FDR Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory

[PeZook]

The Maus would be unable to use most of Europe's bridges, and I wouldn't hold my breath for the performance of its transmission and suspension systems

Can you imagine the logistics and support train that say a battalion of those beasts would generate? Half the combat engineers in Germany would be busy throwing up new bridges just to get the damn things to the battlefield.

Bah, bridges.

The King Tigers had a tendency to blow out transmissions after short marches ; I think it was due to German materials getting crappier and crappier due to shortages of rare earths used to make high-strength alloys.

Now, imagine you are happily driving a maus, twenty fuel trucks pulling alongside every hundred kilometres just fine, and then you blow out a transmission. A transmission which weighs as much as it does on a small ship.

Now you have to replace it. In the field. Under continuous Allied air threat.

How about throwing a track? Or yeah, getting bogged down in the mud.

[Imperial Overlord]

Well I actually imagine each Maus being supported by roughly the same number of men as built the pyramids of ancient Egypt. I have the mental image of ten thousand men dragging a Maus out of the mud. Given the problems (tiny matters like fuel, breaking the fuck down, and not being able to cross a damn bridge) that much less massive heavy vehicle designs such as the Tiger II, Elefant, and Jagdtiger were suffering the idea that the Maus would have been anything other than the king of all White Elephants is crazy.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah. About the only thing superheavy tanks had going for them, I think, was that as research projects they helped to define the edges of the possible. Once you've tried to build a 100-ton tank and seen it not work, you have a better sense of what a real future MBT will look like- that simply scaling up the existing vehicles isn't the answer and you have to get clever.

[U-95]

Yep, that's true. Behind those impressive technical data lie logistical concerns, and those monstrosities (nothing to say about the Ratte or the humongous Monster -a self-propelled Dora) would have been logistical nightmares. Worse, air attacks would have been their doom as planes were the bane of the huge Yamato & Musashi. At most, they'd have been used as strategic or psychological weapons but not something to send to the front as one could send -for example- a Panther.

Tigers had the same problems German stuff had during the late times of WWII due to Allied attacks: poor quality of materials and handwork added to troubles they had even before, despite the fact they (especially the beautiful Tiger II) were excellent tanks and the expected improvements the Tiger II would have had (a larger gun, crew protected against poisonous gas, auto-loading ammo...) or could have had (a snorkel would have been an excellent idea).

Yeah. About the only thing superheavy tanks had going for them, I think, was that as research projects they helped to define the edges of the possible. Once you've tried to build a 100-ton tank and seen it not work, you have a better sense of what a real future MBT will look like- that simply scaling up the existing vehicles isn't the answer and you have to get clever.

And you have to follow another paths: better ammo, armor that's not just more steel over already existing steel, etc. After all, a Leopard 2 (to continue with German-made tanks) is a tank certainly much better than a Tiger II in terms of firepower, armor, etc. and it does not dwarf the latter.

[Sea Skimmer]

Bah, bridges.

The King Tigers had a tendency to blow out transmissions after short marches ; I think it was due to German materials getting crappier and crappier due to shortages of rare earths used to make high-strength alloys.

Now, imagine you are happily driving a maus, twenty fuel trucks pulling alongside every hundred kilometres just fine, and then you blow out a transmission. A transmission which weighs as much as it does on a small ship.

Now you have to replace it. In the field. Under continuous Allied air threat.

How about throwing a track? Or yeah, getting bogged down in the mud.

The Maus does not have a transmission like a King Tiger. Maus was diesel-electric. The engine is in the center hull forward of the turret, the generator is under the turret. Field replacement of the generator would be plain impossible due to the requirement to remove the turret which itself weighs as much as a medium tank. However Maus did have an APU, and more importantly, since I doubt the APU could move the tank at even 1kph, Maus was designed with a electric cable system to let it be plugged into another source of electrical power. This was intended for river crossings, but it would also be entirely feasible to have a generator on a truck roll alongside and power the vehicle back home. The drive motors are big but smaller then a normal tank engine by a wide margin, and could be easily accessed through hatches on the top of the rear deck. Maus would be so damn slow throwing a track isn't likely to occur often. One of the many problems with the Maus design was found to be not enough cooling air for the generator so odds are in service they would have burned up like crazy. I can see Germany being crazy enough to put the extra engine on an armored half track to go along with it all the time.

