side armour or pz 4 penetrated by 37 mm.

[Sublime]

The evolution of combat aircraft during WW II was phenomenal. The top speed of first line fighter aircraft more or less doubled. This was mostly due to huge increases in the horsepower of aircraft engines. This also allowed single engined fighters to carry a bomb load greater than that carried by twin engined light bombers at the beginning of the war. Even though only about five years separated their design, the technology embodied in the B-29 was a quantum leap from that of the B-17. Helicopters appeared and were used operationally.

So in this one area alone, there were huge technological leaps. Then there were electronic computers...

Michael

And then you have the next 20 years. The evolution from Sopwith Camels to F4 Phantoms dropping laser guided bombs over North Vietnam in 50 years is incredible. There's almost nothing I can think of in human history to rival it. An F4 Phantom could carry more payload than a B17 - thats amazing too when you think about it - fighter aircraft 20 years later could carry more bombs than a heavy bomber of WW2.

[JasonC]

"almost nothing I can think of in human history to rival it"

Vaccum tubes first meant for radios turned into a way to make single logical distinctions, to solid state transistors, to universal computers with multi-gigahertz speeds tracking delicate arrangements of gossamer charge on bits of glorified sand the size of a fingernail - in about 60 years.

[Sublime]

I did say 'almost'

[Duckman]

IIRC the Pz III and IV were designed more with fast mobile infantry support in mind rather than to go up against other tanks. So they were given enough armor to withstand what a typical infantry unit could throw at them at that time with the idea that the infantry they were supporting would be protecting their flanks and doing the bulk of the work.

Germany actually had the same kind of doctrine as the much-maligned American one, i.e. tanks were primarily for soft-skinned targets while AT guns and TDs were supposed to take care of enemy tanks. It worked well for them early in the war, particularly in the desert.

The odd man out was Britain, where the infantry support tanks were given (at the time) credible AT capability with the 2 pdr in the Matilda in order to protect the infantry from tanks. Unfortunately this meant abysmal HE capability.

I'm reading El Alamein by Bryn Hammond right now, and it's interesting how weak infantry still was against tanks by late 1942. There are numerous occasions where British tank or AT gun support failed, mostly due to catastrophic interservice cooperation. In several cases the German tanks simply drove on top of recently captured positions and forced the infantry to surrender. Given even modest portable AT weapons this would have been much more difficult.

Tank-infantry cooperation proved very hard to solve, probably because it was a low-level problem that required lots of people to cooperate effectively. By contrast the British quickly fixed their artillery by reintroducing centralized fire control à la WWI. This proved very effective and several German-Italian attacks were stopped cold at the start line by the British quickly dropping huge amounts of arty on them.

[Sublime]

So before centralized control how was it handled? It's interesting, when you say centralized control a la WW1, it makes one think of a slower more cumbersome system. I guess because WW1 is 20 years older and different type of warfare. Stopping attacks at the start line implies they had great reaction times, etc. Was this because they had time to fortify a front in El Alamein, or was this a regular feature during the war after they fixed control issues?

[womble]

Tank-infantry cooperation proved very hard to solve, probably because it was a low-level problem that required lots of people to cooperate effectively.

I thought it was because tanks are mostly blind and deaf, and need some sort of telephony (radio, or bolted to the back) to get communication into them. So the technical problem had to be solved before the mass interaction problem even became soluble.

[Michael Emrys]

Tank-infantry cooperation proved very hard to solve, probably because it was a low-level problem that required lots of people to cooperate effectively.

And since it was rare in the British Army for infantry and armor to train together, that kind of cooperation seldom occurred. Armor and infantry tended to fight their own battles, even when they were on the same battlefield. One exception was the 11th. Armoured Division which did develop some measure of tank-infantry cooperation.

BTW, before someone from the UK jumps up and accuses me of chauvinism, the US Army had similar problems for similar reasons. Seems to me that it was a little quicker to learn from its mistakes though.

Michael

[JasonC]

I don't think tank infantry cooperation was primarily a matter of infantry having phones to tell tankers what to do - that was an infantry command, tanks as mere support model that the US and to some extent the Brits backed into in the late war for a portion of their armor, but neither the Germans nor the Russians ever had anything similar, and did fine without them. I think that was really a technical solution to a command and subordination problem, that infantry officers wanted to use tanks to solve infantry problems - which is hardly the only way (or the main way) of achieving tank infantry cooperation.

