Fury

Fair point. But relative to the numbers of German AFVs deployed over the same period, the Soviets still deployed more T-34s between June and December than the total number of all German AF Vs of every type (Pz IIs, Pz IIIs, Pz IVs, StuGs, captured French and Czech models) deployed in that same period.

My point was that the 6:1 kill ratio in 1941 would have eliminated a great many of the Red Army's obsolescent tanks, the production of many of which stopped prior to the German invasion, which would then go on to be replaced by T-34s. Despite that, in 1943 and 1944, the kill ratio was still 4:1 in the German favour.

edited 3rd Nov '14 3:31:16 AM by pagad

Hilary Doyle is Irish, and has devoted his life's work to writing on German tanks, often in collaboration with two German authors, Tom Jentz and Walter Spielberger, who was a Jagdpanther commander during the war.

The most thorough critique of Wittmann's actions at Villers-Bocage comes from Wolfgang Schneider, a German and a tank instructor with the modern German Army: Wittmann made several elementary mistakes. Indeed, it wasn't even necessary for him to advance into the town, since 1st company of s.SS Pz. Abt. 101 and Panzer-Lehr had already cut the road to Caen further up.

It did not. The advance was stopped by the assault of 1st Company s.SS Pz. Abt. 101 under Karl Möbius and the Panzer Lehr. Wittmann played no further part in the battle, which raged all day, after he lost his vehicle in the morning.

When I was five, I took the "tactical decision" that the gooey brown substance in a pot in front of me was chocolate cake mix. It was Dulux. Like Wittman, I made the wrong decision. Even if Wittmann's propaganda account was accurate, he should never have been in a position where advancing solo against nine enemy tanks was the best course of action. His poor dispersal of his own vehicles doesn't make his later actions a good idea.

s.SS Pz. Abt. 101 had fewer than twelve running tanks by the end of the engagement, and records from two days afterwards show them nine Tigers short, twenty-one in the repair yard, with only fifteen operational vehicles. The British likely destroyed or rendered useless considerably more than they actually claimed.

The Germans could have claimed a more shattering victory with a combined assault with 1st and 2nd companies of s.SS Pz. Abt 101 and Panzer-Lehr. They lost the chance to prepare a more effective ambush through Wittmann's actions. When 1st company and Panzer-Lehr actually turned up, they found the British entrenched in the town, which is why the Germans took several casualties which prevented them continuing the action.

And yet Kurt Knispel never received a Knight's Cross, despite being the top tank ace of all time. But then, he was a Sudetenlander who treated POWs well. Not exactly the template the Germans wanted for their heroes. Otto Carius began on the even less capable 38(t), and he never got Swords to his Knight's Cross. Moreover, the poor performance of the Waffen-SS suggests that the "professional jealousy" of the Army was rather justified. The German Army did not lack for tank aces, after all.

Yes, because Wittmann on Wittmann is a picture of historical reliability.

If you want real Tiger aces, you can find them in Carius, Knispel, and Boelter. If you want boastful war criminals and fantasists, then the SS provides plenty.

—

The British did screw up at V-B: they did so by failing to hold the town after repulsing the German attack - instead they panicked and bombed the town rather than dig-in. The further screw up was logistical, in the sense that substantial reserves of infantry and armor should have been available but were not. The halting of 7th Armoured's advance at V-B has little to do with the "heroics" of Michael Wittmann.

edited 3rd Nov '14 8:15:14 AM by Achaemenid

Speaking of Carius, I'm reading Tigers in the Mud at the moment and, whilst it is eminently readable and enjoyable, I'm finding it to be a little...ah, myopic, shall we say. Apart from the general tone of "Deutschland stronk! remove borscht", he speaks perhaps a little too glowingly of the Nordland division than someone who should know what the Waffen SS got up to should be. I suppose it's understandable for a Heer vet to feel hard done by regarding their post-war treatment, but he presumably is aware of whom he was fighting for and that the Heer's hands, although not nearly dirty as those of the Waffen-SS, are not exactly clean either.

