Nog hade de (M10, M18 och M36) pansar i tornen, det var väl bara det att tornet inte hade tak.Belisarius skrev:Tank Destroyers som M10 och M18 led ju av den lilla nackdelen att de inte hade något pansrat torn överhuvudtaget, dessutom var det öppet (eftersom tak inte gav plats för pjäsen). De kunde ju således endast användas i bakhåll om man inte hade en ovanligt modig besättning och litade helt på sin snabbhet att komma undan.
tigrar vs sherman
Belisarius, jag klistrar in ett långt inlägg från ett annat forum där stridsvagnsdoktrinen behandlas. Det är mycket att läsa, men oerhört lärorikt om man orkar ta sig igenom det:
Det är JasonC på Battlefront.com:s forum som skrivit det.
"There is an enourmous amount of confusion, one sided accounts, revisionism, and oversimplification about interwar and early war tank doctrine, in all countries. Everyone has some pet theory about what eventually worked and why it was important, and regards everyone else as a hidebound straw man making some comical and easily avoided error, typically all the same one.
If all that were required to use tanks correctly were veering in a direction, as all these stories imply, nobody would have had poor tank doctrines and they would not have evolved so much. The reality is quite different. Nobody had it figured out in the fall of 1939. Multiple errors were made. And each of them spawned misdiagnoses, pet theories, that then went and made their own errors in some other direction. Meanwhile, half the things called errors afterward simply weren't. They were legacies of these straw man debates. Which get layered with service branch and national and personal rivalries, in addition to the doctrinal meat.
Tanks were invented in WW I by the Brits. They already had theorists, that early (1917), calling for massed employment of tanks as an independent arm. Understand that the problem was thought of as "restoring mobility to the battefield". WW I was thought of as an anomoly in the whole course of warfare, which "should" be based on maneuver to seize ground. This deeply engrained offensive military view was relentlessly and bloodily refuted by the practical realities of WW I. They spent years chasing the mirage of "breakthrough" while the reality was artillery based attrition.
Early tanks could not change this, despite the theorists being listened to. They retroactively carp about how they should have had this and that, but the fact is they were given an independent arm, massed armor, operationally employment, and all the rest of it. But they did not initially understand combined arms. And the tanks of the day were horribly things from a reliability and maintenance point of view. At Cambrai, 90% of the tanks employed broke down within a week.
Giant trench-crossers were the original idea. They carried MGs or light cannons through the enemy wire and over his trenches, silencing enemy machine gun posts by direct fire. They immediately had half a dozen problems. One, the enemy MGs just hid, and the tanks had zero visibility. Two, enemy artillery knocked some of them out by direct fire, where any got through. Three, they broke down in hours, particularly when trying to navigate shelled terrain and trenches etc. There was practically no coordination with any other arm.
Armor theorists sometimes leave out this part of the story, as though they never got a chance to show what they could do employed independently, before being tied to the infantry, and supposedly thus slowed down to a walking pace. Officers coming from cavalry backgrounds are particularly revisionist on this score. They continued to blame failure on "tying the tanks to the infantry", and wanted to be allowed to just drive off into the enemy rear. Where, in reality, a WW I tank would be off to the side of the road, broken down or out of fuel, in a matter of hours, to a day or two at most.
What the cavalry officers did get was fleets of light tanks, MG main armament, thought of as meant for "exploitation". (Small numbers of armored cars were used the same way in remote theaters; in primitive enough conditions (very weak enemies) they could be fairly successful). At Amiens in 1918, they even got a chance at breakthrough. The overall offensive was successful but tanks mattered only for the immediate break-in of the German trench system. The advance continued at a walking pace, hampered by terrain wrecked by shelling, by the inability of gun poor forces to compete with gun assisted ones, and by the dependence of the guns on rail supply for ammunition.
The basic cause of the static nature of WW I was not the trenches, or the slowness or vulnerability of infantry. That was a misdiagnosis of the issue. The basic cause was a mobility differential on the two sides of the front. Operating on one's own side, rail allowed rapid movement of men and material in effectively unlimited quantities.
Operating beyond the no man's land scar tissue belt, on the other hand, depended largly on manpacking. No vehicles could negotiate the intervening ground, not for a single passage, but repeatedly for logistics. Rail lines do not lay instantly. The vehicles used from railhead to front were horsedrawn, and horses do not work effectively in barrage zones. A few motor vehicles could not make up for these limits over a limited and shell-holed road net.
