Fury

You're overlooking the fact that the 75 mm had a better high explosive shell than the 76 mm, and the Sherman's role as set out by US armoured doctrine was primarily to engage infantry, not tanks. One of the reasons the Americans didn't adopt the Firefly is that the 17 pdr wasn't optimal for taking on infantry. The 75 mm was sufficient for taking on Panzer I Vs and the Americans assumed that, like the Tiger, the Panther would only be encountered in small numbers.

Anyway, can we discuss the actual film, please, rather than rehashing arguments that we've had about fifty times over in OTC?

edited 20th Oct '14 12:58:16 PM by pagad

Personally I think the whole tank history debate is very well suited for this thread, it's practically the primary subject of the whole movie!

Part of me is kinda mad they played the whole 5 to 1 Tiger thing straight but then another part of me is ok with that because the world's last Tiger deserves a little bit of glory.

Seriously though, Hollywood should make another movie featuring the M18 (since they've already did that a few months ago LOL), but more specifically on apparently the only known instance where their legendary speed was quite effective in making the Germans think they were engaging a lot more than just 9 Hellcats...and lose at least 40 tanks in the process.

edited 20th Oct '14 8:42:53 PM by entropy13

I guess posting this here would be relevant. LOL

I would also add Wikipedia, which is very hit and miss because of their doctrine of "verifiability not truth".

There's also the footnotes and bibliography and other references from folks in the field of armor and its usage. But if you want to ignore all the stuff that contradicts your point of view simply because it's on Wikipedia, then go ahead.

Thing is, the same stuff shows up in lots of other places as well. Try reading "Overlord", by Max Hastings. He covers a lot of topics in that book. About how much of a nightmare the bocage country was for all the Allied tanks, not just the Shermans. The Cromwell wasn't much better. Mark Urban did a two part documentary on 5 Royal Tank Regiment, which followed them from the beginning of the war right til its bloody conclusion, and the veterans weren't shy on saying how horrid that particular tank was.

http://www.radiotimes.com/programme/tjymx/tankies-tank-heroes-of-wwii

Uh, bocage country is a nightmare for all World War II tanks, especially if they're not the "defenders". Put a T-34-85, in the "attackers side" and it will struggle. Do the same for the IS, the Tiger I, the Tiger II, etc. Heck even the Centurion and the IS-3, the M26 Pershing. I'm guessing the only ones that would have theoretically not struggled would be the T95 and the Tortoise, since "hedgerows" are just like the Siegfried Line (for which both were specifically designed to "fight").

edited 21st Oct '14 8:53:56 AM by entropy13

Depends on the quality of the source, which Wikipedia doesn't evaluate - or even attempt to. Hastings, whilst good, is not a technical or even particularly in-depth historian. His strength is in oral history and trying to create a picture of "what it was like" for Tommy Atkins on the ground. Which is fine in itself, but doesn't give a tremendous impression of the big picture.

As for the bocage - as entropy notes, any tank would have had trouble in the bocage. But especially the Panther; the commander of the Panzer Lehr absolutely slated it: "While the Pz Kpfw IV could still be used to advantage, the Pz Kpfw V [Panther] proved ill adapted to the terrain. The Sherman because of its maneuverability and height was good ... [the Panther was] poorly suited for hedgerow terrain because of its width... High silhouette. Very sensitive power-train requiring well-trained drivers. Weak side armor..Fuel lines of porous material that allow gasoline fumes to escape into the tank interior causing a grave fire hazard. Absence of vision slits makes defense against close attack impossible."

As regards the Sherman's armament - 76mm Shermans had been in production for the guts of year by the time D-Day was done, and the Firefly had been a standard modification for a while too. The key error the Americans made was not actually taking any, because they thought that the 75mm would be adequate for the job. They weren't entirely wrong in that either - most American tankers would never see anything younger than a Panzer IV; it was the British who faced the majority of German armor in Normandy around Caen.

edited 21st Oct '14 10:27:39 AM by Achaemenid

A tank veteran on Fury: 'Very realistic, but it can't show the full horror of war'.

Did any movie even reached close to portraying the full horror of war? I remember Waltz With Bashir (which, ironically, is animated) being close.

No. They can be horrifying but it's nothing compared to actually being there.

Of course. But I did ask if any movie "reached close" or 'got close' to portraying such a brutal, life-scarring experience.

edited 24th Oct '14 4:52:11 PM by Quag15

Just got back from seeing it. That was pretty great.

The Tiger's appearance will probably have Ach spitting blood, though.

edited 26th Oct '14 1:42:32 PM by pagad

I'm on my way to seeing this albeit it would still be a couple of hours away. lol

Was planning on going to see it yesterday but couldn't due to having to help my grandfather. Oh well, I can see it later when it comes out on DVD.

Says a lot though when 5 v. 300 (soldiers) is realistic while 5 v. 1 (tanks) never happened. lol

Never happened isn't quite right. There are plenty of incidents from the war where one, two or a few tanks destroyed many times their number (particularly on the Eastern Front), but that was likely more due to the tactical situation and crew discipline (or lack thereof) than the actual vehicles involved. It's also worth remembering that against the Soviets German AFVs did indeed manage to maintain a 4:1 kill ratio almost up until 1945.

edited 2nd Nov '14 11:11:49 AM by pagad

Kill ratios are one of the least useful metrics for evaluating the performance of a weapons system ever.

