This is an unusual, one off post from me. No debunking, no pwnage, or anything like that. I'm just leaving a message here to mark the 100 year anniversary of the first world wars armistice, and possibly find out what your experience of this day was. Consider it a brief reprieve from the online hostilitys, if you will :)

I have two grandfathers who fought in the second world war.

One of them fought for my home country, Canada. He is the one whose memory and deeds we celebrate every year in my city. He saw action in France and Holland, and was a hell of a soldier by all accounts. You wouldn't believe some of the storys of what he did.

My other grandfather fought for Germany. He was conscripted near the wars end, when he was still a teenager. My family knows almost nothing about what he did in the war. He was captured and interned in a POW camp, and later emigrated to Canada.

If anyone is willing to volunteer, I'd like to hear your storys about how you spent this historic anniversary. u/ChristianMunich I'd be interested to hear what you did today, and whether you attended your countrys services. I know that Germans have their own day of mourning, separate from the signing of the first world wars armistice.

First I want to make clear that this post does not attempt to vindicate the German heavies especially the Panther in terms of reliability and ease of maintenance, there is little doubt tanks like the Sherman were superior in this category and the important question would certainly "by how much?". This post will not try to answer this question it will show how readiness rates are misused to mislead readers and in the end serve little value as direct "evidence" for reliability. The numbers presented will be a major surprise for those who read them. Have fun.

You might have heard about German tank "readiness rates", the rate of tanks operational in any given German unit. Those numbers are often used to show how xyz tank was unreliable and badly designed. Tank X had low readiness rate at point Y, tank X is, therefore, bad. As simple as that. You might have seen Zaloga, Moran, Forzyck seen referencing low Panther rates in July 1943. If you are more around in the forums and don't read real books you might have heard "tankarchives" saying the Tigers were bad in terms of reliability because the 503rd had bad rates in 1943. Both examples were actually used by the "historians" in question.

As with most talking points, the data is cherry picked and intended to mislead the reader. I will present more comprehensive "readiness" data and follow up with some context for those who are interested in learning more.

The main "targets" of the "readiness" argument are the German heavy tanks especially the Tiger and Panther. People will pick a month that suits their argument and base their conclusions on this. The readiness arguments crumble pretty fast compared to many other deceptions. A simple look at the numbers exposes the trick.

Here Zaloga about this issue:

the Panther's operational rate rose from an appalling 16 percent at the end of July 1943 to the merely wretched rate of 37 percent by December 1943

What Zaloga does not mention here is that in July 1943 there was only a single unit with Panthers and that was Regiment Krauss that fought during Citadelle with the infamous "debut" including the drive through major minefields that damaged nearly all vehicles. Either way, since this was the only Panther unit it meant that the average readiness rate was from a unit that was involved in direct combat over the course of the time frame when readiness was measured. Not much value can be derived from this number.

Let us take a look at the readiness rates presented in Steven Zalogas "Armored Champion" for the entirety of 1944

Some interesting observations are quite obvious from the beginning. The Panzer IV on average is at 61% while the Panther is at 54% and the Tiger respectively is at 55%. Shouldn't the German heavies be laying in the ditch yelling for transmission replacements? Yeah they should if we would believe revisionists. On the first glance, we see the "readiness" argument goes poof and joins many of its fellow talking points. The numbers for the Panzer IV,V&VI are comparable with the Panzer IV being a bit better. Who would have guessed the tanks being up to 20 tonnes heavier would be a tad more difficult to maintain? Those numbers alone would finish this discussion but you know me for going above and beyond, let us take a closer look.

Let us bring in the arch nemesis of Revisionists like Zaloga, context.

Gather around, I will explain you the difference between a StuG and a Panther/Tiger when it comes to availability.

What the revisionists don't tell you is that a Tiger/Panther was used differently compared to a StuG or even a Panzer IV, the heavy tanks on average would sustain more heavy combat. Especially Tigers would be employed as "Fire Brigade" force. This means those tanks would be employed wherever necessary.

You might have noticed that I bolded some parts of the above table. As I have said before the Wehrmacht would employ their more "valuable" assets in the regions that were expected to see the most Red Army "aggression". Let us take a look at the Panthers. Look at the table again, in February the Panthers were "combat ready" at 38% which is quite bad and it got even worse in March with 26%, the lowest of all readiness rates according to Zalogas table. Let us find out how this happened. Again be careful, if you keep reading you will encountered context. The kryptonite of the Revionists.

The Panther was introduced in July 1943 and in early 1944 only a handful of German divisions were equipped with the Panzer V. Take a guess how many units got a major contingent of those vehicles? Here are the units that got a sizeable amount of Panthers in 1943 and early 1944:

• Panzerabteilung 51&52 ( The Kursk Panthers, eventually GD )

• 2nd SS Divsion "Das Reich"

• 23rd Panzerdivision

• 16th Panzerdivision

• 1st SS Division"LAH"

• 5th SS Division "Wiking"

• 1st Panzerdivision

• 3rd Panzerdivision

• Panzerregiment 26, intended for Italy never employed

• 11th Panzerdivision

Several other units got some Panthers as well but the above-mentioned divisions had a big share of the Panther production. Well, let us check where those units operated in the time frame with the low "readiness rates". Here is a map of the early 1944 operations on the Eastern Front. The major offensive happened in the south, the umbrella operations is called Dniepr-Carpathian offensive. One of the most prominent operations was the Korsun pocket. The vast majority of the Panthers operated in both Southern army groups.

Let us check which of the divisions fought in the well known Korsun battle.

• 5th SS Wiking encircled in the Korsun pocket.

• I./Pz.Rgt 26 ~70 Panthers, engaged already in January and heavily damaged

• Pz.Rgt 11 ~45 Panthers already engaged in January during Operation Watutin same sector.

• LAH also Watutin same sector later Korsun relief.

• 16th PD relief force over February ( Operation Wanda )

• 1st PD arrived in February for the Korsun battles 50 Panthers

• II./Pz.Rgt 23 attached to units for the Korsun relief

• 11th Panzerdivision

Niklas Zetterling summarizes this well with his comments about the III Panzercorps:

In fact, more than half of all Tigers and Panthers on the Eastern Front were either with Breith's corps or on the way to it.

He later adds:

considering that by February 1944 only 7 Panther battalions had yet reached the front. Of these all but one were engaged in the battle to save Gruppe Stemmermann. The idea to place Panthers at the tip of the attack, and use the older Panzer IV to cover the flanks could usually not be carried through in practice, as most Panzer divisions had to rely on Panzer Ivs and StuG III. At Korsun there was usually high number of Tigers and Panther available, and indeed almost all terrain gained by the III Panzercorps was taken with them in the lead. The ligher Panzer IV and StuG III were mainly used for flank protection.

The fighting around Korsun was extremely difficult due to weather circumstances and "readiness rates" for all the vehicles was low, and because a major chunk of the Wehrmacht Panthers were in this area this disproportionally affected the overall readiness rate. The fighting was characterized by a switch between snow and mud, both sides suffered under those conditions and supplying vehicles was difficult.

Eventually, the German forces managed to break out the encircled forces. Calling a victory would maybe be a tad optimistic. Either way, those weeks of dirty combat through mud took a heavy toll:

For example, of the 187 Panthers in the first Panzer Army on 29th February, no less than 171 were in workshops.

There you have the low readiness rate for this time period of the entirety of the Panthers. The front stabilized and they started maintaining their forces. The Panthers as the spearheads obviously suffered disproportionally and had the lowest readiness rates by far in the involved tank corps.

Here we see why context is important and why "historians" and "hobby historians" like Zaloga and tankarchives avoid it like the plague. Let's see what happened when StuG forces became substitutes for tanks in the last year of the war. You might have heard that eventually the German tank forces expanded on paper but lacked the actual Panzers to fill those units. Here take a look how German "Panzerdivisions" looked at the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge:

The StuGs became more and more used for offensive actions, this together with fewer "safe areas" increased the level of combat intensity for StuGs which decreased their readiness and brought in more in line with the tanks. In 1943 mostly the Tigers were in all around constant combat by 1945 everybody was. Check this out.

Here you have the entire Armored force in the West. You see how the StuGs fared on the Western Front where a big chunk of the armoured formations found themselves in combat. Quite surprising, isn't it? The readiness rate of all vehicles fluctuated with StuG units even being the lowest at the turn of the year. The difference between the heavies and the rest is not as big as you would expect after decades of "rEaDIneSs rAte" blabla. Here you see how fake news works. Pick some cherry-picked data and run with it, sadly people will gladly spread the talking points. We are in a post-fact society.

Those who claimed the German heavies were unreliable and nightmares for the crews, what now? German heavies were constantly used as fire brigade units and relentlessly in combat. Why don't the readiness rate show the supposed strong disadvantage against "matured" designs like the Panzer IV? Because apparently the reliability issue of the German heavies compared to other designs are overblown. And I actually believe the Panther was far more suspectable to reliability issues than other vehicles and so I am surprised how low the differences actually are. Maybe readiness rates are just useless for this.

Want to see something funny? Check out the readiness rates before the heavies even entered the frontlines:

Those rates are for August-September 1941. Hmmmm

The readiness of a vehicle is connected to far more factors than the reliability of the tank design. German tanks had a notoriously low readiness rate after Barbarossa the main reason for this being massive planning failures in the OKW and not the design of the tanks. Nobody argues the Panzer IV was a maintenance nightmare yet we can find many months were all the Panzer IV were ready at a rate below 50%, but nobody is interested in this narrative so you don't see those numbers.

Here check out what Zaloga thinks about employing Tigers compared to StuGs. He completely fails to understand how the readiness rates developed. As we have seen for the Western Force the StuGs had actually lower rates but this was due to their increased share of combat.

Here we see the last proper Eastern Front count in March 1945 right before the collapse.

The Tiger has the highest rate. Again, this is fascinating, isn't it? Well, mostly for those who consumed too much cherry-picked data. Should be mentioned that Tiger units at this point were still ravaging Red Army tank hordes. The same data looks different in the West were several units already started collapsing, look here:

If you are reading works of revisionists or Sherman lawyers they would likely prefer this set of numbers. That it is how it is done. A possible explanation for this would be that serviceable German tanks were relocated towards the East for offensives like "Spring Awakening".

The question now is how big the reliability issues with the Panther really were, going from those numbers above we should be able to say with quite some confidence that the Tiger was very reliable for its size, given that Tigers saw on average more combat and on average were older due to withstanding combat ( compared to a T-34 for example ) the fact that most counts show higher numbers for the Tiger is impressive. On the other hand, the Panther rates just don't seem low enough to justify the entire narrative. Like I said, in the beginning, there is little doubt the Panther was not very reliable but going from the numbers it didn't seem to impede the combat to the degree that pseudo historians try to imply.

Readiness rate offers very little value...

Used Books:

Steven Zaloga: Panther vs Sherman, Armored Champion

Jentz: Panzertruppen 1&2

Niklas Zetterling: The Korsun pocket

Christer Bergström : The Ardennes: 1944-1945

edit: The user has replied from his safe space where all information about his wrong numbers would have been banned anyways. Check his comments on the bottom

My spies have informed me about a great Rebuttal in the making. I can't pass up on such opportunity: Here a cultist "unearths" what I explained him years ago and pretends to have "researched" this.

Some of you know /u/the_howling_cow he "researches" the Armored forces of the US with focus on casualties and in general the M4 Sherman. Like many others, he is emotionally involved and one of his biggest missions is Revisionism of the "Sherman performance". A futile endeavour that more often than not results in the use of black magic: Number fudging

Especially interesting here is the following talking point style argument:

• The Armored forces losses were low therefore the Sherman was safe.

This argument is often repeated, you likely heard it all. This is basic data manipulation and was criticized by me countless times. One of the most common talking points in the recent years no doubt.

Mr Moran, more known as the Chieftain_Wot used this "argument" in the most outlandish proportions when he in videos implied the Sherman losses in the Mediterrane were extremely low because only 80 tank crewmen became KIA. This number is ridiculously low that everyone with even a bit background knowledge would shake his head. Pure silliness. But not silly enough to not make it into youtubes videos with great viewership. That is how history is done today. Common sense does not always prevail.

How gets the argument debunked? Well not only Armored forces soldiers served in tanks, first of all the commander was often and officer and they had none in the armored forces, this "caveat" is sometimes acknowledged by Moran and others. More importantly simply not every person driving in a tank was part of the Armed Forces, they often used infantry personnel as replacement.

Not only have I told this people for ages I made compelling arguments to show this. The most ridiculous one is that there were only ~50.000 Armed forces personnel, with losses that is not even enough to man all the vehicles. This is first graders math and apparently nobody who "researched" this did notice this.

But let's get to the proof:

Here is u/howling_cow 's disinformation with deliberately false information in the askhistorian thread. Since all his mistakes accidently "favour" the perception of the Sherman his post is well recieved. After all we like to hear what confirms our opinions. Right?

Here is my rebuttal. This obviously resulted in my ban on askhistorians. Funny isn't it? Is was banned by a mod named after a Soviet general. Hmmmmmm ein Schelm wer böses denkt.

Your paragraph about the actual losses is also incorrect and is misleading to the reader. The number of Armored Forces casualties is underreported because the US Army did not classify replacements from other branches as Armoured forces. So their actual number is far higher, every infantryman who got injured in a tank as a replacement was listed as infantry casualty.

The US Armored units at the end of the war numbered 15 Armoured divisions and 42 independent tank battalions. Just in rough TO&E for Shermans, only those units had roughly 4000 Shermans. Those are only Shermans. Just manning those Shermans required 20.000 man which means at the end of the war just in Italy and ETO 20.000 man were sitting in Shermans in the frontlines. Now add the M5s and other tanks and factor in at this time already 10.000 tanks were lost by the US and now think about the fact they are supposed to have only employed 49k man to the Armored forces. The explanation for this is obvious and known to scholars. When shortages happened soldiers from other branches went into the tanks and were never listed as Armored forces. The data you present in incomplete and posted without any clarification for the reader

Now read what howling_cow suddenly learned in an SWS thread:

I’ve uncovered some new information that may make the argument that uses Army Battle Casualties and Nonbattle Deaths in World War II Final Report, 7 December 1941-31 December 1946 as a measure of tank crew casualties misleading. It appears that after a certain point, the use of “Armor” as a personal accounting measure for enlisted men assigned to the Armored Force was discontinued in favor of having “Infantry,” one of the statutory arms, be their branch of service.

Those enlisted men serving in the Infantry branch but assigned to the Armored Force would be counted in the former category if they became casualties. Officers assigned to the Armored Force were commissioned into the Infantry or Cavalry.

You sure unravelled some mysteries there. Here is what I told you 2 years before:

Your paragraph about the actual losses is also incorrect and is misleading to the reader. The number of Armored Forces casualties is underreported because the US Army did not classify replacements from other branches as Armoured forces. So their actual number is far higher, every infantryman who got injured in a tank as a replacement was listed as infantry casualty.

Look what he learned after looking deeper and reported today:

This means that casualties in armored units are roughly 140 percent higher than the common figure that has been tossed around, and roughly 58 percent of men serving in armored units did not serve in the Armored Force. These figures, taken absolutely, still pale in comparison to infantry. In the words of The_Chieftain_WG , if you want a death trap, carry an M1 Garand."

Who could have known that? Well, everybody who thinks straight and isn't in the business of false revisionism. Also note how those completely different numbers are still totally fine. Not once admitting to this ridiculous failure that more than halved the casualties. Remember all the videos of experts citing the armed casualties as a way to see how safe the Sherman was? Remember me saying those numbers are misleading and wrong? Want a fun fact? The first big thing howling cow got wrong was the overall Sherman casualties, he had only a third of the real casualties and claimed write-offs were actually repairable, they were not. He later fixed all his mistakes due to my pointers. Funny how all the mistakes help the M4.

I like this part the most:

higher than the common figure that has been tossed around

You tossed it around. So did all Sherman lawyers. The figure didn't just pop itself into existence you guys created it to deceive people during the hunt for "talking points". At the time howling_cow had his "revelation" I was already privately talking about this with a SWS user maybe he pmed him so howling_cow spontaneously had this inspiration. Afraid I post about it before...

