Question regarding permanent tiger I losses...

[dizee]

....in comparision to enemy tanks destroyed.

i read in panzer aces by franz kurowski that for every 30 tiger I tanks written off, 1000 enemy tanks where destroyed.

this sounds astonishing, almost unbelivable. im well aware of the difference btw a tank written off and a enemy tank put out of action in combat, wich can be retrieved later and repared.

is this statement true?

[Hensworth]

Means 33 tanks KO'ed per Tiger. I have no way of checking it but it doesn't sound at all improbable to me.

[flamingknives]

The Allies tended to simply bring up new tanks rather than fix a heavily damaged one - a holed Sherman would be abandoned and replaced, whereas the Germans would be more determined to recover and repair their Tigers, which would contribute to that sort of total.

[Kingfish]

Doesn't sound right to me. Total Tiger I production was around 1300 vehicles. If that ratio is true then that means that they alone accounted for 43,000 allied tanks.

[Charlie901]

If your reading the book "Panzer Aces" you will get an idea of the destructive power of a Tiger and a well trained crew who use suprise and terrain to their advantage. Just keep reading.

It is an excellent book. Time and time again I read how a lonely tank crew (usually in a Tiger), that was well disciplined and had their tank in an optimum position, fought against enemies that used a mass tank rush out in the open. Usually these tanks were trying to fire on the move with optics that weren't as good as the German's. Add in the fact that most of the Russian tanks had no radios so they could let each other know where the fire was comming from and you have a recipe for disaster. So to answer your question I think it was definately possible.

[Charlie901]

Originally posted by Kingfish:

Doesn't sound right to me. Total Tiger I production was around 1300 vehicles. If that ratio is true then that means that they alone accounted for 43,000 allied tanks.

You have to read the original post. It said "Tigers written off". Which I assume means lost in combat due to enemy tank fire.

I'm sure many were abandoned (lack of fuel or replaceable parts) or destroyed by allied air power before even reaching the front.

[Kingfish]

Originally posted by Charlie901:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Kingfish:

Doesn't sound right to me. Total Tiger I production was around 1300 vehicles. If that ratio is true then that means that they alone accounted for 43,000 allied tanks.

You have to read the original post. It said "Tigers written off". Which I assume means lost in combat due to enemy tank fire.

I'm sure many were abandoned (lack of fuel or replaceable parts) or destroyed by allied air power before even reaching the front. </font>

[JasonC]

It is a nonsense statistic, apples and oranges. The average Tiger I probably accounted for around 5 enemy AFVs before being lost. The most optimistic estimate might stretch it to 10. There is no way it was 33.

All Tiger Is were eventually lost by some process. Some were destroyed in combat, some were recovered and under repair but never returned to operational status before being left behind, some were blown up by their crews to prevent capture - because they were damaged obviously - some were abandoned without being blown up - all of the above due to battle damage, mechanical breakdown, or lack of fuel.

When a Tiger was damaged in combat, intense efforts were made to recover it. It was then carried on unit rolls as "under repair", not "written off". If the damage was extensive, "long term repair". If it was just being cannabilized for spare parts, it might still be on the rolls. Only when the unit moved and could not bring the vehicle along with them would this change to a permanent strength reduction. And it would often be accounted for as "abandoned". This does not remotely mean it wasn't knocked out by enemy action. It just means the Germans kept their hands on it a while afterward, hoping to get more use out of it eventually.

Because of these issues, TWOs in any given time window do not correspond to actual battle losses. Only integrated over large time scales will TWOs and actual permanent reduction in strength of running tanks, coincide. Over short time scales, TWOs will be dramatically lower, without it meaning anything beyond accounting.

Some were of course returned to service after battle damage. Others went into repair for mechanical reasons without ever being damaged significantly by the enemy. An average Tiger might have been knocked out twice before being written off, and might have passed through short term repair status half a dozen times.