Just saw this:

Not, I would argue, as a retrospective assessment on a year-by-year basis of the Heer's armoured forces. Anyway, the 1945 1:1 ratio takes that into account by counting all German AFVs still active in 1945 as being operational losses.

But what of the middle stages? To take Kursk as an example, the Germans went on the offensive against a numerically superior and defensively prepared enemy that knew they were coming and still managed an extraordinarily high kill ratio in AFV terms. Of course, the Germans still lost because of the hopeless strategic situation, but the fact remains that the Soviets lost an extraordinarily high quantity of materiel (not to mention lives).

edited 3rd Nov '14 10:32:50 AM by pagad

"No, my tank dick is bigger."

"No, my tank dick is bigger."

"No, mine."

"No, mine."

Etc.

The ratio is not as high as it seems. The commonly provided figure of 6064 Soviet armored vehicles lost for the Kurk battle is generally misunderstood:

• It refers not simply to destroyed vehicles, but also those damaged enough to need field repair.
• It includes the Soviet losses from the two Soviet counter-offensives that followed Kursk: Operation Kutuzov and Operation General Rumyantsev.
• German losses are not accurately known, merely estimated from recorded losses of 1331 vehicles across the whole front, which itself is likely a low total.

Something I've brought up before is the way in which the Germans counted their losses versus the way the Allies did it. The Germans would not write a vehicle off as lost unless there was absolutely no chance at all of it being recovered or repaired. Hence, German force's claimed losses are usually far smaller than the actual results, and why they can find themselves "losing" tanks days or weeks after the battles have concluded.

By contrast, the Soviets would record as "lost" any tank that had been rendered unable to complete its assigned objective - so a tank could be "lost" by throwing a track. Hence, Soviet vehicle "losses" are usually much higher than Soviet vehicles actually destroyed.

Just because a discussion doesn't interest you isn't any reason to mock it.

edited 3rd Nov '14 12:27:56 PM by Achaemenid

Doesn't even matter who hast the biggest tank dick when the other one keeps setting itself on fire for no obvious reason

Tanks and history aside, is the movie any good? I heard it's not really remarkable, with Pitt basically doing a more serious rehash of Lt. Aldo Raine, so to speak.

Movie is good. But the Sherman v. Tiger is nigh impossible in real life, but their last stand is actually possible. Or it already happened, in a sense, multiple times. Even in a different year, in a different place. lol

I have mixed feelings about it. It was overall a much darker movie than I was expecting, and the characters didn't feel very motivated, since the plot is just them following orders. Though I guess shame on me for expecting something not dark, and you could justify the latter complaint with realism.

Eh, I don't think he even does that. I got the feeling Pitt was a bit miscast here, since he doesn't seem to really get "into" the Wardaddy role. Some of his dialogue ("Ideals are peaceful, history's violent") sounds forced and inconsistent with how the character is otherwise presented.

edited 3rd Nov '14 9:07:38 PM by Robotnik

The last stand is, I would argue, far more ludicrous than the tank battle. 300+ men with antitank weapons vs immobilised tank without infantry support should not end well for the tank. That fight should have been over the moment they managed to flank Fury.

As to the tank battle, "nigh impossible" is a stretch. Sure, it may not be realistic in its details, but the 5:1 thing is a myth because it wasn't the case with every Tiger vs Sherman encounter, not because it didn't ever happen. It is hardly unknown for Tiger aces to knock out multiple tanks even at short ranges.

Yes. The characters are fairly standard archetypes, but it plays things a little differently to your average "Greatest Generation is Greatest!" Second World War film, and deconstructs it a little in terms of the way that it presents the enemy as opposite but essentially the same. For example, one of my favourite things about the tank battle in particular is that you hear the desperate combat chatter of both sides, which goes some distance towards humanising the scene.

edited 4th Nov '14 12:19:16 AM by pagad

If they do it in the vein of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, I suppose it's a good thing. Are there any reelevant German characters in terms of us getting an insight in their inner and outer struggle?

It's a possiblity. The trailer did made him look like he didn't really want to be there (the actor, not the character).

Cross-posting this for the third time from the History and Military threads:

I've posted an incomplete review of Fury back in the Military Thread a day after its premiere, which I've frustratingly been too lazy to complete. I'll repost it here with some updates.