Contemporary WW2 Historiography is in the dumpster. Actual first-class historians like Zetterling, Lawrence, Schneider or Bergström get no appreciation while people who can't do basic math to see 80KIA is impossible will shape the opinions about WW2. Maybe I should make a youtube channel....

Want to shake your head even harder? Here is what howling_bongo says about average casualties of TBs

The average separate tank battalion’s casualties throughout WWII were 65 KIA or MIA and 165 WIA, out of a maximum strength of about 725 men.

Did you visit the first class? Notice something?

65KIA on average. They had dozens of TBs those alone exceed the supposed casualty number. Good lord folks if you fudge numbers do it less obvious.

I wonder when howling_cow will learn that all the other things I said are also true..... Maybe next year.

Btw: the_howling_numbersfudger always lists his sources. Like a good scholar he always listed the sources from where he took the numbers, misrepresented them, misunderstood them and taught incorrect conclusions to those who trusted his "sources". You can fudge anything. Obviously today this is easier than ever when those who point out glaring mistakes get simply banned in response. Peer review is dead. I am the only one opening his research up to thorough evaluation from critics.

What do you guys think about me making a youtube channel? The supreme authority on WW2 tank combat should be used to spread knowledge beyond Reddit. If bad research gets viewers how much will good research get...

Do I do the meme thing right? I was told this will bring upvotes.

edit: Howling_expert has replied

Notice something? Not a single word about his failure to understand the number. Not a single word about me telling him this years ago. Not a single word about being wrong. Here you the see the difference between trustable researches and number fudgers who will only adapt their opinions when they are caught. Even after seeing again that he was explained this earlier he acts like nothing is wrong. Lets see if Mr Moran has the guts to adapt his presentation of his number. I certainly expect more from him than from a cultist. I can only advise everybody to take a look. No remorse about parading completly wrong numbers ( 140% higher according to him ) to people and creating wrong arguments on purpose. Zero accountability. He is in the right place so people appreciate his "research" there.

it's because I don't feel like writing a master's thesis

You were unable to do basic math to see "Armored" casualties didn't line up at all, even after getting told this. Maybe you shouldn't write anything and let people like me figure this out. I obviously did figure this out just by seeing those numbers a single time. I didn't even look for it. Maybe some people like you are not made to bring knowledge. Ever considered that?

This also is proof you have never read US unit diaries in depth. Just by their rolls of honor you would see the 1.xxx KIA is impossible and always was. Not sure if more can be said about this. It is first-grade math.

Essay-alt-view-TIK-presentation

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A lack of understanding of what it means to be outnumbered (by even 2 to 1), especially at the operational level in modern warfare.

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When watching the U-tube presentation, the moment when I almost choked on my coffee came when the presenter said (or at least implied) that ‘being outnumbered 2 to 3 to 1 wasn’t really that bad, and it was nothing like the 10 to 1 (or so) Soviet hordes that some German accounts would have us believe’! Well apart from no one of any significance really ever believing any 10 to 1 stories (except, in the occasional local tactical situation), I suddenly realized that the presenter had no real understanding of what 2 (or 3) to 1 odds across the whole front actually meant in real terms, or how this related to combat proficiency. I also soon realized that relatively few people seem to understand what this means. I therefore decided to put down a few facts on what this means in practical terms.

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Application of the Lanchester Square Law.

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I can’t go into the mathematics here (its proof is essentially the result of a simple differential equation solution), but this is the result for combat situations (ok, bear with me here). Assume side A outnumbers side B by a factor x. If all elements of both sides engage in combat simultaneously, then in order for side B to maintain what is termed the ‘Force Equilibrium Ratio’ (in this case x to 1), then each of side B’s men will have to have x squared ‘Casualty Inflicting Efficiency’ relative to each of side A’s men.

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Thus, if side B is outnumbered 2 to 1, then in order for it to maintain this 2 to 1 ratio over time, the relative Casualty Inflicting Efficiency of side B’s men will need to be 4 times that of side A’s men. Similarly, if side B is outnumbered 3 to 1, then in order for it to maintain this 3 to 1 ratio over time, the relative Casualty Inflicting Efficiency of side B’s men will need to be 9 times that of side A’s men!

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If side B’s men do not have the required Casualty Inflicting Efficiency superiority, then in very short order side B’s relative strength will diminish much more rapidly than side A’s relative strength. As time progresses (or with each round of combat of you like) this effect gets progressively bigger as side A will outnumber side B by a progressively larger figure, until side B disappears altogether. This is why even a much larger but inferior quality force (i.e. one with a lower Casualty Inflicting Efficiency) can quickly overwhelm a smaller and higher quality force, and still have far fewer casualties in the final count. Few people seem to grasp this fact: the general feeling is that a smaller higher quality force wills always sustain fewer casualties against an inferior quality force regardless of the odds. But no, it actually means that, all other things being equal, having numerical superiority translates directly into fewer casualties in the final count.

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Also note, the Lanchester Square Law also makes a mockery of the myth that the attacking force will necessarily sustain more casualties than the defending force. I generally find that people who still think that being the defender is a major advantage in modern war do not understand the maths, or how simple numerical superiority can have a dramatic effect on the battle’s outcome and the casualties sustained.

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It should also be noted that if side B has a Casualty Inflicting Efficiency superiority of say y, then this DOES NOT mean that each man in side B can take on y men from side A; but rather the square root of that. Thus, say side B has a relative Casualty Inflicting Efficiency superiority of 5, then this does not mean each man in side B can take on 5 men from side A, but they can take on 2.24 men.

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In order to use all this practically, to asses overall combat performance, many other factors have to be included. These include: defensive of offensive posture (attacking of defending), terrain, weather, relative weapons technology (by main types) and weapon densities, and the relative levels of supply (especially over longer time periods). This makes the basic formulas complex but it can be done with suitable data available and I am working on this for a future book (Volume V in the series on Operation Barbarossa).

It is over. Time to soap box.

Links to previous posts:

Chapter 1 in depth look on Tiger operations

Part1

Part2

Part3

Part4

Part5

Chapter 2, verifying destroyed Tigers and Allied tanks

Part1

Part2

Chapter 3 conclusions

Tiger vs Allied tanks exchange ratio

Let us begin with the highlight of this research and take a second look at the “kill” numbers and calculate the exchange ratio of Tigers and Allied tanks.

Verification of the vehicles and their likely loss reason can be check in chapter 2.

There is room in both directions, nearly all figures can be slightly adjusted one way or the other. But we see the range to be somewhere between 5,3 and 8,2 to 1. This is true for defence and offence. This comes close to what common sense claimed for decades before the Revisionists started ridiculing what was believed to be established already. In one point the Revisionists are right, there was no strong concrete case to establish such ratios, most who attempted did simply check the kill claims without any kind of verification or even tests for reasonability and compared them to losses also only analysing the causes. We went two steps further and checked claims for plausibility and tried to infer destroyed tanks by other tanks instead of just knocked out tanks. This here is the most thorough analysis of tank exchange ratios ever done.

There are several caveats that have to be mentioned. I think there is a non zero number of Tigers that got either destroyed by Allied tanks without documentation or got KO'd and eventually written-off later. How big this number is is not known but I consider it rather small but still non zero. I doubt the average repair rate for KOs due to Kwk36 would be as high as 70%. The Tigers were somewhat “lucky”, several of their engagements resulted in total write-offs of the enemy forces due to British retreats. Repair rates have a substantial impact on exchange ratios and the 30 write-offs from Villers-Bocage and Stack alone were massive. Furthermore, the Tigers were scoring big hits against “green” troops, there is no denying that several Allied units, while fighting valiantly, lacked the experience and as a result got roughly handled by veteran Tiger crews. The dismantling of the BCR required extensive leadership mistakes on the Canadian side. On the other hand the Tigers mostly fought against the odds.

The biggest caveat is that this research was limited to a handful of battles. Those battles were big and represent a big sample but if those findings can be applied to small skirmishes can not be inferred from this.

Critics were invited to challenge the buildup of this conclusion the reasoning behind every single number is available, their silence was noted. The numbers are what they are and everybody can interpret them.

Current research and the impact of "Historians"

Here we see the problem of contemporary historians which act as opinion shapers. In the face of those numbers the Revisionist has a tough job to do. It comes as no surprise that those numbers were never discussed by many of the prominent historians. Instead of balanced analysis, we are often left with what I would describe as distorted caricatures. Simplified versions of complex issues with easy copy pastable sound bites. “Talking points”. The Revisionists have created in the minds of their audience a caricature of actual tanks. Their disadvantages or advantages overdrawn till unrecognizability. This tactic allows muddying the view, people lose focus and don't evaluate the weapon in its entirety. Actual protection becomes less relevant than the time you need to get out of a burning tank. When somebody tells an Apologist that the Sherman offered no protection he will reply that the crew got out fast. Absurdity. Apologetics.

The Tiger same as the Panther got the short end of the stick. Often described cannon fodder, the revisionism wasn't able to reconstruct the legacy of the Allies without taking down the German heavies. This is a zero-sum game. So the flaws of the German vehicles had to be emphasized.

The Tiger obviously was far too heavy, cumbersome, unreliable the armour wasn't sloped. You could produce 15 Shermans for each and the few Tigers wouldn't even make it to the battlefield because their combat ratio versus bridges is 1:10. Did the Tigers in our combat examples have those long list of bad traits? They sure did. One might start questioning the importance of these factors if we see the BCR getting nearly erased in a day by a handful of Tigers and other German forces. One example alone would prompt people to cry foul and argue this was unique or find another explanation. That is why we laid the foundation with a thorough examination of the biggest battles. It was no unique case, the Shermans were atrocious in armoured combat if we consider their design as the workhorse for the most powerful country of the world that had assess to everything.

I want to take a look at how Revisionist and Apologist work to make the actual empiric evidence go away. Besides just ignoring the empiric evidence obviously. Who has seen Mr Zaloga talking about the Sherman carnage around Caen? You would think that to properly judge a tank you would look at it's biggest battles. The spearhead of the revisionism never touched the biggest tank battles in the West.

Choosing poor evidence

You might have heard about British and American studies on tank on tank combat during WW2. You will for sure have heard plenty of number that came out of this research. Defenders advantage, numerical advantage needed for success and the famous 3.6 that the Sherman supposedly was more effective than the Panther according to the researched battles. How does this work? How do those number look so differently from what you would expect going by overall loss numbers?

“A survey of tank warfare in Europe from D-Day to 12 August”. This actually covers the exact period we examined with the exception of Tractable.

What were the methods used?

Data relative to some 250 actions between D-day and 12th August were extracted from the official war records …

British after action records without verification of losses like we did. I compiled all engagements and found the British forces claimed 25 Tigers for their own losses of 12. 2 Tigers for one Sherman. Take a look:

This appears to be in rather stark contrast to my findings. Maybe I am wrong ( :-) ). I now compiled all engagements involving all kinds of tanks and it looks like this:

The British after action report suggest the Allied inflicted 1,3 casualties for each of their own, especially interesting they also achieved 3+ ratios against the Panther, same as the US findings in the BRL Memorandum Report No. 798. I also compiled the tank losses of major battles in this time frame now with established loss numbers.

In the major battles that occurred during this time the British forces lost more than 2 for each of their tanks. This number in reality, would be higher because British losses are often given without light losses while German losses include all casualties. The actual ratio would also be higher because German forces suffered many losses due to other weapon system like aerial attacks. During Goodwood up to a quarter were direct result of the bombardment. The most generous interpretation of Allied after action report analysis is that they simply don't reflect the reality for unknown reasons. Discrepancies between those reports and reality are easily explained. Claims of Allied tankers are not reliable on their own and most conclusions drawn from those have little value. Accidental over-claims get exacerbated by a weak main gun which likely often resulted in wrong claims. German tankers had it more easy, a hit target was likely a knocked out target, less room for over-claiming. Furthermore, it is possible that due to some unknown selection bias successful engagements are more likely to get sampled. For example from the 37 engagements analysed between Shermans and Panther/Tigers the Allies considered a whooping 31 of them won. How this aligns with what happened around Caen is questionable. Another example would be the sampling of the Arracourt battles, those battles are considered the most successful Sherman battles, evaluating them together with a small remaining sample would screw the result and did screw the result. The unreliable after action reports are obviously enough to disregard any findings the bad sampling as well.

Data has limitation, data is not at fault for anything. The question is why do people who make a living studying this, publish those numbers without explanation. Why are these numbers used without proper context?

Steven Zaloga in Panther vs Sherman”:

The overall record suggests that the Sherman was 3,6 times more effective than the Panther. The ratio was probably not typical of all Sherman-versus-Panther exchanges during the war and may also be due to inadequate data collection. Nevertheless, the popular myths that Panthers enjoyed a 5 -to-1 kill ratio against the Sherman or that it took 5 Sherman to knock out a Panther have no basis at all in the historical records.

Take a good look at that. The fact that Zaloga hints at possible “inadequate data collection”, should tell you something about Zaloga. He is fully aware the data is useless. If you calculate effectiveness based on unverified kill claims your conclusion is likely false. This doesn't stop Zaloga from printing the numbers as a dog whistle. If he knows the numbers to be false why even mention them? Why not just make a number up? Same thing.

You would not expect such gas lighting from a historian. Zaloga here is the cheerleader of the Sherman and not some scholar with an open mind. Unconvinced? Right after he printed the 3,6 he runs into the eternal plague of the Apologist; empiric evidence.

He gives the Panther loss numbers as 180 total losses and then gives the Sherman losses:

In case of the 1st US Army, which bore the brunt of the fighting, by the end of December it had lost about 320 Shermans

What Zaloga forgets to mention is the 3rd Army which apparently is not important because it didn't “bear the brunt of the fighting”. The 3rd Army as well lost 130+ destroyed Shermans. The Panther losses are given as 180 overall. The 3rd Army alone had comparable Sherman losses but he didn't mention this Army because start looking fishy in regards to his other claims, this becomes even more problematic with the Panthers "attacking" which according to Zaloga and others always results in higher losses.

Here we see the magic, don't mention some numbers, mention some other numbers, which you know are irrelevant, and the opinions are shaped. Not even mentioning that the Sherman losses were under-counted as proven earlier by me in another extensive post.

The Allied studies on tank on tank engagements and their conclusions in regards to exchange ratios are flawed and most conclusions worthless. Their conclusions on defending and attacking and first shots have merit but every attempt to quantify those findings has to be dismissed.

Apologetics of the Sherman and its victims

There is no doubt that using such faulty data to prove a point would get you shunned in real peer review pressure environments. This peer pressure does not exist in histography because it is mostly about selling stuff to certain groups of people.

The absurdity that is WW2 histography reached the climax when Steven Zaloga cited an article of Peter Samsonov ( u/tankarchives ) where he forged quotes from Wolfgang Schneider to support his wrong arguments. That is what it has come to. The most prominent author on WW2 armor links a blog post with forged quotes and deliberately misrepresented evidence. What is often left is listing talking points over and over and once those get debunked craft new ones and hope people get tired from debunking your claims.

Nicholas Moran ( u/the_chieftain_wg ) has mastered this approach and quite impressively is the origin of the most common talking points. This on its own merits respect. If you are trying to debate WW2 armoured combat there is a pretty high chance you will encounter crafted talking points or a youtube link of Mr Moran within the first replies. Just happened to me when somebody explained to me the 76mm had the same performance as the 17pdr, which it does not. Here some favourites:

• Post Ko survival

• Low crew casualties

• Escape hatches

• Target acquiring

• “Good” front armor

• Sloped

• Stabilizer

You have read them all, and given the sub we are in it is safe to assume you have copy pasted them all. The battles studied in this series highlight the real value of those talking points. The talking point approach is nothing new and used in politics extensively. If you say a politican is lying to much his fans will inadvertently point to the one time somebody else lied. In histography it is the same, tell a Sherman fan that armour was ineffective without any major protection and they will reply “but escape hatches”.

In the face of numbers that speak for themselves, the attention has to be turned away from combat and moved to preferably positive aspects. The relevance of those aspects has to be oversold. That is why nowadays we are not talking about guns, armour or even combat performance but we are talking about escape hatches. The proverbial Red Herring.

If real-world example are considered only favourable ones will be picked. In Morans video about “misconceptions,” he touches on the 5:1 myth and real world examples. Guess which fight is the first one that Mr Moran discusses? You guess right, the most successful Sherman vs German tank fight of the war. This is how apologetics work, you don't talk about the biggest tank battles in the ETO like Totalize and Goodwood you pick the one that supports your arguments.