A typical Tiger unit in the field, after its earliest period of commitment from rear, refitted, or reserve status, would decline to half its original strength in runners in a short period of time. The decay of the running strength would then slow, and move in both directions as the unit increased or decreased operational tempo.

What is happening is a portion of the under repair category are returning to service every day, while some damaged or broken down runners are returning to it. If the unit avoids action, only the plus side of this process occurs. If it presses attacks, it rapidly increases the minus side, until only a handful of runners remain. Then it pauses automatically, and some return to running status again.

A small number of tanks dribble out of this back and forth process as they are burned out on the field, or given up as hopeless after being stripped completely for parts to return others to service, etc. Meanwhile, others pile up in long term repair but are not written off. If the whole unit is forced to move they will be written off. If it isn't, some may eventually return to service. Many never will, and are TWOs in all but name - but the time of their loss is obscured by the repair accounting procedure.

The main thing to understand here is that TWO is not an operational reality term. It is an accounting entry term. It is not like "profit", it is more like "cost of goods sold" or "SG&A expense". Meaning, a somewhat mushy internal category that only has to correspond to reality in aggregate effect over long enough time scales. But statement to statement, can be massaged to any degree. What an expense is or when a loss is "recognized" are inherently arbitrary decisions.

What isn't arbitrary is how many tanks one fields and how many enemy tanks one manages to take out with them. And on this score, the 33 figure is completely untenable. Total Allied AFV losses in WW II are bounded above by 125k, and 100k is a more likely figure. Total major AT weapon systems fielded by Germany are about the same - around 50k each of AFVs and serious PAK.

In addition, millions of infantry AT systems and of AT mines accounted for some of the Allied losses, as well as minor numbers KOed by air, arty, and just lost to mechanical causes. (Actually, mechanical causes probably account for quite a few, but some are also repaired and thus "lost" twice, and these probably balance each other, about).

We have figures on portions of AFVs lost to things like AT mines, and the Germans tracked how many infantry AT kills they got (with some measurement error) through things like tank killer medal awards. And any reasonable accounting for these things is going to leave AFVs killed by major German AT weapon systems at or below the number of those weapon systems.

All weapons cannot be above average. The average German AFV can only be credited with more than 1 kill if PAK are credited with less than 1. And they can't be credited with as many as 2, unless PAK are credited with 0. The average German AFV therefore almost certainly accounted for something like 1 to 1.5 Allied AFVs. Not 5 or 10.

Of course there is room within the fleet mix for some vehicles to do better than this average while others do worse. But all German claims on the matter cannot be accomodated by the number of Allied AFVs actually lost. Indeed, German internal staff practice during the war was to give all own-side claims a 50% "haircut" to reflect claim exaggeration, overkill, multiple claims for the same kill because the shooters did not know which got it, kills reported that were actually hitting a tank that was already destroyed, etc.

Prior to such adjustments, the Germans report things like 5 AFVs KOed per StuG, let alone per Tiger. And there is just no way the average German AFV can have done such things. They would not have lost the war if they had, because they would have killed the entire Allied AFV fleet several times over.

Around a quarter of the Allied AFVs lost were Russian lights destroyed before midwar. The major high quality German systems were not even out yet when these were obtained. The German fleet mix that did it was lighter and smaller than the average for the whole war, while the loss ratio was quite favorable.

Necessarily, this above average period early means the rest of the war they did worse than the overall average. Infantry AT improved dramatically and those kills are backloaded. Mines got most of theirs during the German defense period, obviously. Any reasonable look at those numbers will put the average kills per mid to late war AFV at 1 to 1.5 at best.

Low figures for the Pz IVs and StuGs - like, 1 - may leave potential averages as high as 3-4 for the better German tanks - Panthers and Tigers e.g. But can't support higher figures. Tigers can only rack up average scores in the 5-10 range if Panthers aren't much better than Pz IVs - which is implausible. They can get totals as high as 4-5 with reasonable tiering of other systems below them on the quality scale.