So I saw Fury today after paying a visit to the Tankland Museum (where Sabre's Edge volunteers) in El Monte, California - otherwise, a decent and well-produced film with quality acting, especially in regards to the battle scenes and successfully capturing the grim atmosphere of being so near the end of the war but also with so much fighting left to do. However, its plot was rather predictable to me - the film features a storm of tropes and cliches that a constant seer of its genre could easily pick up: the basic plot features a New Meat second-line clerk being forced to adjust to the expectations of his assigned Sherman's Grizzled Veteran crew led by A Father to His Men Brad Pitt. Like other similar characters of his kind, the New Meat is initially guided by his virtuous conscience and has difficulty participating in the violence of battle while Brad Pitt constantly drills him into doing so, featuring a classic ambush scene that's triggered by the New Meat spotting the Panzershreck-armed Hitlerjugend troops but failing to react in time, resulting in Brad Pitt chewing him out for the consequences of "his fault".

Upon flushing out a German town of armed resistance in an interesting Perspective Flip of the final battle from Saving Private Ryan, the tankers are allowed to rest while command works the strategic situation out. Brad Pitt turns out to be An Officer And A Gentleman when he sits down for lunch with a terrified mother and her blonde daughter Emma. The New Meat, who originally was ordered by Brad Pitt to accompany him on a house-clearing assignment, leads the film into its Hope Spot when his experimenting with the family's piano and German folk music manages to earn him a Duet Bonding session with Emma and Rescue Sex (Brad Pitt apparently planned on getting him laid by jokingly threatening to "sleep with her if you don't"). Shortly after our potential couple fnishes the deed, the rest of the tank squad barges in, dissapointed that their commanding officer had left none of the spoils for them. The assistant gunner is a particularly brash and gung-ho man, and harasses a clearly frightened and upset Emma throughout the draggingly tense scene as the crew eats lunch in the apartment. Brad Pitt protects her throughout the scene (which I swore had to have been at least 15 minutes) and sends a clear message to lay off of her.

War films rarely ever allow a form of romantic happiness to stay permanent, and the film evokes I Let Gwen Stacy Die when an artillery bombardment of unknown allegiance strikes the town, killing Emma and her mother in the film's big Tear Jerker. The New Meat begins to harden up after this, and Brad Pitt warns him that there are millions of tragedies in the war like what just happened.

WWII buffs will be pleased to find the much awaited battle scene with the restored Tiger I satisfying, although it plays the whole 5 Shermans vs 1 Tiger saying literally, with the latter utterly pwning the Sherman squadron in a Curbstomp Battle until our titular heroes manage to score a shot in its rear. While the enemy depicted in the film is of the ill-trained and crumbling Wehrmacht, I couldn't help but cringe at the Tiger crew being Too Dumb to Live and Leeroy Jenkins charging the five M4's with no reinforcement whatsoever - it's as if they were trying to commit suicide by air superiority.

While the film does aim to portray War Is Hell complete with Saving Private Ryan-esque monochrome lighting, my major complaint is that the circumstances of the Fury's finale just defeat the entire nature of such buildup; the final battle just seems to come straight out of a Rambo film, complete with a muscular hero bravely manning an M2 machinegun and holding back waves of enemy infantry with it, while the Five-Man Band manage to tackle down an entire Waffen-SS battalion with nothing but their crippled Sherman and small arms.

The Germans in the sequence, to quote the film's Tropes page cringely utilize Hollywood Tactics;

___

On a personal note, I'm also quite disgusted as how my classmates who've seen the film instantly label Brad Pitt's character as the best one, describing him as a Badass or something else along that line.

How would they have felt, terrified and helpless and just wanting to be reunited with their loved ones, if they were in the boots of that surrendering German artilleryman that was shot by Brad Pitt's character to make the New Meat "a man".

It's as if a surrendering young U.S soldier being executed on-screen would prompt anger and outrage for such a heinous war crime, while the act being done to a surrendering German soldier of the same age raises no complaints because he's an Acceptable Targets.

