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jasoncawley@ameritech.net

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  1. On T-34 armoring, I see 45mm hull and turret front on 1940 models, and 47mm hull front, 60mm turret front on the 1942 model. If you want to call that no uparmoring, that is fine by me. If you think it is simply wrong, I'm all ears.
  2. You are right, for the T-34 it is ~60mm at 1 km, which will go through the turret front of any model, the hull front of the F2 and early Gs, but not the later Gs, Hs, or Js. A useful correction. Still fits the tactical picture I had, but rougher. Over the course of 1943, the Pz IVs are armored enough in the hull that the T-34/76s need turret hits at range, which probably means they want to close. That is about the same time as the Panthers appear, of course. Still fits the discontinued HEAT, but adds an extra cause for changing Russian tactical doctrine, certainly.
  3. Gen-x87 - more details please. Terrain each was in? Ranges? Quality of your men? Other fire they may have been under, e.g. field guns? It is hard to say what was going on without such details.
  4. I'd expect to see Molotov cocktails as their squad level, intrinsic AT weapons, not always present, like how rifle grenades and fausts are done now. And I'd expect 2 man ATR teams, instead of the zooks, piats, and schrecks the other powers have. There have been long threads on the ATRs, and you can find some of my thoughts there along with everyone else's if you care to look. But I will briefly recap my preference, instead of the argument that leads to it, about how the ATRs might be handled. Penetration modeled something like HMGs are today (bit more), but with a relatively low chance of KOing a vehicle penetrated. In addition, though, some chance, even if small, to bog, immobilize, shock, gun-damage, or cause a crew casualty. That is, the main difference from other AT weapon types is "hit does not equal kill", and even "penetrate does not equal kill". On the other side, they have much better range that schreck, piats, zooks. So, facing Russian infantry, it'd be lots of needles instead of one sledgehammer, with the coup de grace administered by Molotov if the infantry can get close.
  5. The main limit on using them wasn't terrain per se, it was infrastructure. Beyond the cities of the coast, and a short way up the main river valleys, there were almost no roads. And Japan had only a limited ability to supply forces there. The Japanese limited themselves to the coastal areas, and the more developed northeast 1/3rd of the country, because of this. In fact, they didn't possess a land line to Indochina until 1944. Plenty of the land they didn't control was flat, or modest hills. The Chinese forces were internally divided, not only communist vs. nationalist, but by factions within the, especially the latter. The nationalist forces had been formed, before the Japanese invasion, essentially out of a sort of snowballing of local warlords, many of whom remained as officers, with their men loyal to them. The Japanese also patronized various local puppet forces to rival these. And everybody fought everybody else, but with much of it internal security level, guerilla, or political, rather than military fighting. The Japanese still had nearly a million men there, over 50 divisions - some of them garrisoning Manchuria and keeping an eye on the Russians, more than half of them to deal with the Chinese. The Chinese army was huge on paper, smaller but still large in manpower terms. Their problems were political division (already mentioned), and military supplies. There was no industry in country at all - well, tiny amounts in Japanese held areas, that was it. They got some stuff from the U.S. and U.K. (less) through India, and the Russians had sent some stuff back when the war began (and was mostly lost, from the Chinese point of view and in conventional military terms). More came through when the Burma land route was finally reopened, but the war ended not long after that. For most of the period, Chinese military supplies had to come in by U.S. transport planes, while for the Japanese it was shipping. The Japanese never really made the logistic commitment necessary to take control of the whole country. They may not have been able to had they wanted to - Japan had only about 3% of world steel production in 1941, on the same scale as Italy. But even Italy had better tanks, which is saying something - LOL.
  6. On the Japanese supposedly not needing tanks - they fought a land war in China for nearly 10 years, against numerically superior forces, and were still trying to launch offensives there as late as 1944 (to shorten lines, free up troops, etc). Of course tanks would have helped them there, potentially freeing units. They also fought the Russians in Manchuria and saw in the process what tanks could do. They also sent inspectors to Germany to report on tank warfare developments. They had plenty of reason to need decent tanks, knew it, and they made several types. They just never made one that was worth a damn. On the Russians using lend lease, they were free. No further reason required.