If the average Tiger only got 5 enemy tanks, where do the tales of killing 14 each in a single outing fit in all of this? As outliers, as best cases over the whole war, they are compatible observations. You can ask e.g. in a binomial distribution with a Tiger winning 4-5 times more often than it losses, how many runs of a given length will you see from 1350 attempters? And the results basically fit the sort of "Tiger tales" propaganda likes to trumpet.

For all such long runs there are others than break down before killing something, or after only getting 1-2.

What clearly did not happen is - a company of 14 Tigers drives out and kills 5 apiece and does it again the next day, for a week, numbers dropping to 4 themselves in the meantime. That would account for every dead Allied AFV just from the tiny crop of Tigers, alone - which did not remotely happen.

So, how can people report a 33 ratio with TWOs, given the above? First it is probable 15-20 just from overcounted claims (the German's 50% haircut). Then they don't count half their own losses as TWOs, because they are counted as something else. On a short enough time scale that might be a higher ratio than 2. Etc.

[MikeyD]

You've got to remember the Tiger I was queen of the Russian battlefield from its introduction Oct. 42 until new Russian equipment started coming out around mid-43. That alone would HEAVILY skew any overall Tiger statistics. Facing earlyT-34-76s without radios I can very well imagine a Tiger kill rate very much over 33:1 on the Eastern Front. After Kursk during the long retreat solitary or pairs of Tigers would often be called on to plug holes in the line single-handedly!

Most published Allied combat accounts celebrate the near-miraculous killing of Tigers by Sherman crews. There was less incentive to chronical the more numerous episodes where another dozen Shermans are lost to a single distant Tiger, which then gets off scott free. I doubt that those statistics above included the boatload of new Tigers that sunk on their way to N Africa in '42(?), or any number of them abandoned on flatcars at some obscure Eastern European railhead in early-45.

[JonS]

Originally posted by flamingknives:

The Allies tended to simply bring up new tanks rather than fix a heavily damaged one - a holed Sherman would be abandoned and replaced, ...

Belton Cooper would disagree with you.

[flamingknives]

The men of the 9th Battalion, RTR, support my viewpoint though.

Over the next couple of weeks, I intend to find out what the men of 3 RTR think about it.

[Mr. Tittles]

Tank repair: The US not only repaired its vehicles but had preference to types of shermans. When they were allowed to pick some out from a depot, they would want Ford V8s and such. They would try to keep these prefered models in the field at all costs.

Tank Overkills: So Jasons logic also applies to allied tanks that were killed. Every 100 tanks produced may actually result in 175 kill rings on german guns.

[ May 04, 2004, 08:23 PM: Message edited by: Mr. Tittles ]

[JasonC]

"from its introduction Oct. 42 until new Russian equipment started coming out around mid-43"

... they didn't do diddly. There weren't enough of them fielded yet. I show how one can tell, below.

The number of Tigers in the east - not runners, all of them - didn't pass the 100 mark until May of 1943. It didn't cross 150 until Kursk. Also, the Russian fleet was T-34/76s for the bulk of 1943, not just to the middle of the year.

No, they weren't killing 30 or more apiece in a few months time. What they were doing was killing a few apiece and mostly staying alive, which makes a highly effective weapons system - but just a weapon system.

From playing CM, one might easily get the impression that heavy tanks typically kill multiple enemy tanks in every engagement, and one might think they can and do achieve this regularly, as often as they fight. But this is not the case. To see this, look at how many tanks are destroyed even when tank losses are at their highest, and compare it to the fielded tank forces facing them and the time they spend opposite one another.

A high figure for Russian tanks destroyed from the start of Kursk to the end of 1943 is around 18,000. This is the period when T-34/76s faced Tigers and Panthers in numbers - and also StuGs and Pz IV longs that still outclass T-34/76s, but are much more nearly comparable. PAK and FLAK, Marders and Nashorns, older tanks, infantry AT, arty, air, etc undoubtedly account for some of these, perhaps a third. Leave a big margin of error and call it 12-15k tanks KOed by the good German tank killing AFVs. How many vehicle-days do the Germans have to rack up that many kills?

