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Acebuckeye13 posted:It should be noted that while in the American case the Sherman being a firetrap is pretty exaggerated (And in many cases flat-out wrong), for the British the sterotype was a bit more justified-they never upgraded to the later variants that had better ammunition stowage, and as such their tanks were far more vulnerable to ammunition fires. That's definitely a point often missed. Semi-unrelated, but there was also the case of the firefly, where the bow gunner was replaced with more ammunition. The whole situation was likely worseened by the problem where infantry reserves for Britain were running low by Normandy, and armored units had to do a lot of the grunt work in the open, flat lands around the Caen sectors. I think it was in one of Zaloga's piles of books that he mentioned that for every Sherman lost to enemy fire, maybe one crewman died. That's pretty damned good for the time. This most likely resulted 4/5 of those crewmen talking about their flaming tanks they kept losing to enemy fire after the war, while tankers of other nations likely didn't survive after more than or two such losses.
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Mar 19, 2016 08:48
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ineptmule posted:So I've been taking my sweet time to catch up with this thread. Like the last one, I drop in every few days to read a few pages and so it seems like a functionally limitless source of fascination. Cheers all for keeping it going. Nobody in the US wanted to have to look after tens of thousands of Shermans when we'd only need a fraction of that post-war. What we didn't want to keep ourselves (that eventually got used in Korea), we'd dump off on other countries who had no interest in them beyond scrap when they were finished with them. What we kept was either turned to scrap or re-purposed as construction/farm vehicles (IIRC, there's a Canadian company that still makes vehicles based off the Sherman chassis design). Still others were just kind of dumped here and there to display outside government buildings and museums. Nobody really thought to preserve them like they would other relics, which is sort of why there are only a handful of antique naval ships still preserved. Basically, nobody really cared about the vehicles as historical pieces until WW2 started to become something we should remember. Even nowadays, though, a lot of the tank museums are outdoors and letting their collections go to hell. There have been some really dedicated private collectors out there, though.
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Mar 22, 2016 10:07
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Whoah, I had no idea tanks were converted to civilian use as tractors et cetera. Weird. Makes sense, though. Some rough googling turned up this page. Not that I know of. Military planes require much more maintenance than other types of military vehicles and especially civilian planes, so I'm guessing not. I could see the possibility of non high-performance biplanes and scout planes being used in that way, but I have no idea. I do still see an inordinate amount of Matildas re-purposed as farming/construction vehicles in Australia, though: http://the.shadock.free.fr/Surviving_Matildas.pdf Funny related story. The museum that I volunteer at has one of the only original-model US M1917 tanks in the world. The owner would bring it out for parades after WW1. It was spared from a scrapping by its owner during WW2 by hiding it under a haystack. He took it back out after the war, but lost control of it during a parade and dinged up somebody's car. It got put in the museum right after that.
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Mar 22, 2016 10:41
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I forgot about C-47s and DC-3s, so in other words I am dumb.
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Mar 22, 2016 11:21
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The current curator of the museum I give tours at had a good example of mis-handling relics, too. That M1917 I was talking about was part of this really old, non-updated trench warfare display until he got the job. One of the first things he did was pull the tank off because he had the good sense in his head that the painted concrete slapped on it to look like dirt was destroying the metal on the outside. He said he'd seen ignorant stuff like that destroy pieces dating back to the Civil War and seemed to really get to him.
