Crew morale and confidence in their weapon system (their tank's ability to defeat their opponent) has no impact  on their effectiveness in battle?

It was above average in 1941. But I agree that it didn't win the war.

I'll give you that. By 1943, it wasn't, 85mm or not.

Quoted for the truth.  Duece and ahalf moved just about all their supplies.  Wool and cotton twill made many of there uniforms, I think we sent them around 15 million pairs of shoes alone.  Heck, we sent them pistol belts and Tommy gun mag pouches to go with Thompsons we gave them.

I used to have the tables of how much stuff we sent them  It is truly staggering.  

Flip it around and give the Germans T34's and the Russians PzKw III or early IV.  Pretty big difference in outcome.  The poorly trained Russian tank crews were a big part of the high combat losses.

My hat is off to M_M for his "Chieftain" videos on various tanks, especially the T-34.  I just watched most of them the last couple days.

According to the searching I've done, T34/85s were part of the Angolan/Cuban order of battle during the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale as late as 1988.

Cuba is another former Soviet satellite train wreck that I could see still having them in reserve status.

In 1941 it was one of the best tanks in the world.  

Compare it to the Panzer Mark III, with a 50mm gun, or the Panzer IVF1, which had a stubby 75mm.

Antitank guns for the Germans were mostly 37mm or 50mm.

It had frontal armor that could defeat  enemy tank cannons and 90% of AT guns, with the exception of infrequent 88mm flaks, and a 76mm that could penetrate frontal armor of tanks it saw. The 76mm could punch through 90mm when the normal defensive armor plate was 50-60mm.  It also had wide tracks that allowed good mobility in snow.  Characteristics the Sherman did not have with the exception of North Africa.  Guderian called it the deadliest tank in the world, which should mean something.

It had typical Soviet ergonomics...lousy...and poorly trained crews.  

If you want to evaluate a tank you have to pick a point in time.  Also divorce yourself from the crew level of training.  Otherwise the only tanks worth comparing are the ones on V-E day.  And todays tanks are better then those.

Later other tanks passed it by.  By that yardstick every tank in WWII is inferior to the Abrams and some day something will come along better then that.

If you look at the T-34 on paper in the sense of the theoretical "holy trinity of tankdom" between mobility, protection and firepower, it comes off very well, particularly against pre-war and early WWII designs.

In typical commie fashion though, in practice it comes up mediocre at best.  Marxism performs equally as miserably on the shop floor, battlefield, or conference room.

All I really know about them is Grandpa told me there werent to hard to knock out in Korea as long as you could get up on it .

It could be produced in large numbers, with a relatively unskilled workforce, in a short amount of time, given to a crew of beginners and sent into battle immediately. If they survived their first encounter with the German tanks and assault guns they learned to stay alive. If the worst happened and they were hit it was almost certain that they would die in place having been told that leaving their tank in anything less than a fireball was a sure way to end up being shot by the NKVD for cowardice or desertion in the face of the enemy. Visibility was poor for the driver and he often had the front hatch open so he could see where to drive. Quantity had a quality all its own and Stalin knew that he either had to pour millions of soldiers into the war or have the Germans march into Moscow. That's why Russia lost 20 million and the Germans lost the war.
Best tank for what it was asked to do but compared to the German or American tanks that came later it wasn't even close technologically.

Best German tank in 1941 was the Pzkw IV with the 75mm/L24.  Slower and not as well armored as the T34.  
The Brits had the Matilda II.  Heavy armor but with only a 2 pdr gun and slow.  
The US had the Grant which was just coming out.  Limited traverse for its main armament.  High silhouette and mediocre.  
The Italians had thin riveted armor tanks.  
The Japanese tanks could not stand up to the T-34.  The BT-7 or T-26 yes, but not the T-34.

In terms of armor, armament and mobility the T-34 wins hands down in 1941.  

By 1945 though the German Panther, British  Sherman firefly, M4A3E8 w/76 mm gun, M-29 Pershing and the Russian JS-2 were all better vehicles than the T-34/76.  The T-34/85 was still nothing to laugh at.