Seriously, fuck double-standards.

_______________

Both battles are possible in real-life, but the last stand of the Five-Man Band against an entire battalion of infantry would require Japanese-levels of suicidal bravery that even Audie Murphy or John Basilone would shrug off after thinking about it. The closest sounding Real Life battle that I can immediately recall besides Rourke's Drift would be how a Chinese Nationalist M5 Stuart crew bunkered down in their vehicle, which had suffered a mechanical failure right on the planned landing beach for the coming PLA invasion, during the Battle of Guningtou/Kinmen towards the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 - however, said stranded tank and its crew were also reinforced by friendly operational tanks of its respective unit which made their heroic stand at least sustainable.

I personally believe that the Tiger crew would have lived to see another day had they chosen a defensive strategy instead of the Leeroy Jenkins bum rush they ended up doing that allowed Fury to get behind them for to shoot them in the ass; shoot and scoot backwards from the cover of the treeline as to deny the Shermans the close-in tactics that they'd prefer while maximizing the long range firepower of the 88 gun and quality German optical equipment.^note  On the Eastern Front, Soviet tankers used aggressive close-in tactics as to make up for their disadvantaged gunnery equipment, whereas their German opponents preferred engaging from afar and longer ranges due to their excellent optics

As guilty as it may seem, I was actually rooting for the Tiger to win in the theatre. . .

edited 4th Nov '14 6:00:25 AM by FluffyMcChicken

I think the thing about Wardaddy is that he's more or less an American Reznov, but unlike Reznov we never really see (at least, firsthand) what made him as angry and vengeful as he is.

Okay, now that I'm home from work I can post a more detailed response than the rushed one this morning. There aren't really any German viewpoint characters, but I feel that a major theme of the film is that the German enemy isn't a fanatical, dehumanised "other" existing only to be mown down by our all-American heroes, even if that is what the film appears to be on the surface. I've seen criticisms to that effect, and frankly I think they're unfair. I think that the film is a lot more nuanced in that regard than many critics give it credit for.

This necessitates discussion of a couple of key scenes in the film. However, as its plot isn't particularly intricate and doesn't really hinge upon twists, I'm just going to post a mild spoiler warning for the following rather than blank it out.

Admittedly, I'm also going to refer to Pitt's character as "Wardaddy" and the newbie's character as "the newbie", because I can't remember their characters' names.

So there's an early scene after a successful American attack on a German position where Pitt's character tries to force the newbie to kill a German prisoner to get him over his aversion to machine-gunning Germans from the tank. This prisoner was singled out because he was wearing an American jacket, and it was assumed by the Americans that he therefore took it off a dead comrade - and for this they're going to kill him in cold blood, despite his pleas about his wife and child. After the deed is done, there's a shot showing that one of the spectators is a grinning GI wearing a German Stahlhelm. There's a temptation to regard this scene as just an Obligatory War Crime Scene, but I think that's doing it a disservice, and it's not nearly as throwaway as, say, showing American troops off-handedly executing surrendering Czech conscripts and then moving swiftly on. From this moment on, the newbie becomes more and more brutal, and actually takes pleasure in cutting down a group of burning German soldiers later on.

Later on, there's a scene where the exhausted American commander holding a village asks in frustration "Why don't they just give it up?" to which Wardaddy replies "Would you?" I think the brevity of the exchange is effective because it provides a simple answer to a puzzling question, certainly one I've pondered before: well, why didn't they? Yes, the roaming SS death squads hanging deserters from telegraph poles had something to do with it - the film certainly doesn't spare that grisly detail - but many German troops fought on even in the West because they could see no future once the Allies won - indeed, German resistance was stiffened after details of the Morganthau Plan leaked out, and in believing that Germany would be dismembered and dismantled by the Allies weren't even far wrong. I can imagine Allied resistance being equally fanatical if German troops were knocking on the doors of London and New York, and don't even need to imagine Soviet desperation in '41 and '42.