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Mar 22, 2016 20:24
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Ensign Expendable posted:Aaaaaaaaaa They wanted it to look like mud to make it look all battle-worn for the display
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Mar 22, 2016 21:13
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MrMojok posted:Oh good Lord. I have a documentary about the ME-163 Komet, the little egg-shaped rocket plane that could take off and climb virtually straight up to get to the bomber streams, and there is an actual German training film showing how they fueled it. German weapons procurement is weird. Pilots: "We can't match the power and maneuverability of Allied fighters, and their campaigns are devastating because they focus on taking out our planes while they're still on the runway like we used to do." German MIC: "Here's a five-pound plane filled with rocket fuel to strap to your rear end. Everyone else, keep attacking civilian targets." Soldiers: "Please, please don't put these bigger guns on our vehicles. They lack the explosive power of the smaller ones. We mostly want better hatches, vision devices, and ease of repair and maitenance." German MIC: "Gotcha. Here's an un-tested SPG mounted on a chassis that was rejected by the German army but was built and forced into service anyway." Plan Z fucked around with this message at 11:29 on Mar 25, 2016 |
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Mar 25, 2016 11:12
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Ensign Expendable posted:The T-28 equivalent would be the Neubaufahrzeug. Never noticed until now that's basically a Panzer I turret on the left
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Mar 25, 2016 19:57
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Comrade Koba posted:Someone should really do an Insane Nazi Projects megathread. You couldn't make half of this poo poo up if you tried. Could be fun depending on the subforum.
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Mar 25, 2016 21:47
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Ensign Expendable posted:Isn't that this thread basically? I admit it's in my interest, but I feel like I've had the conversation a million times already, and this thread's been really cool to read about in terms of things I'm unfamiliar with. I wouldn't want to hijack it with an echo chamber I've participated in before (Even though I only started posting recently and it's all I've done), but that's only my own feelings.
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Mar 26, 2016 00:22
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PittTheElder posted:Seen as in the first time we've been able to observe it photographically? I thought that was a pretty common killer of tanks in WWII. Depends on what you mean by artillery. Direct-fire fixed AT guns? Yeah, that was like #1 most of the time from what I remember. Indirect artillery fire? Not many destroyed directly, but it could screw up an attack by causing bad terrain or disorganizing an attack enough, but I guess I'm cheating with words there. I think it was Aachen where an American artillery battery famously caught a heavy tank unit out in the open and forced them to retreat.
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Mar 26, 2016 08:53
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Ensign Expendable posted:We have a WWII one, but no one's posted in it for months. Nobody seemed to really give a poo poo unless it was a chance to call Americans stupid for thinking the instantaneous destruction of two cities were any sort of a factor in convincing the Japanese to surrender. Their surrender was only 100% because Russia captured Manchuria not a mixture of both and a massive list of other problems, mhmm.
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Mar 28, 2016 21:55
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Nebakenezzer posted:Dumb sorta serious history question: Like Cyrano said, it's mixed. On the armored warfare side of the Western Front of WW2, it seemed like every US crewman ran into Tigers, when American units had something like three recorded engagements with Tiger tanks in Europe. Unfortunately, every tank looks like a formless blob at 500m+, and "Tiger/Panther" is easier to remember and carries more weight than Panzer 3/4 or the myriad of self-propelled guns (never mind an understandable lack of education ib the many vehicle types). And if their tank was hit, then what their own country gave them was a gigantic death trap because it got set on fire, never mind that most of the vehicles that they defeated probably brewed up. On the other hand, they can be useful for descriptions of events if they line up with reality. Guys like Dimitry Loza are important in armored warfare accounts because they're trustworthy, but he also gives accounts of things like how Soviet troops came to use Lend-Lease equipment in day-to-day work at the lowest end of the chain. And even the descriptions of day-to-day life in Belton Cooper's godawful opus are pretty valuable in seeing the life of things that he actually did. tl;dr personal accounts aren't great for analyzation (with exceptions), but they can be helpful for adding context.
