CMBB v CMAK

[Mad Russian]

Your comments are drifting a bit off subject here.

My premise was and still is that T-34's and KV-1's with more AP rounds would have killed more German tanks. That in turn would have had an impact on the German forces almost immediately. That too would have an impact on the CMBB early war games we play.

If I want to discount all the biographies of the higher ranking generals of the war as fairy tales why then would I accept the very same information coming from the sources you quote:

I prefer to read books, referring to official reports of engineers and officers, responsible for comparative testing and analysis of related first-eye reports from the front. Things look very different, than in general memoirs. And one should also remember that tank is not only gun and armor.

Things certainly do look different on the battlefield instead of on a testing ground. That I will agree with you on.

More than one German commander sent a request that the German factories build T-34's. That's not a fantasy but a fact.

You seem to think that the Germans were supermen without the ability to lose an early war fight. That all Soviet equipment and tactics were junk and worthless.

The statement that T-26's and BT's is also incorrect. Those were the bulk of Soviet tanks not the backbone. There were, in 1941, a grand total of 0, yes, that's right zero, T-26's and BT tank versions were produced. The Soviets were not using them as the backbone of their forces but replacing them. The only tank types to be produced in 1941 were T-34, T-40, T-50, T-60, KV-1 and KV-2 models.

The backbone were the new tanks. They were not missing on the battlefield, as you surmise, because of a lack of training but because of a lack of availability. The more of these tanks simply didn't exist. The Soviets had just started production of them as their main tank force and the production rates hadn't given them sufficient time to equip their entire forces yet. This is also the reason for the lack of AP ammo for the tanks in the early war months. The gun was so new that the factories producing the AP rounds had not produced enough of them to meet with the demands of the war.

I think you miss the point again with tank guns. Yes, tank guns got larger. But if the sole purpose was to kill infantry why were they guns of ever increasing velocity? Why would they need a gun that would have better armour penetration if the sole purpose was to just put a shell on an infantry position. As you pointed out earlier you don't need velocity for that. You need velocity to punch through armour plate and that only means one thing. To kill tanks.

The 122mm gun on the JS-2 was chosen because of the avialability of the gun. The design team wanted the 100mm gun that equipped the SU-100 but it wasn't being made in enough numbers to support that. So they went with the 122mm gun that it finally received.

What can I say. You are poping up post-war myths for folk-history.

The post-war myths and folk-history I see in this thread is that the Germans were an almighty force that couldn't be beaten in 1941 by the ill-lead, ill-equipped subhuman forces of the Soviet Union. That German tanks were better and nothing the Soviets had was that good. That it was an unfortunate set of circumstances that lead the Germans to not defeat the Soviet Union. Now that's what I call post-war myths and fairy tales.

The reality of the situation was much different. The Soviets were in the process of changing over their tank forces with much superior armor. They had already stopped all manufacture of inferior types before the war even started.

I suppose you consider the Soviet inspection of German tank factories before the war when they were shown the PzIV as the German heavy tank and they got upset. They wanted to see the REAL German tanks. Why? Because the T-34 was that much more advanced than what they were being shown and they thought the Germans couldn't possibly have taken out whole countries with those.

Are you aware that every single Soviet gun, whether a tank gun, an antitank gun or an artillery piece was supplied with AT rounds? Now multiply the numbers out. There were multiples more AT and artillery, both higher level and infantry support, than there were tanks. It's easier to produce a gun than a tank. Of course more tanks were put out of action by guns than tanks. Same is true with all nations.

Again, what I'm saying, is. that the backbone of the Soviet armored forces would have forced a different result if they had been fully equipped with AT rounds in the early months of the war. That also will make a difference in CMBB games you play.

And you even agree. You claim that the Germans often had to resort to the use of 105mm guns to destroy the Soviet tanks. Then you go right back to the, they weren't so good, stance. You move back and forth from they were very good to they were practically worthless. Which is correct but not for the reasons you quote.

They were very good because at the time they were the most advanced tanks in the world. They were practically worthless because they were so new that the crews sometimes had as little as 10 hours training on them before being thrown into battle. They were so new that the crews/leaders/commanders hadn't been able to train in upper level tactics with them to know their capabilities. They were so new that most were loss to mechanical breakdowns or simply by being abandoned by their crews.

They were so new they threw the German attack formations into a complete tailspin the first time they were encountered by them. You should read some of the German divisional reports of their first encounters with the T-34's and KV-1's. The KV-2 doesn't figure into this discussion except to say that the first few times it was used it created the tank panic in BOTH German and SOVIET units! That thing was so big that Soviet troops even ran from it.

The Germans were not supermen. The equipment they were producing was inferior to the equipment the Soviets were producing. Their response was to build the Panther, because Hitler refused to think, that untermensch had made a tank better than Germans could. It was his decision not to reproduce the T-34 in Germany. Just another post-war myth, folk history and fairy tale I guess.

I have never seen, in any literature, your assessment that the Panther was a natural progression vehicle. I have only ever read where it was designed in direct answer to the T-34 threat.

It seems I might not be the only one in need of some additional reading.

Good Hunting.

MR