gunnergoz

Michael, I suppose they are better examples of disruptive painting than camouflage. But, to answer your question: It was sort of a personal grog joke...I was just struck by the inelegant and jarring appearance such paint schemes have when taken out of context. And, while the top one might actually blend in somewhere in the Outback, the bottom one just hit my funny bone, can't quite say why...perhaps its reminiscent to me of the way I "camo'ed" my Dinkey Toy tanks as a little boy, using housepaint and mud. I suppose there is something that is endearingly humorous to me now about amateur paint jobs on military hardware (and I mean the authentic, historical ones, not postwar amateur botch jobs like some of the terrible imaginary schemes I saw splattered on some German tanks on display at APG many years ago). The real paint jobs say a lot about the times and the men who painted/rode/fought them. These little 2-pdr guns were all that they had and a lot of good men died because of them (on both sides, in both roles) but in the luxury of hindsight, they just look sort of quaint, dolled up in their warpaint du jour. Its all relative, though. In a 100 years or a 1000, future grognards will be laughing their socks off at our pathetic efforts to hide our martial, mobile tin cans using optically reflective, variegated chemical coatings that were applied by means of animal hair bristles affixed to the end of cut tree branches. [ April 11, 2004, 08:29 PM: Message edited by: gunnergoz ]

The Ontos, at least, carried 106mm recoiless rifles that were absolutely deadly to contemporary armor. The camo job on the two photos above, however, might render the enemy incapacitated by laughter. It's hard to hit a target when you're too busy rolling on the turret floor, LYAO.

Nightwatch, your conclusions may be a bit premature. For one thing, there are few or no Brit tanks in Iraq to be subject to such weaponry, so we do not know their actual vulnerabilities and strenghts. Not so's I've heard, anyway. As to the Russian armor, reactive armor is fine on the steppes where there is no infantry around to get fragged by chunks of blown reactive armor. Tanks in Iraq (or any urban battlefield) have infantry all around them a fair part of the time. One more thing - reactive armor works but once. From what I understand, the Abram's composite armor is no worse than Chobham. The problem is, no tank can be equally protected in every area.

I just want to know why the seated chap's crotch is smoking...then again, maybe I don't...

Put any tank in an urban environment where the bad guys can get clean side, top & rear shots and you have a multimillion dollar toaster. Ask the Russians in Chechnya. Hell, ask our guys in Iraq. Tanks are not ideal for combat in built-up areas. We use them because they can throw a lot of lead and protect what's in them better than most things...but they weren't designed for that role as rolling city roadblocks/bunkers.

And why do you want to know? Is there one double-parked in front of your condo?

Juju, you are an artist. Thanks.

Just finished Carlo D'Este's masterful biography of Ike. Check it out, it only covers his life to 1945, but does so in great detail. "Eisenhower: A Soldier's Life"

In the US they were called "combat cars" because the politics and military bureaucracy of the day insisted that all "tanks" belonged to the infantry arm. Cavalry could only get their hands on full-tracked combat vehicles by the workaround of calling them something else. This sort of (now) ridiculous nit-picking deprived the US of a truly viable armored doctrine throughtout the war that was to come. We ended up with light tanks, mediums and tank destroyers as a result. No one could come up with a successful "heavy" tank so we didn't field one the whole war (the M26 was described as a "medium" by the time it was out in numbers, although compared to the M4 it certainly was a "heavy." It's actual enemy counterpart was the Panther in German useage, making the medium description valid. It's a lot of fun to wonder what might have happened if some of the old US army rigid-thinkers had been set aside somehow and the young turks like Patton and Chafee been allowed to build us a real modern armored force.

I recall at least one story about Russian Matilda-equipped tankers cutting German infantrymen in half with well-aimed AT shot. Not conventional, but when that's all you have and the gunner's got a twitchy trigger finger... Don't forget that 2pdr and 6pdr guns, especially on tanks, often did not have HE at all. IIRC the 6pdr got it later in the war, not sure if it ever reached the 2pdr. Oddly enough, the 2pdr is almost exactly 40mm and Bofors made a superb HE round in that caliber. But then, knowing how stuffy the Brit tank/gun design and procurement people were, its not suprising that they'd field tanks with no HE "because their job is to kill other tanks" or similar dogmatic drivel. [ March 01, 2004, 01:27 PM: Message edited by: gunnergoz ]

Very interesting site, thank you.

Well, let's be thankful, then, that WW2 Nazi Germany was'nt as good as designing governmental bureaucratic efficiency as it was designing weapons... What they did well, they did exceptionally well.

I'd agree with this. Rather than a truely innovative design, it is basically a lighter, less accurate and less reliable equivalent of the BAR. </font>

I just finished reading "Tanks on the Beaches" which is a biography by a Marine tanker. He mentions some buddies in an M-5 light that were killed when a Japanese tossed a grenade in through the open rear turret hatch...which might indeed have been open to eject spent brass. In any event, when the tanks are mixing it up and enemy infantry is around, leaving any hatches open is a risky business.

The FG42 certainly was a curious hybrid. I suspect it was expensive to produce, as well. FWIU it also had a severe muzzle blast that made it easily discernable on the battlefield and the recoil was supposed to make it difficult to control in full auto mode. Still, it is an interesting mix of features: semi/full auto, bayonet lug, full-size rifle cartridge and a 20-rd magazine. We could compare it to a number of arms based upon certain these characteristics, and might even find some equivalence but for one significant descriptive not yet mentioned: that it was designed specifically for airborne troops and for the peculiarities of their style of combat. I think it will remain unique and a solitary example of its kind.

