Captured tanks

[Mad Russian]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Ah, so it was trucks cars and motorcycles. If you ever find a census of the 83rd's captured AFVs I'd be interested. At least now I know the unit, so I can look further myself. Thanks.

As for claiming that I have said Germans never had a fuel shortage, straw man fallacy. I said in another thread, not this one, that they did not have serious oil problems until the USAF smashed their hydrogenation plants. Which they did in the summer of 1944.

By the fall the Luftwaffe wasn't flying. By the end of the year fuel was certainly scarce. They had lost the war by then. In the other thread, the issue was whether oil was a decisive consideration in Russia. It wasn't. Not whether they had all the fuel they wanted at the time of the Bulge (when they had already lost).

And as for the Bulge, notice that the operational scale fuel shortages show up as things like inability to commit an additional corps, or local shortages slowing movements. Not as "then 10,000 AFVs ran out of gas and had to be abandoned". They didn't have that many, obviously.

Just as obviously, they lost whole units only when they were cut off (e.g. Peiper) or plain outfought (e.g. 2nd Panzer). They were still running full panzer corps scale local attacks in mid January, to get time for other units to withdraw from the salient, etc.

At least three of the quotes have the word TANK in them. Read it all.

Nowhere did I ever say that 10,000 vehicles ran out of gas and had to be abandoned. The Germans would have been hard pressed to come up with 10,000 operational vehicles by this time. Let's see, if I can't commit an additional corps in my last major offensive would that lead me to believe that the "normal" state of affairs in any other part of the front would be any better? I don't think so.

Panther Commander

[ May 30, 2004, 10:32 PM: Message edited by: Panther Commander ]

[JasonC]

Read page 58 of the colonel's book. The image is pretty fuzzy but you can see the description. There is no mention of captured tanks. There is mention of up to 34 infantrymen riding on a US tank. And of using all the captured German transport they could, even to the point of using horse drawn wagons as trailers for jeeps and such (with up to 15 men on a jeep and trailer).

Also, this period is not the whole war, it is the race across Germany. If you read the preceeding portions of the narrative, they describe what that was like. They would call the burgomeister (mayor) of the next village on the phone, and ask if he rather surrender instead of having his town all shot up. This usually worked. Sometimes a few hundred would set up roadblocks and such. Then they drove around the village and it usually surrendered. They told the Germans their policy was to offer PW status to anyone they took fighting their front elements. But if anybody let those pass and then attacked the rear area and supply stuff behind them, there would be no quarter for them.

They say the SS and Hitler Youth still fought, "literally dying for Hitler". That the rest didn't. The force was split up into separate columns, each with a battalion of infantry, a battery of arty, a Sherman platoon, and an engineer platoon - thirds of regimental combat teams. They only have issued US trucks to lift one battalion at a time, and 10 of those were on supply duty because the lines had been stretched so much. Transportation was the main problem, not fighting. Thus the circus.

The only one of your links that says captured German tanks were among the vehicles used, was a forum posting. The others say riding tanks as well as other vehicles yes, but not captured tanks in particular. It makes no mention of the number or of any use of German AFVs in combat. The "rag tag" moniker came from the press. It was due to the odd assortment of vehicles, the wagon trailers, all the men hanging off every available vehicle. Not because they lead into battle with a captured Panther platoon because Panthers are better than Shermans, or anything remotely like it.

As for my comment about 10k vehicles, I brought it up because - as I argued previously - the Germans had to lose 30,000 AFVs between January 1 1944 and the end of the war. Because the number they had on January 1 1944 plus the number produced before then end comes to that figure, and they don't still have them. I have myself emphasized that little of this lost armor was sent to the west, and the largest waves of it (all of 2 of them) came to 2500 vehicles at a time (Normandy, and Bulge plus Alsace).

As for fuel situations in major offensives and the rest of the time, obviously it is harder to keep 4 panzer corps starting at full strength and in continuous combat, gassed up, than it is to keep 30 odd remaining runners per panzer division moving fast enough to avoid being overrun. Gas consumption in the west had to spike in December and January. When supplies weren't high, but the number of AFVs they were trying to operate was. That was the worst the fuel shortage would get in the west. They didn't have to worry about keeping all their tanks gassed up later on, because they didn't have any left (to speak of, in the west, etc).