The Russian way was to strictly subordinate the infantry that worked with tanks to those tanks (in the mech arm at least). While smaller groups of tanks supporting mostly rifle forces just picked their targets as opportunities while the rifle infantry did its best without leaning on them. Admittedly the latter often resulted in poor cooperation. The former was tough on the riders but got the tanks all the infantry help they needed, when the tanks not the infantry were in the drivers seat.

The Germans got better tank infantry cooperation by forming pretty tank heavy KGs and letting the tankers call the shots with those formations. The infantry working with them wasn't as strictly subordinated to tank ends and aims as the Russian riders, and they relied on more intelligent combined arms tactics to mesh their fighting with that of the tanks. But fundamentally they were just relying much more heavily on the direct fighting power of the massed tanks.

The Brits in the early and mid war and the Russians in the early war had used massed tanks far too independently, that didn't result in good cooperation either. It didn't help that their tanks were singularly ill equipped to deal with non-tank enemies on their own (poor HE firepower e.g.), but the basic problem was that none of the other arms were directly subordinated to tanks. It was always tanks alone or tanks subordinated to infantry, and neither is a particularly good model.

The other hard thing to coordinate was tanks and artillery fire, and there the secret is just radios on the one hand and letting tanker officers command, on the other. The Germans got that right before most. If you read the tactical accounts of desert fighting, it is the fundamental asymmetry between the Germans and the Brits, rather than coordination with infantry.

When the Brits have a gun front, it gets inundated by shellfire, visibility drops to zero in dust, and massed German tanks crawl into range with the forward bits a little at a time and chew them to pieces. When the Germans have a gun front, there is no artillery barrage and the Brit tanks recreate Pickett's charge, and the German antitank guns pick them off at will. It isn't tank infantry cooperation that is missing there - it is tank artillery cooperation, tank HE firepower, and sensible tank tactics.

[JonS]

So before centralized control how was it handled? Stopping attacks at the start line implies they had great reaction times, etc. Was this because they had time to fortify a front in El Alamein, or was this a regular feature during the war after they fixed control issues?

Actually, the British artillery used very centralised command, and very DE-centralised control.

Control of engagement of targets - that is the application of fire - was pushed right out to the FOs who could actually see the target. Any FO could - within clearly defined limits - order the amount of guns he wanted, the type of ammo to be used, and how many rounds he wanted to fire. All batterys were on a common survey, and linked by a very efficient communications network, so that targets could be engaged rapidly by any fire unit in range. There's a fairly well known exaple from the fighting in Italy in which a German battalion was spotted moving into a village by an FO. Within half an hour he had obliterated the German battalion with the fire of over 700 guns! That was pretty exceptional, but regimental targets - involving 24 guns - were regularly employed, and took a few minutes to engage. Again, the FOs were ordering these missions, not requesting them.

The centralised command bit comes down to all the guns being under an artillery based hierarchy, rather than farmed out on an even-stevens basis. All the divisional guns were under the divisional CRA (Commander Royal Artillery), and all corps artillery was under the CCRA (Corps Commander Royal Artillery). Battalion and brigade commanders weren't allocated any artillery, and even a divisional or corps commander could see the fire of "his" artillery being taken away by a higher artillery commander in order to be used in support of a different formation. This made efficient use of the guns, since it is trivially easy to switch the target the guns are firing at from one flank to another, as long as the command and communications infrastructure is in place.

That's what they had sort-of in place in France in 1940, but with not enough guns or radios to really make it work. And their proceedures were a bit sh!t after 20 years of peace. Back in England after Dunkirk the proceedures were refined, the number of guns vastly increased, and the number of radios went through the ceiling. Meanwhile in the Desert from 1940 through till mid 1942 dispersion was the name of the game. Divisions were broken down into 'brigade groups' which roamed the desert more or less independantly, and almost invariably with only a small number of guns in support, if any (see Jason's post above - an armoured bde might have no guns at all, or perhaps one eight gun battery). The gunners knew, at a professional level, that they should have been massing their fire to achieve effects, but the nature of the fighting seemed to conspire against them to prevent that happening. Too, once the Germans showed up the infantry were often crying out for something heavier than 2-pr AT Guns, so the 25-prs tended to be mis-employed as direct fire AT weapons, rather than indirect support weapons. That started to change in July at Alamein when massed guns crushed the first German attacks against the Alamein line, and became formal Army policy once Montgomery took over and decreed that divisions would fight as divisions.

It's interesting, when you say centralized control a la WW1, it makes one think of a slower more cumbersome system. I guess because WW1 is 20 years older and different type of warfare.