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Mar 29, 2016 00:25
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chitoryu12 posted:Also, not everyone who provided information was someone qualified to talk about it. Accounts of the supposed invincibility of Panthers and Tigers and the shittiness of Shermans came from people who didn't actually fight in them, like infantry. Death Traps, if I remember, was predominately written and/or sourced from a mechanic who took the fact that he saw a lot of damaged and destroyed Shermans as evidence that they must have been awful (much like how a field hospital is evidence that soldiers are awful at fighting because the only soldiers you see are wounded ones!). Even worse. He was a liaison officer for a repair unit, and in his book, showed he knew nothing about the tanks nor how they worked. Here's a start on what's wrong with his book: http://tankandafvnews.com/2015/01/29/debunking-deathtraps-part-1/
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Mar 29, 2016 04:38
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Nckdictator posted:So, I'm reading "Mussolini's Death March" a compliation of accounts from Italian soldiers on the Eastern Front and something that stood out is how most accounts I've read so far emphasis the "kindness" of the Russians. Random examples: Cyrano brought up any misgivings I would have vis a vis the author's backgrounds and intentions. Call me overly-optimistic, but i believe most people out there are decent. Your average person isn't a piece of garbage. That's why you hear of German soldiers and civilians showing humanity and compassion. After all, Hitler didn't exactly have majority approval going for him. This isn't to propagate things like the "Clean Wehrmacht myth" or to say that non-intervention is okay, but your average modern person doesn't have the cruelty in them to inflict awful crimes. Which is why there were political units like the SS or NKVD to make sure the message was overall being kept to.
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Mar 30, 2016 22:39
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PittTheElder posted:Pretty sure everything about the experience of WW2 (and the rest of them really) reveals that this absolutely is not the case. War is a hell of a drug, and the trauma of it will gently caress with your brain in surprising ways. I guess in my mind it went more like "They didn't always like what they were doing or were aware of the larger picture." It's much more complicated than my original statement, which is why I hovered over "Submit Reply" for a very long time. I was re-reading about Operation Torch recently, and a tank destroyer unit in particular was talking about being strafed by friendly Mustangs and Spitfires for several days on end, presumably because all of the M3 GMCs looked like German halftracks. One thing I've always been curious about how often air crews were ever confronted about specific issues of friendly fire in terms of either debriefs or even punishment like court-martials. I imagine it could really mess someone up. I'm guessing if it happened, it was only in extreme cases as keeping crew numbers up was probably very difficult, but it's something I've been really curious about even since I was little.
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Mar 30, 2016 23:19
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Mazz posted:I feel like in the many ways you can call out German equipment small arms aren't really one of them. They had some oddities and poo poo like Hitler meddling in dumb ways like he loved to do, but all in all they had some great infantry weapons. FG-42 was good and had a lot of neat features (Louis Stange always had interesting ideas). I'll agree that Germany generally did well in regards to small arms. There really aren't any particularly bad ones (obvious last-ditch weapons not included). Yeah, while the MG34 was more practical in terms of a more sustained fire, the MG 42 beat it in most every other regard. The 34 has lots of tiny little bits and bobs and was harder to produce, while the 42 seems less extravagant (Bolt housing on the 34 has around 25 individual pieces while the MG 42 has around ~15 from what I remember, for example). I've never particularly gotten where the "M60 is copied from MG-42" comes from. I don't see much similar in terms of mechanics or internals. One's even gas operated while the other is recoil operated. I could see it as more of a "The US adopted the idea of a mobile, belt-fed LMG like the MG-42", but unless I'm way off about something, "copied" seems strong. Plan Z fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Mar 31, 2016 |
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Mar 31, 2016 07:31
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feedmegin posted:Why do you believe this, out of curiosity? After 1933, anyway; and even then, while he didn't get a majority in those elections, people in proportional voting systems very rarely do. He still got by far the highest number of votes. I don't understand what the contention is. The 30-ish some percent doesn't constitute a majority.
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Mar 31, 2016 10:30
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feedmegin posted:I took the implication to be that the majority of Germans explicitly didn't want him and felt oppressed by him. My point is that this wasn't really the case; the guy who wins 50% more votes than anyone else, in a system of proportional representation, has about a big a mandate as you're ever going to see under PR - so he was certainly pretty in the last unbiased direct evidence we have for that - and I don't really see much evidence that that really changed, until say 1942 or so at any rate (losing a war will tend to do that for you). It was an intended understatement in a lot of ways to just be safe. I meant for it to be vague to allow lots of people who supported/opposed the regime in different ways and for different reasons. I was just sort of making a "safe bet" remark as I didn't want someone to come in with "WELL ACTUALLY not all Germans" as is usually the case.