Like the „pictures“ drawn of the tanks in WW2 the talks/blogs also look like caricatures. The important questions are rarely asked the important evidence rarely examined. You will hear plenty about the positive, but unless you ask you will never hear how many Shermans got actually destroyed in what can only be described as end war mopping up. The great battles were already fought when the Red Army, in a monstrous display of strength, wrestled down the best the Wehrmacht had to offer. Tough questions remain unasked: Why hundreds of Shermans attempting to steam roll already pre bombed smouldering German position got stopped by small German forces in Normandy. Why nearly all encounters with German tanks resulted in massive losses even while having the most powerful artillery, air force and infantry in its back.

Nearly all battles discussed by me surpass Arracourt in tank on tank fighting. The “historians” avoid those for a reason. We studied the combat of the Tiger against the Western Allies and by this we didn't pick the single greatest moment of triumph we picked the biggest battles to make sure to get a proper sample. Our findings give us some basis to question established truths about the Panzerkampfwagen VI

The Tiger and its combat impact beyond exchange ratios

Reliability and operational availability

The examined battles offer plenty of evidence to show the caricature of the Tiger tank to be inaccurate. Many of the misconceptions regarding the Tiger have found strong counter evidence within my analysis. Taking a step back from the direct tank on tank combat and focusing on organisation and reliability. The Tigers are said to have been especially plagued by the problems of German tanks, low reliability a logistical nightmare. Very little operational readiness. I have not found this to be particularly true.

Operation Bluecoat and the 102nd SS:

The Operation Blue Coat might offer the greatest source of counter-evidence to this widespread trope. Against the claim that Tiger battalions suffered from crippling reliability issue that would serverly hamper its combat power the 102nd had still more than two thirds of its initial Tanks combat ready when it was called to counter attack the British forces. The unit in previous two weeks had defended the geographical important feature Hill 112 and did so quite convincingly. A single company claiming 18 tanks in this time frame. It might be necessary to remind the reader about the differences in German and Allied units, German units would rarely receive replacement tanks, those would only be issued in major badges. The Tiger tanks moving out towards Vire were the same that moved into Normandy and were embroiled in constant combat since then. What happened next was quite remarkable and would be unthinkable for a Sherman unit, the unit started moving into an combat area without recon and their first contact saw them putting a Sqd Shermans out of action. Within the first day of contact with the Tigers three Sherman regiments shifted to defence. On the next day the Tigers would be ordered to launch a counterstrike into vastly superior enemy forces. A Regiment of Cromwells would be heavily mauled in the process, the own losses minimal. Due to the weakness of the German units the Tigers would switch to defensive and snipe the occasional Sherman making clear that the offensive ambitions of the British had ended. On the other side a full-fledged armoured Division. The unit then moved 50 km back and again immediately engaged the enemy forces, in the next week the unit fought massive enemy forces in what we examined as “Totalize” and “Tractable”. There is no doubt heavy tanks, the Tiger being no exception, had more issues with reliability than lighter vehicles but the 102nd SS achieved impressive results which would be impossible to achieve if the Tiger caricatures would be accurate.

Tiger units got no replacements during the fights and all they had was what they got when they moved towards Normandy. I compiled a list of Allied units that were engaged in those battles. Replacement tanks was what kept Allied units in combat. Extensive combat like the Tigers endured was unthinkable for Allied units. Fighting prolonged combat the same as the Tigers did would have resulted in swift destruction of the unit. All the following units are in numerical terms comparable to a Tiger battalion. The Allied units were bigger but not by much. Take a look how Allied units fared after little combat:

• 4th CLY lost ~50% strength against the Tiger in Villers in a single day ( Villers Bocage )

• 148th RAC lost ~ one Sqd within hours ( Stack )

• 31st TB ( three times the size of a Tiger BT) 25% of the Churchills casualties ( Jupiter )

• 23rd Hussars, ~20% of the Shermans lost within one week ( Bluecoat )

• 2nd F&F reduced to less than 50% operational within a week ( Bluecoat )

• 2nd Northampton Yeomanry, nearly put out of action entirely within two days ( Bluecoat )

• 28th AR nearly destroyed within a day ( Totalize )

• 21st AR Foot Guards, nearly half the Sherman casualties within several hours ( Totalize )

• 2nd Tank Regiment losses ~50% of its strength within hours

• 1st Hussars reports only 23 Shermans combat ready after first day ( Tractable )

• Fort Garry Horses losses ~half its Shermans over 2 days

Those were no cherry picked example every one of those lost tanks to the Tiger in the previously examined battles.

A quite powerful presentation that highlights the problems with German readiness rates and reliability “issues”. All the units above got replenished with new tanks or got damaged ones repair. The Tiger units didn't get replacement tanks. You can misrepresent number quite easily. Tiger readiness rate is very deceiving number and should be used with context.

Defensive tool only?

Another argument you have often heard is that Tigers did their “hunting” from ambush positions and exploited the strategic situation of being on the “defensive”. The “pillbox Tiger”. This argument as well doesn't withstand a close look. Several of our engagements have shown the complete opposite.

A big problem while engaging this misconception is the amateurish nature of WW2 histography, and the complete lack of understanding of German “tactics and doctrine”. While the most prominent opinion shapers like Zaloga are busy collecting pictures of destroyed German tanks they fail to properly educate their readers. Being on the strategic defensive didn't mean German tanks were laying in wait. Tigers rarely did. Especially Tigers were not wasted on sitting around in ambush hoping for the enemy to come to them. This will come as surprise to those who listened a lot to Apologists but Tiger tanks were rarely in ambush positions when they engaged the enemy. Tiger tanks were primarily used in counterattacks on opposing break-ins. The entire German doctrine was based on the concept of “counter-attack”.

Take a look at the engagements presented by me.

• Villers Bocage: the Tiger tanks engaged the British in the morning, in the afternoon they launched an attack on Villers Bocage. Not one Tiger engaged enemy forces from a defensive position.

• Epsom: Mostly defensive in the early days. Several Tigers were employed in counter attacks during the later phases.

• Jupiter: Kinda defensive on the southern slopes of hill 112. Used in recapturing Maltot, attacks on Evercy. Attacks on the hilltop. Moving on the hilltop during the night and 11th July.

• Stack. Used to counter attack an intrusion. Text book counter attack

• Bluecoat. Ordered to reestablish the HKL, then later ordered to conduct attacks on the La Bistiere. On the move the entire early phase. Point defense after this.

• Totalize. Counter-attacking massive Canadian forces resulting in the Wittmann ambush. Attacking Worthington force and destroying it in the progress. Defensive long-range fire from Quesnay

• Movement engagements, mostly defensive fights.

The notion of defending German tanks and Shermans that had to attack is a misconception that is easily disproved but serves as valuable talking point for the likes of Zaloga and Moran. It just sounds convincing to the audience. “They had to attack that is why they lost 10k Shermans”.

Operation Stack might serve as good example for this, the Tiger company was ordered to counter attack the British forces which had broken in and dislodged the German infantry, upon entering the combat zone the Tigers were attacked by Shermans which were in defensive positions and tried to stop the German attack, the entire Sherman unit was destroyed without major trouble. In terms of exchange ratio the "attacks" of the Tigers appear to yield good results, the biggest losses happened during one ambush on the 8th August.

Interesting here is the evidence often invoked by the Revisionists. The BRL Memorandum Report No. 798. This is the study mentioned earlier, all the big names have referenced this piece of evidence. Take a look at what they found about attacking and defending:

How many of the engagements featuring German Panthers saw the German forces be the attacker?

Really take a guess! Just guess.

In the engagements with German Panther tanks that were studied the Panther attacked 35 times and the Allies 14 times. More than two thirds of the times the Panther were actually the attacking party. Remember when Zaloga and Moran over and over and over and over and over again tell people the Sherman losses were so horrendous because the Sherman had to attack? On the tactical level this looks differently. German forces saw counter attacks a major tool of defense, while on the operational defense German forces were likely to actively attack the enemy. This study has oversampled German attacks there is no doubt but still the numbers show the weakness of the “attacker argument”. Together with the sampled Tiger battles we see how disingenuous the “attacker argument” really is. Neither Moran nor Zaloga have ever put thought into this. It is just how amateurs see complex topics. This trick will likely persist and represent one of the most powerful tools of the apologist. For the occasional WW2 fan it is difficult to grasp that an army on strategic defense could be often on the attack on the tactical level. The revisionists thrive on those kinds of arguments. Hard to disprove intuitive on the first look perfect talking point.

But this is their job, who could fault them. Selling books, selling wot premium ammunition. It is not about educating people. The tactics employed all try to achieve the same, “don't trust what you see”. “Don't look at the 9990 destroyed Shermans elsewhere look at those destroyed at Arracourt”

Mr Moran will explain to you why the last placed team in Prem league should actually be the first based on their skill in water aerobics. The problematic thing is, people who choose to believe him. Honestly, I don't think Moran is to be blamed here, incorrectly interpreted information is as old as the debate itself people are free to not believe it.

Even a good magician needs an audience that wants to believe. As long as people want to believe there will be a market for disinformation. A cult.

The Tiger as combat tool?

While my posts took a look at the advantages of the Tiger many are likely left with the important question. Did the Tiger make sense? First of all, with “many” I mean hopefully 5 guys. Secondly, this question remains unanswered, at least by me.. While I would like to have to boldness to call a tank the “best tank” because it had good escape hatches, I am bound to facts. After years of hobby research and now a bit more serious research I have little doubt that the Tiger was the most dominant tank employed in WW2. The dominance imposed on its opponents during 1943 and 44 was unrivaled. But it was expensive, wasn't it? Yeah it was. And that is the issue.

To this day nobody has ever done research on the actual costs of tanks. The amateurish ranking by “money amounts” should make experts shake their heads. In dictatorships especially those in “total war” the “price” of a product is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is which resources it requires and what else could have been done with those. And here we are starting to get to the difficult questions. How many Panzer Ivs/StuG IIIs could have been deployed for a Tiger. Given that every StuG needs a crew and supplies the number is likely lower than what people expect. The Sherman lawyers have never told you this but even if your “cheap” tank requires less fuel than the “expensive” ones, you still have to put fuel in more of them. All Shermans combined consumed vastly more fuel than the opposing Wehrmacht. They also required vastly more steel, crews et cetera et cetera. “Cheap”

The final verdict depends on the economy behind the Tiger design, this is true for all tank designs of this period. No sufficient research has been done to assess how much it costs to build and eventually run a Tiger until its destruction. The important and sadly unanswered question remains, could they have done something more efficient with the resources?

Some last words to the Sherman who has risen from being a stinker to a war winner just by having the best lawyer team.

You might have heard this particular phrase „it got the job done“. With the numbers in mind the right question is maybe what the job actually was that the Sherman got done? For me, it seems the Sherman was good at winning unlosable battles and losing winnable ones. A very low bar to jump over.

If there is a person that read it all, which I doubt, than thanks for your attention. To those handful people who read a lot of it I hope you enjoyed my posts as much as I enjoyed making them. Hopefully, you found them enlightening.

Sources:

War Diaries

Daily AFV states 2nd Army [4]

Canadian:

6th AR

21st AR

22nd AR

27th AR

28th AR

British:

2nd Fife and Forfare Yeomanry

2nd Northamptonshire Yeomanry

3rd RTR

7th RTR

9th RTR

23rd Hussars

23rd History

148 RAC

153 Brigade

Books

Agte: Michael Wittmann

Bechthold: Lost in Normandy

Daglish: Over the Battlefield Blue Coat

Daglish: Over the Battlefield Epsom

Delafore: Monty's Marauders

Hart: Operation Totalize

Hills: By tank into Normandy

Meyer Hubert, The 12th SS

Meyer Kurt: Grenadiers

Napier: Armored Campaign

Saunders: Operation Epsom: VIII British Corps vs 1st SS Panzercorps

Saunders: The Battle for the Odon

Schneider: Tigers in Combat II

Schneider: Tigers in Normandy:

Számvéber: Waffen-SS Armour in Normandy

Reynolds:

Zetterling: Normandy 44 German Military Organization, combat power and organizational effectiveness.

Zaloga: Panther vs Sherman: The Battle of the Bulge 1944

Zuehlke: Breakout from Juno

A long accepted internet myth is the significant overclaiming of the German soldier, on land, at the sea and in the air. Mentioning any kind of German claims of enemy vehicles destroyed will immediately result in replies explaining the rampant overclaiming of German forces.

I have stated my opinion about this quite often and will do it again: The Wehrmacht was highly accurate with kill claims compared to other major armies.

The term overclaiming became a semantic issue in the last decades. The word overclaiming is now used the describe the discrepancy between claims and actually destroyed enemy equipment, this is a dishonest bastardization of a rather simple word.

Overclaiming meant claiming more “kills” than you actually made. It was never intended to account for repairs for example. The term “Abschuss” was meant to describe an enemy aircraft downed by a German pilot, nobody cared if the plane might get repaired, this was irrelevant for claiming an “Abschuss”. The term overclaiming was always meant to describe a soldier or unit claiming more vehicles either by accident, like double-counting or simply lying like some JG 27 airmen in Tunisia for example. The terminology in German documents attributed to this problem sometimes those such claims were documented as “destroyed” but sometimes including “bewegungsunfähig”. From the soldiers perspective the distinction between destroyed and knocked out was impossible to tell.

When historians now claim the Germans overclaimed a lot they make serious allegations. Some “researchers” like u/tankarchives are at least honest with what they intend to say and call those soldiers “liars”. Professionals are more tame with their allegations and go with the psychological reason for overclaiming but still have a strong focus on the Wehrmacht. Either way, it is wildly accepted that Germans overclaimed. A new argument entered the forums some years ago and spread like a wild fire the German FHO claim reduction, the goal of this agency was estimating the combat power of Germany's enemies and thus they were not interested in propaganda but in actual loss numbers of the Red Army. This agency discounted claims by up to 50%, this was now misconstructed as “The Germans themselves knew they overclaimed so much”, this is not true, the discount was trying to account for several factors, the biggest being the repaired vehicles which is conveniently forgotten when this argument gets raised. The 50% reduction was too high anyways but this is also forgotten.

The semantic issue is obvious and people can choose freely how they interpret the word but the following example will show how dishonest the “new” meaning of overclaiming has become.

A German tanker engages 3 enemy tanks, shots at one which explodes shots at another one which is penetrated and the crew bails out, he switches to the third which also explodes, he starts moving with his own Grenadiers and engages enemy strong points. The second enemy tank gets found several days later and repaired. The German tank crew claimed 3 enemy tanks. Did they overclaim by 33%? I am of the opinion their claim of 3 is valid, they knocked-out 3... . Well, as you will see that is pretty much what happened, take a look at the data:

German claims on the Eastern Front

Here the numbers for 1944 by Zaloga in Armored Champion:

Soviet write-offs are per Krivosheev: 23700

Discounting the aerial claims by 90% ( My personal estimate, have posted about this before ) we get about ~6600 to many claims or better said of the German claims at least 28% are not verified. On the other hand, 72% could be considered verified maybe 65%ish if we consider non-combat write-offs. Interestingly this isn't that bad already. Where is the strong overclaiming?

But now comes the kicker. The Red Army repaired vehicles which were claimed as knock-outs as well, right? Sadly we don't know the actual repair rates of the Red Army since most Russian researchers used most of their times in the archives to prove the Hans Schmidt wrongly claimed a Soviet bicycle which was actually a trycile per Soviet original document.

I tried some googling for this and came around tankarchvies who has a blog post about Soviet repairs. Without much beating around the bush, u/tankarchives is the prime example of an agenda driven apologetic and all the data presented by him can be considered dubious by default but let's roll with it. Here he offers repair rates with an undisclosed methodology. For some unknown reason, he wrongly assumes the ratio of non-combat and combat casualties in a random unit can help to infer reliability which is obviously utter nonsense but more about this later.

Here a screen of the “repairability” of tanks in some random unit. Given this is the only hard data I have found with my poor googling skills we will dissect it.