  7. Here is what I think is happening. There seems to be a routine that AFVs check, to see whether or not it is suicidal to duel with a given enemy AFV. In pseudo-code - Tanks asks itself - - can that tank kill me? if yes - - can I kill that tank? - if no - override all previous orders. instead ask - - do I have smoke? - if yes, fire smoke - if no, evade That seems to be the routine giving your Sherman 105mm trouble. It seems to me quite likely that at the stage where it checks "can I kill that tank?", is not working properly. The question then is, why? Well, it is possible the reason is that the HE should be enough to kill the tank, in most circumstances, and that is what has it hung up. See, 105mm HE should go through the side of a Pz IV, pretty easily, at that short range especially. So why go to the HEAT when it is not needed? But, if the side angle is steep enough - probably about 45-50 degrees from flat to the side - then an HE round would not go through. If the ammo selection check, and the can I penetrate check, are made differently - one taking full account of the side angle and the other not - then I'd expect the tank to get "confused". Suppose it decides HE is enough before checking the angle. Then it checks the angle, and it finds "I can't kill this tank *from here* - and it can kill me". A test of this wild stab in the dark is whether there was any appreciable angle to the side of the Pz IV. If it was broadside, there is some other issue. Because any 105mm round should take out the target in that case, HE included. It is also possible that a situation in which the "use HEAT?" test *fails*, is always interpreted as meaning, "tank can't be killed". That is, some subroutine is set up to ask "should I use HEAT?" And it returns "no", because it has correctly checked and found that HE will do the trick. But that "no" is then passed back to some other part of the program. Which may interprete a "no" on the "use HEAT" decision, as "can't kill it with the best round". That would be a subtle logic bug, if it is the case. Such things crop up, especially when two programmers have worked on different subroutines. Or they can happen when a programmer didn't see how "use HEAT - no" and "can kill - yes" are compatible, and thought he was saving a step. Because it is relatively rare that the HE shell is enough to do the job, this might have gone unnoticed before. I hope this helps.
  8. Wyatt Earp's idea of armored combat. First to the draw. Let infantry scout for you, staying behind cover. Do not prowl around looking for a target. You go kill a target after it has been located, from whatever angle looks good, no matter how long the path. Go ahead and tackle the big guys, if you have T rounds or a flank - you can kill anything there is from a flank. Just don't approach from a turret's current angle. Reverse to cover immediately after your kill, relocate, then play it again.
  9. A fine question. I think the palm for best program has to go to the T-34. My reasons - 50,000 of them produced, the most of any tank type of the war. For several years, superior to what they faced, and serviceable against the average tank down to the end of the war. Only one major upgrade (though also one minor one set of changes early on), produced in massive quantity, which corrected the perfectly real weaknesses of the original model (2 man turret especially). The guys that had 'em, won. Hampered at first by poor doctrine, but very effective once the Russians learned a thing or two about armor tactics, operations, and organizations. Cheap enough to make tons, simply enough to come from an existing pre-war model. Mobile, though a bear to drive - they certainly proved in practice capable of long range penetration and exploitation work,on several occasions, all of them of extreme operational importance. They also proved capable enough in tank battle work, at Kursk e.g. One fellow mentioned minor powers, and certainly Japan had no servicable tank in the whole war. The French and Italians are easy targets. And one can point out small vehicle types that were failures, but without huge investments put into them. But sticking to the major land combatants, and major tank programs, I give the raspberry to the Crusader. I will explain why. It was not a bad tank, by specs or in principle. It 1940 it would have been a fine tank. But it was a large investment, and there were high hopes pinned on it. In practice, the armament had not improved enough for the time of the war, still the 2 lber, without HE capability. It was supposed to be built for speed but only made 15 mph cross country. The armor was not good enough to stop the mid-war AP rounds it faced - thin sides, very boxy, with near verticle plates defeating what benefits there might have been in the reasonably thick front armor (for its day). Big fleets of them were tried in North Africa, and largely were destroyed by considerably smaller bodies of German tanks, with quite low losses. Some of this was doctrine, some combined arms, some particular SNAFUs. Last model (Mk III) have a better 6 lber gun, but the upgrades always seemed to be behind the curve. It was used at the main tank type from the summer of 1941 until being taken out of service completely in 1943. After that, it was used only for training purposes. More than 5000 of them were built, a high total for a early to mid-war tank, and a significant part of total British AFV production. For the amount of effort invested in them, the tribulations of those that fought in them, any follow-on uses of the same ideas or production lines, I think the return was quite meager. I mean, marginal lines like the Pz II went on to field marders and wespes, and many other types found some useful role for the vehicle program, even if a given model became obsolete. These lost battles to DAK on their own, played second fiddle to Shermans and Valentines in the desert wins, and were then reduced to training vehicles. Not a lot of bang for several years work and >5000 made.