As a result, the enemy front line could be not only entered, but entirely carried, through all 3-5 belts of its depth, and nothing of operational significance would follow from it. The enemy could still rail in reserves faster than the attackers could get forces across. Fighting at the limits of the penetration, the attackers had rifles and grenades, the defenders had 6 to 8 inch artillery and dug in machineguns. Such fronts were "self sealing". To carry a single trench was difficult, to carry 3 faster than the enemy could dig a new one almost impossible, and even achieving that resulted in a 10-50 miles movement of the front but no decision.
The reality was that WW I era tanks were not yet technically capable enough to change any of this, and they were plugged in to a logistic system geared for rail, not automotive, movement. Which inherently favored artillery firepower and attrition strategies, and a tactical defensive stance. But this was poorly understood, largely because it was not acceptable in its human consequences, and officers found the reality of it intensely frustrating. They substituted wishful thinking for facing the reality.
This contributed to a large front to rear command "disconnect", that wasted hundreds of thousands of men in fruitless quixotic attempts at "decisive breakthrough". After Ypres, one staff officer visited the front for the first time since posting there. He saw the mud the artillery had created, for the first time. "We sent men to fight in *that*?" was his reaction. It was news to him, a month after the battle.
The interwar period can only be understood if one realizes this prior fight had already taken place. And the naive faith in the offensive power of massed tanks employed alone expressed by the cavalry minded has already been tried and had been completely unsuccessful in practice.
Tanks had proved useful. But the key to their effective use had been combined arms coordination. Especially, they had to work with infantry to force enemy MGs and such to show themselves, so the tanks could deal with them - or to allow the infantry to clear with grenades those hiding from the tanks. (Secondarily, coordination with artillery helped deal with enemy guns using direct fire against the tanks. But this was not achieved interactively, due to communications limits. A rolling barrage could create the necessary effect).
Infantry and artillery minded officers coming out of that whole experience viewed the cavalry minded as refuted hotheads deluded by a glamour they attached to speed, that was no more than wishful thinking and had failed in practice due to lack of combined arms. They wanted to subordinate tanks to ordinary infantry-heavy formations and use them all along the line to support all-arms attacks. Cavalry minded armor officers, on the other hand, viewed the failure of tanks to achieve decision in WW I as everybody else's fault. They hadn't been given their chance (this was factually untrue, but widely believed). Their immediate post-war mantra was to mass the tanks, and use them alone, not "tied" to the infantry.
In reality, both of these doctrines were wrong. The infantry minded were entirely correct about the importance of combined arms - which the cavalry minded did not admit. Failure to achieve real combined arms coordination made for spectacular failures, losing entire tank brigades in a single afternoon to no purpose, as late as 1942. But it was important to mass the tanks.
The cavalry minded were right to stress massing the tanks on narrow sectors and putting them in the driver's seat, as it were. But they were entirely wrong about "cutting the tanks loose" from infantry and artillery. It was not enough to veer in a direction. But only the infantry branch really understood combined arms, and only the cavalry branch really understood operational massing and exploitation.
So how did the various countries deal with all of this? Far from having one bad idea and sticking with it, most of them tried all of them and dissipated their efforts as a result. The French had half of their tanks in independent battalions, regiments, and brigades meant to support infantry divisions. They also had light tank brigades meant to be employed en masse like cavalry. They also had a few light armor combined arms formations. And a few very tank heavy full armor divisions, like fleets of land battleships. The revisionists often reduce this to "infantry thinking, penny packeted all along the line". But the French had pure ADs as big as the Germans used, and combined arms legere divisions as integrated as later PDs, and behind every German breakthrough they had brigades to corps to throw in to immediate counterattacks. They just didn't have any unified doctrine. If the war had been the one the infantry doctrine envisioned, they would have done OK without. Obviously it wasn't.
The Brits on the other hand were much more heavily in the cavalry thinking camp. Fuller had been an early proponent of this view. They tended to think pure armor was the way to go. The infantry tanks were a hold over, a poor second sister, within the British armor force. They were a concession to hidebound outsiders who did not understand that masses of crusier tanks operating alone would decide wars by deep slashing exploitations. Which in practice became Pickett's charge affairs that lost entire brigades in half a day.
The Germans made the British mistake, before Poland. Guderian - originally a motorized signals unit officer - had discovered the importance of communications and motorizing all supporting arms in interwar tests. That was their major innovation. It gave them something approaching combined arms at the speed of the tanks. But the PDs themselves were still extremely armor heavy, way too heavy for real combined arms effects.