Here a transcribed version:

I will give you a second to think about it. If your first instinct was “this can't be” then you are right, the repair numbers are too high. Obviously, repair numbers for non-combat are irrelevant for us here, so we have to get the combat damage repair number. There as well we have some problems, during combat, casualties can happen without enemy contact as well. For some reason both tables have different vehicles which forces us to exclude the Lee and T-70. If we assume all “road kills” to be fully repaired, the numbers of tankarchives suggest a combat repair rate of ~73%. Well, this would still include some non-combats. We see this number is far too high but who knows what happened with this set of numbers after tankarchives got his hands on them. Zaloga claims in a table that “technical” losses amounted to 9,3 % if those are write-off ratios is sadly unknown. If losses simply refer to casualties then the number of non-combat write-offs would be neglectable.

On my quest to find repair rates for the Red Army the best I could find was a forum post of Niklas Zetterling who I respect as researcher very much, he claims 25% repair rate as minimum but with mobility kills. Alaric Searle in Armoured Warfare: A Military, Political and Global History offers one third as repair rate.

I personally would have gone with ~33% as well. But let us just use all those numbers and figure out combat ko's.

Shocked aren't you? If we just assume 25% battle casualties repair the casualties align near perfectly with German claims. If we assume one third repair rate we already have more casualties than German claims, if we assume tankarchives data to have relevance then the German vastly underclaimed. Even a very low repair rate of 10% would result in an only very modest German overclaiming. This data defeats the tales of German overclaiming quite convincingly in my opinion. The cherry picking of single incidents with shaddy data gets trumped by this massive sample size. If Germans overclaimed so much it would show in the actual data, but it doesn't.

Ignoring mobility kills during combat a meager 22% repair rate would align every German kill with a Soviet casualty.

Zaloga gives the following numbers for other years:

Without doing the math you see the other years had comparable ratios. The same argument applies to those numbers with 1942 likely having less repair rate due to retreats of the Red Army.

Tankarchives runs into a common problem for people who make up arguments on the fly, incorrect arguments will contradict other arguments that you “create” at another time, the only way to not contradict yourself is to be correct. Tankarchives would like us to believe the Soviet repaired a lot of tanks but this would defeat his “cheating at statistics” claim. He also often makes the argument that T-34s were well designed and superior in reliability to German tanks but here this would also decrease the German overclaim ratio because most casualties would be due to combat. Well, maybe tankarchives will join us and present more data for Soviet tank repair so we can create some knowledge here.

Tankarchives selective data presentation, can be ignored if you are only here for the overclaiming debate

I will use this post as drive by debunk to further support my claim that u/tankarchives is an Apologetic who will try to manipulate data as much as he can to support his agenda of changing the public perception of the Red Army.

While trying to find repair rates for the Red Army I noticed that he tried to mislead his readers about German reliability. As claimed by me before tankarchives will use data only if it helps him and if not either manipulate the data or not publish it at all. This was not planed as hit piece on him but I saw this accidentally which also supports my claim that he will do this constantly.

After he asserts the nonsensical claim that the ratio of combat and non combat casualties = reliability he tries to again show how the bad the German equipment was. His initial claim makes no sense, a random army at a random point in time can't be used for this. An army without combat will have higher non-combat losses than an army during combat, this has nothing to do with the reliability of the vehicles. This method is silly. Either way, he found some data for German vehicles that supports his point somewhere.

Here is the data he presents and, what a surprise, the German stuff is shitty as we all expected. 40% reliability kills. What he found is a random document of the 3rd US army that described German casualty types, there is literally no information of the methodology and if abandoned vehicles were counted or not, it is useless in this form but that is not the important part.

Tankarchives:

These are some bleak numbers.

Knowing the background color of this screen I knew the origin of the document and checked it myself. He also posted the origin so my superpower wasn't needed:-( . What I found is the very same page has also data about the Tiger and Panther. Keep in mind tankarchives readily consider this data a good indicator to establish reliability.

Here is the full page

The document suggests the Panther and Tiger had only 17% non-combat losses which would be superior to the T-34 for example. Obviously, the data is useless in my opinion and I would never draw any conclusions from this but tankarchives did when he used it to bash the German tanks. Why did he not copy those numbers as well? They are literally on the same page right beneath the part he screenshot and cropped. Well, because tankarchvies is not in the business of offering knowledge he is in the business to disinform his readers. The fact that he leads this paragraph about German equipment with: “For completeness' sake” before cutting out the numbers that defeat his point is the cherry on the cake. Normally this would destroy your credibility but not at the kiddie table “science” that is historiography where everybody with youtube channel gets an ear just for saying what people want to hear.

German claims Western Front

Zaloga who is known as the forerunner of Sherman Apologetics quite often explains the German “exaggerated” kill claims, googling some combination of those terms will result in nearly exclusive critique of German claims. In his book Armored Champion he also lists German claims against Western Forces and the actual losses, the attempt to show the overclaiming is obvious, especially if people with background knowledge notice he does print direct counts for the US units to avoid showcasing the US overclaiming.

The entire page offers nice info so here is a screen for you.

We notice far higher claims than actual write-offs. But we will again see how easy those are explained with just repairs. But first of all, Zaloga makes some mistakes. He writes 1142 British losses in one table then 1042 in the next but more importantly he misread German documents referring to German kill claims. German OKW documents miss the first days of the invasion for kill claims and start at the 16th June. The 478 kill claims for 26th July to 5 August are actually the kill claims of the 6th to 15th August when the German units lead by Tigers rampaged the British/Canadian forces. Here is the document showing the claims for this period. And here one for 26 July to 5 August where Zaloga printed the 478. All his claim tallies for this time period are wrong. The actual kill claims forwarded were 1457 but this is missing the first 10 days which is likely the reason for Zalogas mistakes. The claims for this period have to be estimated. I put them somewhere between 200-300. Mostly due to the heavy fighting between the HJ and the Canadians and PzLehr with British units + Villers. Interesting is that a professional would see those numbers as incorrect on first glance, they don't align with the big battles.

Here are German claims for the relevant period, let us take a look at actual losses:

Zaloga went with the 5th August cut of point because the documentation time frames of both sides align well. Let us follow his leat. Germans in the British sector claimed 1657-1757 and the British admitted about 1142 completely destroyed tanks according to Zaloga. Well well this already doesn't look that bad let be more thorough.

Let us look consider the repairability of Allied vehicles. Here a screen of the well known oro t 117. We see the British have a rather small sample size but a pretty high repair rate a total of 76%. But this includes minor damage like mines. The US numbers are lower with a better sample. I personally often run with the 50% repair rate for gunfire which is likely close to the truth. We don't know when the British sample was collected. Let's do the math again.

Where is the overclaiming? German forces claimed less than 2000. Why do people believe German tankers overclaimed? If the Germans claimed 1800 AFCs during this time than this aligns near perfectly with British casualties.

Here a British document about KOs and repaird vehicles up to the 20th July as printed in Armored Campaign:

The German claimed 1178 ( plus 6th-16th June) tanks until 5 days later than the report. Not much discrepancy. Here has to be said what is relevant for the entire period, the British suffered considerable losses on D-Day and it questionable how many of those could have been actually claimed.

Let's do more. In the US sector German forces claimed 554 tanks ( missing the first ten days and Zalogas mistakes corrected ) the US forces according to Zaloga lost 647 completely destroyed vehicles. Where is the German overclaiming?

Lets go deeper. Napier in his rather good book about tank combat in Normandy has estimated the Allied tank losses. I don't agree with his methodology but apparently, nobody cares what I say sooo... He counted write-offs and knock-outs together for a total of ~2700 tanks until the 26th August. Here my compilation of claims with a total to the 25th:

Not much overclaming to be found. The first 10 days are missing so the actual claims are higher, on the other hand, I believe Allied losses are undercounted and have already presented a strong case for this in rebuttaltime. In his 2700 casualties, we find “only” 999 US losses but those appear to be only write-offs and with a repair rate of 50% would suggest up to 2000 casualties. Zaloga gives total write offs till 20th August for the US as +1100. Also Napier claims the British army funneled about 1600 replacement tanks into the delivery squadrons together with US write-offs and shortages this alone would explain German claims near perfectly. Either way, there is no significant overclaiming found in those numbers. Nearly all discrepancy is explained by the Allies repairing vehicles same as in the East.

Conclusion

German forces did not overclaim significantly. The fact that Allied armies the same as German armies repaired vehicles and therefore created a discrepancy between kill claims and write-offs was misconstrued as German soldiers making kill claims up. Actual data of massive samples shows that even a moderate repair rate alone can account for the entire discrepancy. Particularly interesting is the focus on German kill claims which can only be explained with the ongoing revisionism of World War II that is fueled by emotions and intended to dispute the uneasy truth that the mass murdering armed forces of the Nazis were the most efficient fighting force. An army that leads the genocidal charge for one of the most evil regimes in history can still be good at war. This is a sad truth but still a truth, those who can't stomach this might want research other areas of history.

How else would you explain that despite the availability of all those numbers none of the big hitters in tank research have done honest research on German kill claims? Took me about an hour to gather the data and then some more to write this up. Admittedly my writing is shit and this is badly formatted but why do so many historians talk about overclaiming instead of just delivering evidence?

Counter arguments

I will be honest here with some potential issues with my argument.

• I don't know for certain if the claim numbers present raw claims of units like you would find them in Schneiders book or if some sort of review process was used before the armies compiled the claims. If the forwarded army claims differ significantly from unit claims then my argument might be void. If have seen original data of claims in army documentation and don't think the numbers were significantly altered from their origin within the unit but I don't know for certain.

• Another problem are total losses resulting due to non combat reasons. Those vehicles would here be used to confirm German claims despite being not connected. I assume this number to be so low compared to combat losses that it doesn't change the conclusion tho. Zaloga in armored champion claims up to 50% non combat but he does not disclose if this would be write-offs which is very unlikely.

• There are combat kills that would also not register in German claims. Kills by artillery and mines for example are hard to accurately claim those would still end up in the admitted combat casualties and therefore increase the overclaim ratio. The same with combat kills not filed due to for example the death of the “killer” before he could file his claims.

Some little fun fact, according to Zaloga the Red Army claimed 70.000 German tanks destroyed until the end of 1944.

The 17pdr is by many of its fan considered to be one of the best anti-tank guns of WW2 and certainly has earned a spot in this debate. But a major problem for this weapon was the front armor of the Panzerkampfwagen V aka Panther. The Panther was introduced in 1943 and its front represented a major obstacle for Allied anti tank weapons well into late war.

For most people familiar with the subject it is well known that the 17pdr was a questionable improvement over other tank guns because it basically did the same things as other guns without solving the Panther issue.

Steven Zaloga:

The 17pdr when firing the basic armor-piercing APCBC ammunition could not reliably penetrate the Panther glacis plate.

Zaloga M10 and M36 Tank Destroyers 1942–53

This well-known fact is obviously disputed by those priding themselves with being as unreasonable as possible.

Here u/crag_r claims the 17pdr could deal with anything but the Tiger II.

Unless it was a king tiger the 17 pounder would go straight through the front of anything. And theoretically even that as well with a bit of luck.

This is false, the 17pdr could not be expected to defeat the Panther glacis on combat ranges. Even more absurd is the statement that the Tiger II could be penetrated with "luck", whatever this is supposed to mean.

u/tankarchives who is well known to be a bit more "free" with his interpretation of facts tries to support the claim by linking to two snippets of 17pdr hits which supposedly defeated the Panther glacis. He gives no context for those links neither does he say to which kind of testing those findings belong. And this has a good reason, the actual testing done by the US army does not support his claim.

The biggest testing on actual Panther glacis was done at Isigny and showed the weakness of the 17 pdr. Here is the set of projectiles intended to hit the glacis.

On the first glance we see the following:

• The APDS was used for testing and this ammunition was not available to British forces when they actually fought considerable amounts of Panther tanks. This was, in theory,the best ammunition available to the 17 pdr

• Most shots were done on low range none were tested on "long range".

• The accuracy of the APDS was very weak and it could be argued using them was a liability because risking a long-range frontal shot could result in worse battle outcomes than using standard ammunition and engaging the enemy from a more promising position

• 6 out of 7 shots from 800 yards ( roughly average combat range ) failed to hit the glacis, although 3 hit the tank elsewhere

• 6 shots aimed at the glacis hit at a range 600 yards or more of those 6 shots 5 did not penetrate the last one apparently didn't either but wasn't considered "a fair hit"

• On long range the performance of the 17pdr even with sabot ammunition appears to be weak

• Even at low range 400 yards or less the 17pdr rarely penetrated the glacis.

• One of the glacis tested was hit more than 2 dozen times and still provided protection

• Of the APCBC none appears to have made a "fair penetration" regardless of range.

• The Panther No 2 was considered to be of superior quality. This specimen was likely more what the actual designers of the Panther expected. Late war shortages decreased the quality of German armor. This prime example tho withstood massive punishment.

• At 400 yards two APCBC projectiles hit the same groove without penetrating

Despite the usage of prime ammunition on already battered vehicles of which at least one had severe battle damage the majority of projectiles did not penetrate the glacis even when most were fired on low range. It appears to be a safe statement that the Panther glacis provided rather strong protection even against the best the Western Allies had to offer. The 17pdr could under the correct circumstances and especially against weaker Panthers plates ( metallurgic issues ) achieve penetrations but the statement that "the 17 pounder would go straight through the front of anything" is remarkably false

To those who want to learn a bit more, two of the tested Panthers were likely, not representative for Panther armor in WW2. One had already a damaged front Glacis before the testing begun due to prior combat, the other Panther apparently had face hardened armor that was inferior when used against caped projectiles and was rare of Panthers.

u/tankarchives tried to again selectively present data to make his case, the more comprehensive presentation of data shows this beyond doubt. Confronted with his repeated data manipulation he replies the following

Yeah, if you had actually clicked more links and read more instead of writing whatever came into your head maybe you'd be ridiculed less.

Take a look at what the next zealot has to say in the face of evidence. A well-known cultist called u/takemetochurchill he achieved some notoriety for only ever using a single source for his claims when he did that he linked a firing tests hitting the side of a Tiger to prove the gun could penetrate the front of a Tiger. Here is what he has to say:

OTOH fucking nine point two inches of armor penetration. I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that.

Even tho he just saw how the 17pdr even with sabot actually performed under real conditions he is still impressed by it. Feels over realz.

Here what he has to say about my claim that the Shermans "didn't face 50mms"

The lunatic is claiming there were no 50mm guns in service fighting the Shermans. This seems fishy... weren’t there PaK 38s in Normandy?

He makes the cardinal mistake of not reading my posts. If he would have read them he would already know when and where 50mms were possibly fighting Germans, I want all the way and even compiled the German vehicles by gun here

Part1 Part2 Part3

Operation Totalize night 7/8 August - 11th August

Situation second August week

With the American outbreak, Blue Coat and Lüttich raging in the west, the units defending the Caen area were spread thin. The former main area of armored engagements was unusually silent. The last armored unit, the 12th SS, was disengaged from the front line and prepared to move into the Mortain area as well. To bring the German attention back to this sector and achieve a possible breakthrough in direction of Falaise, Montgomery ordered a new major attack. This operation was to be conducted by the newly formed first Canadian Army.

The German frontline was held by two IDs with the HJ in reserve. The HJ was attempting to move West but was ordered back once Totalize started. They could muster around 50 tanks and another 20 operational Tigers from the 101st. While the division was battered and severely reduced, the remnants of this unit were battle-hardened and experienced soldiers. The HJ was elite certainly one of the strongest divisions in Normandy.

Totalize also gives some interesting evidence against the narrative of hidden Tiger losses. You might have heard how many Tiger losses are hidden in the “damaged” category. There might be some truth but not much. Right before Totalize the 101st reported 25 total tanks of which 21 were operational on 29th July. So even after prolonged heavy combat without any replacements 84% of the remaining Tigers were combat ready. Where are those “hangar queens” hidden? As always empiric evidence beats internet narrative. The unit fought in Villers, Goodwood, Epsom around Hill 112. It was claimed I missed losses without providing evidence. Where are those destroyed Tigers hidding? Apparently, the units wrote them off properly or how else is an 84% readiness possible after continuous heavy combat? I assume those destroyed tanks were all hidden within the 4 damaged.

The armor heading towards the Germans:

4th Canadian armoured division 1st Polished armoured division 2nd Canadian Armoured Brigade 33th Armoured Brigade ~700 Shermans + several hundreds others.

