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Bacarruda posted:There was unwillingness (and the simple inability) to counterattack amongst British and French commanders in 1940. But the paralysis wasn't universal. Counter-attacks can be an important part of defensive schemes, and some Allied commanders in the Battle of France did launch them. There were several major and minor armored counterattacks made during the Battle, the Battle of Arras being the most notable example. These efforts largely failed because of poor execution or inadequate resources, but they were tried. Tigers were used primarily for infantry support. When you can lob a kilogram of HE at your target, that's a very nice gun. Compare that to the Panther, which got 30 more millimeters of armour penetration at the cost of nearly half of the HE payload. Nenonen posted:No, I don't think you can compare Tiger to Infantry Tanks. Tiger was essentially as fast as and, with its wider tracks, more mobile than Panzer III and IV. Infantry tanks like Matilda and Churchill (16km/h) were far too slow to stay in formation with Cruisers like Crusader or Cromwell (64km/h!). Assault guns filled German infantry's needs for dedicated armour support. Yes, the Tiger is a breakthrough tank, like the KV. I wouldn't say it was as fast or as mobile as the PzIII or PzIV though.
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Dec 14, 2013 18:44
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One must also consider the difference between mobility as in "it can cover x sorts of terrain at y speed" and actual mobility as limited by gas mileage and reliability. If I remember correctly the reliability of Tiger I was mediocre and the mileage fairly bad, although neither was so bad as the late war German monsters.
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Dec 14, 2013 19:33
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Ensign Expendable posted:Tigers were used primarily for infantry support. When you can lob a kilogram of HE at your target, that's a very nice gun. Compare that to the Panther, which got 30 more millimeters of armour penetration at the cost of nearly half of the HE payload. I don't think that 1 article really says anything about the manner in which Tigers were employed.
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Dec 14, 2013 20:35
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Fangz posted:Well, slow, with heavy all-round armour tends to be more of an infantry tank thing. The gun was good, but the large calibre made it suitable for firing HE - the smaller calibre guns you see in the Panthers are better for anti-tank roles. I guess I was a bit overambitious in drawing the parallel. The distinction between Cavalry and Infantry tanks gets lost after like 1941, when everybody realized that you want at least passable performance fighting both tanks and infantry. Except for the British.
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Dec 14, 2013 20:40
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Except for the British. Got to bad at something.
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Dec 14, 2013 20:42
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SeanBeansShako posted:Got to bad at something. Generals weren't enough for them?
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Dec 14, 2013 21:03
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Generals weren't enough for them? To be fair Mediocrity covers that in my general opinion. The bloody war before that sort of killed a majority of promising people as well as crippled the budget.
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Dec 14, 2013 21:10
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The distinction between Cavalry and Infantry tanks gets lost after like 1941, when everybody realized that you want at least passable performance fighting both tanks and infantry. Explain. As far as I know British tanks were plenty effective in the later period. The main issue was advancements in German armour outpacing British gunnery, but that was something separate. Fangz fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Dec 14, 2013 |
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Dec 14, 2013 21:33
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SeanBeansShako posted:To be fair Mediocrity covers that in my general opinion. The bloody war before that sort of killed a majority of promising people as well as crippled the budget. It's a pity Monty gets all the glory of the British army in WW2, Slim and Dempsey were much better generals that hardly anyone knows about.
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Dec 14, 2013 21:54
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I dunno, if you count the Centurion as a WWII tank I would say the Brits figured out tanks pretty goddamn well.
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Dec 14, 2013 22:33
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The distinction between Cavalry and Infantry tanks gets lost after like 1941, when everybody realized that you want at least passable performance fighting both tanks and infantry. No, this applied to the Germans as well, look at their tank guns. Look at 1942 and early 1943, where they have the Panzer III with the longer-barreled 50mm/L60 for use against tanks and the early Panzer IV models with the short barreled 75mm/L24 for lobbing HE. Same kind of split as in Allied armies - one specializes against enemy armor, one against enemy infantry and fortifications. I don't know why people forget about the German tank guns early war and then accuse the Brits and the US of doing something that the Germans were just as guilty of.
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Dec 14, 2013 22:34
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Fangz posted:Explain. As far as I know British tanks were plenty effective in the later period. The main issue was advancements in German armour outpacing British gunnery, but that was something separate. The Cromwell and Comet were effective, but the early tanks were definitive standards of mediocrity, from the 30 year obsolete designs like the TOG to embarrassing things that they wouldn't let anyone else see, like the Covenanter.