In practice, better commanders discovered this for themselves during the Polish campaign. They used supporting motorized infantry divisions to flesh out combined arms, or worked with full leg infantry divisions for particular attacks. Infantry formations were used in deep column behind the PDs, to hold what they took and inundate units penetrated by the PDs. By the time of the French campaign some of this worked itself out, by experimenting with TOEs. They used several light divisions in France, which were too armor light, alongside PDs that were still too armor heavy.
By the time of the Russian campaign, they had found about the right mix of armor to infantry in the PDs. They did so in part to increase the number of PDs overall. The number of mediums in a PD remained about the same, while the number of lights fell dramatically, as the whole force transitioned to mediums. So, in Poland and France they had used a "cavalry doctrine" force by later war standards. The median tank in France was a Pz II.
The Germans went through a familiar process on the issue of tanks fighting tanks, exploitation doctrine, and tank armament. Understand that cavalry doctrine had stressed speed and exploitation, not combat power. The Germans used small numbers of Pz IVs with short 75s as artillery support for the tanks, but most of them fought as mobile machinegun nests, and antitank ability was an afterthought.
German anti-tank doctrine in this period was based on the WW I experience that guns firing direct stopped tank attacks. What later became the PAK front was an extension of this idea. When the Brits counterattacked at Arras in France, Rommel's entirely doctrinal counter was based on battalions of divisional 105s firing direct, along with a handful of 88s and the 37mm PAK from divisional AT battalions. Every division had an antitank battalion, originally with quite light pieces, dedicated to this, but supplimenting them with div arty was entirely normal.
Against very light early war tanks this worked fine. But the French also had Char-Bs. And these bounced 37mm AP easily. The Germans put in for better PAK and for gun upgrades for the Panzers, most of which had 20mm or 37mm main armament. The ordnance department turned down the initial call for 50L60 guns for the Pz III, because the tank's mission was cavalry-like, exploitation and fighting soft enemy targets, not enemy tanks. So a 50L42 with the same HE was thought adequate. Remember, these are the guys who are in the lead, doctrinally, in the period of their greatest successes. It is not like Guderian figured it all out before 1939.
The general purpose tank that made clear to the Germans they could not get by with a cavalry and exploitation armor doctrine was the Russian T-34. The Char-B and Matilda had been just as tough armor-wise, and could penetrate anything the Germans had at the time. But both were slow infantry tanks. But the T-34 had greater cross country mobility than a Pz III, better protection than a Char-B, the HE firepower of a Pz IV, and in 1941 sufficient AT ability to kill any German tank at medium range. It set the standard for what *not* to compromize over. Tankers could demand all of the above from the designers and factories, rather than limping along with special purpose items for every tactic.
Understand that the Russians were doctrinally in about the same position as the French. They had every doctrine and thus none. They had flocks of cavalry tanks meant to be used en masse for exploitation - BT series - but without sufficient combined arms to work in practice. They had giant land cruisers to smash through enemy trench systems - KVs - but penny packeted as infantry support tanks. They did not know how to use the T-34 yet. But they had the tool, and the Germans quickly showed them what fleets of such things could do, as parts of all arm, corps sized formations.
The US had plenty of armor development in the interwar years. It is revisionist projection to claim otherwise. They were not ahead of the Germans, but that isn't saying anything - nobody was, and the US army was a tiny, starved thing that occasionally sent horse cavalry into Mexico to chase bandits. Patton was charging "bonus marcher" squatters in depression era Washington DC riots, on horseback, with sabers.
Still the US came out of it with the Stuart, reflecting cavalry tank doctrine, and the Grant, reflecting infantry tank doctrine. The former compares favorably with the Pz IIs, 38s, and early IIIs the Germans used to conquer most of Europe. The latter is a more mobile Char-B, with better communications etc. By 1942, the US had in the Sherman a general purpose medium about as good as the T-34, or the Pz III and IV series, the other major powers were using then. And years ahead of British Crusaders and Valentines.
Nor was US doctrine on fighting enemy tanks with tanks any different from the stages the Germans went through. The US just went through them later, having entered later. The US used M-10s much as the Germans used Marders, and rather more successfully. The US saw the need to upgun Shermans to 76mm, but was slow about it in practice, much as the Germans saw the need to upgun IIIs and IVs, eventually abandoning turreted IIIs to get a decent gun. The US developed a vastly improved heavier tank after that process ran its course - but the war ended before the Pershing got as old as the Panther.