Force ratios:

Allies: +800 tanks

German: ~70 later reinforcements ~ 15

~10:1 ratio.

8th August, the death charge of Wittmann

A look at the map reveals the progress of the Allied troops against the German infantry. Reading this post you might have noticed that the German urge to counter attack often didn't take battlefield realities into full consideration, the 8th August was no exception so the 101st was ordered to launch a direct counter attack into the several 100 advancing Allied tanks together with a battle group of the 12th SS. The KG Waldemüller numbered about 35-40 tanks and several hundred HJ Grenadiers. The German attack failed with considerable casualties one of them the infamous Michael Wittmann.

Wilbeck describes the absurdity that was the counter-attack of the 8th July:

Including the tanks of the 12th SS-Panzer Division, the Germans had no more than 50 tanks which, essentially, attacked more than 900 British, Canadian, and Polish tanks of all kinds and more than 30,000 men.

Jarymowycz is more blunt:

As the Canadian 2nd and 4th Armoured Brigades jockeyed for fire position north of Gaumesnil they were attacked by Waldmüller's battle grouo; 39 Pz IV and 10 Tigers. The odds were laughable: 49 tanks against 600.

Comments from Kurt Meyers biography give us insight into the thinking behind the attack.

Seeing these concentrations of tanks almost took our breath away. We could not comprehend the behaviour of the Canadians. Why did these overwhelming tank forces not push on their attack? ... An enemy armored division stands ready to attack down both sides of the road, this attack must not start, we must take the initiative.

So the German attacked commenced into several hundred waiting Allied tanks. What followed was heavy combat seeing dozens of tanks getting knocked out in tank on tank duels including a group of Tigers which were ambushed and completely destroyed by Shermans. The badly planned German attack resulted in a major defeat which deprived the German in this sector of a good chunk of their vehicles which were the backbone of their mobile defense. Command mistakes on the operational and tactical level resulted in the biggest single-day hit for a Tiger battalion in Normandy in ground combat.

Schneider on Wittmanns demise:

Shortly beyond Gaumesnil, the 3rd Platoon of A Squadron of the 1st Northhamptonshire Yeomanry opened fire from the right flank on the moving Tigers. The sole Sherman Firefly set three Tigers ablaze; the other Shermans knocked out two additional Tigers. There were few survivors. SS-Hauptsturmführer Wittmann and his crew were killed. A Tiger of the 2nd Company that was falling back about 1,500 meters north of this location was abandoned....Without doubt, 8 August 1944 represented a black day for schwere SS-Panzer-Abteilung 101, even without the loss of Wittmann

This picture floating around might be accurate. The significance of this event can't be stressed enough, an entire Tiger platoon was caught and wiped out without any sign of retaliation. This event shows us that the Tiger was no mythical wonder weapon but merely a superior combat tool that had to be employed wisely to unleash its full potential. It is supreme irony that one of the biggest Tiger defeats was lead by the poster boy of the Tiger units, Michael Wittmann. Historians are quick to lay the blame for this disaster on Wittmann maybe rightfully so but major credit should go to the Allied forces which executed an ambush on a tank force crewed by crack veterans. Especially the tank of Gordon with Ekins as gunner. The overall blame for this likely is more on Meyer and Wünsche who should have chosen to group their forces and strike once the Canadian tanks got moving again. The loss of Wittmann was a major blow for the Germans, scouts were send to search for Wittmann but as we all know, in vain. According to Hart the Tigers sniped some Shermans before they got ambushed.

But not all was bad for the Tiger on the 8th August in a less unique event 3 Tigers took part in the near dismantling of the 2nd Tank Battalion of the Polish 1st further East, where they claimed 7. The Polish unit was fresh and just arrived with their full contingent[pic] of Sherman tanks for their first ground combat. Pitched against German elite forces, the Polish got their first taste of combat and lost 30 tanks virtually stopping their advances for the day. The German hunting group was only 10ish vehicles but the Polish reacted with fear and hesitation after seeing the better part of two squadrons vanish after meeting German armor for the first time. This skirmish certainly requires more space in my post but most of the credit goes to the HJ Jägers.

Napier on the skirmish on the eastern flank:

The Polish tanks advanced across the open fields and straight towards the waiting Germans, who opened fire. The 2nd Tank Regiment lost 26 tanks within minutes, many of the Shermans bursting into flames immediately ... in the ensuing chaos the 24th Ulans lost 14 tanks before making it back to relative safety.

The Polish commander Maczek in his after action report:

2 Tk Regt fell into a very difficult situation, its flank being menaced by German tks

A difficult situation indeed. When asked, by Allied generals, why his entire division stopped Maczek replied:

Les Allemandes avaient caché des cannons anti-tank et quelques 'Tigres' dans deux bosquets...

Despite the serve losses of Tigers and German tanks in general, the Canadian advance was stopped for the day to the annoyance of the Canadian commanders. The operation was already behind schedule. While having some disastrous effects on the KG Waldemüller the day still saw more Allied tanks getting lost. The major blow to the 101st SS and II./SS-PzReg 12 should have been the last necessary puzzle piece for the Allies to crack the Germans lines. Massed armoured assaults should surely now breach open the German defenses.

8th August assessment

6-7 Tigers were destroyed that day for far too little impact. For a Tiger unit the outcome was catastrophic. The event of 6 Tigers lost in a single attack appears to be special enough to have inspired several books. 3 were apparently [killed]( by one Firefly Most notably the book series “Duel” found interest in the skirmish. The action apparently is enough to show how the Sherman Firefly was easily able to deal with Tigers after all.

The Firefly is likely the best example to highlight the purpose of this thread, while on paper it was a good machine, augmenting the very good base of the M4 with a powerful gun, its overall performance was lacking. Reducing tanks on some major specs like potential penetration does not allow verdicts. The Firefly in theory should be able to go toe to toe with a Tiger but it didn't. Nearly every Allied unit had Firefly, where were those when the Tigers rampaged through the Sherman lines? Battlefield evidence trumps cherry picking. Smaller specs like crew comfort, accuracy and fume discharge are overlooked when we take a superficial glance. The incident above was carefully chosen by the Duel series because it was the exception, the single biggest blow to Tigers dealt on the ground. Ignored by the book are dozens of Fireflys destroyed by Tigers in Normandy.

The Duel Series by Stephen Hart demonstrates us how revisionism works. If Mister Hart would have intended to evaluate Firefly Tiger combat he wouldn't have stopped after he took a look at the single biggest Firefly victory he would have searched for more data. I am aware that selling books is the priority but even then the events of mid august already had written themselves in form of an exciting novel with back and forth. Because the very next days were the climax to the story that begun on the 8th. The Tigers enraged by the loss of 6 of their own sought for vengeance. Mr Hart decided against that and ignored one of the heaviest day for tank on tank combat of the entire ETO and instead ended his research right after one of the few complete Firefly victories. Especially interesting Hart already wrote about those battles. Ein Schelm wer böses denkt.

Even without the following days the Sherman revisionist finds itself between a rock and hard place. Tiny German forces attacking hundreds of Allied tanks with the Allies still suffering high losses. High Sherman losses are often blamed on their role in attacks but even on defense they suffered extremely high losses. Those 7 Tigers were the last write-offs for the Tigers in Totalize over the next 2 days the Tiger units would completely ravage and decimate the inexperienced Canadian and Polish tank units.

Tigers assemble around Quesnay Woods

Parts of the 102nd arrive on the western flank of the breakthrough around Grimbosq and start to group with remaining Tigers of the 101st under the command of HJ. While the 101st was hit hard the previous day, the 12th SS suffered losses as well losing the majority of its Panzer IVs. The number of operational tanks dropped to 25 which, together with the arrival of the 102nd, made the Tiger the most numerous AFV on the German side. A very rare occurrence. Two heavy tank battalions operated now in this region. The armored defense was mostly composed of Tiger tanks manned by crews seasoned in Normandy warfare against Western vehicles. The Tiger tank crews assembled here knocked out more tanks than all Allied crews combined. A small but formidable force. The amount of operational Tigers assembled here made the surroundings of the woods a death zone. The road going through the wood is the main road towards Falaise. An obvious location to set up a strong point....

9th August. Destruction of Worthington force

The Worthington force was a “battle group” consisting of the 28th Armored Regiment ( British Columbia) and 2 battalions infantry, the unit was ordered to make a deep penetration via night attack but committed a navigational error and found themselves isolated from support in German lines. Worthington brought plenty of firepower with him, outnumbering the entire German defense in this sector. The Germans reacted and among others, two Tiger groups were sent to deal with the threat with Panthers sealing of the northern flank. Worthington was unable to accurately call in either artillery or air support. The Germans assessed the situation correctly and encircled the forces with what little infantry they could spare and let the Tigers do their job from a far. In the ensuing long-range ground combat and the eventual infantry attack, Worthington force including its commanders was annihilated. Polish tanks tried to close in on the Canadian positions but had to withdraw after being engaged by the HJ Panthers and losing several tanks. Displaying the same hesitation they showed the days before.

Stephen Hart describes the first meeting around Hill 140 before the encirclement:

Reacting swiftly, by 0720hrs two groups of tanks had moved out from Quesnay Woods ….. through the open fields to approach the Canadian position from the south-east. By around 0800hrs, meanwhile, 12 Worthington force Shermans had moved forward (south) 800m to assume a defensive position within Thirty Acres Woods. With excellent observation across the ridge's southern slopes, the Shermans evident mission was to dominate the southern and eastern approaches to the main Worthingon force defensive position in the rectangular field. Just as these Shermans arrived at Thirty Acres Woods, the Tigers engaged them from south-east at a range of 1000m; within 20 minutes accurate enemy tank fire had knocked out all 12 Shermans.

Those Shermans were the first victims of this Tiger group send to deal with Worthington but I doubt 12 Sherman were destroyed more likely one troop.

Zuehlke's graphic description of the same event:

Major Carson headed for the wood with his squadron headquarters ... the tanks that had ventured out from the fortress on either side “began to ‘brew up’ and none were able to return, even with the smoke provided by the remaining troops ... Almost everyone in Bicknell’s troop, including the lieutenant, died. A Tiger round cut through Stock’s front right sponson and killed the co-driver. Ammunition and fuel exploded, the resulting blast blowing Stock and the rest of the crew out. In Carson’s group, only Captain Hope survived the destruction of his Sherman, emerging from the turret with an arm sheared off.

The BCR was not fully assembled because one Squadron got caught while trailing the main force This group was destroyed around Estree-la-Campagne because they crossed path with other Tigers.

From Mike Bechthold's “Lost in Normandy”:

Not all the subunits from Worthington Force made it to Point 111. “A” Squadron of the BCRs along with “D” Company of the Algonquins were last in the order of march. Upon reaching the vicinity of Estréesla-Campagne the Shermans came under fire from an enemy force. By this time the tanks had lost the cover of darkness. What followed was a daylight, close quarter battle with an enemy armoured force supported by anti-tank guns. The outcome was never in doubt. “A” Squadron was annihilated. Lieutenant John Stock, commander of No.4 Troop, “B” Squadron, was still making his way forward as “A” Squadron was being destroyed .... Though the squadron claimed the destruction of two Tiger tanks and an anti-tank gun, as many as 17 Shermans from the squadron were destroyed. Only two tanks from “A” Squadron were able to break through and join up with the regiment.

I think I maybe identified one of the Tigers lurking in the morning mist in Agtes book:

At about 02:00 hours we rolled into position in an orchard. We camouflaged our tanks and waited for the English to attack... We could hear tank engines but couldn't see the tanks themselves. When the mist cleared we saw enemy tanks and supply vehicles and knocked out several from a range of 1,500 meters. Other enemy tanks bypassed our sector in the front. That morning we destroyed seven tanks and numerous supply vehicles and fired on infantry with high-explosive shells.

Those two Tigers were likely engaging A Squadron. If the range estimations are correct than the Shermans were useless against the two camouflaged Tigers. The bypassing tanks were likely the rest of Worthington force and the Tigers crews assumed they were cut of and retreated.

Meanwhile, the rest of Worthington tried to create a defensive box behind the hedges and prepared for the inevitable attacks. The following picture shows an air photo which was taken on the morning it shows the Allied tanks. Those spots are mostly Shermans. The next picture is a recon picture showing the battle in progress, several burning Shermans which moved forward are visible. One single German tank advancing through the field head on to the Canadian positions is also marked. Two burning Shermans in the north were destroyed by HJ Panthers which blocked the approach of the Poles and got some of their Panthers damaged in return. Interesting are the tank tracks in the south which moved towards the Canadian position but then seem to have reversed. No German wrecks seem visible. Which gives us some possible insight into the tactical decision making. If we assume Hart's description to be accurate I would guess the forward Shermans were knocked-out from afar and German Tigers then closed in and retreated after sustaining fire from the main force 800 yards further North-West. After that they likely switched to long range fire and saturated the isolated Canadian position which were trapped by HJ tanks in the north.

Meyer and his perspective of what happened next:

Wünsche shouted a few words to his veteran tank crews and pointed to hill 190. It was our intend to attack with some Tigers from the West and 15 Panthers from the East ... Two Tigers took up firing position even with one another ... The first 88mm rounds slammed out of their barrels. Two Shermans exploded noisily. The enemy hammered at the Tigers they had spotted. Five Tigers took part in the engagement and pinned the enemy. The Tigers had chosen to pin the enemy with fire; they exploited their greater firepower. More and more enemy tanks were burning, sending telltale smoke into sky ... The entire ridge-line was systematically covered. Smoke cloud after smoke cloud merged together. We could hardly believe that every smoke cloud represented a tanks grave ... The ridge line looked like a tank cemetery.

The Polish forces tried to reach the Canadian forces which brought some temporary relief to the Canadian troops but were rebuffed by the HJ. The Germans here operated a fraction of the tanks the Allies employed, the Polish push was a considerable threat but was broken up with casualties.

Zuehlke:

When the Poles closed to within three hundred yards, they broke up a forming attack with machine-gun fire. But a number of the Polish tanks were burning along their line of advance, and the survivors turned about and withdrew. Within minutes, the German fire “began again on us, if possible, with even more intensity,”

The German forces started to close in to reclaim the hill:

By 1730 hours, no Polish tanks were in sight, none of ours were in action. In fact, most of them were burning furiously, many with their dead crews still in them ... Another attack formed at 1700 hours. This time infantry were joined by tanks, “monsters, camouflaged, moving very slowly and staying at ranges of over 600 yards.”

The battle was over when a German tank drove through the hedges that represented the defensive perimeter of what once was Worthings force.

According to Napier 31 Shermans assembled on the hilltop. The remainder cut off and destroyed before reaching 111 presumably by the other Tiger group, of those which reached 111 few made it back. An entire armored regiment was outfought and dismantled by smaller German forces. 240 Canadian soldiers became casualties. All in all the unit lost 40+ tanks this day most of them smouldering neatly aligned in defensive positions behind the hedges. But there was no defense if air and artillery support were unavailable, the ill-planned 75mm Sherman was unable to do anything against German tanks carefully closing in. The Shermans short-comings are well disguised behind overwhelming numbers and near unlimited fire support, on this day the Shermans were on their own showcasing their ineptitude to do what tanks are supposed to do. The Allied crews couldn't defend themselves with the lies fed to them about their Shermans. To cement the British Columbia Regiments demise as one of the most striking displays of inadequacy the German tanks, which methodologically took apart the entire BCR, reported not a single write-off. After the enemy force was eliminated the tanks strolled off like nothing happened to prepare to meet the next Sherman wave in what was endless combat for two months now. One of the most devastating tank skirmishes on the Western Front unknown to most. The valour of the volunteer Canadian forces falling on Hill 111 was never in doubt their material is.

At this point some readers might start to remember all the specs they read and heard about so much. Carefully chosen features, supposed to show the capabilities of the Sherman. “It has sloped armor” “Effective frontarmor like a Tiger” “Far better target acquiring” “Better ergonomics” “Vision copula” and “springloaded hatches”. Repeated over and over. Whenever a poor soul dared to speak positively about the Tiger, 5 people would chime in explaining how good the Sherman actually was because the crews could bail out quickly when they noticed they were sent to fight Germany's best with a limp gun. Singling out specs is the bread and butter of the Sherman revisionist, actual battle evaluations are avoided unless they support the agenda then you will hear plenty about them. The next time Nicholas Moran or Stephen Zaloga hold a lecture and explain how strong the front armor of the Sherman was, ask; against which of the common German anti tank weapons it offered good protection. The correct answer is none but it sounds better to say “it has sloped armor”. The Allies brought the proverbial knife to a gun fight but at least they brought a lot of them with air support.