The answer is 87,500 AFV-days for the superior Tigers and Panthers, plus 325,000 AFV-days for the StuGs and Pz IV longs. If the long 75 AFVs killed as much as a tank a month the better ones only have one per three weeks, maximum. There is no way the Tigers and Panthers averaged even a kill a week.

One every two weeks for the heavies and one every month and a half for the long 75 types are more reasonable estimates. Those figures still have the well armed AFVs accounting for 75% of all Russian tank losses, leaving practically nothing for PAK and FLAK as numerous as the AFVs, thin SP AT, older tanks, mines, etc. In other words they are probably wrong on the high side, certainly not on the low side.

Through the start of Kursk, there are no Panthers and only a handful of Tigers. They can't have killed a thousand AFVs before then - they hadn't had the fleet numbers or the time. Not to mention the fact that the whole front was in a lull between the aftermath of the Kharkov battle and the start of Kursk - so 500 still probably an upper bound. The overall average score of 1350 Tigers for the whole war cannot be moved appreciably by the whole score of that early period, even if no Tigers had been lost in return - which was not the case.

[Joachim]

Originally posted by Kingfish:

Edit: turns out there were 3 Tiger battalions (101 & 102 SS, 503) plus the Pz Lehr detachement in Normandy, bringing the total to around 150 tanks.

3 sPz Abteilungen with 3 companies each. Even on paper this means 10 companies including the detachment in the Lehr. Each comapny has 14 tanks, giving 140 tanks on paper.

Most sPzAbteilungen did not arrive with their full complement of Tigers then there are many non-runners. My guestimate is there were 70 Tigers, some of them under repair with several non-runners under repair further back.

I doubt there were 50 Tigers operational in Normandy at a given day.

Consider Wittman's company strength at Villers Bocage. 5 runners plus one going to repair - and the company had probably not seen combat there before.

What might be included in the 33 figure is allied vehicles, not just armor. That still won't explain the number. But I guess most of us wonder "how is this figure 33 calculated when JasonC shows it can't be real".

So we have saome guestimated:

50% off for crews overcounting

33 % minus several vehicles misid'd or just counted as "armor"

20% Tigers that never reached the front or never saw combat

1:33

1:17.5 "haircut"

1:12 "other vehicles with some kind of armor"

1:6 TWOs opposed to killed

1:5 for all Tigers seeing deployment

And I get exactly what JasonC wants. With just guestimates for the percentages used. Guestimated before seeing the result of 5 in the end.

Statistics are just worthless if you don't have exact definitions.

Gruß

Joachim

[ May 05, 2004, 07:56 AM: Message edited by: Joachim ]

[Kingfish]

Originally posted by Joachim:

Most sPzAbteilungen did not arrive with their full complement of Tigers then there are many non-runners. My guestimate is there were 70 Tigers, some of them under repair with several non-runners under repair further back.

I doubt there were 50 Tigers operational in Normandy at a given day.

You are correct.

This site shows the number of runners for each Abteilungen. Mid / late July looks like the peak with about 50-60 tanks in front line service.

[MikeyD]

"One every two weeks for the heavies and one every month and a half for the long 75 types are more reasonable estimates."

The old axiom says warfare is long stretchs of boredom punctuated by short episodes of terror. If one were to look over an active Tiger's entire service career it might average out to one tank every two weeks but I rather suspect the kills were in brief intense packets followed by withdrawal and refit. The low numbers of Tigers in action in '43 wouldn't count against their kill ratio but for it. For one thing there would be more targets to go around per vehicle, plus their low density would mean the Russians wouldn't exactly be expecting a Tiger behind every hill and would be more likely to stumble into Tiger kill zones.

One big surprise from recent reading is to discover how common it was during offensive operations for Russian (and U.S.) armor to outpace their infantry support by miles and miles. Sometimes it was a veritable shooting gallery for Tiger crews. The idea of a Tiger picking off a tank every couple weeks implies one tank stumbling into another while performing infantry support duties.