As for the one-tank armies - I believe there were relatively few confirmable instances of that actually happening. The KVs at Raseinai and Krasnogvardeysk are examples, as well as Pierre Bilotte's thirteen tank kills in his Char B1 at Stonne. I did read somewhere that Bilotte's rampage is the only confirmed example of a single tank destroying more than six enemy vehicles in a single battle, but I can't speak to the reliability of that.

edited 2nd Nov '14 2:21:35 PM by Achaemenid

As far as I'm aware those ratios cover all AF Vs and not a particular model.

Villers Bocage and Michael Wittman spring to mind. As I recall that documentary trilogy by Mark Urban I referred to earlier on in the thread covers what happened there to elements of 7th Armoured Division on the 13 June 1944. There's a lot of effort currently being spent by (mainly British) historians to undercut just how badly the British performed that day because, frankly, they are embarrassed by it.

Wittmann destroyed no more than seven tanks at Villers-Bocage, despite being officially credited with the entirety of the German tank kills from the assault. Even if he killed every single tank he saw, he could have killed no more than nine. Indeed, Wittmann's fame owes more to SS propaganda and casual historians than reality. Moreover, his lone assault on the County of London Yeomanry was a serious tactical error which cost the Germans casualties and the chance at a more effective ambush by alerting the British and putting them on the defensive. It also cost him his tank, disabled by a six-pounder gun.

Hilary Doyle quotes a report from the Heer into Sepp Dietrich's golden boy in one of the Operation Think Tank videos: "A danger to his crew, a danger to his unit, a danger to the whole front, indisciplined, doesn't follow the rules, doesn't perform as part of a team." The man was a dangerous liability, and his hot head would cost him his life (along with those of his crew) at Gaumesnil.

It's still fairly unhelpful. Indeed, arguably one could say that the Germans took 100% casualties in WWII, since every German soldier was either killed, deserted, maimed, or captured when the surrendered.

If you want to address the Eastern Front: one would expect high Soviet casualties in the early stages because they were unprepared. You would expect high Soviet casualties in the later stages because they were on the offensive against a prepared enemy. Neither factor has anything to do with the quality of their equipment.

edited 2nd Nov '14 4:59:34 PM by Achaemenid

Again, British/Allied historian who doesn't want to address how shit the British were that day, when one tank held up an entire DIVISIONAL advance - which led to the entire command staff being given the sack. Wittman took the tactical decision that he didn't have time to wait for his company to form up otherwise the position would have been overrun and the battle lost.

So his tank got destroyed. So what? The British lost far more that day in terms of tanks and other armored vehicles lost. A tactical victory for the Germans. And let's not forget that there is such a thing as professional jealousy involved in warfare, especially from those who served on the same side as the guy who collected Knight's Crosses like they grew on trees and yet started out in a Stu G. Besides, that quote you mentioned was from a Heer soldier. Remind me how that organization and the SS got on during the war? Amicably and without argument? Nah. Contempt from both sides.

And it wasn't just casual historians describing Villers Bocage in that documentary, it was the people who were there and saw the carnage and the aftermath and all the burning Cromwells.

It's quite easy to maintain a 4:1 ratio when at the start of Barbarossa German tanks were already outnumbered by USSR tanks, including the almighty T-26, T-46, T-60, T-70, T-28, BT-2, BT-5, BT-7... There were at least 10,000 Soviet tanks in the Eastern Front in June 1941 (Clark already says that that figure is quite "low" already, given the fact that it's lower than German "official" figures; the USSR meanwhile said there were less tanks for obvious reasons). At this point the Pz IV is already "mature" and the T-34 is yet to get out of the factories (first ones were finished in late Oct, iirc, and they went straight to battle; first major use of them was in December). And all of Tukhachevsky's reforms were reversed, so the numerical advantage was for naught.

edited 2nd Nov '14 6:54:45 PM by entropy13

According to the link I posted, that was not the case.

The USSR had large numbers of T-34s right off the bat. Furthermore, in 1941 the kill ratio was 6:1, due to the vast numbers of Soviet tanks destroyed in that year.

You didn't get my point. They had some T-34s in June but they really only went out of the factories (or in battle) by October (because it took them that long to realize that they had to do something else besides run away and get surrounded...by getting new tanks surrounded - they were sent piecemeal). Your link has no per month figures, but my (only, unfortunately) source has June-Sept production figures of T-34s at the low hundreds, at best. By October, the "get the industries to Siberia" (in a sense, not literally; the new factories won't be operational until the next year; it's because they just ramped up production quite exponentially in the factories that they already have) was well underway so the -ber months had production from the high hundreds to around a thousand.

So they still didn't have "a lot" of T-34s right off the bat either. Unless you get pedantic and say "ah, but anything more than two can be considered 'many' already!"

edited 3rd Nov '14 12:23:04 AM by entropy13