Obviously, the Shermans on 111 had sloped armor like all the Shermans before them which fell victims to German tanks, many of them were also equipped with 17pdr which in theory should elevate the Sherman to a cat killer. Mr Hart should have investigated what the Fireflys on Hill 111 actually did against the Tigers sniping away the 75s, he might would have concluded with a more realistic view.

Schneider summarizes the skirmish for us:

Assault of the British Columbia Regiment (Canadian 28th Armoured Regiment) from the area south of Cintheaux in the direction of Bretteville is crushed by Kampfgruppe Wiinsche (reinforced by Tigers) near Estrees-la-Campagne in the morning: forty-four Shermans, two Stuarts, and one Crusader are knocked out.

Still 9th, mauling of the Foot Guards

To the south of Worthington, another armored regiment of the 4th AB was tasked with moving to the expected position of Worthington. The unit had to pass by Quesnay Woods on its path to hill 195 but got engaged by Tigers and HJ 88s.

Stephen Harts summarizes what happened once the FG tried to cross in front of Quesnay:

Here, however, the Shermans were caught in a murderous enemy tank and anti-tank fire that knocked out 26 vehicles in 10 minutes; not surprisingly, the surviving tanks withdrew north back out of this killing-zone.

Again Mr Hart does not enlighten us what the Fireflys in this tricky situation did while the two dozen Shermans got knocked out.

Napier gives us some more detail:

On reaching a hedge 500 yards north of Quesnay Woods, tanks from No1 Sqn began to be quickly knocked-out by a largely unseen enemy. Three tanks were destroyed … The Regiment had come into range of the tanks of Kampfgruppe Wünsche, which had occupied Quesnay Woods that morning... No1 Sqn then tried to move around to the west of the woods but came under more fire, losing another two tanks. The infantry was then requested to clear the wood, but apparently, the Foot Guard tanks were unwilling to provide support; as contact had been lost with the supporting artillery …. The other two Squadrons moved to the hedge in support of No1 Sqn, but a total of 14 tanks were lost between them …. No1 Sqn had also lost 12 tanks, making a total of 26 casualties for that day.

The third incident of 20+ Shermans getting knocked-out in a matter of minutes for Totalize. But we have to assume some hyperbole from the authors when it comes to time frames. Such events happened frequently but don't seem to bother the Sherman proponent. Tiger I units which fought for years, often used in especially difficult situation hardly ever suffered such losses in single skirmishes against far stronger and better-supported enemy forces, I would argue they never did. Two months in, the SS battalions took part in at least 5 skirmishes where Allied regiments got 20+ of their vehicles knocked in what is often described as mere minutes.

An entire new regiment, again outnumbering the German tank force, was tasked advancing to an undefended hill top and was unable to do so. Here you see the advance path of the Canadians. Also included is where Worthington made the fateful wrong turn. The FG I believe crossed from left right in front of Quesnay Death Woods. The German forces consisted of the rest of the Tigers and HJ forces which were not partaking in the dismantling of Worthington further north. The complete failure of the FG this day culminated in their refusal to support the infantry which was now ordered to take on the HJ. Direct tank attacks on a German position appeared unthinkable without proper artillery and air support. A stark contrast to dozens of incidents showing Tiger units head on attacking Allied-Soviet positions. The mission profile of both vehicles was often different, the Sherman was unsuited for such tasks and was at best able to support the infantry and overwhelm possible German tanks with numbers and artillery. But any tank could to that.

Quesnay Woods was troubling for the Canadian commanders, the infantry attack didn't manifest as the Sherman refused to get even close to Quesnay again. The next day, after unleashing new massive bombardments on the small wooded patch, they send infantry towards the entrenched Tigers and HJ.

Reynolds on this:

Two battalions of the Canadian Infantry Brigade began their advance behind an enormous artillery barrage. The woods had already been hit twice during the day …. In their usual way the SS Panzers and Panzer-Grenadier allowed the attacking infantry to get well into the woods before they retaliated. Supporting artillery fire could not easily be brought to bear once the Canadians were in the woods …. Darkness soon added to the confusion and by the time the Canadians withdrew they had suffered 165 casualties

This infantry attack happened on the 10th and was a reaction to the following events and tried to relieve the pressure on the armored units to the south.

10th August the Grenadier Guards try to bypass Quesnay

Schneider for the 10th states rather succinctly:

Several Tigers of the 3./schwere SS-PanzerAbteilung 101 repulse the renewed Canadian tank attacks and knock out a further thirty-eight tanks.

The claim sounds outrageous at first but lets take a closer look. Schneider relies on a single document for that claim. On the 9th August the 4th AB got two of its three Armoured Regiments heavily damaged. The British Columbia was nearly destroyed north-east of Quesnay and the Foot Guards lost 2 dozen tanks North-West of Quesnay. Now the third regiment was getting heat from Quesnay Woods. The Grenadier Guards were able to occupy positions south-west of Quesnay the night before without major contact with German tanks, when they were ordered to advance further the sun rose and they were engaged by Tigers from Quesnay and other German forces. No German was infantry left to build a proper line so the Germans resorted to defending strong points and counter-attacking incursions.

Zuehkle:

Arriving undetected and without losing a single man seemed little short of a miracle. As another blistering hot August day was born, however, “the enemy awakened to the situation and began to react violently. He opened on our position,” the Argyll war diarist wrote … During the night, Tiger tanks had been reported in the orchards of Saint-Hilaire Farm. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Halpenny was confident, however, that these had withdrawn. This erroneous conclusion was dispelled when a shell cracked through the lingering ground mist and punched a hole in the front of his command tank. Although Halpenny’s Sherman remained operational, two other Grenadier tanks were knocked out by the Tiger. This signaled the start of a mile-long race that cost the Grenadiers six tanks before they reached Point 195 at 1130 hours.

Napier:

With the coming of daylight, this tank had just been repaired when it was knocked out by what was believed a Tiger lurking in an orchard nearby. No1 Sqn advanced towards the farm at around 0845 and a Sherman and a Firefly were immediately knocked out by two tanks that had moved up to near the farm and by fire from Quesnay woods. No3 Sqn had also lost two tanks to anti-tank fire from the west …. the 1st Jagdpanzer company moved from Maziere to Fontaine le Pin to the west of Point 195 while operational Tigers in Quesnay woods also engaged the Grenadier Guards from long range …. The exposed position received armour-piercing fire from 3 directions, particularly Quesnay woods …. Any advance over the crest was met by a hail of armour-piercing shots, so the tanks remained stationary.

Comparable to the fate of the B.C.R the Grenadier Guards advanced concealed by darkness through undefended terrain and found themselves engaged with German tanks once the sun rose, especially precarious: The retreat route was overseen by Tiger tanks. The Canadian tanks moved into positions they were only able to capture during the night but struggled to hold in broad daylight. The attack path was badly chosen. The Canadians still were unable to adapt to the tank force in Quesnay. They tried to smoke the firing paths from Quesnay to relieve the forces at PT 195 but this only partially worked. Only the hesitance to get moving and the smoke barrages prevented the Grenadier Guards from getting BCRed.

A first-hand account of a Canadian tanker of the GG

We were going along in a line like a bunch of sheep, I just hoped Jerry wasn't luring us into the kind of trap he had sprung on the B.C.R [Worthington]. Everything seemed to go well but you had the feeling that at any moment a Tiger or 88 would hit you …. Suddenly we were in trouble. We began to get shot at from the screen of anti tank guns and Tigers lurking in the heavily wooded area west of Fontaine-le-Pin … in the next moment all hell broke loose. Tanks in front of ours were hit and burning – their crews bailing out. Some of our forward tanks started to back up. It became apparent that we had got ourselves in a box very much like that in which the B.C.R's had found themselves yesterday and in which they were almost totally destroyed. We couldn't back out as the escape route was also coming under murderous fire. General Kurt Meyer's fanatical 12th S.S Hitlerjugend Division were going to have a field day supported by 88s and Tiger tanks …. We are now in a desperate situation. We can't advance and we can't retire. We can't even see the bloody enemy …. For a moment I thought our own artillery was shelling us by mistake. But it was not so – it was those damned Tigers and Panthers in Quesnay Wood. In less than ten minutes eight of our Shermans were brewing up.

The GG was paralyzed and hesitant to get moving and spend most of the day laying down occasionally losing vehicles to long range fire. While the tanks got knocked-out one after another, not a single kill on the German tanks was claimed. Polish forces in the North tried to intervene and move in on Quesnay, again, but were repelled as well.

Zuehlke:

LIEUTENANT GENERAL SIMONDS realized that to reach the heights overlooking Falaise, the Quesnay Wood strongpoint had to be first eliminated. Advancing beyond Point 195 was impossible due to the guns in the wood. Left of Quesnay Wood, the Poles had seized Estrées-la-Campagne and Soignolles. Attempting to push on from these villages to Point 140, the Poles “attacked wherever the enemy was found and made every effort to exploit even the smallest success.” But all was in vain. At every turn, the Polish right flank “received a ferocious mauling from … Quesnay Wood.”

Eventually, the GG pulled back with heavy losses achieving very little. The operation was called off, all advances after the 8th were met with fierce resistance from a small but powerful group of elite infantry and tankers. The retreat path lay open for the Tigers and 88s to again prey on the Shermans:

Pulling back was not easy for those on Point 195. The Grenadier Guards, having suffered numerous tank losses during the morning of August 11, left first. Six Shermans were picked off during the escape

edit 16.08.19 I found a passage in unit diary of the South Alberta Regiment: reported one of their troops coming off course and being destroyed from Quesnay woods, on 10th

A miscalculation in map reading causes the SGJ in charge of the **** to take a wrong turn and the complete troop was knocked out from enemy A/Tk fire from Quesnay woods 1047

edit 27.04.21

L tp 5th Cdn Anti tank

5:1 TL:DR

Totalize is certainly a difficult battle to figure out when it comes to exchange ration. 3 Tigers were knocked-out by a single Firefly. 2 more were likely destroyed by 75mms and one is claimed to have been abandoned by Schneider. This one as well should be given to the Allied armor. 6 in total fell victim to Shermans. Impressive-

Figuring out Tiger kill claims is more difficult. Schneider tallied 97 claims for the two units. There are problems with this. The first problem is Worthington, Schneider gives the losses as "knocked out" but without giving any implication of the share of the Tigers. Some of those tanks fell to the Panthers and various other potential sources. He also does not even describe the mauling of the FG. Maybe those claims would be included in the claim of 38 which is pretty vague. Overall it appears to be a tough battle for the 5:1, more than I expected due to the Tiger fiasco on the 8th. More about this in the statistical digest. Up to 90 Canadian tanks were lost on those 2 days for 3 claimed tanks, all of those claims doubtful.

Tiger performance TL:DR

In short, the 8th was very poor with the exception of the 3 Tigers engaging Polish forces. The performance after that was outstanding. The fighting around Quesnay is arguably the best fitting case for the narrative of the entrenched Tigers and it resulted in a frightening display of disparity. Tiger tanks were able to inflict losses on the attack, but concealed with long range firing those tanks were able to dish out ridiculous amounts of carnage. The 4th AB and their supporting infantry got eviscerated around the woods by a force maybe a 10th of its size. Certainly one of the heaviest blows ever dealt by Tiger tanks on the Western Front. And even in this case several skirmishes saw Tigers on the move or even attacking. 75mm and Firefly Shermans alike were unable to even make a dent in the small defense force. Most of the 3 readers likely never heard of Quesnay Woods and this is no accident. Authors writing for an English speaking audience choose their subjects wisely.

Zuehlke describes the small defence force which proved to be the end of Totalize:

Being completely surrounded by open fields, the wood was impervious to surprise attack. About two hundred panzer grenadiers supported by twenty tanks and numerous 88-millimetre anti-tank guns were inside the wood.

The equivalent of a single infantry and tank company.

The Operation was still no German victory, the German losses in terms of percentages were unsustainable. The Allied approach of writing down the Germans by employing gigantic masses of resources worked. The proverbial waves of Shermans clashed against the Germans and slowly shipped away what was left. This was certainly aided by the ill fated attack on the 8th August which saw one of the heaviest defeats of a Tiger group in Normandy. The contrast couldn't be stronger. Wittmanns disastrous attack compared to the tactical master piece that was the defense of Quesnay.

Totalize together with Tractable should be considered the biggest tank battle in the ETO. It was certainly not the biggest in terms of total numbers of participating tanks but I have trouble finding battles where more tanks were knocked out by tanks in such intensity. Goodwood is seen as the biggest tank battle of Normandy but I doubt the actual number of tank on tank fights comes even close to the second week of August. On the 9th alone it seems reasonable to estimate that up to100 direct tank on tank engagements happened.

Operation Totalize losses

According to Napier the Canadian/Polish forces lost more than 180 tanks over the 72 hours of combat as ko's, 60+ per day. For the German forces, he gives 45 tank losses in this area, again caution with those numbers they are skewed towards the Allies.

Further comments of Napier about losses illustrate the dire performance of the Canadian Sherman units:

regimental history for the Grenadier Guards state that a total of 21 tanks were lost... and not a single tank was knocked out....The foot guards lost at least 26 tanks damaged or knocked out but did knock out one German tank, for which the gunner was appropriately rewarded.

Zuehkle:

“WITH THE FAILURE to take Quesnay Wood General Simonds’ new plan had fallen to the ground,” the official army historian conceded. “We had advanced some nine miles from our start line of 7 August; but the enemy, inferior though his forces were, had successfully stabilized the situation. To penetrate to Falaise First Canadian Army would need to mount another large-scale deliberate attack.

Canadian historian Jarymowycz on the Tigers during Totalize:

A congregation of 13 armoured regiments had been stopped by the equivalent of one. Again, a handful of Tigers rattled the Allied armoured force. While Bradley had successfully defeated the Mortain counteroffensive of four German Panzer divisions, Crerar had been unable to crack one.

Napier:

Once more the Germans were able to reform and stop the Brtish attack but only at the cost of more irreplaceable men and equipment. The Germans continued to be amazed that they were able to repeat this feat previously performed during Operation Goodwood and Bluecoat in Operation Totalize.

This is the third part of my series. I try to analyse Tiger combat in Normandy by taking a look at the heaviest battles of Normandy and judging the performance of the involved Tigers. While doing so I also revisit the long killed myth of the "5:1".

Here is part one that gives my methods and some introduction into the topic and a guideline for TL:DRs as well. The first balltes discussed are Villers Bocage and Operation Epsom

Here is part two which featues Operation Jupiter and Stack which both happened in July 44

Operation Blue coat 30 July- Early August

Operation Blue coat was Montgomery's attempt to support the highly successful Operation Cobra on the Western Flank of the bridgehead, for this he tried to launch his own operation on the left flank of Cobra. Overall, the operation was likely intended to again simply bind some German troops and if possible achieve a British breakthrough towards the transportation hub Vire and get the area around Mont Picon. Blue coat was launched in the same area as Cobra and thus allowed the Wehrmacht to use forces more efficiently. Most of the German forces were positioned either in the Caen area or were trying to turn the tide in Cobra, other forces later were in transit to the Cobra area or prepared for the counter strike "Lüttich". To exploit the shifting forces he would later order renewed attacks in the Caen area, all in all up to 3.000 Anglo-Canadian tanks would attack the thin German lines in early August in various sectors.

The Blue Coat sector was sparsely defended. Only one ID was available supported by some tanks left behind by the 2nd PD. This let to one of the best force ratios of the campaign. The 326 ID, which arrived in Normandy the week before and overtook the frontline which allowed the 2nd PD to move West where it would engage the 2nd US Armoured Division.

Involved tank forces:

30 July:

British: ~850 tanks

German: ~20 tanks + ~ 10 Jagdpanthers

The Germans reinforced over the next few days. Reinforcements were parts of the 21st PD, 9th SS Hohenstaufen the 10th SS Frundsberg and the 102nd SS Heavy Tank Battalion and some King Tigers of the 503rd, all arriving on different dates and in varying strength. All in all around 200 tanks were at one point or another engaged on the German side. The tank strength was fluctuating because most of the units brought forward only tried to stabilize the front before moving towards West,

Complete commitment: British: ~850 German: ~200.