Countries in black are current users of some version of the t-34.

Fucking 09ers

My guess would be that if you expand it to include SU variants based on the T34 chassis, a few more countries would turn black.

Something like an SU122 or SU152 will never really go obsolete so long as there are things which need to be blasted to smithereens.

No shit.  Aren't they just the best!?



I've kind'a-sort'a liked the Matilda for decades now but, after I watched his video of it....PURE SEX lol

That "Use your shoulder as 'STAB' thing knocked me out! "  It's a shame that they didn't get a better

ammo selection.





 

This.

As I said earlier, I truly doubt there are many T-34s left in the wild that are deployable. Looking at that map doesn't really change my mind all that much. Just look at those countries and tell me with a straight face they've got functioning T-34s ready to go in their motor pools. Heck, half of those countries aren't even really countries for Pete's sake, they're tribal states. Sure, it's possible there are some T-34s out there that still run and/or still have main guns that can fire, but we're talking about a couple of needles in a haystack.

You mean I can't reliably count Somalia as a current user of the T34?!

Good tank and good design are two different things.  The T34 was a good design because they could make a bunch of them.  The German tanks were better tanks, but worse designs because they could not make enough of them as evidenced by the fact that they lost.  Stalin did not have a problem sending 10 tanks to kill a Tiger knowing that 8 or 9 would be killed.  He had more people and more T34s he could send.

In the same vein, AK 47 is a crappy rifle, but a great design.

The question was really more of do you want 100 of one, or 1000 of the other?  Keep in mind we are talking about Stalin's troops, so he really didn't care how many got killed as long as they won.  Given that design criteria, what is the better design?

You are missing the point of what some of us are trying to say.

The T-34 was first present in numbers in 1941. The Tiger and Panther not until 1943.
In 1941, when it came out, it was a great tank. One of the very best.  If it did not exist there would have been huge tactical impact.
In 1943 or 1945 or 2005 or 2014 technological progress had passed it by.

Front armor was 47mm at 60 degrees, effectively 80+mm of protection. AT 500 meters the 76mm could penetrate 60 mm.
Front armor on a mark III was 30mm; mark IV was 50mm.

The T34 was a great tank for a while and then it was decent to good.

I wish M_M would do a video on the King Tiger!

He's done quite a few others - give him time, maybe he'll do that one as well.

That would be a good one, I agree..

I've watched a lot tank documentaries the last couple days and weeks.  The vast majority of them are far less about the tanks and far more about the battles and the war overall.  Fuck that, I want to see the tech about the tanks.  M_M delivers that!

You and me both brother!



 

Hell, yeah.

I got to sit in the TC's position of the Fort Knox cutaway right after I graduated from OSUT as a fresh and sparkly 19K. The curator was installing some stuff inside the tank with the plexiglas off as I walked up to it, and when I engaged him in conversation about the tank, he said, "well, why don't ya climb on up and we'll give you the grand tour?"



YAYUS!

It was a near religious experience for a tank nut like myself, and I learned a lot about the turret and hull systems of that giant monster that day. Fer instance, the vision blocks in the commander's cupola are from a Leopard I. They're exactly the same vision blocks as the King Tiger had, with later dates of manufacture. Mount the same way and everything. The gun system is remarkably similar to what we have today, with the exception of the foot trip gun trigger. The cases are fired electrically, using much the same system as the M1A1's 120mm gun. They had a primitive NBC system mounted in the turret roof, that had hoses you could attach to the standard German Army gasmask to get filtered air.

Damn, that was a neat experience!

He does a great job in those vids. I enjoyed them.

This, what ever led the Germans to believe that they could take on two huge countries like the USA and the USSR and win anyway?
Crazy.

Its fame is due to the praise of those filthy cheap Mosin owners.

It was a small mallet, according to a friend's grand-dad.  Had to do with the linkage having to run the length of the hull and how the driver entered the vehicle.

When the driver would get in and out, snow would fall and freeze the linkage.  Occasionally you'd have to tap on the shifter to knock the ice loose.