The anomoly that caught the initial poster's eye, however, is the fact that even the main British I tanks were armed with 2 pdrs firing AP. This largely reflects the dominance of cavalry thinking and the cruiser arm within British armor force circles. Understand, the existence of infantry tanks was a concession to (branch) outsiders and their ideas of the role of tanks. If they had really believed in infantry tank doctrine they would have made things like the Char-B or the Grant - large HE chuckers. Instead they had just a few 3 inch CS versions."
Det är JasonC på Battlefront.com:s forum som skrivit det.
"There is an enourmous amount of confusion, one sided accounts, revisionism, and oversimplification about interwar and early war tank doctrine, in all countries. Everyone has some pet theory about what eventually worked and why it was important, and regards everyone else as a hidebound straw man making some comical and easily avoided error, typically all the same one.
If all that were required to use tanks correctly were veering in a direction, as all these stories imply, nobody would have had poor tank doctrines and they would not have evolved so much. The reality is quite different. Nobody had it figured out in the fall of 1939. Multiple errors were made. And each of them spawned misdiagnoses, pet theories, that then went and made their own errors in some other direction. Meanwhile, half the things called errors afterward simply weren't. They were legacies of these straw man debates. Which get layered with service branch and national and personal rivalries, in addition to the doctrinal meat.
Tanks were invented in WW I by the Brits. They already had theorists, that early (1917), calling for massed employment of tanks as an independent arm. Understand that the problem was thought of as "restoring mobility to the battefield". WW I was thought of as an anomoly in the whole course of warfare, which "should" be based on maneuver to seize ground. This deeply engrained offensive military view was relentlessly and bloodily refuted by the practical realities of WW I. They spent years chasing the mirage of "breakthrough" while the reality was artillery based attrition.
Early tanks could not change this, despite the theorists being listened to. They retroactively carp about how they should have had this and that, but the fact is they were given an independent arm, massed armor, operationally employment, and all the rest of it. But they did not initially understand combined arms. And the tanks of the day were horribly things from a reliability and maintenance point of view. At Cambrai, 90% of the tanks employed broke down within a week.
Giant trench-crossers were the original idea. They carried MGs or light cannons through the enemy wire and over his trenches, silencing enemy machine gun posts by direct fire. They immediately had half a dozen problems. One, the enemy MGs just hid, and the tanks had zero visibility. Two, enemy artillery knocked some of them out by direct fire, where any got through. Three, they broke down in hours, particularly when trying to navigate shelled terrain and trenches etc. There was practically no coordination with any other arm.
Armor theorists sometimes leave out this part of the story, as though they never got a chance to show what they could do employed independently, before being tied to the infantry, and supposedly thus slowed down to a walking pace. Officers coming from cavalry backgrounds are particularly revisionist on this score. They continued to blame failure on "tying the tanks to the infantry", and wanted to be allowed to just drive off into the enemy rear. Where, in reality, a WW I tank would be off to the side of the road, broken down or out of fuel, in a matter of hours, to a day or two at most.
What the cavalry officers did get was fleets of light tanks, MG main armament, thought of as meant for "exploitation". (Small numbers of armored cars were used the same way in remote theaters; in primitive enough conditions (very weak enemies) they could be fairly successful). At Amiens in 1918, they even got a chance at breakthrough. The overall offensive was successful but tanks mattered only for the immediate break-in of the German trench system. The advance continued at a walking pace, hampered by terrain wrecked by shelling, by the inability of gun poor forces to compete with gun assisted ones, and by the dependence of the guns on rail supply for ammunition.
The basic cause of the static nature of WW I was not the trenches, or the slowness or vulnerability of infantry. That was a misdiagnosis of the issue. The basic cause was a mobility differential on the two sides of the front. Operating on one's own side, rail allowed rapid movement of men and material in effectively unlimited quantities.
Operating beyond the no man's land scar tissue belt, on the other hand, depended largly on manpacking. No vehicles could negotiate the intervening ground, not for a single passage, but repeatedly for logistics. Rail lines do not lay instantly. The vehicles used from railhead to front were horsedrawn, and horses do not work effectively in barrage zones. A few motor vehicles could not make up for these limits over a limited and shell-holed road net.