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Dec 14, 2013 22:49
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gohuskies posted:No, this applied to the Germans as well, look at their tank guns. Look at 1942 and early 1943, where they have the Panzer III with the longer-barreled 50mm/L60 for use against tanks and the early Panzer IV models with the short barreled 75mm/L24 for lobbing HE. Same kind of split as in Allied armies - one specializes against enemy armor, one against enemy infantry and fortifications. I don't know why people forget about the German tank guns early war and then accuse the Brits and the US of doing something that the Germans were just as guilty of. The Germans invaded the USSR and immediately realized that infantry and cavalry tanks are total bunk. It takes until 1942 to upgrade the guns on the Panzer IV, but the idea is there. The Americans have the troubling issue of TANK DESTROYER DOCTRINE, but the Sherman is mobile and the 75mm gun was pretty good for 1942. This stands in direct contrast with the Brits, who have the Churchill (40t, 25km/h) and the Crusader (20t, gofast) in their armoured divisions. I understand that British armour development was hindered by wartime shortages and desperation, even though I made a joke about their early tanks being a little dumb.
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Dec 14, 2013 22:55
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All the major powers in WW2 have different things going on with their tank designs for different reasons. The UK has what's effectively a cottage industry that takes forever to design things and when it does they're terrible and don't take into account lessons learned from the battlefield, so you end up in 1944 with the Cromwell which is kind of a medium tank and has a gun, but ignores all sensible advice on design everyone ever gave. The US doesn't even have a real tank worth the name at the start of the war (actual start, not their entry), but they do have this pretty decent 75mm gun so they rush it into the monstrosity that is the M3 and then follow up with the M4. Germany starts with the PzIII and PzIV (and all the legacy stuff) and because of the Eastern Front has to upgun those models while rushing development of the Tiger and Panther and welding guns onto anything with tracks they can find in French warehouses. It's a horrible mess caused by the dual pressures of wartime emergency and the dysfunctional Nazi system. The USSR starts the war with the T34 entering into service and while the initial versions are a bit poo poo because of the lack of turret space/radios the core design is pretty much perfect and they stick with it for the duration.
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Dec 14, 2013 22:56
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gohuskies posted:No, this applied to the Germans as well, look at their tank guns. Look at 1942 and early 1943, where they have the Panzer III with the longer-barreled 50mm/L60 for use against tanks and the early Panzer IV models with the short barreled 75mm/L24 for lobbing HE. Same kind of split as in Allied armies - one specializes against enemy armor, one against enemy infantry and fortifications. I don't know why people forget about the German tank guns early war and then accuse the Brits and the US of doing something that the Germans were just as guilty of. The roles might be superficially similar but it's not quite the same doctrine, though. If you look at BT (cavalry tank) and T-26 (infantry tank) you'll notice that they had the same 45mm gun but the difference came up in speed and organization. Nor did Germans think that Panzer III could do without HE shells, a fetish that apparently only the Brits had. Marks III and IV had differing capabilities, but they still were medium tanks arranged into mixed Panzer regiments/battalions and were supposed to do anything that a medium tank would do. Ie. break through enemy lines, wreck poo poo and drive on. The British system starts to get a little bit confusing later on when you have Cromwells carrying 95mm HE lobbers and Churchills wielding 57mm high velocity guns... :uk:
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Dec 14, 2013 23:23
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:This stands in direct contrast with the Brits, who have the Churchill (40t, 25km/h) and the Crusader (20t, gofast) in their armoured divisions. The british did not have churchills in there armoured division. Well not late war anyway. The brits had to type of formations. Armoured brigades and tank brigades. Armoured brigades would have either cromwells or shermans, and would be a component of the armoured division, or independent formations, while the tank brigades would be churchills and in some uses sherman tanks. The tank brigades would normally be supporting infantry divisions, so in that regard operational mobility wouldnt be as important as armour.
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Dec 14, 2013 23:25
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Why didn't the US use the Sherman Firefly Ltd. edition(c)?
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Dec 14, 2013 23:41
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Nenonen posted:The roles might be superficially similar but it's not quite the same doctrine, though. If you look at BT (cavalry tank) and T-26 (infantry tank) you'll notice that they had the same 45mm gun but the difference came up in speed and organization. Nor did Germans think that Panzer III could do without HE shells, a fetish that apparently only the Brits had. Yeah it's a misunderstanding to call the III and IV 'Infantry' and 'Cruiser' tanks because those concepts don't form part of German doctrine. Infantry tanks existed to bolster the power of infantry divisions and therefore had design specs that meant they could load up with armour and drop to an infantry unit's operational speed. Cruiser tanks were supposed to operate as cavalry independently of support and that's why they get speed and higher-velocity guns - they're supposed to run around the enemy rear areas shooting up trucks etc. The III and the IV have a clear 'anti-tank' and 'infantry support' function, but that doesn't make the IV an 'infantry tank'. The Germans didn't sacrifice speed in it's design in order to make it a useful infantry support weapon, they put their infantry into trucks and halftracks in order to keep pace with the tanks.