Late WWI fighting was very sophisticated. A lot more sophisticated than it's generally given credit for. It was also a lot more sophisticated than a lot of the early fighting in WWII. In fact, most of the tactics and techniques used in WWII (and even still in use today) had a direct lineal relationship with those developed in WWI. WWI was a watershed, and marks a clear break between 'old' styles of fighting battles and waging wars and 'new' styles.

[Duckman]

And since it was rare in the British Army for infantry and armor to train together, that kind of cooperation seldom occurred. Armor and infantry tended to fight their own battles, even when they were on the same battlefield.

It was both a doctrine/training problem and a TOE issue. Early and mid war British armoured divisions were extremely tank heavy, only one or two motorized infantry companies to an entire tank brigade I think. On top of this the infantry had very weak organic support and no halftracks until 1943 when American ones became available.

Infantry divisions, on the other hand, had no organic self-propelled support like the German StuGs and instead relied on attached tank units. However given the poor state of cross-formation communications, let alone training, this did not work at all. So even if British tanks were perhaps a bit better than they are usually given credit for it was still undone by utter failure at combined arms early in the war.

BTW, before someone from the UK jumps up and accuses me of chauvinism, the US Army had similar problems for similar reasons. Seems to me that it was a little quicker to learn from its mistakes though.

To be fair to the British the Americans did have a few more years to prepare and absord lessons. The basic American armoured division TOE was very sound though, with a good balance between infantry and tanks as shown in the Combat Command concept. US problems were in replacement and rotation policies and perhaps in the reluctance to form armoured corps.

[Duckman]

Too, once the Germans showed up the infantry were often crying out for something heavier than 2-pr AT Guns, so the 25-prs tended to be mis-employed as direct fire AT weapons, rather than indirect support weapons.

Even if a lot of the improvements were in doctrine and command, equipment still made a significant contribution to the British turning things around by late 1942. 6-pdr antitank guns (with factory-raw weldings), Grant tanks, and 5,5-in guns to complement the howitzers all made a difference in the desert.

That started to change in July at Alamein when massed guns crushed the first German attacks against the Alamein line, and became formal Army policy once Montgomery took over and decreed that divisions would fight as divisions.

Hammond spends a lot of time defending Auchinleck, who he seems to feel got an undeservedly bad rep. However he does give Monty credit for providing clear and steady leadership, even if a lot of what he did was already set in motion by The Auk.

Late WWI fighting was very sophisticated. A lot more sophisticated than it's generally given credit for. It was also a lot more sophisticated than a lot of the early fighting in WWII. In fact, most of the tactics and techniques used in WWII (and even still in use today) had a direct lineal relationship with those developed in WWI. WWI was a watershed, and marks a clear break between 'old' styles of fighting battles and waging wars and 'new' styles.

Indeed, a lot of early WWI was simply spent catching up. The German head start was in a large degree due to the fact that they had to do less of this.

In the interwar years the British were distracted by colonial policing, while the French took a wrong turn doctrinally and the American army contracted to an embryonic state. That pretty much left the Germans and the Soviets, and after the latter started to self-destruct the German position was quite good despite the Versailles treaty.

A number of fortunate circumstances meant that they basically continued on from the work done during WWI instead of starting over; as Frieser points out the panzer divisions were basically the old infiltration and stormtrooper tactics in mechanized form.

[YankeeDog]

I don't think tank infantry cooperation was primarily a matter of infantry having phones to tell tankers what to do - that was an infantry command, tanks as mere support model that the US and to some extent the Brits backed into in the late war for a portion of their armor, but neither the Germans nor the Russians ever had anything similar, and did fine without them. I think that was really a technical solution to a command and subordination problem, that infantry officers wanted to use tanks to solve infantry problems - which is hardly the only way (or the main way) of achieving tank infantry cooperation.

I agree that telephones mounted on the back of tanks and/or direct radio link between tank crews and small-unit infantry commanders was not an absolutely essential thing for Tank/Infantry coordination in WWII.

I do I think this type of setup became more useful for the US late in the war because U.S. forces were increasingly fighting near-fanatic enemy in very well-prepared, highly concealed, dug-in positions. Very low level tank-infantry coordination (as in one tank with one platoon, or even one squad) was one of the better tactics for dealing with pillboxes on Okinawa, fortified buildings in German cities, etc.

Of course, infantry most definitely takes the lead in this type of engagement, with Armor in support, so it's not all that surprising that comms devices which help the infantry quickly communicate targeting orders to the tanks become important.