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pamak1970

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  1. A link which shows the previous memo and in addition discuss the armor doctrine http://tinyurl.com/y8bljdk
  2. This memo does refer to tactical success for the TD and I was wondering on what basis it was said This memo comes from McNair himself as as Commander of Army Ground Forces in 1943
  3. It is important though to point that all these tools were not supposed to be the answer countermeasure of a breakthrough, which was what the TD dogma was supposed to be. Beefing up infantry with AT or making many of them mobile following the trend of a mech infantry is one thing. Expecting those things to act as an operational reserve and counter breakthroughs is different. The belief was that the best antitant is another tank. All of these things like ITVs or even At guns in jeeps were seen more as a tool to free more tank assets from the need to support infantry. At the end the main armor thrust would be met by tanks
  4. I was talking about something i mentioned earlier. That is the death of the TD doctrine at a time when it could easily have a mission against Soviet armor after wwii. It seems the army could not justify the existence of Tds even then.
  5. Funny how cheap and tested solutions which worked were finally abandoned.
  6. @ Jason In one post you talk about all these other factors unrelated to the equipment specifications that determine outcome and in your last post you use outcomes of battles to justify the quality of equipment . You are aware that even towed AT guns countered successfully the German tanks in many of these battles you mentioned. I guess according to your logic which continues to stick to the big picture and end results, towed AT weapons are not vulnerable to HE fire in which case you should start a thread trying to convince battlefront that they have to do something with the very unrealistic model they have in their games which permits players to use even mortars to silence AT guns. The point is not to find the case of German artillery destroying TDs. It is difficult to do so under the presense of air supremacy. However as i said a doctrine should apply also when no army has any significant other advantage. The point is that we can still use some type of judgment seeing a picture of a TD . The point is that we can claim that the need to combine arms and mix tanks and artillery was not in the vision of the guys who built the TD doctrine (to their defense, many others missed it also). That is why i said from the beginning that i look this all thing from a more theoritical point not sticking to specific battles. I may not be able to find mass German artillery fire killing Tds, but i can find the trend of advanced armies using combined arms concept and i do find cases of having the operational reserve forced to execute a movement to contact and even having to attack in order to counter a threat. Yes TDs were never used centrally as an operational reserve, but remember that the doctrine DID visualize them under this concept. The fact that this doctrine was not executed in practice, does not mean that we should not examine the soundness of it based on the above observations.
  7. by the way, a little bit off topic but i would appreciate if someone has information to verify if CharB needs refueling every two hours when it operates in difficult terrain (not road movement). It is clear that the French commander asks additional time for refueling after moving just 15 to 18 km in a two hour period, but this might well be not a case of having the tanks empty. It might just be a very cautious move from the part of the tank commander who wants to be sure that he has topped his vehicles, 100% before starting the attack. On the other hand as i said, the book does talk about the high fuel consumsion of this tank when it operates in difficult terrain, giving a figure of two hours and a reference to back it up. It is just that i could not check the reference and it is possible that this number which seems very low might be the result of faulty analysis of events (the commander asks to refuel after moving for just two hours , therefore the tank needs refueling every two hours )
  8. since i have free time tonight i continue If anyone wants an object lesson in how irrelevant the frontal superiority of a Panther over a Sherman 75 can be in the presence of such factors, please review Cole's description of the battle of Dompaire in his "the Lorraine Campaign", pages 199-200, between 112 Panzer brigade and CCL, French 2nd Armored division. Green new formations, reckless premature offensive commitment, poor battlefield reconnaissance, terrain, flanking positioning and possession of terrain features, command of the air, and effective use of SP artillery - matter. As a result, 112 Panzer has 4 Panthers left at the end of its first day in action, and is spent. Armor numbers on the ground even at the start, wipe out to losses of less than a company for the side with the lesser tanks. "But but, Sherman 75s are Ronsons and death traps and we've got 40 spanking new Panthers, they should just be fresh meat for no loss". No. How you use the weapon at the grand tactical scale, operational factors, and overall combined arms power dominate outcomes You are beating the strawman here, because i do not believe that there is a disagreement . I do not think anyone here said that better armor and guns matter more than Green new formations, reckless premature offensive commitment, poor battlefield reconnaissance, terrain, flanking positioning and possession of terrain features, command of the air, and effective use of SP artillery combined as it was the case in the battle you mentioned. THere is still though expectation that having doing my part as a member of a military unit, and having done proper training and recon and the rest against an equally capable opponent, that i am not backstabbed by a poorly designed doctrine or machine. My belief about the failure of this doctrine does not come because of the end result of particular battles since all of these factors you mentioned were present and influenced outcomes . This is why i prefered to explain from a theoritical point of you the obvious decline of the tank destroyer concept. In order to avoid misunderstandings, the above