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Dec 14, 2013 23:47
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Why didn't the US use the Sherman Firefly Ltd. edition(c)? Slower rate of fire compared to the 75mm, much less HE in those shells for dealing the the masses of panzerschreck wielding jerks, and of course, it wasn't made in AMERICA!
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Dec 15, 2013 01:40
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Why didn't the US use the Sherman Firefly Ltd. edition(c)? Because us Brits were throwing 17pdr guns into Shermans as fast as we could make them and there were no spares to hand out. Also the US had the 76mm gun. It's worth bearing in mind that between the Firefly and the E8, the Allies brought more upgunned Shermans to Normandy than the Germans brought Panthers and Tigers.
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Dec 15, 2013 02:05
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When did the Brits give up their shell weight measurements in favor of metric bore (shell?) diameters?
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Dec 15, 2013 03:54
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Can someone link me to the Zulu war posts from the last thread?
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Dec 15, 2013 05:39
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Grand Prize Winner posted:When did the Brits give up their shell weight measurements in favor of metric bore (shell?) diameters? Wikipedia is giving me after Hungarian rebels drove a t-54 onto the British embassy during the Hungarian revolution and examined it, that they decided to ditch the twenty pounder. In 1959 they begin releasing centurion mark 5 armed with the royal ordinance 105mm.
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Dec 15, 2013 06:11
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Grand Prize Winner posted:When did the Brits give up their shell weight measurements in favor of metric bore (shell?) diameters? I'm going to guess at the time they joined NATO and everyone realized that logistics would run more smoothly if all allies used a common standard for marking calibers and other things.
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Dec 15, 2013 11:08
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Wikipedia is giving me after Hungarian rebels drove a t-54 onto the British embassy during the Hungarian revolution and examined it, that they decided to ditch the twenty pounder. In 1959 they begin releasing centurion mark 5 armed with the royal ordinance 105mm. what?
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Dec 15, 2013 12:12
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That is true, the stolen tank thing at any rate.
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Dec 15, 2013 12:52
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Wikipedia is giving me after Hungarian rebels drove a t-54 onto the British embassy during the Hungarian revolution and examined it, that they decided to ditch the twenty pounder. In 1959 they begin releasing centurion mark 5 armed with the royal ordinance 105mm. What the what? Someone who knows their stuff should explain this better, because that sounds like one hell of a story.
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Dec 15, 2013 17:17
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Sorry Ipad + it being late = bad posting. After WW2 the main British tank was Centurion which came armed with a twenty pounder gun, as they upgraded the base model the new variants would be mark 1-13. During the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the revolutionaries somehow got their hands on a soviet T-54A and drove it to the British embassy grounds. There the British military officer attached to the embassy examined the tank and sent the data such as hull thickness back to the ministry of defense in the UK. There it was determined that the twenty pounder currently mounted on the Centurion Mk. 4 was inadequate for dealing with the new soviet tank. Thus development was accelerated on 105mm gun that the Royal Ordinance factories had been working on for a few years and which was first mounted on Centurion in 1959, becoming the Centurion Mk. 5.
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Dec 15, 2013 17:25
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Going back a couple of pages to the sonobouy chat, has anyone ever developed a gun launched sonobouy? It seems like a cheap way to expand the ASW capabilities of ships without a helideck.
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Dec 15, 2013 18:05
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Did Ethiopia and Somalia have a horse-riding tradition in antiquity?
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Dec 15, 2013 18:08
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Ethiopia did, although we don't know much about it. Excavated Axsum era tombs included horses and elaborate harnesses. Cavalry were important across north Africa and the Sahel in the middle ages so the climate must have been amenable for them. On slightly related topic, I was just looking for sources on the colonization of North Africa and was wondering if anyone had recommended reading on colonial military campaigns in the region, or anywhere really. A few thousand modern soldiers conquered empires, often equipped with modern firearms, holding hundreds of thousands of people extending of tens of thousands of square miles. Squalid fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Dec 15, 2013 |
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Dec 15, 2013 20:21
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Slavvy posted:It pretty much was. Liddel Hart and Fuller developed a doctrine of rapid movement, bypass and penetration which was wholeheartedly adopted by the germans and shrugged off by their own military. These concepts were then proven in the blitz on France. Liddel Hart had a lot less to do with driving doctrine than most people think. Guderian didn't even mention him in his book until LH wrote him a letter asking to be credited, which is what shows up in later editions.
