Skipper

> I think that even today the Russian army > follows this doctrine (see T-80) The purpose of the minimimal crew (in both cases) is to decrease volume behind the armor. Thus you get a considerably lighter tank with the same amount of armor protection. And in tanks design lighter means faster, cheaper, harder to hit, more mobile and more reliable. However, TC+loader combo in early T-34 turrets proved to be a poor solution. T-80s use TC+gunner combo and an autoloader. This gives them a small disadvantage with the rate of fire, which soviet designers deemed to be a reasonable price to pay for all above.

> some of which did at least token defensive fighting iirc, these french troops lost something like 10,000 people KIA before surrendering (and inflicted comparable losses on US troops). I wouldn't call it "token".

Which reminds me. When I used to go outdoors (whitewater, mountains - that sort of outdoors), we would always appoint somebody responsible for the weather. When (NB: not if) the weather gets ugly, it is always reassuring that there is somebody to be blamed for that.

> As far as I remember, there were no Tigers > involved in Barbarossa and very few > Panthers only towards the end. Neither Tigers no Panthers took part in BARBAROSSA. However, both were introduced on Ostfront, in 1942 and 1943, respectively. Even King Tiger's first appearance on the battlefield (a reinforced heavy tank batallion attack that ended up in fiasco) also happened on Ostfront, in 1944.

> That's asking for debate and you're trying > to hedge or quantify sensless acts. Didn't mean to porovoke anyone, just noted that Yugoslavian partisans played a significant part in liberation of their country by the Red Army.

> Wrong or not, he survived the war so he > must have gotten something "right." I've seen dozens of merchant marine shipmasters who go to sea for 20+ years and still have no slightest idea how the money is made and lost in commercial shipping. All of them surely were outstanding navigators. > Just about any weapon is > good against soft targets... To cary the above analogy further, just about any ship can carry grain from USA to Europe. And yet, only certain (narrow) range of size/speed/consumption makes good money in that trade at any given economic environment. > Eg the Abrams fine record in the Gulf War > was due to a large extent to the fact they > simply could not be penetrated. About the only logical lesson of Gulf War on the armored warfare is that when you pit tanks of different generation and weight category against each other on a flat table, the younger and heavier one wins hands down (or should I say the older and lighter one loses pants down?). But we knew that all along, right? WWII was different exercise. I mean, totally different, from whatever angle you look at it.

> I raised myself, and only after exposing > most of myself to the enemy was I able to > see the half-figures some way down the > range... Earlier in the same post: > This was obviously a lousy position Yup. So it sounds. > Hell, even the beat up, tired, old ones I > used in boot camp and MCT never jammed on > me. Did you get to fire long bursts to the point where you see the barrel glowing? > Add in the armament of a Canadian squad's > APC/IFV Ie, another trusty .50cal on M-113?

A far away AT gun can in some situations be dealt with by a tank in the following way: 1. a couple of MGs or an onboard mortar or a rifle platoon gets it well suppressed (about two turns). 2. a tank pops up from behind a ridge and puts some he on it. 3-4 shots usually do the job. 1-2 with 105mm. Olle: you should be putting your small caliber AT guns on the flanks. Or something like this: forest, SMG platoon in the middle, AT gun just behind.

> With hordes of cheap russian squads Why should there be hordes of cheap russian squads??? I fully agree that MGs are underrated (that's an opinion from somebody who is losing pbem defence with an auto-picked MG company / rifle company combo ).

> he puts protection first, mobility second, > and doesn't mention firepower at all... That's a typical perspective of an individual tanker. Essentially, it is wrong.

> How on earth did the Serbs suffer more > than the Poles/Jews? They lost almost 1 mililon dead out of 4 or 5 million population. I don't remember off-hand how many divisions Wehrmacht had to keep in Yugoslavia, but it was many enough to make some difference in Russia. > What program of systematic elimination did > the Germans implement to wipe out the > Serbian people from the face of the earth? Same style extermination program as in Belorussia, Poland, Russia and Ukraine. Incidentally, all these were the places where there was a real large scale partisan movement. I don't think arguing who among these suffered more makes any sense.