does not mean that it is useless to study those battles. On the contrary, as long as we are not fixed at seeing only the final outcome of casualty or exchange ratios and as long as we are willing to examine various other details, they can still teach us many things about proper doctrine, or arming the force. For example someone else mentioned an excellent book "the blitzkrieg legeng" and i am going to use a case from there to make my point. It is on chapter 6 dealing with the French attempts to counterattack at Sedan after the breakthough. Time is of essense for the French who have to counterattack soon since the bridghead is still fragile. Of course they do not know it yet since their reports do not give the magnitude of the problem At the end their attempt to counterattack with tanks is terribly slow. If i stop my description of events here someone might simply point to surprise or inept command and control and the like arguing that there is nothing wrong with the Char tank or the French doctrine but then the book reveals more details. Although surprise and broken communications do exist there are additional challenges because of technical and doctrinal issues. French have Char and Hotchkiss tanks and of course they want to combine them in the upcoming counterattack. However the Char tank presents some challenges. Since French saw this tank in a tactical mission role supporting infantry, it had limited range. The compo of armor (weight) fuel capacity is tailored for wwi enviroment. At the end a Char B tank needs refueling every TWO hours when it operates in difficult terrain ( The book actually gives a reference for the above). When Brocard, the commander of the 3rd Armored Division is assigned the mission to counterattack with extreme haste, he has to refuel his tanks ,( assuming the supply columns survive the German airforce), move between 14 to 18 km in two hours (among others the Char is terribly slow) and then needing another two to three additional hours to refuel again! Then the final blow comes when French hesitate to attack fast. While they advance (at wwi rates) they see French troops fleeing and talking about hundreds and even thousands of German tanks. At the end they do not have the nerve and raise to the demands of the specific situation. They decide to stop, spread and wait for the Germans , probably counting on engaging them from advantageous defensive positions. Unfortunately for them, The German effort is not pointing towards them. The Germans have already turned and advancing towards the sea at wwii rates, in a perpedicular direction to the one French are waiting. They have also the time to bring more troops on the other side and strengthen the bridgehead. The French position has become irrelevant to the demands of the situation and since they do not care on pursuing the initiative through an offensive action, they seal their fate. Of course today it is easy to talk about ineffective French commanders but taking in consideration the fog of war and the like, it is not difficult to understand even the most horrible decisions. Because if in an alternative universe the French commanders were moving with haste and happened to bump on strong German units waiting for them in the bridgehead instead of rushing towards the sea leaving a weak cover behind in the bridgehead, the same people would accuse them for inadequate recon, or stupidly aggressive attacks against a well placed enemy. Anyway my point was not to talk about the French, i just wanted to show how we can still dig for details of military operations and try to draw certain conclusions about the challenges presented by the military equipment used, in spite of the fact that we have other parameters of operational significance which are certainly responsible for the final outcome.
  9. continuing the previous post since a lower casualty rate does not show anything about the level of protection against enemy artillery (a Sherman has obviously better protection that a TD and still has higher casualty rates according to your words ) what is the point of mentioning it in the first place? If you attempt to compare armored infantry to TD i fail to see the point. The armored infantry was not supposed to seek find and destroy enemy tanks. and its enemy was equally vulnerable to artillery and air inderdiction fire. In addition since you yourself mentions that the TDs did not have many opportunities to put in practice the doctrine they were supposed to follow, then why you use their overall casualty rates to argue that they were actually capable to do what they were supposed to do? Again let's not confuse things. The situation in west and the results there can not be used by themselves without a deeper examination to justify doctrines. Forget the arguments of air superiority , material advantage and the like. The thing is that overall at the end you have an army which can perform operational moves freely and be fully mechanized against an army which has to hide half of the day and still use mules and horses to move the rest of it. Under those conditions you have plenty of room to make mistakes as an Ally and still end up on top. I do understand your position that Germans enjoyed similar advantages of air superiority or mobility against Polish, French, Russians and so on which is of course irrelevant to the evaluation of the AT doctrine. I tent to see the latter in broader terms because the people who formulated it in the beginning were not supposed to assume that it would apply under air supremacy or any other huge advantage. A sound doctrine should apply successfully with good results even when things are on parity in other fields