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Dec 15, 2013 21:01
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Godholio posted:Liddel Hart had a lot less to do with driving doctrine than most people think. Guderian didn't even mention him in his book until LH wrote him a letter asking to be credited, which is what shows up in later editions. Incidentally the wikipedia page on Hart appears to have been vandalised into a sycophantic attack on his critics. e: and by that I mean that some drama in Israeli military theorist circles has somehow leaked onto it. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Dec 15, 2013 |
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Dec 15, 2013 21:05
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Retarded Pimp posted:Going back a couple of pages to the sonobouy chat, has anyone ever developed a gun launched sonobouy? It seems like a cheap way to expand the ASW capabilities of ships without a helideck. Most modern ASW destroyers have a towed active and passive sonar array that allows the ship to locate underwater targets. iirc, there's also a number of sonobouys that can be dropped over the side by hand.
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Dec 15, 2013 21:30
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Where did the chariot originate, and when? IIRC when they showed up in Egypt the Egyptians were all  until they adopted them for themselves. Also, how useful were they really? I picture them being like cavalry but a lot less flexible and with really poor agility. I can only really see them being useful for driving in a circle shooting arrows, and for light cavalry style harassment duty.
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Dec 15, 2013 22:13
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Central Asia, during the mid-Bronze Age, pretty rapidly disseminating from there. Their quick adoption and massive spread should really be all you need to know to prove their usefulness. Cavalry didn't exist during this time- war horses were the product of thousands of years of breeding; the horses you'd get in the Bronze Age were much smaller and more fragile, and chariots were the first step towards actually using them in battle. The image of chariots as heavy platforms thundering into enemy lines is a much later one- from the Iron Age, with the heavy scythed chariots and poo poo. The ones during the Bronze Age were light platforms for skirmishing off of, and more importantly, for shuttling the well-to-do troops to the front lines (and back out when things got messy). Especially in places like Egypt and Mesopotamia (and Central Asia) where the land is mostly flat, they were extremely maneuverable and startlingly quick, but they were used extensively in China too so it's not like they were useless elsewhere. And actually, I don't know this for sure, but I'd imagine they were considered more agile than cavalry for some time; you get them filling that same role well into the Iron Age, even when actual cavalry started appearing in force, in places like Britain and France. Not to mention Roman chariot races that would persist well into the Middle Ages. Maybe there's something to those I'm missing, but "use fastest thing" sounds like it's half their point to me, so if cavalry were a better alternative I'd imagine they'd have maybe used them? Maybe tradition superseded that. Koramei fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Dec 15, 2013 |
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Dec 15, 2013 22:38
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Squalid posted:On slightly related topic, I was just looking for sources on the colonization of North Africa and was wondering if anyone had recommended reading on colonial military campaigns in the region, or anywhere really. A few thousand modern soldiers conquered empires, often equipped with modern firearms, holding hundreds of thousands of people extending of tens of thousands of square miles. http://www.amazon.com/Wars-Imperial-Conquest-Africa-1830-1914/dp/0253211786 A bit more on the academic side of things and not a very narrative history but decent writing and a compact overview of most of the highlights such as the First Italo-Ethiopian war aka the Battle of Adwa, aka modern Italy's ur-military gently caress up. Also lots of really neat steamboat river campaigns by the French. Also was pretty hilarious to find out that the local French military types in Senegal had figured out the same thing that the Kwantung Army would but back in the 1850s. That is: 1. Cook up a border incident requiring immediate retaliation 2. Use as pretext to get around parent governments status quo policy 3. Wrap selves in flag and present the politicos back home with a fait accomplis and dare them to return the territory the army has bled for. And oh yeah 4. Bite off way more then they could chew and scream for reinforcements until the whole frontier is a giant, bloody, resource suck on the mother country statim fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Dec 15, 2013 |
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Dec 15, 2013 22:41
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Nenonen posted:The roles might be superficially similar but it's not quite the same doctrine, though. If you look at BT (cavalry tank) and T-26 (infantry tank) you'll notice that they had the same 45mm gun but the difference came up in speed and organization. Nor did Germans think that Panzer III could do without HE shells, a fetish that apparently only the Brits had.
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Dec 15, 2013 22:47
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Yeah independent campaigns by local officers against the explicit instructions of civil governments were a common feature of European colonialism. When you have operational independence and victories are a prerequisite for career advancement, there's a huge incentive to behave aggressively, even when doing so is technically insubordination. What really interests me is the government history. How the hell do you extend administrative control across territories larger than any European country in only couple decades? It's freaking me out.
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Dec 15, 2013 22:57
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Squalid posted:Yeah independent campaigns by local officers against the explicit instructions of civil governments were a common feature of European colonialism. When you have operational independence and victories are a prerequisite for career advancement, there's a huge incentive to behave aggressively, even when doing so is technically insubordination. You don't, really. You coerce local governments, or install your own. Maybe your territory is mostly empty and you just ignore the unprofitable bits like French West Africa. Or maybe, you can divert all your resources into a single area that you can access easily, like the Congo river, rather than the entire territory of the Congo Free State.
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Dec 15, 2013 23:13
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