I have a question about Tank maintenance.

[Oddball_E8]

And this will undoubtedly show how little I know about the construction and maintenance of tanks and armoured vehicles.

Ok, we've all seen pictures of heavy tanks like the Tiger and Panther with potmarks from the impact of shells that have riccocheted off them during battle.

Now, here's my question:

What happened after those battles?

Did they leave them like that until they finally got a breakdown or damage and had to go to repairs?

Did they patch it up with something?

Did they replace the entire armour part?

Wouldn't this degrade the armour for the next battle if they didn't replace that armour piece?

And did they replace the entire tank perhaps?

What happened with tanks that had survived several impacts?

I'm curious.

[Lacroix]

i also wondered about that for quite some time,the whole process behind the battles is unknown to me

[Oddball-47]

http://www.3ad.com/history/wwll/feature.pages/death.traps.htm

I read this years ago. It's a great insight as to what happens to damaged/destroyed tanks on a battlefield after the fact.

Regards,

Oddball-CAF

[c3k]

Grinders, welders, patches, or just a bit of paint. It depends on the depth of impact, the location, and the time available with whatever maintenance abilities are possible.

It is very variable.

The odds of a second hit on the same exact place is not high enough to worry about. (Well, for anyone other than the crew inside the repaired tank!)

Ken

[John Kettler]

Oddball-E8,

Panzer Regiment approach to tank maintenance and repair, from Panzers in the Sand, Hartmann, p. 81 et seq.

http://tinyurl.com/n7mbhcu

For a more extensive look, there's the US Army's Historical Study: German Tank Maintenance in World War II.

http://www.history.army.mil/html/books/104/104-7/cmhPub_104-7.pdf

Russian side of things, Armstrong, "Mobile Groups: Prologue to OMG," Parameters, p. 67 et seq. As you'll see from the footnotes, most of the material derives from detailed discussions in the military-historical journal ViZh.

http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/Articles/1986/1986%20armstrong.pdf

In a now-blocked site (virus problem) pkka.narod.ru/intro.htm there is an OT-34 commander's memoir. In it he describes various battle damage to his tank, including a hit so bad it completely removed the armored housing from his final drive, which somehow still functioned. Forward maintenance units repaired it on the spot, as they did to major mine damage. Believe it was him who also reported going into battle in a tank which still had shell holes in it.

Regards,

John Kettler

[John Kettler]

Oddball_E8,

Battle damage sufficient to sideline armor doesn't have to actually damage the metal armor. There is a case in which an entire Tiger company which fought at Kursk was sidelined for weeks because concentrated ATR fire on tank cupolas had wrecked the vision blocks, exhausted unit spares and injured numerous TCs. Injuries were mostly minor eye stuff (minor?), but there were several cases in which the impact tore loose the entire block and mounting bracket, smashing up the TC's face, resulting in weeks of hospitalization.

Nor could battalion make good the vision block shortfall, forcing the matter all the way up to regiment. All told, that Tiger company was out of action for two weeks.

Though the account I read during my PE days didn't say so explicitly, I'd imagine other optics got shot up, too. This is explicitly shown in the specialized graphics produced to show the Russian soldiers how to fight various Panzers. Where to aim, and what was effective at which range. Cupolas, gunsights, driver vision slots or ports and MG ball mounts were explicitly targeted, as the following article and expandable pics show.

http://tankarchives.blogspot.com/2013/06/weak-spots-and-hit-zones.html

Regards,

John Kettler