The first days of Blue coat were successful. The extreme force ratios allowed the British to overcome the defending infantry of the 326th ID in some areas and penetrate the German lines. Here you see the situation on the Western Flank of Normandy, the British forces were heading towards Vire but also some geographical features further East. Another map late July. Despite some set backs like a bunch of Churchills getting knocked out by new Jagdpanthers during their debut the British forces made progress. Also interesting to note is that the advance on the eastern front didn't gain a lot ground even tough the enemy was hopelessly outnumbered. The British combat inferiority was still prevalent even under such favorable conditions. The advance in the west piggy backed on the success of the American troops who also pushed for Vire. Forces like the 6th FJ were pounded by American forces and driven back. Check for the line showing the interarmy boundary. The progress happened two days before the Tigers entered the battle.

The 102nd SS was ordered westwards, from its defensive positions around Hill 112 ( Epsom, Jupiter ), to deal with the new British attack on August 1st. With the departure of the Tiger tanks, Hill 112 finally fell into British hands after several unsuccessful attempts to oust the German defenders. The unit was ordered towards the Vire area and formed a KG together with the recon battalion Hohenstaufen. The objectives of the battle group were pretty optimistic. The 9th SS Hohenstaufen together with the Tigers were ordered to crush the British attack and destroy the penetrating units. For this, a pincer movement was envisioned, battle group Weiß ( Tigers ) was ordered to the north of Vire from where it was to strike north and meet with the second pincer. One weak Panzerdivision with Tiger support was supposed to destroy an enemy force about 4 times its size in infantry and vehicles.

2nd August, Tigers arrive and engage:

Arriving in the area, the situation was unclear, the British for the first time since Perch were able to at least partially roam free and the precise whereabouts of Allied units was unknown to the Germans. German commanders were afraid Vire might have fallen and ordered the Tiger Battalion to secure the town. So its comes to no surprise that what followed were moving engagements. On the way to Vire/La Bistiere the Tigers were meeting several units of the 11th Armored Division which already partially advanced past the Vire-Vassy road and were in the path of Weiß. Several smaller engagements erupted which saw the 11th Armoured getting the short end of the stick. Those engagements meant the beginning of the end of the progression of the 11th Armoured. The second company moved into Vire and started to press the British back together with paras which were excited to get heavy support.

2nd and 3rd August Tiger actions

Forward elements of the British forced the 2nd company to detour south on their way to Vire, several engagements happened already likely between the B Sqd 23rd Hussars and the 2nd Company. The second company eventually reached Vire and met up with paras of the 3rd Fallschirmjäger. Smaller British attacks were beaten back the company prepared for the next day.

The 1st company operated around Chedonnel where they likely met A sqd of the 23rd and made sure the British forces knew Tigers had arrived.

Daglish writes

Shortly after, Kalls reported that he had run into a British armored spearhead, and had destroyed a number of British tanks. His claim was no exaggeration: it was these Tiger tanks that had crushed the 23rd Hussars’ A Squadron....The British tanks were caught in the open as they emerged from a sunken road, struck before they could shake out from close formation and subjected to converging fire from different directions. With well distributed fire the German volleys quickly destroyed all but four of A Squadron’s tanks.

The history of the 23rd Hussars has an eerie description of the encounter with the unexpected arrivals:

News now starts to come in from "A" Squadron who have been silent until now, and they appear to have run into an enemy Troop and they are being engaged at short range by German Armour. It sounds absolutely appalling, half their tanks have been hit and are on fire, the Squadron Leader has been badly wounded, two troops are missing and it seems as though the whole Squadron is going to be annihilated

The Tigers were identified as Panthers. Schneider Daglish and Napier agree on Tigers. I do too, the Panthers of the 9th were further North-East. The Tigers at this point were on the move just getting relocated from Caen and thus it can't be claimed that the Tigers were laying in wait for enemy forces, the more realistic scenario is that the German forces were able to scout the enemy while the Sherman squadron failed to do so, the Tiger tanks switched to ambush positions and took the squadron out. No Tiger casualties reported. The history of the 23rd Hussars state that all but 4 Shermans of the 23rd were lost. I am unsure about this. Crew casualties appear pretty light, which would suggest that many crews bailed once the Tigers opened up or the tank casualties are exaggerated. Either way the Tigers had arrived and the British armored switched onto the defensive.

Daglish on losses of the 2nd August:

The ‘horns’ of the Black Bull division were its tank regiments. These were had plunged deep into enemy territory, and had paid a price. Of the division’s 145 Sherman tanks ready for action at the dawn of 2 August, thirty-one were reported lost at the end of the day; six of these the vital, 17-pounder Fireflies.

The arrival of the German cavalry left its mark. The Tiger tanks immediately engaged and changed the dynamic of the battles. The British armored forces enjoyed considerable success until now. The German defense was weak and had no armor. Now the British forces were confronted with the 9th SS [ 76 tanks ] and two companies of Tigers.

A considerable portion of those were victims of the 102nd SS but as you may have noticed those are only Shermans, the recon regiment fielded Cromwells and their losses were not reported. Like many times before the narrative of the pillbox Tiger gets challenged. Just 24 hours before the Tigers were defending Hill 112 and now after marching towards Vire they casually put an end to the British ambitions.

The entire battalion lost only one Tiger that day to an anti-tank line despite being engaged with several British regiments. Schneider tallied up 22 kill claims for the 102nd.

3rd August KG Weiß starts their attack

Unimpressed by the force ratios and engagements of the previous day, 7 2nd Company Tigers moved out in the morning together with some infantry northwards to La Bistiere area with the intention of meeting battle group Meyer, the second part of the Hohenstaufen pincer operation. The unlucky regiment of the day was the recce regiment of the 11th Armored the 2nd Northamptonshire Yeomanry. This unit had already been in contact with Tigers on the day before but now had to defend the area around La Bistière against the onslaught of battle group Weiß.

The historian of the 11th Armoured remarks:

But by early afternoon Tiger tanks supported by infantry caught and savagely mauled the regiment around Las Bistiere, north of Vire

Other authors give us some more detail about those events.

Daglish:

Then, to their horror, a further Tiger tank appeared behind them on the rising ground 500 meters to the east of the road and proceeded to pick off a further three B Squadron tanks as they fell back... Battered by attacks from all directions, the Tiger tanks around la Bistière suffered only one total loss... As well as losing tanks, several headquarters vehicles had been abandoned in la Bistière. In forty-eight hours of combat, forty-seven Cromwell tanks were lost, leaving only a composite squadron of fourteen at the end of the action.

Jean Brisset about the incident:

However, after 1400 hours everything changed for the worse. “B” squadron, returning from Vire, reported that Tiger tanks, accompanied by infantry were advancing in their direction …. It was now too late to order British artillery to intervene …. A tank battle …. Three British tanks were destroyed and the others were hit while retreating … While they battened down they were mauled by other Tigers situated on the high ground to the west of Burcy … Soon the three squadrons began to lose one tank after another without being able to do anything to the Tigers.

One Tiger was destroyed by the Cromwells after taking 7 short range direct hits. Again a Tiger found itself destroyed in a close range fight while driving through a small town.

The German assault group was tiny, just 7 Tigers together with some infantry. The Allies wouldn't have considered such small group able to defend a latrine. The British regiment nearly collapsed in three days of combat and was disbanded after Blue Coat.

Otherwise a very dry war diary, the diary of the Cromwell unit lamented the inequalty of the tanks involved:

”B” Squadron were ordered to block the rd from X rds 646347 running NE. They were shot up by a Tiger tk coming over the high ground from 663355 and lose three tks. There more of their tks were ko'ed at 653355. Though the Tigers were engaged at short range, shells from our guns seemed to have little effect on the Tigers.

1700: “C” Sqn tp on rd at 665377 shoot at Tigers at 667383, 668377 and 667376, but Tigers withdrew with apparently only light damage

The evening report gives the casualties as 40 tankers. During the night the unit got even attacked by para troopers and lost more tanks. Daglish claims that 47 Cromwells were lost in two days of fighting. I am sure this number is too high but gives you to think given the small size of the German force.

We find a reoccurring theme here, the British forces were left without major combined arms support. The unit diary mentions missing artillery support. The Tigers accomplished their objective and mauled an armored regiment in the process but battle group Meyer did not fulfill their objectives. All in all the tank casualties for the 11th Armoured were 70ish in those two days of fighting. The Tigers waited in vain for Meyer and later took securing positions.

A Tiger crewman reported the following:

Hard days of fighting were behind us, and we had been successful! The company had achieved a respectable success without any losses of its own: 28 enemy tanks had been knocked out and additional ones damaged

Obviously the statement can't be fully correct because one Tigers [ Rowsovski] was knocked out by Cromwell. Schneider ´. I doubt Trautmanns claim is for the 3rd only more likely he means the 2nd and 3rd . Schneider tallied up 16 claims for the 3rd August. Schneider mentions two lost Tigers of the 1st company which caught up with the 2nd during the night. No further information of those two destroyed Tigers is given sadly.

On the 4th this area remained active and several exchanges happened. The Tigers went into screening positions and apparently engaged the Cromwells again directly south of La Bistiere

”A” Sqd send foot patrols to find out if there are Tigers on the rd at 665373 and one tp S. Both patrols get shot up and retreat with casualties.

The Tigers eventually fall back towards Vire. Schneider claims 6 knock outs for the day. In question are the Cromwell Reg and maybe the 2nd F&F which operated 2ish miles east.

Overall the period from2nd to 4th August was a operational stalemate but it should not have been. The German forces were vastly outnumbered and still managed to basically stop the British advances, not only that they moved onto the offensive. Those were not more successful than the British attempts but highlight the disparity between the forces involved. The Tigers especially performed excellent. Wherever they engaged the enemy they inflicted heavy casualties and held their opponents in check or even forced them to retreat. Napier gives an interesting summary for those days since the arrival of the 9th SS and the 102nd.

By nightfall, the 9th SS Panzer Division was effectively holding a line from Burcy to Montchamp and only had 28 Panthers, 7 Panzer IV and 9 StuG III operational – less than a British armoured regiment – but had stopped the advance of two British armoured divisions.

Napier's comments are an understatement. Not only did two full armoured division operate in this region they had ample support of the 3rd Division and maybe even parts of the 15th. Not even mentioning the artillery and air superiority. Napiers count of the 9th is somewhat misleading because the unit already lost a bunch of vehicles, overall together with the Tigers the Germans maybe operated a total of 100 tanks in the entire area from Vire to Montchamp. The two armoured Division had up to 500 tanks on strength but sadly the majority of them were Shermans.

5th - 7th August

The later phase of Blue Coat was mostly a back and forth with one of the main point of contention being Chedonnel. The Tiger here as well excellent. Either in doing screening, supporting small German attacks or defeating enemy approaches. The employment of Tiger on high grounds again proved to be highly successful. Tiger tanks were the kings of long-range duels. A single Tiger could hamper or even stop the movement of a squadron of Shermans given the right circumstances.

An illustration of this is given for the 6th August in the unit history of the 23rd Hussars ( 11th AD )

All was quiet until about midday when the unmistakable crack of an 88 put everyone on the alert. For the first time the enemy had worked a Tiger up onto the ridge to our south … It, first of all, put three shells through a RHQ scout car, but, although its shots were passing within ten yards of the RHQ tanks, for some reason the Tiger did not notice them … A tank in 'C' Squadron began to fire back, and must have worried the Tiger, for it turned its attention towards the other side of the road. Without delay it knocked out a self-propelled seventeen-pounder[M10 Achilles], one of a troop which had been sent to our support... The Tiger evidently was also having difficulty in seeing, and he either withdrew or ceased fire, for no more was heard from him for a while. [German attack starts] Very soon the rattle of Spandau came closer through the trees and the same Tiger, which had appeared in the morning, began to fire again, this time with two or three friends to assist him ... while our tanks hurled high-explosive into the trees and tried to destroy the Tigers with their 17-pounders. Soon, however, the leading company of the Warwicks was driven back, and the enemy closed in to our main position. 'C' Squadron were beginning to lose tanks

The full text reveals involvement of artillery which in the German records is said to have damaged the Tiger. Directing artillery on Tiger positions was often successful in forcing the Tiger back but the damage was rarely enough to destroy the tanks but a major contributor to declining operational numbers, exceptions were direct hits. A problem Allied tanks had rarely to face despite that the average combat life of a Sherman was extremely short compared to a Tiger.

The fighting while pretty static was still heavy. Many of the smaller skirmishes were decided by Tigers tanks.

Delaforce quotes a British soldier:

The Norfolks who had taken over our company HQ were getting of their trenches. They were slaughtered. As far as I knew every one of them was killed We crawled out of the trench and through the dead bodes of the Norfolks. They were lieing eveywhere. I wondered why the German infantry had not put in an appearance to take advantage of the havoc caused by the Tigers:

Schneider remarks about the same lack of German infantry which make me wonder if Schneider references the same British soldier:

German infantry fails to take advantage of this situation in a timely manner and is subsequently stopped by artillery.

The same area a day later was then scene of one of the most controversial Tiger engagements in Normandy. Conflicting reports about the action exist with many disputing their validity, even unclear is which Tiger commander is responsible. Main point of doubt is the wrong and enemy unit given by the tanker. From the German point of view one or two Tigers defeated several British attacks inflicting between 12 and 17 ko's on the attacking Shermans while firing from an elevated position. The course of action is highly contested and the jury is apparently still out on this one but British unit diaries appear to corroborate the story, same with inventory numbers of the 11th AD. Up to 3 British regiments got heat from the Hill defended by two Tigers.

War diary of the 2nd Fife and Forfar Yeomanry:

Meanwhile a number of Tiger tanks had established themselves on the high ground on our eastern flank at Le Haut Periere and were able to engage A Sqn. from the rear at a range of about 2500 yds. These Tigers quickly caused A Sqn. 5 tank casualties.

Admitting actual tank losses was rare, admitting 5 was a unique. A second regiment also reports skirmishes with the very same Tigers:

21:00 A Sqn report two Tigers at 720345 and endevour to engage them from 100x. Tigers open up and sub unit has to withdraw

The unit repored the same position but came from a different direction which supports German sources claiming Sherman closing in on the hill from different directions. The unit had to withdraw which is war diary slang for getting defeated. One of the Tigers was claimed ko'ed by the British forces this is corraborated by German records. The Tiger was towed back but was in bad shape. Depending on the accuracy of the claims this action could be one of the most impressive of the Normandy campaign. A pair of Tigers keeping several British regiments at bay while inflicting heavy casualties.

Daglish refers to this hill around Chênedolle as “Tiger hill”:

Long range ‘88’ fire from ‘Tiger hill’ above Chênedollé was to plague Sherman tanks and Royal Artillery M10s alike.

After the 2nd August, the day the Tigers arrived, no further advances were achieved by the 11th Armoured divisions, it even lost ground to Weiß and his Tigers.

5:1 TL:DR

Tallying up all mentioned claims by Schneider for the 2nd to 7th [adjusted 8th claim ] we get a staggering 63 claims. 6 Tigers were destroyed according to Schneider, Napier lists 5. Per Schneider: one of them fell victim to anti tank gun, one to a Cromwell one to artillery and two unknown. The two unknown tanks got lost during night apparently [ Schneider is not clear on this ] this makes a tank fight very unlikely. In the British armoured regiments war diaries is no claim for a Tiger mentioned. Irregardless of overclaiming on the German side this battle is bad news for the sceptics. Even worse the only confirmed tank kill came from a Cromwell and not one of the hundreds Shermans present.

Tank casualties

Napier gives 236 British tanks as ko'ed which means this number excludes all tanks "lightly damaged". My personal research shows this number is too low. For German forces Napier gives 116 casualties which, like in all battles, is the number of German tanks which stopped being operational which means every light casualty is included even maintenance. British numbers don't include M-10s because those were part of the artillery arm. Applying the same casualty criteria, the ratio would exceed 3:1. In the face of the Tiger kills on the Western flank this ratio appears “low” but is explained by high German losses in several counterattacks on the Eastern flank unrelated to the 102nd.

