----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Grammont" <islander@midmaine.com>
To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2002 4:51 AM
Subject: Re: [MV] Overseas purchases? - Private Smokey Smith, PIAT, Panther,
Sherman, War memorials, Iltis,
Hi Steve,
>
> >> I for one was VERY impressed with the Panther I saw at Borden and the two I
> >> saw in Paris many years ago. I understand that these Panther tanks had
> >> running gear reliability problems, but other than that were very, very good
> >> tanks.
> >>
> >Hmmmm, they _could_ have been, average availability a little over 50%
> tends to
> >fly in the face of "good" as an overall rating, certainly when
> >operational they were good.
>
> This is the old reliability vs. performance standard regarding rating a
> vehicle. Obviously if something is so bad it never works right, it
> deserves to be kicked in the pants. But the Panther had a superior
> performance record when crewed by trained crews correctly supplied with
> spare parts, fuel, and shops. Fortunately for the Allies, the Germans
> were not working under ideal circumstances.
>
I agree, and to develop the point it seems the scenario is often hazy or
misunderstood a whole ocean away by interested parties working in a largely
enforced mono-culture of national vehicle types, it is a privilege to be
positioned on the doorstep of history here.
Certainly even with the devastation being caused to the Wehrmacht support and
logistics, their relatively small army and limited armour was no soft touch or
push-over, even with the undivided attention of the 8th AF by day and the RAF by
night their munitions output peaked at this time. Had the support conditions
been slightly different a very different story might have been the case.
Although the "Bodyguard" and "Fortitude" deception plans worked beyond
expectations, the Wehrmacht armour did move from the Pas de Calais eventually
and so did the forces deceived to maintain defence on the Norwegian coast. The
devastation caused by relatively small forces is surprising and gives an
indication of the competence of the Wehrmacht and the efficiency of their
armour. We are of course continually miffed by the commonly held view that the
British and Canadian armies stalled and simply sat around Caen for weeks,
whereas in fact they were grinding themselves away against excellently well
managed armour and well trained troops with a huge attrition rate of men and
material in a quite correctly conceived plan to both hold off the Panzer forces
from untested and small (30% of the invasion force) US troops making the sweep
round from the Cotentin Peninsular and to capture the port itself; in fact the
tenacity and strength of German forces around Caen was seriously underestimated.
It is a fact of life that the popular dramatised documentaries from Hollywood
will skew history by omission since the piper payer calls the tune
understandably.
> To illustrate my point... I don't think many people would argue that the
> M1A1 Abrams is one of the finest, perhaps the finest (depends on who you
> ask!), tank ever to grace the battlefields of this too often fought over
> Earth. But... how good do you think they would be if the US Army's rear
> area was constantly bombed, shelled, and overrun, not to mention its
> factories and infrastructure being bombed back to the stone age? Me
> thinks not many would be running very long :-)
>
The essence of tank design still is, firepower, protection and mobility, getting
the vehicle to the front in timely fashion is an often overlooked facet of
"mobility". It is becoming apparent that tanks of the 60ton class are not
ideal, gunnery and weapons are such that a round will come through with a near
certainty of first round hit and our armour is such that it doesn't go out again
but proceeds to destroy the interior and crew.
It has generally been the case that only 60 degrees of the frontal area can be
heavily protected, any more leads to impossible designs because of the
weight/power/fuel considerations and leads you down the E100 and Maus dead end.
RCMS Shrivenham, where they teach armoured warfare, (if you can afford the
course fees) tell me that faced like for like, Abrams or Challenger II which are
accepted as the current pinnacle of tank design and power have a typical
battlefield life of 7 seconds. We can take this to mean the vehicles are a
one-shot, the return fire takes you out. Having seen an Abrams power pack the
essence of the small, lightweight and powerful gas turbine is compromised by the
bulk of essential ancillaries needed to protect it from its operating
environment, especially the intake arrangements for cleaning tons of air and
preheating the charge. The transmission has to be a chunky device and the
prodigious thirst of a gas turbine engine is suggested to be a bit of an
Achilles heel, shades of the Centurion shortcoming.
Six days is about typical for a modern battlefield war, you fight with what you
have to start with and the person with the most territory and materiel at the
end is the winner, western technology allows us to effectively and relatively
safely negate the enemy communications, command and control before a battlefield
war which is immensely helpful and continuous strikes on lines of communication
denying logistic support is highly effective, a fuelless tank is just a
pill-box, easily by-passed.
> In fact, there was a report that came out at the last stage of the Cold
> War which predicted readiness numbers for US/NATO forces in the event of
> an all out nuclear war. It was not pretty. They figured that whatever
> survived the big boombooms would quickly fall out of service due to the
> inability to keep them running/flying.
>
> BTW, US/Commonwealth readiness numbers were very often horrible as well.
> Sometimes they had tanks and no crews, other times crews and no tanks.
> All depends on where and when and what you look at. But unlike he
> Germans, the Allies could decide when to stop and refit. The Germans had
> to wait until the Allies gave them a break.
>
Indeed so, we tend to forget that the allied tank losses simply meant opening
another box of Shermans and that the German intelligence really believed, until
well after D-Day, that the Sherman was actually a ploy to cover the existence of
much better designs, as one astute Panzer commander actually observed "One of
our tanks is worth 10 of yours, but you always have 11."
Richard
Southampton - England
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