P-Mack posted:

Would it be fair to say that the invasion of France, and Russia for that matter, depended heavily on the defenders making a poo poo ton of mistakes, large and small? I just get the impression that gay black Hitler is really facing an uphill fight just to reproduce Germany's historical performance, let alone do that and also add that one weird trick wehraboos think would win the war.

spectralent posted:

Ah, I can see where that'd be confusing.

any idea why the extra dude was there? Just some straggler?


I don't want to restart The Wars but is there a link to when this discussion was happening? It's a topic I did hit on a few months ago and wanted some opinions on but didn't want to poke the nest

TasogareNoKagi posted:

How do you keep the various military subdivisions straight? Battalion, brigade, company, corps, division ...

HEY GAL posted:

because everyone who's on the same side as Our Heroes is an enlightened believer in modern ideals

gohuskies posted:

If they made a movie about Emilio Lussu, no one would believe it.

Trin Tragula posted:

2 August: General Haig puts the case for the Somme, which seems so much more reasonable when horses aren't in fact exploding in front of one's eyes; the Battle of Bitlis is already not going well for the Ottomans; Emilio Lussu takes a cavalry staff officer to loophole 14, with predictable consequences; Evelyn Southwell is still very depressed; E.S. Thompson gets some actual orders; and Maximilian Mugge has shockingly discovered that he doesn't much care for the Army, or for being Private Mugge.

MrMojok posted:

OK tankophiles, I know of no better place to ask this.

My Dad just texted me raving about "Fury", a movie I have been wanting to watch. He told me a bit about the plot, and when he got to the point about "lone tank holding off 300 Wehrmacht troops" I said something like "RIP, boys"

I am no armor-head, but it has always been my understanding that a single tank without supporting infantry vs enemy infantry is pretty much hosed. Then Dad says "Yeah Hollywood, but something like this did really happen" and quotes the wiki article about the film, which claims that the film was inspired by a story in "Death Traps", a book which I haven't read, but have heard mentioned in these milhist threads several times. Wiki says it was a disabled(!?) tank that had a bunch of German troops walk up on it without spotting it at night, and the next morning the tank was still there and alive with lots of dead Germans around it.

Can anyone tell me about this? Cursory googling leads me to believe the story is possibly apocryphal, but I don't know.

I'm going to watch the film regardless based on his recommendation, but I find it difficult to believe a single tank with no supporting infantry of its own could hold its own against large numbers of infantry then, now, or ever. They cannot even see well enough out of the tank, to defend themselves. Am I correct, naive, or maybe just ignorant?

Also, what did you folks think of the film overall, if anyone saw it?

spectralent posted:

I haven't seen Fury yet, outside of clips, but I've been told everyone in it is meant to be hitlerjugend-tier SS who're big on fanaticism and low on training. It'd explain the tiger fight (except for the whole "we have to shoot it from behind!" thing).

spectralent posted:

That would explain why it couldn't be shot from the front but a 76mm sherman would go clean through KT side armour too.

Cyrano4747 posted:

That scene is about creating drama for a work of fiction, not accurately portraying the realities of ww2 tank warfare and the potential for penetrating armor with a Sherman's gun. The "Gita shoot it in the rear end" thing has been a Hollywood trope for the better part of half a century. gently caress it was a major plot point in Kelly's loving Heroes.

xthetenth posted:

Honestly I want one so that I can point my mind's eye to it when thinking about combat. A curated collection of liveleak videos would probably go a long way but some shots you just can't get in a real fight.

lenoon posted:

War movies seem to achieve good levels of accuracy in segments. Like the tense waiting followed by insane carnage of the beginning of saving private Ryan or the hour and a half of cock jokes in Hitler my part in his downfall, or when the barbed wire comes alive in deathwatch.

OwlFancier posted:

Tank pretty good AFAIK yeah, cromwells and similar were very useful in places like north africa where they have wide open plains between fortified rocky outcroppings, in that sort of theater you really do need a cruiser tank because you just want to get up in the enemy's grill as quickly as you can and no infantryman wants to slog it on foot over that much open terrain. Well suited to mechanized warfare and motorized infantry.

But for dense terrain tanks and infantry need to work together, with infantry screening for the tank and the tank supporting the infantry when they need something big and bulletproof with a heavy gun on it. I think for a lot of the invasion of Normandy this job was farmed out to Shermans and similar just because they were so ubiquitous, but a tank purpose built for it makes a lot of sense. I think the main reason it didn't see more action was just because it was kind of expensive and nothing could quite compare with the American ability to churn out Shermans like they were going out of fashion.

OwlFancier posted:

Shermans were a medium tank which the British doctrine at the time did not try to produce, the interwar period saw the development of the Infantry and Cruiser tank philosophy in Britain, where you build both heavy, slow tanks and fast, light tanks with medium-grade armament. The infantry tank supports works with the infantry sections to push through contested terrain as part of a combined arms approach, the Cruiser tank serves a similar role to historical light cavalry, being ideally used for raiding and supply line disruption as well as fast strikes behind the main line. This does, of course, run into a few problems when your light cavalry costs a lot of money and the enemy may not leave their flanks undefended. It also means that you have a disadvantage of numbers, because you have to split your production to build both types of tanks and neither one is suitable for the other role.

spectralent posted:

Cromwells wouldn't have been in North Africa; Cruisers of various stripes were, but the Cromwell was only ever present in Europe. The Cruisers in Africa also had pretty disastrous performance from repeatedly charging nests of infantry and antitank guns with a couple of machineguns. On the other hand, this was probably a doctrinal failure as well; being well designed for a dumb job is still a problem.