  10. Then we get the moved goalposts of TDs supposedly being too vulnerable to HE and artillery, when the debate was over the supposed lack of armor vs. armor fighting ability of the US force as planned. As a fact, personnel losses in the TD forces ran below those in the regular armor (tactical doctrine and typical use more than matching any protection difference) and personnel losses in both ran less than a third the rate seen in the armored infantry, which was already lower than the regular infantry. Nor is this remotely surprising; being behind armor of any sort protects against the cause of 70% of all personnel casualties, which is artillery shrapnel THis is the only thing i want to comment on since my belief is that for the most part anything you said related to average numbers and those types of grant statistics shows nothing about the details related to AT doctrine and machines. Talking about moving goalposts................ My understaning is that the debate is about the effectiveness of AT dogma and of the machines used to put it in practice. So vulnerability should be a part to consider in this debate. I seperated this remark because it shows once more how those types of statistics you mention are totally irrelevant to what we discuss. First of all tactical doctrine and typical use of a fighting machine ARE formulated in practice based to some extend on the vulnerability-protection of the system. So if you are naked , most probably you will not be assigned a mission putting use in the middle of heavy fight which will help you have acceptable casualty rates. In other words you can not use just the casualty rate as an indicator of level of protection without knowing the mission profiles I am pretty sure that casualty rates among artillery men or many specialists in the rear areas were lower to those of combat troops. THis does not mean of course they had better protection. You can not just compare Sherman and TD casualty rates unless you have data showing that they were assigned the same missions at similar percetages, exposed to similar levels of lethal fire. What was the percentage of overall TD missions related to indirect fire. Same question for Shermans and continue until you construct the whole mission profile. Obviously things are more complicated than you want us to believe
  11. Critisizing Americans does not imply that i applaud Germans or English. I simply talk about Americans because the thread is about them. At the end neither approach was adopted after wwii. I assume the longer the range of the effective gun range which came as a result of tank progress, the more difficult to justify less protection for even bigger range (tank destroyer idea). After a certain theshold it does not make sense because of other factors like small likehood of finding free LOS to greater distances or identify vehicles.
  12. We have drifted away from the original issue. I am sorry but I do not accept the logic that the winner did everything right because he simply won. The issue is as somebody else said “what if he could win faster or with less cost”. I am pretty sure you can defeat any system by swarming it with many more weak and cheaper ones, but this does not prove that you did the right thing nor it shows the cost of an alternative approach of accepting less material superiority in exchange of better quality. Nor you can use the favorite subject of “average numbers” of exchanging weapon systems or ratios of losses because all these are affected by many parameters irrelevant to US antitank doctrine and quality of US antitank or German tank systems. If Americans after a certain point had chosen to use as an antitank weapon a jeep throwing darts, they would have won with a reasonable “kill ratio” of tanks to “dart throwing jeeps”. That is because in all situations where US companies of “antitank” jeeps would had the misfortune to encounter a few enemy tanks, they would most probably abandon the mission after having a few of their jeeps destroyed and simply accept a passive secondary role letting other much more capable systems dealing with the threat. In fact after a while, seeing their obvious inability to perform any antitank mission, they would not even bother to attempt to knock out any tank. They would simply execute other secondary tasks which would be safer and tailored to their weakness to withstand fire. The end result would be to have after the end of the war, a favorite comparison of “average numbers” of US jeeps to German tank casualties. Right now we are talking about a specific thing which is the US antitank doctrine and effectiveness of US tank destroyer weapons. So let’s focus on these things and their opponents which were the German Panzers. Here are my first thoughts, saying from the beginning that I have no desire to claim that I know everything or that I am an expert but I would appreciate if somebody has issues with my thoughts to attack them with arguments instead of me with slant and nasty adjectives. The US antitank doctrine, failed in my opinion. The reason was that it made wrong assumsions which led to an overreliance on speed at the expense of protection, coupled with suboptimum armament. Let’s start first with the armament. It is wrong to make comparisons with the situation of T34’s and inability to penetrate Panthers. Everybody can understand that systems develop and naturally even the best systems may have issues in penetrating newer tank models. However let’s put things in perspective. First the T-34 was a very good design which came as a shock to Germans when it was first deployed. In this case we had the Soviets acting instead of just reacting. They gained an advantage in armament which was followed by a German answer to recapture it. Americans though seem more like reacting trying to “catch up”. So I cannot put their effort (in this specific category of armament), at the same level with the previous mentioned ones. In addition when we talk about American tank destroyers, we have a totally different demand for armament. I mean the idea behind the antitank concept is that you sacrifice in protection in order to gain an advantage in another area (like armament). If you come in the battlefield naked You better come not with just an equal or marginally bigger gun. You should come with something sufficiently big to justify your original decision to sacrifice protection and give you better chances overall to defeat an average at least German tank at the usual battlefield ranges The point is not if a tank destroyer had a bigger gun. The point is if your compo of gun armor give you a longer effective battlefield range compared to the enemy tank. If the latter in the average case scenario is still able to penetrate you at longer battlefield distances then you have a problem to accomplish your primary mission. The Americans I believe did not see it that way. They thought that speed could compensate. It could let them arrive first and engage the enemy from favorite defensive positions which could negate any possible tank advantage. Well things