[Mr. Tittles]

Originally posted by flamingknives:

The men of the 9th Battalion, RTR, support my viewpoint though.

Over the next couple of weeks, I intend to find out what the men of 3 RTR think about it.

I dont think the tankers opinions matter as much as what the higher up officers demanded of the work crews. In other words, the tankers would just get another tank but was that a factory fresh one or a rebuild?

[Mr. Tittles]

What isn't arbitrary is how many tanks one fields and how many enemy tanks one manages to take out with them. And on this score, the 33 figure is completely untenable. Total Allied AFV losses in WW II are bounded above by 125k, and 100k is a more likely figure. Total major AT weapon systems fielded by Germany are about the same - around 50k each of AFVs and serious PAK. -JasonC

But what I am asking is; Is this fielded number taken from production stats?

Just as a Tiger may be fielded and repaired so can its victems. So there may be more victems than tanks produced. Each Tank produced may actually be a victem 1.5-3 times? so a kill ring on a 88 tube may actually have the same 'tank' killed more than once! (and be a legit 'kill').

German tank recovery crews also made surveys of the kills made by the panzer units as an additional task. They would confirm kills, try to repair/salvage enemy armor, etc. So the germans did make an effort to keep some tally. Mind you, on the retreat when the field is given up, the data would not be reliable.

[Andrew H.]

Originally posted by dizee:

i read in panzer aces by franz kurowski that for every 30 tiger I tanks written off, 1000 enemy tanks where destroyed.

Is Kurowski claiming that the 30 Tigers knocked out the 1000 enemy tanks? The quote above may imply that, but it doesn't actually claim that tigers destroyed any enemy tanks.

Perhaps the quote is there just to suggest the survivability of tigers compared to other tanks.

[JasonC]

MikeyD - You do not seem to understand which proposition I am maintaining. The number of tanks KOed by a handful of Tigers early on cannot increase the average number of tanks killed per Tiger over the whole war by any appreciable amount.

Understand the history of the argument. Someone advances the statement that Tigers KOed 33 tanks apiece. I and others say it can't be so. Someone then suggests that a ratio that high is plausible - as an average for Tigers - because early on they were so invincible. For this to make sense and support the 33 figure, the 33 figure as an average can allow lower ratios later on, but only with ratios much higher than 33 early on - so the average for all Tigers at all times still works out to 33.

This argument does not work. The average can't be dragged up to 33 by higher than 33 numbers in the initial period. The initial period can't make any appreciable impact on the overall average. There aren't enough Tigers involved, and the Russians didn't lose enough tanks in the early period. The 33 figure needs 45,000 dead tanks kill by Tigers alone. And the Russians can't have lost more than about 1000, and probably did not lose even 500, to Tigers before Kursk.

As to the comment that the average of one every two weeks probably reflects short engagements that went higher than that and lulls between, sure. But notice, 1 every 2 weeks with nothing in between is already a pretty long lull. If you have the typical Tiger kill 2-4 in some outing, then they do that only every month or two.

The reality is half the Tigers aren't in service. And many units aren't engaged - either at all, or against armor. But an even more basic factor is at work. In war, people get out of each other's way.

By that I mean, only modest portions of both side's forces actually engage at tactical distances. The leading edge of much larger formations. The formations are powerful enough to threaten anything that remains in an area they just brought into tactical range. As a result, people leave that area. A few don't and die, and then aren't available to be killed again.

Otherwise put, the area within 2 km and clear LOS of a Tiger company very rarely had any live Russian tanks in it. That and not just the stuff they KO, is what made them tactically useful. But it also means they did not regularly get the chance to have a pair KO 14 tanks apiece as in propaganda favorite outliers. You'd be much more likely to see 10 or so Tigers crawl within range of 3 T-34s, and 1-2 of the T-34s die rapidly while the other 1-2 run away.

And the Tigers are not invulnerable to the same logic operating the other way. Some just get hit enough times - whether because a platoon of them faces a tank battalion, or because they hit a gun front. Some just break down - helped on to it by minor battle damage. These don't all show up at TWOs, not rapidly.