Maus really makes some insane sense was a mobile fortification in the west when it only needs to shift positions and would have prepared roads and firing points laid out for it, rather then maneuver across open country, and when being able to withstand shells from heavy cruisers is a actual advantage, I can't think if built more then a few ever would have seen action in Russia before the utter absurdity of it was apparent.

[CaptHawkeye]

Would you say the Heavy Tank and its kin (Like the Super Heavy) were an evolutionary dead end in the development of Tanks and Armoured Vehicles?

[Sea Skimmer]

Depends on what you mean by the heavy tank, all the main western main battle tanks are now very heavy tanks by the standards of WW2. NATO is now making 80 ton tracked 130 ton wheeled tactical bridges standard, and we have good reasons to believe that the heaviest configuration of the M1 Abrams is in the range of 73-75 tons. Since even modern tanks feel considerable pressure for more armor and certainly are not unreliable, I strongly suspect that clean sheet tanks up to about 100-120 tons would work out fine. Certainly modern bulldozers work fine at up to 180 tons but they also are limited to about 9mph at those scales, never mind that 16,000 ton German bucket wheel land-rape machine and various tracked cranes and other construction equipment in the hundreds of tons. 100 ton tanks would suffer more bridging problems but I suspect not overwhelmingly so since in reality most bridges are only meant for 40 ton vehicles anyway and need reinforcement to take such loads more then a few times. Big highway and rail bridges meanwhile already can take 100 tons or more. The real total deal killer hold back is modern tanks already can’t get much wider before they won’t fit anybody’s railroad loading gauge, and without making the tank wider you can’t make it longer without problems turning, meaning that you have a serious design volume constraint and constraint on track area. Too much ground pressure is death. But in general much more compelling pressure exists to make tanks lighter and of course, Russia never went so high in the first place, so we are unlikely to ever see such vehicles tried out. Its too easy to just build a bigger anti tank missile or drop a 500lb bomb on the tank marginalizing any improvements. Also you really need more then one party to build the things at the same time so they justify each other! Spending money on air power makes more sense now that air power has the weapons to engage large numbers of moving tanks at once time.

Really heavy tanks sucked in WW2 because the engine technology just didn’t exist to make even a 60 ton tank work very well at all. Today that’s not at all a factor; the Germans have a 2000hp engine option for the Leopard II now (actually its from the late 1990s) which would take up considerably less space then the 1,500hp diesel currently used, but no one really wants to make the tank faster for so much money as a new engine-supply chain would cost. Suspension and other technology also affected WW2 heavy armor, but this could have been overcome given time. Of course tanks like the King Tiger didn't have years to waste on detail design work before you even considered the production problems with putting the design into reality.

[PainRack]

Does anyone has any english, popular history books detailing the economic competition inherent in the German arms industry? Stuff like Porsche political grandstanding with hitler, how they conceived of the Elefant and etc?

[Zinegata]

I don't know of a book that specifically focuses on the economic chaos of the German Arms Industry, but it's covered extensively in Richard Overy's "Why the Allies Won", wherein there's an entire chapter dedicated to comparing and contrasting the Allied and German war economies. Some of the data on the Russian side may be a bit exaggerated though (as Overy admits, noting how "There are simply too many stories of Soviet factory workers setting up shop in the cold, Siberian ground for this to be mere fiction")

Highlights of Overy's book on the German arms industry include:

1) The German Arms Industry's confused priorities and complete lack of centralized planning until Speer took over. Before then, army officers would oversee factory production, which was being changed constantly based on feedback from the front (resulting in highly customized weapons but a disastrous production rate).

2) The rampant and rife corruption of the Nazi party machinery - such as their attempt to break up Opel as it was actually owned by General Motors.

3) The German distrust for "mass production", to the point that they disallowed Opel from making any vehicles in their giant car plant. Instead, the factory produced stoves and other miscellaneous products throughout the war.

4) The embarassingly poor logistics of the German army. Particular highlights includes having only one spare engine for something like every five Tigers.