As a result, the enemy front line could be not only entered, but entirely carried, through all 3-5 belts of its depth, and nothing of operational significance would follow from it. The enemy could still rail in reserves faster than the attackers could get forces across. Fighting at the limits of the penetration, the attackers had rifles and grenades, the defenders had 6 to 8 inch artillery and dug in machineguns. Such fronts were "self sealing". To carry a single trench was difficult, to carry 3 faster than the enemy could dig a new one almost impossible, and even achieving that resulted in a 10-50 miles movement of the front but no decision.
The reality was that WW I era tanks were not yet technically capable enough to change any of this, and they were plugged in to a logistic system geared for rail, not automotive, movement. Which inherently favored artillery firepower and attrition strategies, and a tactical defensive stance. But this was poorly understood, largely because it was not acceptable in its human consequences, and officers found the reality of it intensely frustrating. They substituted wishful thinking for facing the reality.
This contributed to a large front to rear command "disconnect", that wasted hundreds of thousands of men in fruitless quixotic attempts at "decisive breakthrough". After Ypres, one staff officer visited the front for the first time since posting there. He saw the mud the artillery had created, for the first time. "We sent men to fight in *that*?" was his reaction. It was news to him, a month after the battle.
The interwar period can only be understood if one realizes this prior fight had already taken place. And the naive faith in the offensive power of massed tanks employed alone expressed by the cavalry minded has already been tried and had been completely unsuccessful in practice.
Tanks had proved useful. But the key to their effective use had been combined arms coordination. Especially, they had to work with infantry to force enemy MGs and such to show themselves, so the tanks could deal with them - or to allow the infantry to clear with grenades those hiding from the tanks. (Secondarily, coordination with artillery helped deal with enemy guns using direct fire against the tanks. But this was not achieved interactively, due to communications limits. A rolling barrage could create the necessary effect).
Infantry and artillery minded officers coming out of that whole experience viewed the cavalry minded as refuted hotheads deluded by a glamour they attached to speed, that was no more than wishful thinking and had failed in practice due to lack of combined arms. They wanted to subordinate tanks to ordinary infantry-heavy formations and use them all along the line to support all-arms attacks. Cavalry minded armor officers, on the other hand, viewed the failure of tanks to achieve decision in WW I as everybody else's fault. They hadn't been given their chance (this was factually untrue, but widely believed). Their immediate post-war mantra was to mass the tanks, and use them alone, not "tied" to the infantry.
In reality, both of these doctrines were wrong. The infantry minded were entirely correct about the importance of combined arms - which the cavalry minded did not admit. Failure to achieve real combined arms coordination made for spectacular failures, losing entire tank brigades in a single afternoon to no purpose, as late as 1942. But it was important to mass the tanks.
The cavalry minded were right to stress massing the tanks on narrow sectors and putting them in the driver's seat, as it were. But they were entirely wrong about "cutting the tanks loose" from infantry and artillery. It was not enough to veer in a direction. But only the infantry branch really understood combined arms, and only the cavalry branch really understood operational massing and exploitation.
So how did the various countries deal with all of this? Far from having one bad idea and sticking with it, most of them tried all of them and dissipated their efforts as a result. The French had half of their tanks in independent battalions, regiments, and brigades meant to support infantry divisions. They also had light tank brigades meant to be employed en masse like cavalry. They also had a few light armor combined arms formations. And a few very tank heavy full armor divisions, like fleets of land battleships. The revisionists often reduce this to "infantry thinking, penny packeted all along the line". But the French had pure ADs as big as the Germans used, and combined arms legere divisions as integrated as later PDs, and behind every German breakthrough they had brigades to corps to throw in to immediate counterattacks. They just didn't have any unified doctrine. If the war had been the one the infantry doctrine envisioned, they would have done OK without. Obviously it wasn't.
The Brits on the other hand were much more heavily in the cavalry thinking camp. Fuller had been an early proponent of this view. They tended to think pure armor was the way to go. The infantry tanks were a hold over, a poor second sister, within the British armor force. They were a concession to hidebound outsiders who did not understand that masses of crusier tanks operating alone would decide wars by deep slashing exploitations. Which in practice became Pickett's charge affairs that lost entire brigades in half a day.
The Germans made the British mistake, before Poland. Guderian - originally a motorized signals unit officer - had discovered the importance of communications and motorizing all supporting arms in interwar tests. That was their major innovation. It gave them something approaching combined arms at the speed of the tanks. But the PDs themselves were still extremely armor heavy, way too heavy for real combined arms effects.
