Skipper

I love using guns. I don't normally use the 150 mm one - it is too slow and too expensive to my liking. 105 mm does well enough both in demolition business, as well as tank busting. And it is eaiser to hide / better surviving. The secret is to have them hiding in woods, under command of an HQ with stealth rating (this same HQ can be a spotter for mortars firebase), and not open up until either (a) it has a decent chance to kill an AFV or ( enemy has expended his large caliber arty.

> According to one Red Army vet, average > life span of a tank might be only a month > or two. Well, it was hardly any better for a number of other military professions. Such as AT gunners, combat pilots and normal infantry. There were times in Stalingrad, when a batallion of 30 men was considered a combat-capable unit.

IMO, 4 Pz-IVs popping out from behind a ridge (hull down) from 400-600 m away could duke it out with those Shermans without all this finesse. Some 120mm to button 'em up wouldn't hurt, otherwise - why bother? I'd, too, keep those 150 mm for infantry.

Because 8.8cm was damn expensive to manufacture, and needed barrel replacement after ~100 shots. Which is ~2 ammo loads. Fine gun, otherwise. Cutting edge of 1930s technology. I guess, Americans figured that they can't afford to mass produce something like that. When you are already at war, you need weapons here, now, and in wholesale quantities.

FYI, in 1943 or even 42, I don't remember, artillery department of Soviet general staff issued an official combat instruction on how should a forward artillery observers work from within a tank. Whicxh means that by the time this tactic was widely employed in reallife . I just dont think that there were special tanks for forward observers.

Never heard of soviet tanks like that.

> The idea that a German tank battalion in > Russian fought 5 times as much or killed 5 > times as much as a typical western tank > battalion just doesn't withstand scrutiny. IMHO, it does. Here's why: German tank bn after Kursk: 1. Target rich environment. 2. Operating mainly on defensive, mainly in AT role. 3. Retreating at the double from most battlefields, hence no way to verify your kill claims. US tank bn in Normandy: 1. Not many armored targets around. 2. Operating on offensive, mainly in infantry support role. 3. Advancing -> can verufy kill claims -> less space for fantasy.

How else, do you think, would a tank desant indicate a target to a buttoned up tank? They had no fancy intercom plugs outside.

In fact, it was both ways. Transport AND close-in support. Firing on anything that resembled an ATG or faustpatron shooter was definitely part of their brief. And they were told not to try saving ammo on such targets - the tank as much more precious. The idea of the tactic was not so much fire for effect, as suppression and target indication. Wild shooting would show the threat axis to the tank crew, and with a bit of luck buy some time for a tank to swing turret that way, acquire the target and open up with HMGs and the main gun. We are talking, say, 6 PPSHs firing long bursts at the same target. I guess, density of fire should have been alarming for the receiving side, and a stray round could even hit the target. On assault, the task of riding infantry was to stay on the tank as long a possible and ideally, disembark straight into the enemy trenches, thus passing the defenders' pre-planned killing zones in the shortest possible time. After which the surviving tanks would either move on, or stay and help the infantry with securing the assaulted area - depending on the ultimate objectives.

A comment on that chart. It is safe to assume that until after D-Day most of formations in France were either third line or re-forming after a trip to the East.

Fighting for US, I often use M3 Armored Car + 76mm AT gun for exactly that purpose. The M3 (150 rounds of .50cal, fast and skin thick enough to stop an MG42 bullet) is great for flanking and wreaking havoc in the rear, too. Just keep it out of trouble until endspiel. In ME I also normally load an HMG on it to get to a nice large heavy building somewhere in the middle of the map. If enemy chooses "rush to the objectives" debut, that's his greeting party.

When people merrily discount minor Axis powers, they forget two things: Minor Axis powers were not that poor or that minor. Finns in Karelia and Romanians at Crimea come to mind. USSR had its own version of "minor powers" in the form of rural population of Central Asian republics. Say, Russia, Ukraine and Belarussia (about 2/3rds of total populatiuon) were agricultural suddenly turned industrial 10 years before the war (although still the bulk of the people were from rural background, and 10 classes secondary education was rarer than MSc level education is today). Central Asia was still almost purely rural. An anecdote of that time goes like this: 1942, refreshments from one such place arrive at the front somewhere around Stalingrad. They can barely understand a dozen russian words and dont speak any at all. Neveremind read or write. Company commander sends two of these young fighters to rear area to get company's rations. Two days later they arrive dressed smartly in beautiful officer uniforms, laden with sausages, chocolate, shnaps and hot soup. And carry signs: "Dear Mr. Stalin, these people are worthless as soldiers for you and equally worthless as POWs for us. Please send them home." Question is: for comparison sake should we discount them, too, or (my suggestion) let's rather not discount anyone?