Where is that KT?  Did they move it with all the other stuff to Ft. Benning?

Anyone know if the Armor museum is open yet at Ft. Benning?  The last time I was at the Ft. Knox museum, all the good stuff had been moved out, like 2 Shermans were all that was left moved out, No Tigers, Panthers, T-34, zip, nada.  

Why do peeps think the Pershing was all that??? Seriously, tank for tank it was an equal to the Panther in firepower yet still not an equal to the Tiger or King Tiger armor.  Ditto for the IS2 tanks.
I
Thete are lots of things people keep forgetting to take in to consideration. Rate of fire? Optics? Ammo load? Also, main gun caliber does not equate effectiveness.

There is an unfortunate and very significant misconception which resulted from the creation of the Tank Destroyer arm: That the tank destroyers were supposed to deal with enemy tanks. This is incorrect. Tank destroyers were supposed to deal with enemy tank attacks, concentrated enemy armor on the assault. They were a purely defensive formation.* American tanks were expected to deal with any enemy tanks they came across on their own, particularly when the Americans were on the assault. Of note, even the tank destroyer manual of 1944 points out that an Armored division can deal with an enemy tank attack without calling in the tank destroyers, though it would be advisable for them to do so anyway.

*This is the flaw of the doctrine. Having battalions of men and vehicles hanging around waiting for a possible enemy armoured assault was not considered a particularly useful distribution of assets, so doctrine was routinely ignored.

Fuck be upon all those that used the Tank Destroyer excuse to not upgrade our tanks all the while the Germans and Russians were in a virtual tank arms race while the USA sat and twiddled their thumbs while our Shermans burned.  Even the British figured it out with their Firefly.  And then we raced in at the last minute with a couple Pershings - too little and far too late.

They say that the survivors of the Sherman that stayed in the Army made sure we got it right with the Abrams.

Now I'm hooked on Inside The Chieftain's Hatch YouTube videos but can't find reviews of the M4 Sherman.

 

Find a copy of King of the Killing Field, it's about the development of the Abrams tank from those who did just that.

Here's the problem...

Name any person who relied upon the tank destroyer doctrine as an excuse to not upgrade our tanks.

Clue. There was none. There was -nothing- in the doctrine which said that tanks should not be as well armed as the tank destroyers, it merely took a while before Ordnance branch were able to make a 76mm M4 which passed muster with Armored Force who had rejected the 1942 design for being unsatisfactory (The same complaints which Armored Force applied to Firefly, incidentally). Should Armored Force have accepted the cramped, "quick-fix" (in their own words) M4(76M1)? In hindsight, perhaps, but there was also an argument to be said that Armored Force was correct to hold out for a tank which they were satisfied with (And which, in the end, ended up being the standard tank in the Korean war). Though McNair had a personal distaste for the concept of tank vs tank fighting, nowhere have I found any indication that his preference had actually stymied the development of the 76mm gun tank.


That's because I haven't done one yet.

In red: that is the point. They could build them faster than the Germans could blow them up. Our liberty ships were not very good transport ships either. They were cheap and were built faster than the Germans could sink them.

An engineer I know says that "Perfect is the enemy of Good Enough.."

German tanks were wonders of engineering. They were not able to build enough.

Easy 8 and Firefly tanks were quite good. They used gasoline so that if it were green with a white star on it my uncle Ray could fill you up with his tanker truck. Same as today everything runs on JP8. They built Sherman's with diesels. They were used stateside for training crews and lend leased to the Russians. The Russians were already set up for diesel tanks. Logistics win wars, the logistics of the day had every vehicle running on MoGas. It was a compromise. It was good enough.

Zaloga's "Armored Thunderbolt" makes the case that proponents of the TD doctrine (specifically McNair since you brought his name up) caused delays in the improvements of the Sherman's firepower plus delayed the development of a heavier tank (i.e. the M26 Pershing.

Furthermore, the US Army knew about the Tiger since at least late 1942/early 1943 after the British captured one in north Africa.  They knew the Sherman couldn't penetrate it with it's 75mm gun and that was almost a year and a half prior to Normandy.  There's no excuse.