Lastly, there's the very last German we see. I'm going to spoiler this bit properly, as I think it's probably the most crucial moment of the film. Four out of Fury's five crew are dead, except the newbie, who has escaped through the bottom hatch underneath the tank. He told a mortally-wounded Wardaddy he wanted to surrender; Wardaddy asked him not to, believing that the Waffen-SS troopers would hurt him badly and kill him badly. So he lies underneath the tank and hopes that he won't be discovered, until a beam of light falls on his face and we see that a young trooper is looking right at him. They maintain eye contact for a few seconds - as you might imagine, the newbie is completely terrified - before the trooper moves on, not revealing his presence. As an act of mercy, this is pretty damn significant because as far as I can remember it's basically the only one shown in the film - and it's from a German to an American, after the American in question has been shouting "Die you Nazi fuckers" and shooting them down like enemies in a videogame - which, again, he earlier admitted that he actually enjoyed doing. If that doesn't hammer home the point, I don't know what will.

On a more humorous note...

I must admit, I secretly kinda wanted the German crew's dialogue to resemble the hamtastic Tiger click-quotes in Company Of Heroes. GERRRRMAN STEEL!

Re: Tiger battle in general

Not the case in terms of that particular Tiger crew, I think. After all, they demonstrated some excellent gunnery skills. I like to think of the German crew in the film as African campaign vets, just like Fury's. The real Tiger 131's an early model Tiger I that fought in Tunisia, after all, and I think that some early model Tigers did indeed fight throughout most of the war - I think I've seen pictures of an early model Tiger knocked out in Berlin by the Soviets - so I don't think it would be too implausible.

edited 4th Nov '14 10:44:22 AM by pagad

It's not just a German wearing an American jacket...He's implied to have been part of Operation Greif.

Which is not the same as an American wearing a German helmet.

Implied how? In dialogue? (honestly don't remember) Grief was quite a few months ago in the film's timeframe. I think it's more likely to be a scavenged coat.

Wardaddy made a fast passing line during the scene about the fighting in "Belgium" before leaping off the tank to "man-up" Norman, the newbie - "Belgium" presumably meaning the Ardennes campaign.

_____

I felt that the film somewhat lost its appeal for me after the Tiger battle, which happens only about early on in the second half of the film; see, in the vast majority of World War II films, the appearance of the German big cats are reserved for the grand finale due to their spiritual reputation as monstrous nigh-invincible behemoths - AKA an ideal final boss that the heroes must overcome. When Fury managed to overcome the lone Tiger, I mentally went "now what?" since the big marketing point of seeing an authentic Tiger roll had been spent.

I think that the final stand against an entire Waffen-SS battalion could have been made so much more believable if the Sherman squadron had been allowed to live until the climax. A subsequent German counterattack in the area severs communications with command, and the squadron has to hold out against the Waffen-SS forces as in the film. After suffering setbacks with the first wave(s) of assault due to Hollywood Tactics, the Germans decide to deploy their last remaining Tiger, but one that's mentioned to be crewed by now-rare veterans of the Afrika Korps - a cameo by Thomas Kretschmann as the Tiger commander would especially do nicely. The tank battle thus happens as in the original film, but with the night backdrop to make things more sinister. The Tiger takes the role of the landmine, disabling Fury while destroying the squadron before being destroyed. The film then proceeds as in the original. Allowing the Tiger commander to survive and take the role of the young Waffen-SS trooper would be a nice finishing touch too.

edited 5th Nov '14 6:11:45 AM by FluffyMcChicken

Ok, sure. But I would argue it's still a bit of a stretch to automatically assume that a German wearing a piece of American gear took part in Greif, when Panzer Brigade 150 constituted such a small component of the German forces that took part in the Ardennes Offensive. Scavenging enemy gear was common on all sides, after all.

I would not argue with any of this.

edited 5th Nov '14 10:39:26 AM by pagad

@ Fluffy Mc Chicken

Panzerschreck? When I saw the movie, I thought they were using Panzerfausts?

Don't you mean cousin?

It's "cousin", not cousin.

Oops, my bad - didn't notice the typo until now.

They were cousins? I remember pausing to quickly blow my nose during that scene when they introduce the two, so I must've missed the passing line. I just hung on with the assumption that they were a typical mother and daughter without male family members during wartime.