[U-95]

Very interesting stuff. I knew Nazis had purged engineers due to presumed jewish heritage, but that not.

[PainRack]

Which probably means a search through a university library then...

All copies of that book in Singapore appears to be restricted to the reference zone.

[bz249]

I don't know of a book that specifically focuses on the economic chaos of the German Arms Industry, but it's covered extensively in Richard Overy's "Why the Allies Won", wherein there's an entire chapter dedicated to comparing and contrasting the Allied and German war economies. Some of the data on the Russian side may be a bit exaggerated though (as Overy admits, noting how "There are simply too many stories of Soviet factory workers setting up shop in the cold, Siberian ground for this to be mere fiction")

There might have been room to improve the German production somehow, but then what? The US would simply shift resources to produce more tanks and less of whatever (superheavy bombers, heavy cruisers, trucks or simply less civilian stuff). The thing is plain simple, a factor of 3 in GDP and a factor of 5 in manpower is too much to counter.

1) The German Arms Industry's confused priorities and complete lack of centralized planning until Speer took over. Before then, army officers would oversee factory production, which was being changed constantly based on feedback from the front (resulting in highly customized weapons but a disastrous production rate).

Well production rates might be low on the German side, but:
Soviet tracked AFV production before and throughout the war: 122.500
German tracked AFV production before and throughout the war: 50.000 (assault guns and tank destroyers represented a rather large share in the German armored forces, so simply looking tank production is misleading)

So a 2.5:1 in production to the Russians

Soviet losses: 96.500
German losses on the Eastern Front (including the ones captured after capitulation): 33.000

So 3:1 in the losses to the Germans. So doing a highly customized, handcrafted thingy was not that bad, and under the right circumstances (so something else than fighting a war against one superpower and two great power alone in Germany's league) it might have worked

(data was from here, i have not personally checked the citations http://operationbarbarossa.net/Myth-Bus ... ters2.html)

2) The rampant and rife corruption of the Nazi party machinery - such as their attempt to break up Opel as it was actually owned by General Motors.

3) The German distrust for "mass production", to the point that they disallowed Opel from making any vehicles in their giant car plant. Instead, the factory produced stoves and other miscellaneous products throughout the war.

Corruption was true, more than true, however if Opel could not produce vehicles, than who made the Opel Blitz and Opel Maultier trucks?

[Serafina]

It was actually far worse than a mere comparison of GDP and manpower would suggest. Because the industrial base on the USA was unassailable, while Germanies industrial base was vulnerable to strategic bombing. Even worse was the access to resources - not only did the United States have more resources on their own territory, they also had free access to most of the worlds resources via trade, unlike Germany.

[Simon_Jester]

Well production rates might be low on the German side, but:
Soviet tracked AFV production before and throughout the war: 122.500
German tracked AFV production before and throughout the war: 50.000 (assault guns and tank destroyers represented a rather large share in the German armored forces, so simply looking tank production is misleading)

So a 2.5:1 in production to the Russians

Soviet losses: 96.500
German losses on the Eastern Front (including the ones captured after capitulation): 33.000

So 3:1 in the losses to the Germans. So doing a highly customized, handcrafted thingy was not that bad, and under the right circumstances (so something else than fighting a war against one superpower and two great power alone in Germany's league) it might have worked

But did the handcrafting make a superior tank?

I'd think that you'd be better off incorporating the doctrinal and technical advantage that made a high loss ratio possible, while tooling up for mass production. Don't use two tons of small parts where one ton of large, easy to machine parts will do. It's much better to inflict 2:1 losses on the enemy while being able to build 80% as many vehicles as he does than to inflict 3:1 losses on the enemy while being able to build only 40% as many vehicles as he does.

Moreover, the German methods became a bigger and bigger burden as the war went on and they tried to push the edge of their technological envelope. A hand-assembled Panzer III might perform pretty well in 1940, but a hand-assembled Panther in 1943 had serious issues, simply because the increased size of the tank meant a lot more things to break down, and a lot more wear on the complicated, difficult-to-maintain machinery.