Take the case of 101 SS in Normandy, of Villars fame. Before the invasion the unit had 47 Tigers on strength, 37 running and 8 in short term repair. Just by the 15th of June, less than 2 week after the invasion, the runners are down to 15. But only 9 have been written off. By early July there are *no* runners. But 30 Tigers are still carried on strength.

And by not fighting at all and waiting to repair them, as many as 21 later return to runner status. In June, then, in this one battalion, runner-days and on-strength-days differ by a factor of something like 2.5 times. That is where things like 1 per 2 weeks come from.

You won't see the whole effect even by looking at runner percentages. Because runner percentages are higher at the times when the unit has not been engaged - e.g. the recovery from 0 to 20 here, and some of the period stable around 20, probably reflected the unit not fighting (much, or some days at all).

So it is hard to simultaneously keep a tank in running status and heavily engaged - the only category that can get any appreciable number of kills. And when these conditions are met, the enemy will mostly get out of their way. They will have a few outlier large fights where they manage to score heavily. (Villars or Goodwood or on a much larger scale Kursk). The number running will also plummet in those cases.

Much of the time when they really have 20 runners, there won't be even 20 enemy tanks within LOS over the entire period - let alone the 50 or so needed to boost the average score of the none-runners, too. So the average kill score can't move upward but a single kill per tank.

[btm]

JasonC-

I would just like to express my appreciation for your posts. They always show good reasoning backed with verifiable data.

If not for folks like you, we'd be forced to listen to guys like Rexford tell us that all German tanks were in fact invincible, and that as such, any American AFV kill claims from WW2 were merely propaganda.

[MikeyD]

"The 33 figure needs 45,000 dead tanks kill by Tigers alone."

I think we're reading this very differently. I read the stats as counting number of kills versus number of kills, not number of vehicles vs number of vehicles. For every Tiger knocked out in a fight an average of 33 Shermans or T34s would be knocked out in a fight. That doesn't imply every Tiger ever made had to kill a minimum of 33 tanks. The 'killed Tiger' tally wouldn't include the ones that fell off bridges or succumbed to engine fires, or the ones that ran out of gas and were abandoned, or the ones that got shot up by passing Sturmoviks, or the one kept in Hitler's back yard to drive around in. And the Sherman/T34 tally wouldn't include tanks sunk in transit or wrecked in road accidents. If you were playing 'heads-or-tails' and came up with 33 heads - 1 tails (or 99 heads - 3 tails or whatever) the number of coins on the table left unused would be superfuluous.

...and the dance continues.

[stikkypixie]

That's a very strange way of reading it, i assume that you mean that for every tiger lost in battle killed by whatever, 33 allied tanks were lost (not necessarrily killed by tigers).

But then that number would have no meaning , giving no information whatsoever.

It's like saying for all tigers lost, more than 30 million people died...

[MikeyD]

Hah! This is getting fun. Like the game where people are given a message to whisper in the next person's ear and after it's gone around the room the phrase "the cup is blue" has morphed into "I've got a cut on my backside."

I was trying to compare numbers of Tigers killed by their armor opponents vs number of armor opponents killed by Tigers. Average kills-per-Tiger is totally unecessary to my equation. If 80% of the Tigers fielded never fired a shot in anger that would not skew the results. It's just the tally of hits versus tally of hits.

[Mr. Tittles]

Ive read a stat where a StuG unit (battalion i suppose) destroyed over 2000 enemy tanks. Someone could take that stat and divide by 33 stugs (or how many were in the unit) and get a false idea. Each stug did not get 60 tanks. The unit operated over time (perhaps a 1.5 to 2.5 year run) and cycled through plenty of equipment.

But it is still an amazing stat. Even if they used up 10 stugs a month for 2 years, that works out to a 8:1 kill ratio. Even if that number were off 100%, any weapon system as cheap as the stug that could get such a positive effect is amazing.