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Mar 31, 2016 10:49
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A bit specious for the claims of "copied" I've seen, but the feed system seemed to be the closest thing from the few pics I had. 10 Beers posted:Happen to have a link? All of my bookmarks are rapidly running dry. I don't have the A/T, but here's the semi-recent D&D one. It's 90% atomic bomb debate: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3754268&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1 Cyrano4747 posted:I really think the inefficiencies in German industry get over-played in here, mostly because this thread is half by volume talking about the biggest, most egregious tank-shaped wastes of resources. Looking at small arms manufacture, for example, they did a pretty loving good job of churning out reasonable quality guns in high volumes with little disruption until the absolute last days of the war when supply chains just became insane. Remember: this is a country that managed to go toe-to-toe with the industrial might of what amounted to the entire rest of the world and took five years to get worn down. I can agree with this, but it wasn't the biggest tanks that were the biggest offenses, it was their whole system for armor procurement and production. Inefficiencies in production were mostly on the armor side (detailed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6xLMUifbxQ). There they were depending on skilled craftsmanship in a really weird setup not conducive to producing anything in large numbers, and the political interferences certainly didn't help. As far as I can tell, the only equipment really affected by strategic bombing was the Maus project and truck engines, but that's because we bombed the poo poo out of what supposed to be a Panther production line that was converted to truck engines sometime in 1944. Plan Z fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Mar 31, 2016 |
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Mar 31, 2016 22:01
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RC and Moon Pie posted:Looking through the Daily Telegraph's uploads from 100 years ago, I noticed this: I love stuff like this. Shows us how we could be scared by any big thing of the time.
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Apr 3, 2016 21:05
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Acebuckeye13 posted:To an extent I think people really undervalue the effect that China turning communist had on a lot of people. To the average American citizen in 1948, China was a longtime ally that we'd fought alongside during the War, and many servicemen had even been sent there as a part of the 14th Air Force flying against the Japanese, or had even joined the famous Flying Tigers before then. Then one day you open a newspaper and you read "HOLY poo poo CHINA'S GONE COMMUNIST" and the world's turned upside down-if a country like China could go communist, what did that mean for France? Britain? Us? Most people didn't really know or care about the context of the Civil War, or how the Nationalist Government was overwhelmingly corrupt and incompetent-all they knew was that it had happened there, and that meant it could happen here. That's a good point, considering the USSR was the only "big" communist nation up to that point.
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Apr 6, 2016 21:35
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Arquinsiel posted:It should be pointed out that the M10 actually had an armoured roof that could be fitted but seems to almost never have been because it didn't really protect all that much and it hampered crew efficiency. These weren't part of official issue, unfortunately. As late as Spring '45, I've read stories of M10 crews complaining of losses from airburst shrapnel, while stories of home-made roof covers start showing up in late-ish '44. I have seen passing mention of canvas/tarps in crew accounts as early as Italy, so either they had them standard issue or grabbed some on their own initiative, I don't know. The M10 is probably my favorite AFV of the war to read about. It was this thing that was a logistical craw for for the army due to having relatively unique fuel and ammo needs. They eventually found uses for it though, most notably as a sort of fire support vehicle in Italy. There, its shells didn't rip up the ground like 75s/105s did, and they could perform both direct-fire and indirect-fire adequately.
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Apr 27, 2016 15:03
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Ensign Expendable posted:To the last generation, maybe. To kids these days, not so much While giving tours, I'm finding the younger kids up to about 15-20 are a little more knowledgeable, or at the very least willing to learn. I think it's mostly because they're still in a school mindset or are just interested enough to be mesmerized by seeing stuff outside a book for once. I think baby-boomers are by far the worst (big surprise), usually interrupting to regurgitate internet/History Channel myths and cultural/political biases. In some cases it's obvious that they just made stuff up on the spot to seem smart. My favorite one was a guy who saw our MG-42 and insisted, insisted that half of all rounds afforded to crews were blanks because "the sound was scary enough." I could not convince him otherwise and you could tell he claimed victory in his mind because I didn't want to bog down the tour. And then there's the Garand helmet ping myth that gets parroted by the type of guy who you know locks down the counter at every local gun store for at least an hour per visit when we get to the American weapons display.