In practice, better commanders discovered this for themselves during the Polish campaign. They used supporting motorized infantry divisions to flesh out combined arms, or worked with full leg infantry divisions for particular attacks. Infantry formations were used in deep column behind the PDs, to hold what they took and inundate units penetrated by the PDs. By the time of the French campaign some of this worked itself out, by experimenting with TOEs. They used several light divisions in France, which were too armor light, alongside PDs that were still too armor heavy.
By the time of the Russian campaign, they had found about the right mix of armor to infantry in the PDs. They did so in part to increase the number of PDs overall. The number of mediums in a PD remained about the same, while the number of lights fell dramatically, as the whole force transitioned to mediums. So, in Poland and France they had used a "cavalry doctrine" force by later war standards. The median tank in France was a Pz II.
The Germans went through a familiar process on the issue of tanks fighting tanks, exploitation doctrine, and tank armament. Understand that cavalry doctrine had stressed speed and exploitation, not combat power. The Germans used small numbers of Pz IVs with short 75s as artillery support for the tanks, but most of them fought as mobile machinegun nests, and antitank ability was an afterthought.
German anti-tank doctrine in this period was based on the WW I experience that guns firing direct stopped tank attacks. What later became the PAK front was an extension of this idea. When the Brits counterattacked at Arras in France, Rommel's entirely doctrinal counter was based on battalions of divisional 105s firing direct, along with a handful of 88s and the 37mm PAK from divisional AT battalions. Every division had an antitank battalion, originally with quite light pieces, dedicated to this, but supplimenting them with div arty was entirely normal.
Against very light early war tanks this worked fine. But the French also had Char-Bs. And these bounced 37mm AP easily. The Germans put in for better PAK and for gun upgrades for the Panzers, most of which had 20mm or 37mm main armament. The ordnance department turned down the initial call for 50L60 guns for the Pz III, because the tank's mission was cavalry-like, exploitation and fighting soft enemy targets, not enemy tanks. So a 50L42 with the same HE was thought adequate. Remember, these are the guys who are in the lead, doctrinally, in the period of their greatest successes. It is not like Guderian figured it all out before 1939.
The general purpose tank that made clear to the Germans they could not get by with a cavalry and exploitation armor doctrine was the Russian T-34. The Char-B and Matilda had been just as tough armor-wise, and could penetrate anything the Germans had at the time. But both were slow infantry tanks. But the T-34 had greater cross country mobility than a Pz III, better protection than a Char-B, the HE firepower of a Pz IV, and in 1941 sufficient AT ability to kill any German tank at medium range. It set the standard for what *not* to compromize over. Tankers could demand all of the above from the designers and factories, rather than limping along with special purpose items for every tactic.
Understand that the Russians were doctrinally in about the same position as the French. They had every doctrine and thus none. They had flocks of cavalry tanks meant to be used en masse for exploitation - BT series - but without sufficient combined arms to work in practice. They had giant land cruisers to smash through enemy trench systems - KVs - but penny packeted as infantry support tanks. They did not know how to use the T-34 yet. But they had the tool, and the Germans quickly showed them what fleets of such things could do, as parts of all arm, corps sized formations.
The US had plenty of armor development in the interwar years. It is revisionist projection to claim otherwise. They were not ahead of the Germans, but that isn't saying anything - nobody was, and the US army was a tiny, starved thing that occasionally sent horse cavalry into Mexico to chase bandits. Patton was charging "bonus marcher" squatters in depression era Washington DC riots, on horseback, with sabers.
Still the US came out of it with the Stuart, reflecting cavalry tank doctrine, and the Grant, reflecting infantry tank doctrine. The former compares favorably with the Pz IIs, 38s, and early IIIs the Germans used to conquer most of Europe. The latter is a more mobile Char-B, with better communications etc. By 1942, the US had in the Sherman a general purpose medium about as good as the T-34, or the Pz III and IV series, the other major powers were using then. And years ahead of British Crusaders and Valentines.
Nor was US doctrine on fighting enemy tanks with tanks any different from the stages the Germans went through. The US just went through them later, having entered later. The US used M-10s much as the Germans used Marders, and rather more successfully. The US saw the need to upgun Shermans to 76mm, but was slow about it in practice, much as the Germans saw the need to upgun IIIs and IVs, eventually abandoning turreted IIIs to get a decent gun. The US developed a vastly improved heavier tank after that process ran its course - but the war ended before the Pershing got as old as the Panther.