Lastly, has anyone in the last 50 years developed a tank that was not designed to engage and destroy other tanks?  Or to ask the question in a different way:  Has any land army in the last 50 years embraced the TD doctrine?  These are real questions - I don't know, but I can guess, the answers.


And more to the point:  When are you going to do one of your excellent videos on the King Tiger?????    Since they moved the cutout/glassed KT from Ft. Knox, there's no place around here to get my Tiger II fix!

Mo Betta T-34

I have spent literally weeks digging in Ordnance Branch archives, and though Army Ground Forces may have delayed deployment of Pershing, it seems to have not delayed development, and the deployment was only hindered so as to make little practical difference given how long WWII lasted. The worst case scenario would have been about ten weeks in the difference, and at that the vehicles delivered may not have been to the same quality.

I did a three parter on this. The first two and a half parts are lifted directly from Ordnance Branch records, so you can draw your own opinion from the facts before you get to my own my commentary/analysis at the end of part 3.
http://worldoftanks.com/en/news/pc-browser/21/The_Chieftains_Hatch_Pershing_1/
http://worldoftanks.com/en/news/pc-browser/21/The_Chieftains_Hatch_Pershing_2/
http://worldoftanks.com/en/news/pc-browser/21/The_Cheiftains_Hatch_Zebra/

The bottom line is that AGF (to include Armored Force) wanted to only send tanks over that they were confident worked well and could be produced in enough numbers to make a difference, a position that it is difficult to fault them for.



They did indeed know about Tiger in1942, but they had been trying to stuff the same gun the Tank Destroyers were looking for into Sherman since before the US even entered the war. The problem was an engineering one, not a doctrinal one. The timeline was more or less as follows:

Aug 1941: "Now that we have T6 in production as M4, let's look at putting the 3" gun into it. Yes, the same one Tank destroyer branch is looking at in T24, M5 etc..."
Early 1942: "Boss, we can't do it. The gun is just too damned big and heavy to work in a tank turret. Lord knows we've tried. That open turret job TD branch are looking at might work, but it's unacceptable for a tank"
Mid 1942:"Hey, we've developed a 76mm gun which is half the weight of the 3", has the same performance and we can cram it into the M4 turret. The same gun TD branch wants in their ideal TD, incidentally. Let's adopt this, and we can have some of them in North Africa in time for our landing in Morocco"
August 1942: "Hey, this is Armored Force. You know, the guys who have to end up using the mechanical masterpieces you send us? This thing you sent us is unacceptable. It is far too cramped for efficient use, the sights are awful, it's a stopgap solution. We refuse to accept this, try again"
Later 1942: "Say, you know that T23 tank they're playing with in the other hangar? What if we were to take that turret, work out the bugs, and put it onto an M4?"
Mid 1943: "Here, Armored Force, try this one..."
August 1943: "Much better, thanks. We'll take all we can get"
Sep 1943: "Right. The plan is to stop building 75mm tanks and convert production to 76mm as soon as we can. The engineers say that it'll take a tad over four months to tool the factories up to really get cranking"
Jan 1944: "look at that. We're building the things. Now, to find room on the ships to actually get them overseas together with everything else we're sending for the invasion, from trucks to stretchers,,,,"



If you mean the TD doctrine the US had in the 1940s of a purely reactive and defensive formation of TDs whose primary job was to wait around for enemy tanks to attack before swarming them, no. (Though you can make an argument that the Apache gunship squadrons were developed as the spiritual successor). If you mean a doctrine which has a bunch of lightly armoured vehicles whose job it is to take on tanks, then yes, many countries, including the US, still have such things. If you mean a doctrine which said "tanks are not expected to deal with any enemy tanks they may happen to come across", then no country since 1918 has ever had such a doctrine.



Dunno.

The SU-122/152 was built off the KV-1 chassis, and the ISU off the IS-2. The SU-76, 85, and 100 were off the T-34 though. They keep popping up in places like Syria (saw a SU-100 in a recent Syria article that was in good shape, maybe even in use).