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May 13, 2016 17:05
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Ensign Expendable posted:Huh, well that's a new myth. I only heard the one about a shotgun racking noise being enough to scare off home invaders. As well as certain other blogs that popped up in its wake.
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May 13, 2016 17:17
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spectralent posted:Huh. That one I've not heard before. That, and there seems to be a lot of... extrapolation when people see certain devices. Like the guy talking about the MG42 blanks probably saw that famous old movie teaching GIs about the different MG noises and thought "Everyone was scared of the MG42, so they could fire blanks to have the same effect! My idea seems likely enough that it must have happened." Likewise, someone sees that ping and all kinds of thoughts enter their minds, most of which do not take in any realities of combat. It's especially bad when a myth originates from soldiers' stories, even when they're very obviously erroneous. Besides the line of myths that come up when I get to the Sherman tank, the most common one I've heard is how American weapons, especially the M1 Carbine, could not penetrate the thick coats of NK/PRC troops in Korea. That one has gotten contentious twice because on top of all of the various answers, the top one is "The GIs missed their shots." Both of these people got insanely offended that any US Veteran could be wrong and how dare I and what's my source. It's been teaching me to watch how I answer certain questions. That said, I dig doing the Q&As as people finally get to answer the questions they've always been curious about instead of someone talking for an hour about things they have no concern about. Plan Z fucked around with this message at 21:38 on May 14, 2016 |
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May 14, 2016 21:23
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Fangz posted:Has anyone killed anybody with a pickelhaube? War's True Horrors: http://dai.ly/x2ipqxp?start=1007
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May 14, 2016 21:32
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Cyrano4747 posted:If you ever get that mg42 blanks bullshit again here is why it's impossible: a blank won't cycle the bolt on an automatic. Without the bullet to build pressure there just isn't enough force. When guns fire blanks they need a way to keep pressures high enough to cycle the bolt. The most common is a blank firing device which is usually a thing that fits over the muzzle to keep the gasses from escaping too quick. Firing regular ammo out of a gun with a blank firing adapter on it is NOT a good idea. I mean, yeah, but this guy had no idea and was not taking anything I gave him. All he knew was that there were these things called blanks and this young nerd is insulting his intelligence by disagreeing loving kids these days. Overall these people are rare, and I love what I do.
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May 15, 2016 16:33
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Nenonen posted:Actually you shouldn't say Suomi submachinegun because no one called it that, people at the time just said konepistooli. So from now on just say konepistooli when referring to Suomi KP M/31 if you want me to take you seriously. Americans called it "Hitler's Buzzsaw." "HITLER'S BUZZSAW NEST TWO O'CLOCK. TAKE OUT THAT HITLER'S BUZZSAW."