So unless we assume that the Germans' ability to win battles when outnumbered depended on the intense effort that went into making their equipment, the argument doesn't fly well. And such a dependency seems unlikely, since British and US gear performed well enough against comparable German gear despite being more designed for mass-production.

You don't get a linear increase in quality that doubles the performance of an object by spending twice as much effort making it- there's always diminishing returns past a certain point.

[bz249]

But did the handcrafting make a superior tank?

I'd think that you'd be better off incorporating the doctrinal and technical advantage that made a high loss ratio possible, while tooling up for mass production. Don't use two tons of small parts where one ton of large, easy to machine parts will do. It's much better to inflict 2:1 losses on the enemy while being able to build 80% as many vehicles as he does than to inflict 3:1 losses on the enemy while being able to build only 40% as many vehicles as he does.

Moreover, the German methods became a bigger and bigger burden as the war went on and they tried to push the edge of their technological envelope. A hand-assembled Panzer III might perform pretty well in 1940, but a hand-assembled Panther in 1943 had serious issues, simply because the increased size of the tank meant a lot more things to break down, and a lot more wear on the complicated, difficult-to-maintain machinery.

So unless we assume that the Germans' ability to win battles when outnumbered depended on the intense effort that went into making their equipment, the argument doesn't fly well. And such a dependency seems unlikely, since British and US gear performed well enough against comparable German gear despite being more designed for mass-production.

You don't get a linear increase in quality that doubles the performance of an object by spending twice as much effort making it- there's always diminishing returns past a certain point.

Don't forget manpower, Germany had a serious manpower issues (afterall near the end of the war anyone between 16 and 60 with the appropriate number of arms and legs were conscripted) thus if by handcrafting they could make a tank 5% better it was worth the effort, even if they can build only 75% without it. There would be noone to man them anyway. So they opted to have high quality optics, ergonimically designed interior etc.

About the Panther you are right, they were a poor choice for fighting a defensive war. Having an unreliable machine, when you can not control the battlefield is a bad choice since there is no way to save the lightly damaged vehicles. However the unreliability of the Panther come from its weight, it has nothing to do with quality control and craftmanship. And yes you are also right that the Sherman was good enough and produced in high quantities (however check what the Britons had... not really impressive, in fact between Cruiser A13 and Comet just a big void without any half-succesful design).

But my main point is that it was the shere size of the US economy which decided, indeed the US economy was barely qualified being a proper wartime economy, now that's inefficiency. So they could easily adapt to anything Germany did simply by shifting production priorities (yes a proper chocolate and cigarette ratio is important for morale, but they might abandon it if they would have been really hard pressed). So whatever organization improvement the Germans had is really moot, the Allies had much more reserve to increase production... Germany might achieve a stalemate had they choose to go for Moscow in August 1941. But failing to collapse the Soviet morale and then regroup to the West, there were simply too many people on the other side. Add to the mixture what Serafina said, that Germany was, above that, totally isolated, so the industry must adapt to the lack of certain important resources and have to be transformed to minimize the effect of bombing, and as a side-effect they lost efficiency.

Just from the numbers Poland should have been a tough nut, France is simply impossible and the Soviet Union stays one tier higher. So the historical results are mind-boggling... And achieving more?

[Sea Skimmer]

Well production rates might be low on the German side, but:
Soviet tracked AFV production before and throughout the war: 122.500
German tracked AFV production before and throughout the war: 50.000 (assault guns and tank destroyers represented a rather large share in the German armored forces, so simply looking tank production is misleading)

So a 2.5:1 in production to the Russians

Soviet losses: 96.500
German losses on the Eastern Front (including the ones captured after capitulation): 33.000

So 3:1 in the losses to the Germans. So doing a highly customized, handcrafted thingy was not that bad, and under the right circumstances (so something else than fighting a war against one superpower and two great power alone in Germany's league) it might have worked

(data was from here, i have not personally checked the citations http://operationbarbarossa.net/Myth-Bus ... ters2.html)

The Germans had better crew training and more radioes, that counts for absurdly more then any possible hand crafted quality, and you can only train as many tank crews as you have training vehicles and fuel to spare. That makes low production numbers and heavy fuel guzzling tanks shitty. Anyway without checking citations I would be VERY skeptical about comparing loss totals from two different nation like that, because what is the definition of a loss? Does this count stuff repaired and returned to service? The Germans had much better field level repair facilities then Russia, but the heavier tanks were also almost impossible to recover when disabled. Hand adjusted 'quality' is also about the worst possible 'quality' you could ask for when it comes to making quick battlefield repairs. You want a part that bolts right in, not one which needs six hours of adjustment.