Russian.

CM2: Great Patriotic War to Comissar: face and bitch were correct translations

> Some Poles did fight on the Red side. Several divisions of them, not just "some poles". These were called Voysko Polskoye. Can add France (Neman-Oderskiy fighter regiment Normandia). Austria was considered part of Germany, iirc. Ie, people from there were drafted to serve in german units. Volunteers from many nations fought in SS (Norway, Holland, Denmark etc, etc). Should not forget Yugoslavia - lots of action there. Arguably, the nation that suffered most in WWII was neither jews, nor poles. It was serbs. Reg Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and some other countires that (afaik) did not send their army units to Russia, it can be said that these took part in fighting, anyway. On the way to Berlin Red Army visited those countries and, of course, there were local collaborators fighting among germans.

If you are talking about russian "tsar", it is "tsaritsa". Trust me.

Judging by the fact that there are still thousands of Maxim and Hotchkiss MGs in russian military warehouses, there must be some of those tanks, too

The reason, afaik, was to scare the beejesus out of foreign observers. [This message has been edited by Skipper (edited 03-26-2001).]

IS-3s were still around (in the form of immobile pillboxes, dug-in) in 80s. For Korea, soviet General Staff had some contingency plans and deployments, but I wouldn't say so surely that it was a nuclear threat that stopped Stalin on that occasion. His strategy in Korea was quite strange - thus, he could have easily vetoed the UN resolution that gave USA a mandate to intervene. Instead, soviet delegation did not show up on the Security Council meeting. As for the small "what-if" analysis, I would imagine that in case of full scale soviet intervention 64th fighter corpse would be brought up to an air army strength, get bombs and bombers, and be allowed free hunt south of 48 parallel and over the sea. Hence, not quite as simple as that.

Btw, female tsar is tsaritsa, not tsarina.

> It is part of their national conscience. Yup. Still is.

> So, Poland was not making a "land grab" > but still trying to fight for the freedom > of it's former peoples, land, resources, > etc. > Today though, it would be a land grab, as > these people have grown their own, non- > "Polish" national identities. Ukranians have formed their "non-polish" national identity back in XVIII century. Note: I am not talking Western Ukraine (Galicia) here. As for the "free" Poland, your picture is surprisingly rosy. Orthodox ukranians fought religious wars (sort of) against catholic poles. I guess, they had a reason. I do agree on your other comments, more or less, although it is worth mentioning that quite a few of the countries you mentioned (namely, Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan) attached themselves to Russia at their free sovereign will. They should have thought that benefits of such a union outweighed the negative effects of what you call "russification". Ie, "russification" is not "bad" or "good", it is just the best you can get when you join an empire. The alternatives are "extermination" and "enslaving".

I do not remember where, but I, too, read that the screens originally were an answer to the AT rifle threat. 5 or 10 mm sheet of metal with some space between it and the main armor is noticeably better at defeating AP rounds (by breaking the tip) than just another 5 mm or 100 mm of armor. Besides, it is a lot easier to replace a holed 10 mm clip-on contraption, than a badluy dented armor plate. Ie, makes sense. As for wire mesh screens, that is a completely different design, doesn't help against AP, but does help against early cumulative rounds. They used them on soviet tanks, too - as a field modification. Finally, I've read that people put sandbags on T-34s in the recent yugoslavian wars. That's BAD for tank's suspension, I guess, but in some situation you just dont care.

> IMHO, to characterize the NKVD as *merely* > border guards LOL Fully agree. NKVD was much more than that. It was the Interior Ministy in a tyrant's regime. > Eleven million dead bodies isn't propaganda. It is exactly that. You can more or less rely on Solzhenitsyn's personal experiences - some Gulag acomodations were real hell. As a source of historical information, he is nil.

> He doesn't state that. That's a great relief

> At least some of those border guard units > were among the best Soviet formations. You know, recruits were always selected to serve in the border guard for above average fitness and clean political record. Even paratroopers had lower selection standards, afaik.