seems to work different . First Americans (I am talking about the antitank branch only) were incapable to understand the full effect of combined arms. It is not just tanks against tank destroyers. Where they are tanks there is going to be artillery too and infantry and a pack of different weapon systems and tank destroyers have an open turret vulnerable to every airburst . Although you as a tank destroyer expect as a member of a combined arms group to see a fellow weapon system dealing with your problem, you must still be able to protect yourself all this time which is nessesary to eliminate or neutralize at least the threat. In addition all this mobility sounds good on paper but it is difficult to materialize in practice At an operational level and as a part of a compo group you tent to move at the rate of your slower members of your team which accompanies you and at the tactical level, fire and protection matter a lot. You can not dance all around an enemy when he can still rotate his turret shoot and kill you at longer distances or when airbursts follow you Besides it does not follow in operational or tactical level that you as a reserve have some “inherent advantage” of choosing your location and wait for the advancing enemy who broke through your defense to come at a place and range of your liking.Sometimes the above may happen, especially in places where terrain restricts choice of axis of advance , like mountain terrain and the like. Very often though the enemy has simply too many choices and you can not guard against every possible course of enemy action. “He who defends everything, defends nothing”. IF you become inactive, you give the enemy the opportunity to make your position irrelevant. Fix your position with a minimum of force and maneuver to get an advantageous position towards your open flank or rear. You try to counter this by maneuvering, possibly trying to do the same thing to him. Other times the best way to stop a penetration, is by forcing the enemy to relocate forces from his original axis of advance in order to counter an unexpected threat somewhere else chosen by you, the defender(in operational terms) who decides to attack trying to get the initiative. It is much easier this way instead of trying to read the enemy’s intentions (bypassing fog of war and mirrors by his deceptive operations) and move towards his potential destination faster than him waiting to confront him there. Other times it is simply a matter of confronting him when he is exhausted not letting him time to recover from his previous effort to break your defense. The end result of all of the above is that as a tank destroyer reserve, you often have to execute a movement to contact operation at the operational level, or restore your breached defense by a swift counterattack before the enemy has time to consolidate his gains. However your tank destroyer system is not effective when it is not camouflaged or hidden waiting for the first shot . In a movement to contact environment when both forces move against each other, surprise can come easily at anytime to any of them (assuming there are no issues of air supremacy)while in a counterattack tactical scenario it is probably the attacker who is waiting for you. The reason I wrote all the above is because I wanted to show my reasoning regarding why the American antitank dogma was poor from a theoretical point of view. It is not that all of the above things I described happened in practice. Some of them did not because of other factors unrelated to the “genious” of people who gave birth to this doctrine and who were not in a position to foresee them anyway . The tank destroyer could be effective only in very specific situations against a tank. This is a very poor result for a system designed specifically to deal with enemy tanks and be vulnerable to almost everything else. As a last comment I am going to point the obvious double standards of explaining the result of a battle where tank destroyers did not perform well, in terms of “bad tactics from American commanders in the field” while taking the result of another battle like Mortain as a proof of the soundness of the American dogma. The more experienced members here can recall in other threads the arguments against the silly tactics and dogma which led to hopeless attacks against Mortain and the like. And by the way, by criticizing certain people, I do not claim that I am a “better man” or tactician or strategist than them. Same when criticize Napoleon at Waterloo, Darious at Issus and the list goes on and on…….
  13. It will be interesting to see why the American (NATO) thought of the relative free use of nuclear as countermeasure to Soviet massive armor in the 50's? Consider for example the big disadvantages of that approach like devastation of allied territory in case of tactical nuclear weapons against Soviets in West Germany or taking the huge risk of total anihillation of big European or US cities or even countries later in case of targeting nuclear weapons at the heart of Soviet Union. Is it possible that this type of choice was forced because they did not see they had an effective conventional response at that time ? If this is the case, then it seems strange that Americans ignored a supposedly tested ,successful ,cheap and with relative minor political and strategic risks antitank doctrine at a time when they needed the most.
  14. I do not think this is the main reason for the demise of the antitank doctrine. After 1944 it was the Soviets who had the ability to stage massive armored attacks, but still the Americans did not seem to be thrilled with the use of TDs as one relative cheap countermeasure against Soviet armor.
  15. This thing about "fresh look" made me post one idea for discussion. Since i am not a programmer , i do not know how easy it is to do it . I leave this to the experts here. I recall many years ago, there was a request for the upcoming CMSF related to "zones of operations". In a way it was like having a player establishing boundaries between the major formations under his command and any deviation during the execution of the mission would result in some type of penalty. I wonder if we can link this idea together with probablities for mis-identification (i am talking about firendly fire) or something similar.
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