OwlFancier posted:

I would personally suggest that they, like the infantry tank, became somewhat irrelevant in the face of advancing technology. They make sense for a certain set of conditions (powerful raiding vehicles utilizing speed to evade fire rather than relying on limited armour technology and sacrificing mobility) but by the time they were produced, the conditions ceased to really exist. By the late second world war you could produce an effective medium tank which could do everything.

As an interwar tank (which is where the ideas it was based on come from) however it's quite sensible, because interwar tanks were more restricted in what they could achieve with their designs so specialization was more important.

The idea wasn't stupid, it just got folded into the capability of the Main Battle Tank, as did the capabilities of the infantry tank. Because nowadays you can just straight up build a 70 ton tank that goes like poo poo off a stick and that's not even considered odd.


North Africa had a lot of fortified positions with excellent visibility. While the terrain favors tank mobility, it also gives great line of sight to anything wanting to shoot a tank. And the Germans had some really good AT guns.

OwlFancier posted:

The MBT concept is a somewhat inevitable result of advances in engineering permitting the creation of an effective tank that is heavier than a heavy tank, faster than a light tank, and better armoured than an infantry tank. Britain didn't invent the MBT, everybody eventually gravitated towards building them because they just became the obvious thing to build. Yes you can have as much armour as you want, yes you can have a massive gun, yes you can get up to 30mph offroad, yes you can shoot missiles out of the main gun. Tradeoffs ceased to be particularly necessary.

Cruiser, infantry, heavy, medium, light, all foms of tanks for the most part were subsumed into the MBT as technology advanced because there ceased to be a pressing need for any of the other designs as tanks. You get light armored vehicles sure but they're not fielded like tanks.

It's just... odd to me to say that other tank designs are stupid because they were invalidated. It's like saying battleships were stupid because the aircraft carrier invalidated them. Yes they would be a bad idea to build nowadays and even in their heyday they did not function as expected because people were very shy about actually committing them to battle, but the idea that brought them forth was not stupid, they were the logical progression of naval warfare at the time, as the specialist tank was a logical development of interwar tank theory, as were medium tanks.

Even stuff like the Tiger weren't stupid ideas, because building tanks that were too tough to be destroyed did work, that the tiger was mechanically unreliable was not a problem with the concept because the Russians built heavy tanks that worked, so I'm not comfortable saying ideas are bad because they aren't executed well either.

Arquinsiel posted:

The weird thing to me is that the Leopard I seems to have been built with the same kind of thought process that led to the Cruiser tank philosophy but with the assumption that all infantry would at least be motorised so the Infantry tank was effectively a dead idea at that time.

Arquinsiel posted:

Why is the "realness" of the gun relevant? At no point did the British cruiser designs have a gun that wasn't as close to the best AT gun available in that day, with the possible exception of the Cromwell's 75mm. Note that I am not saying that German designers came out of the MBT-70 program saying "what we need is a fuckton of Cruiser tanks like the British wasted time on" but there was definitely a similar element of assumption at work that drastic compromises needed to be made, with the result that it went fast, had a big gun and very little armour except on the front. As it turns out, both schools of thought were wrong and you can armour against the threats of the day without sacrificing mobility or striking power, with the bonus utility of the tank being usable as a drying rack too.

Arquinsiel posted:

The gun on the Cruisers was the Ordnance QF 2 pdr, which was the same gun on the Matilda II and the Valentine until the Ordnance QF 6 pdr was mounted on them. Coincidentally at the same time they mounted it on the Crusader Mk III. There was literally no difference in Cruiser and Infantry tank armament post Matilda I. The 2 pdr actually had a HE shell designed for it but it was never manufactured for some reason. The 6 pdr did have one and eventually they were simply bored out to match the 75 mm Gun M3 making the Ordnance QF 75mm and simplifying logistics. This was again mounted on both the Cromwell and the Churchill. Also it's kind of beside the point but the "CS" variants of the Cruiser designs usually had a short wide-barrelled gun, but in a moment of pure they were only issued with smoke shells early on.

quote:

As for the actual idea of using Cruiser tanks like cavalry squadrons, it was achieved a few times in Africa but modern defence in depth second line deployments resulted in them running up on AT gun emplacements sharpish and getting blown up pretty quick or just breaking down due to poor reliability. The M3 Stuart was early on regarded as what the Cruisers should have been by some of the tank crews in the desert, but at that point they were just using them for any task that required a tank due to their reliability and armament.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

But infantry tanks were essentially just "Breakthrough" tanks ala Tiger I, KV-1 under a new, exciting coat of paint The idea isn't dumb, because that's what the Germans were doing for quite some time! And the Brits had plenty of Bren carrier lying around to transport infantry, so the problem isn't with infantry not being there with them.