The anomoly that caught the initial poster's eye, however, is the fact that even the main British I tanks were armed with 2 pdrs firing AP. This largely reflects the dominance of cavalry thinking and the cruiser arm within British armor force circles. Understand, the existence of infantry tanks was a concession to (branch) outsiders and their ideas of the role of tanks. If they had really believed in infantry tank doctrine they would have made things like the Char-B or the Grant - large HE chuckers. Instead they had just a few 3 inch CS versions."
För intressant läsning om Tank-Destroyer doktrinen i USA kan jag rekommendera följande PDF-dokument:
Seek, Strike, and Destroy: U.S. Army Tank Destroyer Doctrine in World War II, av Dr. Christopher R. Gabel
Några utdrag:
"The Armored Force perceived antitank defense to be antithetical to its offensive philosophy and declined any interest in assuming responsibility."
S. 11
Intressant är också s. 15-17, där man beslutar att öka antalet infanterister i proportion till stridsvagnar i pansardivisionerna för att lättare kunna bekämpa pansarvärn.
"The tank was introduced to protect against automatic small arms fire, which was developed so greatly during and since the [First] World War. Its answer is fire against which the tank does not protect - the antitank gun."
"Certainly it is poor economy to use a $35,000 medium tank to destroy another tank when the job can be done by a gun costing a fraction as much. Thus the armored force is freed to attack a more proper target, the opposing force as whole..."
- General McNair, s.19
Seek, Strike, and Destroy: U.S. Army Tank Destroyer Doctrine in World War II, av Dr. Christopher R. Gabel
Några utdrag:
"The Armored Force perceived antitank defense to be antithetical to its offensive philosophy and declined any interest in assuming responsibility."
S. 11
Intressant är också s. 15-17, där man beslutar att öka antalet infanterister i proportion till stridsvagnar i pansardivisionerna för att lättare kunna bekämpa pansarvärn.
"The tank was introduced to protect against automatic small arms fire, which was developed so greatly during and since the [First] World War. Its answer is fire against which the tank does not protect - the antitank gun."
"Certainly it is poor economy to use a $35,000 medium tank to destroy another tank when the job can be done by a gun costing a fraction as much. Thus the armored force is freed to attack a more proper target, the opposing force as whole..."
- General McNair, s.19
-
Belisarius
- Medlem
- Inlägg: 5093
- Blev medlem: 26 november 2004, 14:43
- Ort: Utrikes
Ser så ut, där förhastade jag mig en smula. Fick för mig att M10 och M18 endast hade härdat stål i tornet men det verkar som de faktiskt hade pansar, om än endast 10 mm tjockt.Mako skrev:Nog hade de (M10, M18 och M36) pansar i tornen, det var väl bara det att tornet inte hade tak.Belisarius skrev:Tank Destroyers som M10 och M18 led ju av den lilla nackdelen att de inte hade något pansrat torn överhuvudtaget, dessutom var det öppet (eftersom tak inte gav plats för pjäsen). De kunde ju således endast användas i bakhåll om man inte hade en ovanligt modig besättning och litade helt på sin snabbhet att komma undan.
10 mm? M10 hade 25-57 mm, M18 hade 13-25 mm och M36 hade 32-76 mm (vilket är fullt jämförbart med tidiga M4 Shermans).Belisarius skrev:Ser så ut, där förhastade jag mig en smula. Fick för mig att M10 och M18 endast hade härdat stål i tornet men det verkar som de faktiskt hade pansar, om än endast 10 mm tjockt.Mako skrev:Nog hade de (M10, M18 och M36) pansar i tornen, det var väl bara det att tornet inte hade tak.Belisarius skrev:Tank Destroyers som M10 och M18 led ju av den lilla nackdelen att de inte hade något pansrat torn överhuvudtaget, dessutom var det öppet (eftersom tak inte gav plats för pjäsen). De kunde ju således endast användas i bakhåll om man inte hade en ovanligt modig besättning och litade helt på sin snabbhet att komma undan.
