Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Насколько эффективным был Тигр на самом деле?" video.

Of course would it be more difficult to train 4x more tank crews if Germany built StuGs and PanzerIVs instead of Tigers. But on the other hand would Germany not have to bother with making special military bridges, special trains, recovery vehicles, and storing more types of spareparts and such. Germanys biggest problem was after all the lack of numbers of tanks. So the few they had would they have to drive around much to counter allied attacks on one front, and then they had to move to another front to fight back an allied attack there... and so it went on. If Germany had more tanks deployed along the frontline then it wouldn't have to move around as much. And having tanks in defensive positions would not consume much fuel anyways. Another benifit of lighter tanks would be that they would be easier to pull away from the battlefield so they could be repaired. Because controlling the battlefield after a battle is almost as important as to win the battle. If you control the battlefield afterwards, then you can repair your own tanks and perhaps also repair and steal some enemy tanks as well. But if you don't can control the battlefield after a battle, then you have to fast pull away your heavy tiger to a repair shop before the Russians take over the area. And if that is not possible, then you have to blow up your own tank so that the Russians don't steal your tank and use it against you. And recovering a 20tonnes tank is much easier than a Tiger I tank. A Tiger tank was so heavy that only another Tiger had enough power to move it. Or otherwise you would have to use 3 big Famo trucks to move your tank away from the battlefield - which is a complicated thing. Your trucks are rare and in short supply in the German army. And even if you got 3 trucks, then you don't wanna use drive those weakly protected machines on a battlefield where the enemy is firing around you just so that you can use hours to drive away a Tiger tank to a safe place where you can do repairs and maintance. Germany was losing the war after the start of 1943, so having heavy tanks that were too precious to lose and too difficult to evacuate from a battlefield was not optimal. Earlier in the war could Germany use hundreds of captured T-34 tanks. But Germany would not use any later T-34/85 models in their army because they rarely controlled the battlefield after the battle and could therefore rarely ever capture any such tanks. And Germany had to start using overkill tactics, and after they knocked out a tank they kept on firing on it until it catched fire - and only then would it be counted as a kill. And the reason for this was that the Germans did rarely control the battlefield after a battle, and they had to therefore make sure that the allied tank was completly destroyed and could not be repaired and used again another day.
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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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Put one T-55 tank against 300 pz II tanks and see who wins! :D If the T-55 wins, then it must be the worlds best with a kill ratio of over 300:1 which is a number that is probably better than the killratio of a M1 Abrams tank
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Otto Carius joined the army in 1940, and became a loader on a pz38t tank in 1941. And in 1942 he became and officer. So careers often took off pretty fast in world war II, and didn't take 16 years. And allied tank losses were also heavy needed to be replaced, and new tank men needed to be recuited to the new large wartime armies so the allies also used new tank men.
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