  10. Sandwich on the turret might mean bolted on plates for uparmoring. The turret was uparmored in 1942, and perhaps again, though reports differ on the second. Many of the 1941 production models were probably gone, but some of those, perhaps some early 1942, or later mods if there was a second round of uparmoring, may have plates bolted or welded onto the front. Why soft metals? Maybe for welding? I don't pretend to know, as it is the first I've heard of it. On the "penetrate any angle", including 30 degree side angle at 1200 yards, I have to say that I think that is completely out of line with the combat reports from both sides. I still haven't heard of a single confirmed kill from the front, on the glacis, with AP, above 1 km. More on this below. As for HEAT, 10% variation for hardness hardly sounds "extreme" to me, especially compared to your model suggesting penetration ranges varying from <500 meters to >1600 meters for AP, depending on hardness effects. But to answer your questions - the "B" model Gr38-HL is rated to penetrate 75mm of armor at 30 degrees, and the "C" model is rated to penetrate 100mm of armor at 30 degrees. I would think the former was borderline, and may have needed turret hits. They second of those, I expect was effective. Nobody has been able to tell me how many of which type were produced or fielded, or which arms got how many of them (towed PAK, PzJg units, Pz, StuG, etc). As for the comments from 1941, yes the lower side hull was flat, vertical armor, not sloped. 300-400 yards isn't exactly a long way. Incidentally, the 1941 and earlier models are ~4k tanks all told, out of 34k T-34/76 produced. 1942 and 1943 are the peak production years, and the armor is not as thin. In 1944-45 you get 16k T-34/86 with better armor again, as well as the better gun and 3 man turret, of course. For comparison, the German tanks in 1941 had a maximum of 30mm of armor sloped 25 degrees or less. Penetration by the T-34s main gun, at any range or aspect from which hits were likely in the first place, was almost certain. This changed later on, as the German uparmored their tanks - though the Russians put a better 76.2mm in the 1942- versions, and added souped up ammo later on (including some sub-caliber). In 1942 and early 1943, the effective penetration range was probably around 1200-1500 meters, longer against the turret fronts. Tactical doctrine and publish penetration stats agree. The later model Pz IVs had 80mm hull armor, which were probably penetrable at 1 km, though the turret remained 50mm and was penetrable at greater range. So you can understand, that very serious distortions would be introduced by getting this wrong. The German training statements say the T-34 outranged them. With the L48 and 80mm armor, the mutual penetration ranges were comparable, ~1 km. With the turret vunerable at longer ranges in both cases. Essentially, the better L48 German gun, plus much heavier armor, achieves parity with the better slope of the Russian armor, by 1943. Making the L43 penetrate any angle of the T-34 at 1200 meters, and front-flat shots at 1600 meters, means completely ignoring not only the details of the reports of the participants, but the much more basic question of range choices. It implies the Germans were flat too dumb to figure out that they outranged the Russians, and could have merrily blown them all away at 1.5 km without reply, when in fact the Germans were trying to get to 600-800 yards and the Russians were trying to stay at 1200-1500 yards. This simply makes no historical sense. The participants do not do everything bass ackwards with their lives at stake, because they are flat wrong about empirical penetration capabilities, only to be corrected 56 years later by someone's toy armor penetration model, for a wargame. No model that says the Germans outranged the Russians pre-Panther, can be accurate, because they simply didn't and we know it. The training and tactics stuff agrees, both sides, that the Pz IV and StuG with L48 gun, could penetrate the T-34 at 1 km (turret farther), and the published data say that the T-34 could do the reverse (again, turret farther), after the full uparmoring of the Pz IV was done. This makes obvious sense - the Germans continued to modify the Pz IV until it could hold its own.