What is most interesting to me about the Soviet airborne is the fact that, despite wartime failures, they persisted postwar in building up a force of paratroops that at one time numbered at least seven divisions. What's more, they developed armored support and assault vehicles specifically tailored for the airborne forces, then they fielded these vehicles in large quantities. It's unclear as to how many of those seven divisions could have been dropped at any one time by Soviet air transport resources, but the mere existance of such a rapidly deployable and potent force was cause of a lot of concern with NATO planners. The only clear solution to the threat was to ensure that the West maintained a sufficient level of air superiority that would make the massing of such transport fleets prohibitably expensive. We know that the Soviets did employ airborne forces successfully in the original takeover of Afghanistan in the opening stages of their intervention. We can surmise that the Soviets understood that these large airborne forces were best employed at the beginning of a conflict, where shock and surprise would enable the transports to make their drops with little opposition. It makes an interesting contrast to the US doctrine and use of airborne post-war, where the units were seen as rapid reaction forces, typically to be used in response to threats from the real or potential enemy...whereas the Soviets apparently saw these forces as part of an aggressive doctrine of seizing and keeping the initiative.

Not a direct answer to your question, but how about this for starters: http://www.merriam-press.com/mono_025/m008-ex.htm or http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0788160826/qid=/sr=/ref=cm_lm_asin/104-8147785-4161506?v=glance Should get you going.

Does this help? http://www.military-info.com/MPHOTO/P035.htm

Don't confuse wartime reality and physics with the representative, abstract simulation that is the CM game engine of present day. Recall that the squad (say 10 men for the sake of argument) is not all standing on the "zero point" from which all throws originate. Assume that each squad member takes up an area one meter square, and they are seldom if ever arrayed in a "doughnut" but usually some variation on the line. Lets say 8 up and 2 back. That means we're talking about a span of 8-10 meters, somewhere in which is that darned AT bundle. It doesn't matter in CM terms who has it or where. All that matters is that it can be conveyed from A to B in time enough to credibly deliver it and escape the blast. Another poster has already noted that we could be talking of a delivery radius more than a throwing distance. We simply have to recognize that the squad itself takes up a bit more room on the battlefield than our little CM stick men do in our visual representation. Looking at all those factors makes it easier to accept that such a relatively heavy grenade bundle or satchel charge could somehow manage to be lofted 28 or 30 meters. In reality, it was being run part way and tossed part way. Until we get to the point where the engine can represent individual soldiers and individual meter square (or less) "hexes" we will have to do with imagining what is happening in our little squad "area of influence." (My hat's off to MikeyD, who managed to say the same thing with about 10 percent of the words as I.)

I'm with you on this one, Michael. Eisenhower was no strategic/operational genius by any means. He had virtually no battlefield or unit command experience to speak of. What he did do masterfully, was to bring the various elements of an unbeatable coalition together and keep them functioning despite their differences. Eisenhower was uniquely capable in that regard. He was like the coachman, never pulling the wagon himself or riding one lead horse, but instead getting the Allied horses to pull together in the direction he wanted them to go. I find it hard to imagine a war fought as successfully as was the ETO, without the likes of Ike around to orchestrate his various prima donna generals and doing so in spite of often competing national interests. In short, the genius of Ike was that he got people to work together towards a common goal. If you ask me, the real unsung hero of the war (for the US) was George C. Marshall, who knew brilliance when he saw it and made sure that the key players were in the correct assignments when it came time to play ball. Ike was one of these choices, obviously. And Marshall understood his own role well enough to turn down the command of Overlord when was offered to him by FDR. IIRC, FDR breathed a sigh of relief when Marshall elected to turn down the supreme command in Europe, since FDR knew that Marshall was absolutely essential in his role as overall military coordinator for US forces.

Thanks for the photos, JonS. It's interesting that in two of them you can clearly see the unit is hull-down to the enemy. The other thing that strikes me is the awful vulnerablity of the damn thing; the crews are wide open to even a fly swatter. Big brass ones on those blokes, bless their hearts...

Hi, Mom! Not that this thread is OT, it is probably about to be OBE (overcome by events.) I'll play the existing games until the next engine comes out...the sooner, the better.

FWIW, most of the US 3/4 ton 37mm AT combinations were converted in ordnance depots back to ordinary trucks before being issued. The few that were used in combat didn't last long and even then were only a stopgap while the Tank Destroyer Corps concept was being worked out. I don't know much about the UK portees but it might have been feasible to fire them facing fore or aft, without need for outriggers; if one moved pronto after every shot, they might survive an hour or two on the battlefield...who knows? The outriggers would seem to be most necessary for shots fired perpendicular to the vehicle's long axis. Any portee grogs standing by out there?

To Heck with all this hull-down distance shooting...real Shermans manouver. So here's hoping my Sherman engages your PzIV from behind, up close and personal... [ February 04, 2004, 05:05 PM: Message edited by: gunnergoz ]

I won't get into the issue of TO&E levels since I don't have reference material handy now, but we should recall that WW2 organizations didn't always get their hands on weapons just because some chart said they should have them. In particular, items like bazookas could have very well been apportioned out to the troops in contact with the enemy who seemed to need them the most. This might well have applied to the para organizations who got ahold of some during the Italian campaign. There might not be a TO&E of the day that called for it, but they still could be issued from the ordnance depots since there was urgent need for infantry AT weapons. If we slavishly follow only the TO&E's, we stand to short our CM troops in ways that the historical forces were not.