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alexander den store
- Medlem
- Inlägg: 88
- Blev medlem: 10 maj 2005, 15:28
- Ort: ödemarken runt Göteborg
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hoffe_salem
- Medlem
- Inlägg: 1309
- Blev medlem: 3 februari 2004, 18:52
- Ort: sthlm
Det tror jag inte om det inte var en med 76 mm kanonen eller en firefly men även då så är nog bara ett tursamt sido eller bak skott det enda som kan permanent slå ut en Tiger II ( med en vanlig M4 kan man ju om man har en väldans tur pricka banden eller kanonen eller liknande som gör vagnen tillfälligt obrukbar ).alexander den store skrev:En m4sherman har väl inte mycket att sätta emot en Tiger II eller?
Firefly upp till ca 1000m avstånd och Sherman med 76mm kanon upp till 500m avstånd kunde med lätthet (om de träffade målet) slå ut Tiger IIs sidan eller baken. Men det var sällan Tiger II slog ut av allierades stridsvagnar.hoffe_salem skrev:Det tror jag inte om det inte var en med 76 mm kanonen eller en firefly men även då så är nog bara ett tursamt sido eller bak skott det enda som kan permanent slå ut en Tiger II ( med en vanlig M4 kan man ju om man har en väldans tur pricka banden eller kanonen eller liknande som gör vagnen tillfälligt obrukbar ).alexander den store skrev:En m4sherman har väl inte mycket att sätta emot en Tiger II eller?
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Per Andersson
- Medlem
- Inlägg: 1186
- Blev medlem: 24 mars 2002, 21:51
- Ort: Stockholm
Tyskarna använde sig dessutom av sitt själgående anti-tank vapen mycket offensivt med det var väl mera pga brist på "riktiga" pansarvagnar? Detta användes även av bogserat artelleri men mer begränsat.
Kommer att tänka på att jag nästan aldrig ser berättelser från veteraner som tjänstgjort vid anti-tank enheter. Slump eller farlig befattning?
Kommer att tänka på att jag nästan aldrig ser berättelser från veteraner som tjänstgjort vid anti-tank enheter. Slump eller farlig befattning?
Syftar du på StuG III och IV? De tyska stormkanonvagnarna var i grunden tänkta att understödja infanteri i anfall som mobilt artilleri, och var i början av kriget utrustade med korta 75mm L/24 kanoner. Senare i kriget uppgraderades beväpningen till den långa 75mm L/42 eller L/48, och vagnarna fick ofta rollen som mobilt pansarvärn i infanteridivisionerna. De var alltså inte i dedikerade pansarvärnsvagnar.Uruk-Hai skrev:Tyskarna använde sig dessutom av sitt själgående anti-tank vapen mycket offensivt med det var väl mera pga brist på "riktiga" pansarvagnar?
Om du tänker på de dedikerade PV-vagnarna, som Jagdpanzer IV och Hetzer utnyttjades de mycket riktigt ibland i anfall, p.g.a bristen på stridsvagnar. Vid det här laget var dock tyska arméns situation så sorglig att de nästan konstant tvingades retirera, även om lokala, taktiska motanfall inte var ovanliga.
Angående StuG III, var det inte så att de väldigt tidigt utrustades med ammunition med riktad sprängverkan vilket gjorde att äve den korta 75 mm kanoner hade stor verkan mot annat pansar?
Angående de brittiska tidiga stridsvagnarna som endast hade pansarbrytande ammunition så fanns alltid i varje pluton en vagn av samma typ fast med grövre kanon som endast hade spränggranater.
Angående de brittiska tidiga stridsvagnarna som endast hade pansarbrytande ammunition så fanns alltid i varje pluton en vagn av samma typ fast med grövre kanon som endast hade spränggranater.
Ja, men p.g.a den låga hastigheten på granaterna var de endast träffsäkra på kort avstånd.peojon skrev:Angående StuG III, var det inte så att de väldigt tidigt utrustades med ammunition med riktad sprängverkan vilket gjorde att äve den korta 75 mm kanoner hade stor verkan mot annat pansar?
Nej, det fanns understödsvagnar, men dessa fanns inte i varje pluton. Det var helt enkelt inte möjligt att trycka in en grovkalibrig kanon i t.ex. ett Crusadertorn. Den enda under det tidiga kriget jag kommer att tänka på rent spontant är Churchill I. Intressant är att Churchill I var utrustad med en 75mm kanon i skrovet, men att denna byttes ut mot en kulspruta i Churchill II och senare modeller.Angående de brittiska tidiga stridsvagnarna som endast hade pansarbrytande ammunition så fanns alltid i varje pluton en vagn av samma typ fast med grövre kanon som endast hade spränggranater.