  11. I said - "Tough terrain, prepared defenses, muddy thaw, local German counterattacks with armor." Again Mr. Dorosh ignores everything else and accuses others of a fixation on numbers that only he suffers from. In the sense that he is against 'em. It is really very old at this point, and I do wish you'd heed my invitation to drop it, and just ignore everything I write.
  12. How do you think they are supposed to know where to shoot, without any FO? Do you think they are psychic? How do they know what the target is? The on map mortars don't have radios, you know. Only the HQ does, if that. If they can't see it, either somebody that can calls out the target to them, or they might as well shoot a random spot somewhere on the globe. Indirect mortar fire, you can use on map mortars and an HQ as their FO, or you can buy an 81mm mortar FO and use them as artillery. Mostly, the on map ones are for direct fire. Incidentally, the accuracy of on map mortars is, in anything, still incredibly high in CM. It used to be worse. The Germans rated the circular error of their 81mm mortar at around 35 meters, meaning only half the rounds would fall that close or closer. They are stabilized only by a tail fin (like on an airplane bomb), have long hang time, drift in wind, there is windage between barrel and shell size, etc etc. Did they cause lots of casualties? Sure, mostly by the standard means you will see if you buy a 81mm FO and drop 150-200 rounds on a platoon or two, in woods especially, while not dug in. Now do that 40 times, and you've reached the average service life of a German mortar, in rounds per tube. That is sort of the whole idea - throw a bunch of rounds, then walk away whole to do it again tomorrow. The Germans threw ~75 million 81mm mortar rounds at people in WW II. They didn't hit 75 million people, and they didn't need to, for it to be a very effective weapon. If dropping a full module of 81mm ammo caused 10 casualties, they would have hit 5 million people all told. Which they probably didn't, because many barrages probably hit empty areas or whatever. The point is, you aren't "groking" the sheer scale of their use, in numbers at once (in many places) and over time, that made them effective. Artillery weapons work and causes so many casualties, because they throws lots and lots of stuff at the enemy, usually without effective reply, over extended periods of time. Not because every round is a homing whiz bang flash gordon do-witz that never misses. (In WW II anyway - LOL).
  13. How do you think they are supposed to know where to shoot, without any FO? Do you think they are psychic? How do they know what the target is? The on map mortars don't have radios, you know. Only the HQ does, if that. If they can't see it, either somebody that can calls out the target to them, or they might as well shoot a random spot somewhere on the globe. Indirect mortar fire, you can use on map mortars and an HQ as their FO, or you can buy an 81mm mortar FO and use them as artillery. Mostly, the on map ones are for direct fire. Incidentally, the accuracy of on map mortars is, in anything, still incredibly high in CM. It used to be worse. The Germans rated the circular error of their 81mm mortar at around 35 meters, meaning only half the rounds would fall that close or closer. They are stabilized only by a tail fin (like on an airplane bomb), have long hang time, drift in wind, there is windage between barrel and shell size, etc etc. Did they cause lots of casualties? Sure, mostly by the standard means you will see if you buy a 81mm FO and drop 150-200 rounds on a platoon or two, in woods especially, while not dug in. Now do that 40 times, and you've reached the average service life of a German mortar, in rounds per tube. That is sort of the whole idea - throw a bunch of rounds, then walk away whole to do it again tomorrow. The Germans threw ~75 million 81mm mortar rounds at people in WW II. They didn't hit 75 million people, and they didn't need to, for it to be a very effective weapon. If dropping a full module of 81mm ammo caused 10 casualties, they would have hit 5 million people all told. Which they probably didn't, because many barrages probably hit empty areas or whatever. The point is, you aren't "groking" the sheer scale of their use, in numbers at once (in many places) and over time, that made them effective. Artillery weapons work and causes so many casualties, because they throws lots and lots of stuff at the enemy, usually without effective reply, over extended periods of time. Not because every round is a homing whiz bang flash gordon do-witz that never misses. (In WW II anyway - LOL).
