Hey Mecitizenkane,
Watch out for the CM fanboys, they will tell you its your tactics or combat mission is infallible.
While I definately agree that the axis big cats are not indestructible, CM's armor modelling is certainly not an accurate representation of reality. Take the panther for instance, In reality it was darn near impossible to get frontal penetrations on that bad boy. Yet in CM you will lose panthers to frontal penetration quite regularly. It's been debated quite a bit and anyone who has the moxy to bring up such a point usually gets their head chopped off. I suspect that to fix it would have required too much coding, so that means it must have been right in the first place according to the history scholars at Battlefront who no more than other well respected historians on the subject!!
It's just a game anyway right?