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May 15, 2016 19:21
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spectralent posted:Out of curiosity, what's your fix for this? One of the regular things I run into wargaming is the "Tigers prowled normandy and murdered shermans with impunity, my GI grandpa told me so" thing, and yeah, you get a lot of "are you calling my grandpa a liar?" type responses if you suggest that it's probably pretty easy to mistake a Pz IV for a tiger at a distance*. We have to understand vets at the end of the day were people who lived extraordinary (as in unique) lives. Look at the Panzer III, IV, and VI from the front. They all just look like big metal boxes, right? Now remember that the average engagement range was between 300 and 500 meters. At those ranges, those big metal boxes look like tiny metal boxes to men without a lot of vision options operating in the most stressful situation imaginable. And we didn't even engage all that many tanks in the big picture of things. There's also the Belton Cooper situation where he saw big holes in tanks and naturally assumed that they were done by other tanks. Add in the fact that he only every saw busted-up tanks, and you can almost forgive him for assuming the worst. He didn't know what gun knocked out what tank, if the crew survived, the operational successes of these units in the overall scheme of things. He just saw shitloads of tanks that had been shot up, blown up, trapped, or broken down. It's all a matter of perception when it comes to people talking about their experiences. Their stories are history, and like all history, we need to add context and further examine their stories to find the truth. Cyrano4747 posted:abandon all hope, the person who throws the "my grandpappy" card doesn't want to hear it. It's an easy appeal to authority. True. There were a lot of Sniper Grandpas who said what Death Traps said word-for-word. My only two relatives to make it out of the war alive were a plane mechanic and a POW camp guard. They both had some incredibly funny and interesting stories, but there always seems to be stigma among the general population for any serviceman who's not a trigger-puller. I remember hearing all kinds of poo poo in movies and general discussion just digging on people for driving trucks in the army or something when to me it's impressive that someone was a part of the most insanely large logistic monster in military history. Plan Z fucked around with this message at 00:24 on May 16, 2016 |
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May 16, 2016 00:20
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There was also the case of Britain's naming system where it started with official names like Infantry Tank, A11 Matilda, Mk 1. Nevermind the "A" part had arbitrary numbers following them, so it was confusing for those not in the know of every vehicle before the nicknames became commonplace. The US one seemed easy on the outside with the M1/2/3/4 thing going on. It still had that sequence for differing equipment though, like M3 Light/M3 Medium (While a dumb example, I use the P-38 fighter/can opener to get a chuckle out of tour groups) which prompted the British to come up with the "General" naming system of Grant, Lee, Stuart, Sherman, etc. We didn't exactly find an elegant solution until someone in Chiefs of Staff demanded we start giving official "nicknames" to equipment. Still results in stuff like M551 and M1128 MGS, but who cares.
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May 18, 2016 23:30
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I'm wondering if the Soviet system was based on the factory, designer/team, and how much people in the procurement system cared, because up to and during part of the war, there were some inconsistencies. I'm sure an answer isn't far off.
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May 19, 2016 07:35
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USSR liked StuGs, and fitted their units with them and even re-tooled them into slightly more proprietary vehicles. Western Allies didn't use captured vehicles so much. There were enough of these units and enough friendly fire incidents that you'd need to be more specific about this one event.
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May 19, 2016 11:55
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Taerkar posted:The cynic in me feels that this sounds like one of those modern internet stories of how they wanted to get good tanks out there instead of lovely Shermans. And Shermans could travel hundreds of miles beyond projected "Oh poo poo get this in a repair shop NOW" time tables. It was a Death Trap because enough of them got to the front to occaisonally get shot in bigger numbers than Panthers.
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May 19, 2016 20:55
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Taerkar posted:You can draw some conclusions about the military and (possibly) government as a whole from their procurement methods and design requirements as well (And of course how well they stick to those requirements) I finally finished The Opening Curtain lately, and I felt like the "victory" of the Cold War through superior military technology was a pleasant side effect of the world's biggest Socialist Jobs Program.
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May 19, 2016 23:45
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chitoryu12 posted:Wheellock guns, yeah. The pistols were held totally sideways or at a 45 degree angle to better ensure that the priming powder was laying against the vent leading to the barrel. Echoing, but neat info. I gotta read up on them.
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May 21, 2016 10:31
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atomicthumbs posted:so what the gently caress was with the Sheridan? who thought that missilegun was a good idea? The Sheridan was originally designated to use a 76mm gun, but eventually the order got passed down that the tank had to be able to penetrate 150mm of armor. There were other considerations like mounting a 105mm/90mm/76mm with a separate ENTAC, TOW, or Polecat launcher, but the latter two still had development time left, and XM551 was being held up enough as it was. They decided that the 152mm launcher being developed for the Shillelagh would do. The Sheridan was just full of messed up stories. The Shillelagh's guidance system could suffer interference from sunlight and its own smoke plume. The latter was solved with an improved propellant, and I'm not sure how they overcame the former. I'm sure they did though, as having sunlight behind the infrared command link probably lent to its abysmal early performances. At one point, the Army was so scared of the thing that they wouldn't let more than one round of ammunition be inside the fighting compartment at a time during testing. The Sheridan is my favorite tank as there are just loads of stories about it that exemplify all of the worst parts of the MIC at the time, but also because it performed surprisingly adequately in its Vietnam missions.