  14. The emphasis on logistics and total economy mobilization is on target in my opinion. But it does not excuse the failure to upgun the existing tanks. Uparmoring (beyond wet stowage, which made sense) was almost certainly not worth it for the Americans. But a few other war economy issues. One fellow said the limit was raw materials, and mentioned alloys and oil. Not for the U.S. The only significant limits the U.S. hit were #1 manpower, the most critical of all, #2 shipping space, because everything had to go 2000-4000 miles to reach any battlefield, often through sub-infested waters, and #3, to a lesser extent, engineering and design capacity, mainly showing up in scarcities of particularly skilled workers. The manpower trade off was the biggest issue for the war planners. Basically, you have to balance how many people will make the weapons vs. how many people to draft into the armed forces to use them. And for the U.S., in sharp contrast to e.g. Germany before about mid 1944, capital, cost, and raw materials were not a serious overall constraint compared to this trade off. Per servicemember, the U.S. made available by far the most expensive equipment, especially in the form of airplanes and ships. There was a certain economy to this, because the people were scarcer, and moving them more difficult, which fades into the second issue. At one point the U.S. was considering an army of up to 150 divisions. But this would have entailed an enourmous increase in demand for shipping to get them across the oceans and keep them supplied in combat, along with a large reduction in the work force making equipment for them. They pared back the force size repeatedly, which let the production stay high, and kept the shipping space demand lower. It still would not have been anything like enough on the shipping side, if code breakers, centimeter radar, and escort carriers hadn't won the sub war in the Atlantic at mid-war. This environment has to be understood for all the rest of it. Shipping space is the bottleneck, and the way the balance works, you can only support a smaller force if anything you do raises shipping demand, because more people have to make the ships, and fewer can be supplied at the other end of the logistic chain. It is not just a point about "you can have more tanks if they are lighter". You can't have as many *riflemen* if they aren't lighter, because said riflemen will be spot-welding in a liberty-ship shipyard instead. Basically, I think the U.S. planners called this trade off darn near perfect, and uparmored tanks were therefore out of the question. But upgunned ones were not. And here the third issue comes in, and I think the U.S. planners didn't allocate things as well as they could have. Engineering capacity refers to the ability to design, test, and field whole new systems. This not only takes lead time, it takes personnel, and those personnel are in the highest conceivable demand in wartime. They are needed literally everywhere - to rationalize production techniques, to develop new technical equipment, to act as foremen in plants doing detailed work, etc. The U.S. had lots of this capacity, but it was still a scarce and valuable resource, simply because there is no real substitute for it. You can't train new people fast enough, to high enough levels of expertise to matter, in such short time frames. The U.S. chose to put a lot of these resources on the bomb project, many others on bombers, and other aircraft, and many others on shipping, radar, code work, and production technique (including planning) for everything. There was a certainly logic in this. The personnel were thrown at the problems involving the largest amounts of capital, and the greatest technical challenges, with the idea that success in those areas would have the largest effects. But the side effect of this was that less capital intensive areas of the war effort, were effectively starved of the technical personnel to innovate less capital intensive systems. An engineer working on a better tank gun in 1942, is one not working on a better fighter plane. The reason I think they got this one wrong, is they underestimated the impact of the general economic principle of diminishing returns. There is something to be said for a portion of "a little everywhere" in economic allocations, because the obvious innovations in each field are likely to be easier to "reap", while still having a large impact. For example, a high velocity 76mm gun with abundant souped up ammo, fielded by 1944, would probably have had a much larger real impact that central fire control of remotely operated radar-direct 50 cal turrets on the B-29, or some other comparable whiz-kid success in a well-plowed area. So they erred by starving the Army of tech, somewhat, because they underestimated the importance of tech in the "vanilla" areas, compared to the "gee whiz" areas. That is independent of the question of actually upgrading to the 76mm in a timely fashion. There is really no excuse for that, it was pure stuff up. It is also useful, though, to look at the approach the Germans took to some of the same problems. Because they made mistakes that were not the same, but in strategic effect were undoubtedly worse. The biggest of these is the well known one, not to go to full war economy production at the time of the invasion of Russia, instead waiting until after the defeat at Stalingrad. Everyone recognizes how stupid this was, and that overconfidence was its basic cause. What is often not noticed is some of the side effects it had. When economies go to all out war production, they get their big