You're hanging here and in CA



The M4 should have been #1.  I was impressed with the Matilda tank show, but the Brits messed up not supplying it with HE



 

The Germans walked into France in 1940, had a problem with heavily armored Matildas and CharBs, and 2 years later deployed the Tiger (which had some issues at first).  
It also took them 2 years to up-gun the basic MkIV to the L43 and later L48 guns.
Then the Germans waltzed into the USSR in 1941, ran into the T34, and 2 years later deployed the Panther (but it too had some issues, like engine fires, and breakdowns, losing 90% of the force in 2 weeks)

In 1942, we found out about the Tiger, and 2 years later deployed the 76mm M4. Hmm, how about that, 2 years.
It actually went into production in 1943, there were 200 in Depots in Britain at DDay
In the mean time, they built 7,000 M10s with the big 3" gun that were knocking off Tigers in Italy.
From 1942 to 1944, the USSR improved the T34 to have an 85mm gun, it took them 2 years to get it into the field. Hmm, there's that 2 year figure again.

It seems like it took everyone about 2 years to get an improved tank into the field. Somehow, that's only a horrible boondoggle for the US.

In 1940-1, the Germans went through France and the USSR with inferior tanks, and superior tactics and training, and everyone cried "Blitzkreig!"
In 1944-45, the Western Allies used marginally inferior tanks, and superior tactics and training, ripped through France and half of Germany in under a year, and everyone cries "Tiger!"

The vast majority of ammo fired by Shermans was HE in support of infantry (70%), anything that reduces the number of Shermans in the field increases the amount of infantry casualties across the board. While the tank crews get attention, statistically speaking, they suffered a tiny fraction of the Western front casualties. There were roughly 10,000 Shermans in the ETO, if every single one got knocked out once, there would be 2500 crews that didn't take any injuries, 2250 men KIA, and 6000 WIA. Sorry, but that's a drop in the bucket for ETO. Meanwhile, if the Russians lost 10,000 T34s (and they actually lost about 30-40k ottomh) they would have 30,000 KIA minimum. Can you imagine the shitstorm if M4s were as lethal to their crews as the T34?

3AD alone (home of Belton Cooper) lost 632 Medium tanks. Statistically, thats 142KIA out of it's wartime total of 2540 KIA. The vast majority of AD casualties were in the Armored Infantry battalions, which is why they were reinforced by nearby Rifle Infantry Battalions, and their AA got stripped of crews for riflemen.

4AD was in combat for 1 day less then 3AD but lost half as many men and 1/3rd the tanks.

At the end of August44, the Germans had 184 AFVs left on the Western front in its entirety. They threw two months of production into Lorraine and got their socks knocked off by, mostly, 75mm Shermans.



It might be just outside 50 years, but the Leopard1 was lightly armored, fast, and had a 105mm gun, so basically the post war German army adopted the Tank Destroyer/Panzerjager in form, if not the doctrine. TOW ITVs were another form of Tank Destroyer. I'll also remind you that the most successful German AFV was the lowly StuG assault gun.  


PS- can you imagine trying to 'race across France' with a tank that breaks down every 150km and needs a new transmission? Panther's had a 90% transmission failure after 150km. The turret had to be lifted off and the drivers compartment disassembled to replace the Transmission. In Korea, M26s and M46s had a 20-35% breakdown rate, per month. In WWII Shermans averaged 9% down.

WW2 Germany also embraced a form of TD doctrine--look at what the StuG III and IV did, as well as the PanzerJaeger units. This despite StuG being officially an assault gun, which turned out to be a pretty darn effective tank-killer once it was equipped with the longer 7.5cm L/fortysomething gun. (I forget which exactly--I seem to think the L/48 was in use by late in the war but I'm probably wrong )

Plus, you had vehicles like the M56 Scorpion, and the Ontos. Ditto the point earlier about AH-64 and previous AH-1 formations (SnakeDriver has some tales to that effect from the early 1970s, I seem to recall...)
TD doctrine has changed, but there's arguably a form of it still in most major armies.