[Zinegata]

Overy actually says that Soviet losses went down dramatically as the war progressed, and that by 1944 they were trading losses at a 1 for 1 basis (as opposed to 5:1 early in the war). Considering that they were still mainly using the T-34 while the Germans were supposedly getting their monster tanks by this point, this is a VERY good exchange ratio.

Moreover, hand-crafting did not produce a better product for warmaking, period. The Allies were consistently astonished by the finish of the German war machines, but having a nice paint job doesn't win the war. It's having a spare engine and transmission for every tank, instead of having one spare engine for every five Tigers because your parts production is abysmal due to hand-crafting. What makes it worse is the astonishing fact that Germany actually had twice the steel production of the Soviets... yet were outproduced in virtually every category of weapons by a ratio of at least 2:1.

Also damaging was the constant changes imposed on production because of every cry of improvement from the field. It's noteworthy that while German tanks became more and more complex because of all the little useless gadgets they were adding to counter every little threat (I'm looking at you, Zimmerit), Soviet and American factories were actually simplifying their production while at the same time increasing the only important stats of a tank - armor, firepower, and maneuverability. The cost of production of a T-34 was half of what it was from the start of the war - even with a gun AND armor upgrade.

In short, for all their talk of total war, it was the Soviet and American economies that were mobilized to a far greater degree than the German's.

[bz249]

Overy actually says that Soviet losses went down dramatically as the war progressed, and that by 1944 they were trading losses at a 1 for 1 basis (as opposed to 5:1 early in the war). Considering that they were still mainly using the T-34 while the Germans were supposedly getting their monster tanks by this point, this is a VERY good exchange ratio.

End of 1944 maybe... had they got 1:1 exchange ratio, they would end the war with armored force of 50.000. In reality they had fewer than starting number and this is with Lend-Lease.

Also damaging was the constant changes imposed on production because of every cry of improvement from the field. It's noteworthy that while German tanks became more and more complex because of all the little useless gadgets they were adding to counter every little threat (I'm looking at you, Zimmerit), Soviet and American factories were actually simplifying their production while at the same time increasing the only important stats of a tank - armor, firepower, and maneuverability. The cost of production of a T-34 was half of what it was from the start of the war - even with a gun AND armor upgrade.

Well armor and gun are the least important things about a WWII medium tank, since the PzIVF2, Sherman, T-34/85 can destroy each other from any reasonable combat range. All of them were eggshells with hammers The Panther had a little edge, since the front armor offered some extra protection, though not much (oh and the gun could be used against heavy tanks, but they were rare anyway). What really mattered is actually hiting the enemy. And that depend on a lot of factors, like spotting it first (stupid little things like commander cupola), failing to do so finding it after they started the party (again visibility from the tank... that was really the king), the chance of landing the first shell (Zeiss-optic... useless little gadget), the reload cycle of the gun, the time to acquire a target not in line (turret traverse and gun elevation speed... and again spotting it first) how quickly driving and fighting detoriates crew performance (ergonomics and so, roomy turret, turret basket, shell weight etc). And there are other things, like target profile (both in respect in spot and hit), engine noise and smoke...

And of course the real killer: operational losses, how reliable the thingy is, how easy to repair it. Now in this respect the Germans failed miserably, since their monster tanks were unreliable, and there was no chance to field repair a Tiger/Panther. Also they lacked the versatility, thus a Sherman was always present when the infantry needed it, unlike the Panzers (more numbers might have helped).

In short, for all their talk of total war, it was the Soviet and American economies that were mobilized to a far greater degree than the German's.

The Soviet yes, the American not. They produced a plenty of civilian goods, there was much room to turn it into a real war economy. And they could also play within the productions. The edge the US had is their way larger economy, really they can not do it wrong.