> They reduced the time, in steps, from 1 > hour to 5 minutes. Even at just 5 minutes > exposure, men still died from the cold. Couple of quotes: "There is no such thing as a bad weather - only a bad equipment" /russian hikers saying, which is fully confirmed by my own experience/ "True siberian is not the one who does not fear cold - it is the one who dresses well" /siberian saying/ German army simply lacked winter clothing. I don't remember exact figures, but somewhere I've read that the plan in 1941 was to provision winter clothing for only 10 or 15% of Wehrmacht manpower. An intention was to finish everything before October.

On its way

Check your spelling, please. It is ZVE-RO-BOY. Beast killer. The way you put it, it looks rather like beast milker.

Except sapper units in divisional TO&E, there was another kind of rather large units called otdel'naya saperno-shturmovaya brigada (separate assault engineer brigade). Iirc, these were used for fording large rivers, assaulting field fortifications and other such heavy work.

I have two nice maps for Kursk area (Prokhorovka etc). These are about 2 mb in JPEG. Want me to email them?

> I can't remember the exact figures but > someone posted the number of men killed in > action some months ago and it plainly > shows that the Russian's got their butts > beat. Between June and October 1941 - surely, and in a big way. Afterwards it wasn't so anymore.

> Afgan land should have forced them to > switch but didn't. But it did! "Maneuverable group" and all the other small unit tactics stuff. Some new features in arty tactics. Anti-manpad tactics in aviation. And so on. When people want to live - they learn fast.

I once made an oath to myself neve to enter "the best something" threads. So, consider my post off-topic. > Wrt a western audience one can't help but > wonder if the entire Soviet Army General > Staff has been underrated ... It's very easy to correct. Add "The [comparison term] american or german [subject] of WWII". If that looks similar to talking about napoleonic wars without ever mentioning any french names, well... face it, it just looks that way. > with the exception of General Winter and > General H.Wave You sadly forgot about General Mud. [ 07-02-2001: Message edited by: Skipper ]

> Stalin did charge Zhukov with a crime though. "Charge" and "crime" are both from the glossary of criminal justice. Iirc, Zhukov was reprimanded with something like "losing his party member's humility". Which was a serious accusation at the time, but still far from criminal charge. If it wasn't Zhukov, he would quite likely end up in a labour colony or worse. As it was, he was simply exiled.

> Although billed as a Socialist > Brotherhood, the USSR saw other races with > a similar contempt that the Germans did, > only mixed with an inferiority complex > from the condition of the Russian Empire. That's patently untrue. For crying out loud, Stalin was georgian. Khruschev was ukranian. That's not to mention lower levels of hierarchy. And if we are talking about school, in my 10 years there I was told something like a ten thousand times that all nations are equal - and I lived in a place where this was a non-issue (extreme north east).

> I really enjoy reading Great Patriotic > Skippers posts If you dont like it, dont eat it. > T-34 was best choice to produce for soviet > industry. With all sorts of caveats, that's likely true. > Panther was same for german industry. They > were unable to produce tanks in such huge > numbers. That's not quite as likely. As I understand it the strategic implications of this whole story with Pz-V development, in 1942 germans gambled on quality vs quantity. It seems to me that they expected quite a bit more bang for the buck from Panthers than what they actually got. > T-34 had larger overall effect in war. Yup. > 1vs1 T-34/85 was inferior to Panther. Yup. > PS. Patriotism is sad thing. It only leads > us to fight eachother. You know, any good thing can be made absurd if taken to the extremes. Iirc, I haven't as much as personally insulted anyone here, let alone fought.

> Was the Panther actually significantly > more expensive to build than the T-34? I > always had the impression that a PzIV, T- > 34, and Sherman were comparable to > manufacture. I once read a 300+ posts thread on this issue. The question of comparing production costs is rather complicated, because in times of war measuring these things with money is quite irrelevant, because you need to build them here and now. Man-hours, machining hours, number and complexity of manufacturing operations and scarce commodities required for production all count. T-34s were produced on an assembly line, the design (wartime version of it) provided for all sorts of technological shortcuts (things such as slip bearings instead of ball bearings), and demanded much less deficit things than either Pz-IV or Pz-V. The conclusion of that thread was that whichever way you count, T-34 was a lot easier to build in wholesale numbers during the war. Funny fact from that thread: assembly line method was SOP for the soviet tank industry... but not for german. > Maybe at points of desparity did russia > perform with extra umph, but to say that > russia out produced germany becouse they > simply worked harder I think is an > overstatement at best. Guess what? I agree, it was an overstatement. But it does carry an important point. To rephrase it more accurately, the main factor (among many others) that allowed USSR to outproduce Germany during the war was the fact that Soviet industry and general population were fully mobilised for total war effort from the start. Germany did it only in 1943, and even then my impression is that they did not go quite as far.

> This led to Zhukov's jailing. I have to repeat myself: QTE Stalin actually sent him to command a relatively unimportant military district. UNQTE