putin lackeys that dies the better
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  50.  @saschaganser9671  "i don`t belive Ukraine is capable" Of course you say so, you are after all a Krembot. "a peninsular that has 70% Russian population." Lies and misinformation. The population had a 100% Ukrainian population before you stole it. Just because one does speak Russian does not make you a Russian. Zelensky speaks Russian and he certainly does not consider himself a Russian. Denys Davydov is an Ukrainian who grew up in Crimea. He grew up in a family that spoke Russian, but that doesn't change the fact that he consider himself an Ukrainian and that he hates Russia and the brutal war and occupation that your sh*thole country brought to him. "nor will the west finance and support" So much money has been spent already that one might as well walk that little extra distance to get the job 100% done instead of 80%. "At some point, Ukraine will need to make a deal with Russia" Russia have already had so many chances and blew them all. Now it can just feck off. It's our way, or the highway. Crime should never be rewarded. A thief should not be allowed to keep anything that he stole. And freezing down the conflict will not create lasting peace since Russia will then just try again to take Ukraine a few years down the road. So its better to solve all problems now than fighting an never ending series of wars. Lets crush Russias economy and military so the country is forced to give up on all its stupid imperalist dreams.
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