increases in total output by sacrificing other things to achieve that. And one of the things they sacrifice, is overall flexibility - the ability to switch the direction of production from one area to another, to change types, etc. It is comparatively easy for an economy that is not fully "taut", to switch what it produces. In a "taut" economy, doing so dislocates dozens of other tightly interrelated plans. Speer recognized this, and knew the importance of standarization of types that is a kind of corollary to it. He was always trying to get people to settle on 1 or 2 things and then concentrate on getting more of them. But many discussing these issues, do not notice how timing of mobilization affected this and the related tech-fielded issues. The Russians went to full war economy by the begining of 1942. They hadn't been able to earlier, despite wanting to, because they had to move their factories out of the way of the Germans. They immediately took the best design they had, which was an excellent one, and bet the farm (no, their physical lives) on it. They consequently made 50,000 of the things. They made only one large-scale improvement to it, in the form of the T-34/85 - upgunning and a better turret to correct the largest weaknesses of the design they started with. Notice, though, that this innovation took more than 2 years - it wasn't until 1944 that the /85s were having an appreciable impact on the war. And that was ~6 months after they first faced the Panther. They also made SUs that used the same chassis and were reasonably effective as TDs. Well, the U.S. went to full war economy around the same time, very shortly after Pearl Harbor. The best existing design on the boards was the Sherman, and they ran with it. Overall, more than 30,000 of them were made. Not being in combat, the pressure to upgrade the design was much less. Realistically, the U.S. got upgunned tanks about 6 months after they saw the deficiencies of the standard type in combat. They also put better guns on an effective series of TDs using the same or similar chassis. Those two experiences are not all that different. The main difference is that the U.S. did not start the upgunning cycle until later, because they had not been in heavy action. They still should have anyway - some Tigers were seen in Tunisia e.g. But that is about the only thing to say against the overall performance. Now, the Germans had an extra year before going to war mobilization. For all of 1942, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were basically sticking with what they had, while the Germans continued to develop better tanks in an economy that had not yet gone to war mobilization. They fielded the Tiger I in that period, developed the Panther, and put the Panther into action 6 months after the decision to fully mobilize. No tank designed from the ground up after that date had a production run with as many as 4 figures. The only late war vehicle produced in quantity, designed after that time, was the Hetzer, a somewhat buggy design that used an existing light-tank chassis, which had become obsolete around the time mobilization began, and had been making marders in the meantime. It was better than a marder, that's about it. The Germans could not afford to abandon a single chassis production line that was in operation the moment the decision to mobilize was made. The Pz II chassis was still being used for marders and wespes. The Pz38 chassis for marders and hetzers. The Pz III chassis for StuGs. The Pz IV chassis for Pz IVs, which were upgunned, and for Jadgpanzers. In consequence, only about 1/4 of the late war vehicle production, if that was of types more modern than these (Panther and Tiger chassis, mostly Panther). If the Germans had gone to war mobilization at the time they invaded Russia, they probably never would have developed the Tiger or the Panther. They would have ramped the production of the Pz III and the Pz IV, as the best types they then had. They would have upgunned and TDed these chassis, fielding Pz IVs with long guns, and StuGs. Which would have resulted in a fleet very similar to those of Russia and the U.S. They Germans had 2 more modern types because they waited a year and a half after the invasion of Russia, before committing their economy to a few types. They still only got about 1/4 of the later war production, of those newer types, while the rest were lighter ones not much different from the ones the Allies produced. And they were also outproduced overall, by 4 to 5 to 1. If the trade off is 7500 Panthers from 1943-1945, and 2500 heavier types, or an increase to the 1944 production rate by the time of the Stalingrad battle, but making only Pz IVs and StuGs, which would you pick? To me it is obvious, the German chances would have been much higher, with a much bigger fleet of Pz IVs in 1942-1943, than with 1/4 heavy tanks well after the tide turned. The adage includes "first", not just "most" (or biggest). For what it is worth.
  15. I am sure they were heard yelling during lulls in the firefights, or from locations with little shooting going on, or when the range was close and firing sporadic because both sides were on opposite sides of some obstacle, etc. The point is simply that voice is a fragile means of control at any distance, in combat conditions. Most NCOs have to be quite close to the men they are commanding, to alter their actions by giving them directions - a consequently, they do quite a bit of scurrying about. That, at any rate, is the clear impression I get from reading small unit histories.
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