The problem is that the train of thought that led to Cruiser Tanks came to the conclusion that they had to sacrifice firepower and defense to achieve speed.

spectralent posted:

I don't think anyone's trying to validate cruiser doctrine, but some of the designs cruiser doctrine produced were good, or at least satisfactory.

spectralent posted:

Yeah pretty much those.

Also Centurion was created from a Cruiser specification, though it either was immediately or became designated an MBT*.

*I don't know which, it's not an era I'm a huge nerd for.

Arquinsiel posted:

Crusader, Cromwell and Comet, to varying degrees at varying times. The Crusader is debatable but for the early desert war where it fought nothing but the earlier marks of Panzers II through IV it was at least competitive.

ETA: arguably you could claim the infantry tanks were a product of the same doctrinal split, in which case the A12 Matilda II was a top end tank of its day and the Churchill was a solidly upgradeable workhorse like the Sherman.

Monocled Falcon posted:

Has there been any recent analysis on how well the Iraq army is doing against ISIS?

Always had a soft spot for armies in these kinda lovely situations.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Worse than the covenanter.

Ithle01 posted:

Speaking of cavalry, I have a stupid question. There's man on a horse with a bow, with a javelin, with a pistol, with a carbine, etc. but did anyone ever try horse slingers? I imagine this is a recipe for a disaster such as cracking your skull open with a rock, but it seems like the sort of thing that if you could get it to work would be worthwhile.


Also, no mention of elephant cavalry in that dumb video? Lame.

Koramei posted:

I don't think a trained slinger is gonna crack their skull open, but still, one of the main advantages of slings is that they're cheap as poo poo, whereas cavalry were generally a rich man's game. Why would you be sitting there on your gleaming horse with a lovely sling when you could have something cool instead.

PittTheElder posted:

To be technical about it, I don't think it actually says that, what it says is "THERE IS A BOAT THIS WAY". The 'target' of an active sonar pulse can't know the emission time of the pulse, and so wouldn't be able to compute the range directly. Though with a modern boat and long-rear end towed sonar arrays, you might be able to range it if the geometry is right and your computers are setup for it.


I'm almost afraid to ask, but what happened to all the Russian POWs that were captured during the advances of '41? Presumably nearly all of them were shipped to rear areas and worked to death? Are there any instances say during the winter counter offensives of advancing Russians suddenly liberating a bunch of captured dudes?

HEY GAL posted:

18th and 19th
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouging_(fighting_style)

FastestGunAlive posted:

I thought the Spanish did win on occasion even without native allies? And even when they didn't, the casualty ratio was still insane (even when considering later victor inflation)?

lenoon posted:

I used to study stone tools before conscientious objection, so I know a bit about what you can and can't do with various types of stone, and what the Aztecs in particular did with obsidian. Stone tools are and will always be

I've cut up pig carcasses by hacking them to pieces with obsidian blades set in wooden hafts, and it does work very very well. These aren't disposable tools for an hour or two of fighting, but can stand up to pretty significant punishment. Sure the blade will be blunted by hitting bone, or a cuirass, but it will still be sharp, and still capable of concentrating enough force in a very small space (we're talking going from micrometer thickness to 0.5mm) that even after hitting that Marion helmet, the next blow retains enough cutting edge to go right into your skull.

Nenonen posted:

Do you know what they called the American tank destroyers???

xthetenth posted:

Two girls for every guy, man.

sullat posted:

Why would you need to go into those places? Seize Vancouver in the west, shut down the St. Lawrence seaway, and Canada can no longer export wheat to Britain. The rest you just acquire in the peace treaties.

Grand Prize Winner posted:

We've got rednecks with pickup trucks in pretty much every state.

Polikarpov posted:

I believe the German term of art is Brandmeister



"Anyone need some fire?"

bewbies posted:

Some current thought in passive armor layout for the future is that the top should be the most heavily armored thing as death from above munitions keep proliferating. I personally like the idea of driving about in an armored umbrella.

OwlFancier posted:

Delivery McGee posted:

That worked great the one famous time it was tried.

Though in fairness, the entire RN was out for blood after Hood blew up, so maybe Bismark could've had a successful career in piracy if they'd managed to miss that encounter.

Delivery McGee posted:

Bismarck wasn't alone, she (he? I forget what style the Kriegsmarine used) had Prinz Eugen as an escort for most of the trip, and that was enough by the standards of the time (also, as even the heavy cruiser made painfully obvious, the problem with smaller escorts is that they run out of fuel pretty quick compared to the heavies). And I'm pretty sure the Reagan-era USN tried the BBBG thing, and they did nothing of note aside from rearranging the occasional coastline.

Safety Biscuits posted:

I had a thought about the battleships versus aircraft carrier chat a few pages ago. Wouldn't a carrier as capable as a battleship need lots more supplies and crew (e.g. ordnance, spare parts for aeroplanes, accommodation for aircrew and pilots, food, etc) than a battleship, and maybe be more trouble to resupply or keep at sea for a long period? Might that be why everyone didn't switch over immediately?