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May 24, 2016 11:49
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feedmegin posted:Notably, without even attempting to field the missiles Not that it could also shoot its normal ammo easily. The "caseless" ammo that it used had a nitrocellulose wall instead of metal that would absorb moisture and fail to chamber. This was preferable to the other situation where damp cases could not properly extract after firing, risking a catastrophe the next time a round would be fired. It of course caused problems that halted other portions of the tank's development while even more new technological horse poo poo had to be developed for it. It was around this time I think they were actually again considering using a different gun. Plan Z fucked around with this message at 13:31 on May 24, 2016 |
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May 24, 2016 13:28
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chitoryu12 posted:It was also something like 9x slower than an M48 to fire because the gunner had to wait for the gun to automatically settle in and out of the loading position and the air vents to clear the breach so the caseless ammo wouldn't catch a spark on loading. The big things it had going for it were that it could go where the M48s couldn't, and it had very substantial firepower. Its first engagement along Long Binh highway resulted in 125 dead enemies for two shots fired and an unknown number of wounded. Granted, a conventional army wouldn't be walking in such lines, but when that cannon fired, it was devastatingly effective. spectralent posted:One thing I read, and again possibly from this thread, was that one factor that meant the crews liked it was that because it was so weakly armoured and prone exploding, whenever it was defeated it was defeated catastrophically and most of the crew died, so only the people for whom things had gone great returned to talk about it. Conversely, the M48 could take hits, meaning people would come back with some of the crew wounded or dead, and talk about how terrible it went. Which leads to here. Tactically, it was well-liked by the infantry. Much like the M50 Ontos, it could be moved around easily and provide very effective fire support. Strategically, they were liabilities that chewed through unique ammo and trained crews. An RPG or mine could at best send an M48 to the shop and at worst kill crew and write off the vehicle. A Sheridan was pretty likely to be a write-off with dead crew much more often. Flipswitch posted:Risking a can of worms in this thread but I'm curious, the loathing against Tank Destroyers in this thread, or TD chat, is that more the US doctrine of it or against the things themselves? Thinking that you hear people ragging on the idea of them, but less so individual models. Was curious as I was reading some stuff about the SU-85 and SU-100 and they don't get mentioned when it comes to TDs. I missed the chat here, but the debate usually boils down to the same tired argument. People argue that it was a stupid concept to make a bunch of these vehicles and spread them out piecemeal along lines in order to plug gaps. People then determine tank destroyers useless. The doctrine was dumb, but TD crews were still riding in vehicles with cannons and were trained to kill tanks, and they did both. It was just that once you took a whole bunch of dudes and their mobile cannons and didn't scatter them to the winds, they did useful things with their mobile cannons. I'll admit that McNair's obsession with towed AT guns was really stupid and overall detrimental. Plan Z fucked around with this message at 06:25 on May 25, 2016 |
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May 25, 2016 01:46
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Ensign Expendable posted:The SU-76 is close to the StuG, but the SU-85 and SU-100 are not. The StuG started out as an infantry support vehicle, and through equipping a better gun it became suitable for fighting tanks, while still remaining an infantry support vehicle. The SU-85 and SU-100, on the other hand, were tank destroyers created for the purpose of destroying tanks and were sometime begrudgingly forced to support infantry. The German equivalent of the SU-85 would be would be the Jagdpanzer IV, not the StuG. My fault, then. From what l'd read, they never seemed interested in a dedicated tank destroyer analagous to the M10/M18 or Jagdpanzers. There were projects with anti-armor intent like the T-34-57, but it felt like they never really said "This is a tank destroyer. It is for destroying tanks." Appreciate the correction.
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May 25, 2016 06:24
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