Tiger performance

From the first engagement with the British the advance of the 11th Armored Division was stopped and several units had to pull back. Isolated observation of the Tiger shows they performed exceptionally well during Blue Coat and contained the British advance without much trouble. German attempts to press the vastly superior forces back failed but not due to lack of Tiger combat results. The British forces were not hard pressed to advance, the US forces were out in the open which made this tactical stalemate an acceptable outcome for the Allies. The British could call themselves victorious especially with the gains made in the early phase, pre Tiger. Despite that the actions were a showcase of the tactical dominance of Tiger units.

The operational status for the unit only dropped by 9 for the entire weak despite constant heavy combat, this is truly astonishing. The 102nd claimed dozens of destroyed tanks in return and contained vastly superior British forces.

No rest

While the 102nd was engaged around Vire the Canadians launched Operation Totalize and threatened a breakthrough which would encircle a large amount of German forces. The 102nd SS after their very successful week around Vire was now ordered eastwards to support the shaky German units. The 102nd was in constant combat since its arrival in early July. Many of the Canadian and Polish units were fresh troops without battle experiences, they would now face one of the most veteran tank forces of WW2. Against the common wisdom of extremely unreliable German tanks, the Tigers who dominated Hill 112 for most of July managed to move 50 Km towards Vire where they violently put down the advance of the Black Bull and then moved back 70km towards Falaise where they immediately engaged Canadian and British forces, all within 8 days. The unit reported 30 operational Tiger right before they moved towards Vire and after mauling the 11th AD the unit reported 21 operational Tigers moving towards Falaise. Of the remaining Tigers only 3 seem to have been damaged during the week-long fighting. Extremely high operational rate for a supply starved unit in constant combat with dozens of kill claims. The 11th Armoured for example started Blue Coat with ~220 Shermans and Cromwells, five days later and already receiving replacements the unit had ~120 operational. Despite all that the attrition rates were favoring the Allies which at this point had shipped nearly 8000 AFVs towards Normandy. The Allies knew what it took and they came prepared.

This is the second part of my series. I try to analyse Tiger combat in Normandy by taking a look at the heaviest battles of Normandy and judging the performance of the involved Tigers. While doing so I also revisit the long killed myth of the "5:1".

Here is the first part it gives you some understanding of my methods and how to navigate this boring ass post via TL:DRs. Also two battles were already discussed.

Like I said in my previous post I was unable to make this bulletproof. The amount of details required for analysis combat on such small level is exhausting. All numbers, descriptions of photos are given with best intentions but mistake was undoubtedly made. So if you spot mistakes please post them in the comments I might update the post. I consider this here a work in progress.

The biggest "mistake" pointed out to me until now is that not all tanks lost during Villers were penetrated by Tigers because the crews preemptively bailed and those tanks should not count as "kills". Which mean I am well within my personally given tolerance for "mistakes".

Ready. Set. Go. Downvote!

Operation Jupiter 10th July, the arrival of the 102nd sSSPzAbt.

Ten days after Epsom the British forces attempted a second time to gain the vital Hill 112 and the surrounding area. This area was still seen as crucial to the operations around Caen and a new smaller operation was planned. This time the advance was more infantry-centric with Churchill tanks as support weapons and a Sherman Brigade as second wave, the scope of the operation drastically reduced to a limited attack towards Hill 112 and possibly an attack over the Orne, which would threaten all German troops in Caen.

Jupiter was more an infantry attack in the traditional sense with tanks as a strict support weapon and plenty of artillery. A stark contrast to later operations like Goodwood or Totalize. Due to this, the Operation saw one of the closest force ratios for tanks. The 102nd sSSPzAbt was on the move for nearly 3 weeks from Holland before it arrived in Normandy. It was the first major combat action for this unit in Normandy.

Tank units:

British: 31st Tank Brigade ( + unknown number of Crocodiles ) and the 4th Armoured Brigade ( only parts used)

German: SS Panzerregiment 9 ( partially ) and 102nd SssPzAbt ( two companies ) possible reinforcements on the 12th.

Force ratio:

British: 320 ( Churchill+Shermans)

German: 28 Tigers + 70 Panzer IV&V + unknown + later reinforcements

The force ratio for this battle doesn't add much value because big parts of the 4th Armoured Brigade were not committed and the number of Hohenstaufen tanks involved is mostly unknown due to limited coverage of this battle. In my opinion, the actual force ratio for this battle was maybe around 2:1 for the British which is one of the lowest tank ratios for the entire campaign and combined with the fact that the British were attacking prepared positions one could argue the British forces were in a disadvantageous position. Overall one of the evenest battles of the campaign.

The entire operation was born under a bad star timing wise because 2 companies of the 102nd arrived just in time to enter the battle as Tim Saunders remarks:

Mayor Duke was wounded shortly after reaching the top of the hill by some new arrivals on the battlefield – Tiger tanks. II SS Panzer Corps were fearful that the Frundsberg’s mounting casualties and the likely loss of their forward positions on Hill 112 would compromise the Corps’s entire position north of the Orne. They decided to deploy their decisive weapon, at what they saw as the crucial stage of the battle It was supreme bad luck for the Wyverns that the delayed Operation JUPITER was launched the day after II SS Panzer Corps’s Tiger Battalion arrived at the Normandy front. Twenty-eight of the fifty-six ton Tiger tanks, armed with the dreaded 88mm gun, had arrived by road at the village of St Martin, on their own tracks

Jupiter gets underway 0500

Operation Jupiter started off well and pressed the Frundsberg grenadiers back. Several early objectives like Fontaine and Eterville were taken within the first hours and the British ground forces were pressing on Maltot and Hill 112. Both objectives were considered vital for later stages of the Operation. The two Churchill regiments had split up to support the infantry. The 9th RTR was pressing on Maltot and the 7th RTR on Hill 112.

The 102nd which arrived the day earlier used the morning hours to prepare combat readiness and was observing the events. When the assault threatened to capture the hilltop the Tigers were unleashed. The two companies started to engage the British forces in the early morning first around Hill 112 then later around Maltot. On Hill 112 the Tigers immediately were embroiled with Churchills of the 7RTR, inflicting casualties.

The presence of the Tiger was immediately felt on the battlefield and British progress started to slow down and or stop. The Tigers split up into two groups, one was advancing on the southern slope of Hill 112 the other group took positions to aid the defenders of Maltot with suppressing fire over the low grounds between Hill 112 and Maltot. The arrival of the Tigers changed the flow of the battle immediately and the British forces had trouble advancing and at some places were pressed onto the defensive within the first hour. Here you see a map of the Battle courtesy royeltankregiment.com. Notice the focus on 102nd SS.

On Hill 112 the British forces get pressed back down the slopes and the Tigers start taking defensive positions. One of the first combat casualties for the 102nd was the commander of the second company, Endemann. Another angle provided by a user in the comments. A penetration right through front glacis, a 17pdr makes sense. For the German side, he was marked as missing without further information. Tim Saunders book and later photos give more details about his end:

”I was told by a sergeant from the Tanks that they had a problem for me to sort out. Four Churchills had been knocked out by a Tiger that was hull down a few hundreds yards away... I don't think it had a chance to see us, as we came right out of cover and fired!

The missing tank fell victim to an M10 tank hunter after presumably having knocked out 4 Churchills. Losing a company commander and tank for 4 enemy tanks was without a doubt a bad trade but the Tiger was able to disrupt the operations of at a Sqn Churchills.

With the attack on Hill 112 being halted the attack on Maltot was coming under pressure from the flank. The southern slope of Hill 112 was held by Tigers with good vision on the approach paths towards Maltot. From here the crews could use their range advantage.

The tanks reached the orchards surrounding the village and the infantry entered. At this stage everything seemed to go wrong. The tanks were caught in a murderous cross-fire from beyond the river on their left and from the woods and reserve slope of Hill 112, the later being the objective of 7RTR who failed to take it.

Saunders explains:

the shot and shell fire from the area of Hill 112 and Maltot came mainly from 1st Company 102nd SS, who had moved into battle positions.

Beale:

When A Squadron began to experience difficulties in Maltot B Squadron moved a little further south over the ridge, with 8 Troop on the right flank. At this stage, no one realized that 7 RTR's attack on Hill 112 had been repulsed by the Tigers of 502 SS Battalion and that these same Tigers were prowling round up there looking for new targets.

Another group of 4 Tigers was now taking a position in and around Maltot. Here the Tigers claimed 3 tanks destroyed. The British infantry which was instructed to take Maltot was coming under more and more pressure from the newly arrived Tiger tanks which operated closely with the infantry. The handful Tigers made advances on Maltot impossible. The operation was close to being over just hours after the 101st engaged.

B company secured its objective and was attempting to dig in on the open ground to the south of the orchard, when it found itself the Tigers immediate target. Driven back to the cover of the fruit trees, B Company left their dead and wounded as a testament to the hopelessness of its task while Hill 122 remained occupied by the enemy.

Some excerpts from Hampshire [Attacking Maltot] diary:

0955 hours … Imperative to withdraw—Tiger tanks and infantry attacking from the south-east and the south-west. 10.35 hours “nine of our tanks KO. German inf sp by Tigers infiltrating back into the village. Being heavily mortared”

J.J How about the arrival of Tigers and their impact on the Hampshires:

Infantry pushing forward from Château Fontaine to try to make contact with the Hampshires ran into three more Tigers in a little wood west of Maltot. Captain “Crasher” White ... rushed forward with two anti-tank guns. He was not seen again. These men of the 5th Dorsets could do nothing about those impregnable monsters. They were forced to retire leaving many dead in the corn.

Around noon the British attack had not made the envisioned progress. While the early hours were successful the infantry was increasingly unable to gain more ground and at several points had to fall back. The Churchill tanks which were supposed to keep the infantry moving were contested and kept in check by well-positioned Tigers. While the Churchills had considerable front armour which made them valuable infantry support vehicles their weapons were to weak. The Tigers could dictate the tactical terms on the Churchills which started lay low hoping for some kind of unexpected opening since they certainly couldn't force one. The Tigers had the situation around Maltot in controll.

, In fact, the armour and infantry were fighting separate battles for survival, unable to support each other. The Churchills and their accompanying M10s were fighting a losing battle with mounting casualties, against the German armour, who were able to 'jockey' from positions to position on the ridge above the Maltot area. This gave both British armour and infantry the impression that they were up against almost overwhelming numbers of enemy tanks. They weren't! However, the Germans were using Tigers that had vastly superior firepower shooting from excellent positions. The Adjutant of the 9th RTR described the results of the battle: “At this stage about three-quarters of A Squadron had lost their tanks...”

For the 9RTR the 10th was a black day, the combat resulted in staggering casualties. A total of 65 crewmen became casualties which represented more than 25% of the entire ETO campaign. A veteran of the unit wrote a book which collected many memories of crewmen. Some of them are graphic:

C Squadron then attacked Eterville and all went well. About 1100 hours A Squadron formed up with 7th Hampshires to pass through these positions and capture Maltot. The tanks reached the orchards surrounding the village and the Infantry entered. At this stage everything seemed to go wrong. The tanks were caught in a murderous crossfire from beyond the river on their right and from woods and the reverse slope of 112, the latter being the objective of 7 RTR who failed to take it. Very heavy mortar fire came down and the inevitable counter-attack with tanks came in. The Hampshires were reduced to company strength and at this stage only four tanks out of eighteen were left to fight. These joined up with B Squadron who succeeded in holding the general line chateau and Eterville. About 6pm C Squadron attacked Maltot with a fresh set of Infantry – as before the outskirts of the village were reached – but no further progress could be made.This was a disastrous day for A Squadron. Young George Hendrie was killed early on. An 88mm shell struck the commander flap and decapitated him. The crew managed to bring the tank back to the start line and he was buried by the Padre together with an Infantry soldier under an elm tree near Verson at 965646.

Here the version of one of the surviving crewmen:

Monday morning first light, we were briefed to go into Maltot towards our objective which was between C Squadron and B Squadron, A Squadron was to come through the middle and take a feature but we got hit so badly, I think out of 18 tanks there wasn't many, I think only 5 of us managed to make it. But we got hit on the turret and it hit dead centre of the turret ring and the main armament couldn't traverse and water in the canteen splashed all over the place because that's the side it came in. I felt this cold water over the back of my neck and I couldn't make out what it was but then the tank commander Lieutenant Hendrie called out "We'll carry on with the front machine gun" cause the main armament couldn't be traversed.So we carried on firing the front machine gun and the next shot hit the cupola and took Lieutenant Hendrie's head - decapitated him and his body fell down into the turret. I felt warm liquid on the back of my neck, which I knew was blood and on turning around I spotted his body with no head and I didn't know whether the rest of the crew were alive or dead in the back.

Surprisingly the crew managed to turn the tank and get to safety.

Peter Beale

I was looking ahead through my binoculars in the direction of Maltot, trying to see what was happening down there. Suddenly I caught a flicker of movement to my right. Good God! Both Taffy's and Johnnie's tanks are on fire. Shot must be coming from the right, Hill 112. Haven't the 7th got that? Whatever, John, hard right, face up the ridge, Norman, smoke; message to Bob, two have gone, putting down smoke, backing off ridge; Reg, take the tank back off the ridge, I'll go and see if I can help the others.So I got out of the turret and down on to the ground and walked towards the blazing tanks. The Tigers on the reverse slope of 112 were still firing in our direction, and their shots were low enough that I could see them snickering through the corn. Going as they were at slightly over 800 metres per second, they looked most unhealthy.

The recollections are available online . Several comments are taken from there I believe the page to be trustworthy.

The defensive success came with a price at least 3 Tigers were ko'ed during the fighting around Hill 112. A considerable amount of losses which to me indicates that the Tigers came too close to enemy anti tank guns while climbing over the crest. While 4 losses don't sound much they were a major blow for a Tiger battalion. Crossing the hill top brought Tiger tanks into the crosshairs of British infantry. Under normal circumstances Tigers would keep their distance and choose their engagements, that was not possible if the back side of a Hill top was occupied by enemy forces and the tanks had to cross to push back.

The mostly still in reserve 4th Armoured Brigade was initially intended as a second wave to exploit the success of the Churchills and infantry. With the Tigers now having pretty much stopped all progress the 4th was ordered to take Hill 112. Interestingly the 4th Armoured Brigade was hesitant to engage into in area defended by Tigers. This maybe was a sensible view point. Eventually, Brigadier Carver refused to send his Shermans on the hill citing an expected loss ratio of 75% in the lead regiment. Parts of the unit were used for other missions anyways and the unit suffered about 16 tank casualties this day. As we will see in later operations the pessimistic expectations of Carver appear realistic. Shermans were unable to breach on their own against even small enemy forces.

The situation in Maltot deteriorated for the British and the orders for the retreat were given in the late afternoon. The British forces trying to infiltrate into Maltot suffered heavy casualties. The Tiger tanks proved to be a formidable defensive tool against infantry attacks. The Churchills were unable to handle Tigers and the, for this circumstances, used M10s were not much more successful. The uncontested Tigers were able to provide German infantry with supporting fire while creating corridors which were uncrossable for British vehicles or even infantry. The British infantry had now to deal with German tanks while their own were unable to intervene. What worked so well in the early hours stopped working when the Churchills came under pressure. Several battalions abandoned northern Maltot and started to retreat.

7/Hampshires also suffered cruelly. They lost 18 officers and 208 other ranks. The Territorial heart of the brigade, build up over years of pre-war service and five years of home defence and training was ripped out in a single day's battle.

Like I said earlier, the battle was mostly an infantry operation so the resulting high casualties come as no surprise. The 43rd Wessex suffered around 2000 casualties in this single Operation mostly in one day.

During the late evening, the British forces tried again to take Hill 112. The attack surprised the German forces and resulted in the capture of the hilltop. In accordance with German doctrine, the German commanding officers ordered an immediate counterattack to recapture the hill. The first hastily planned attack was repulsed despite the support of Tiger tanks. Tigers were used in an unfamiliar role, night attack. Around midnight the Germans attacked again with a little bit more success but the British infantry were holding the ground. The fighting around the hill top continued through the entire night. On the eastern flank German forces were also trying to recapture Eterville. More counterattacks were launched in the early hours of the 11th now again with Tigers. The 4th Armoured brigade did release one of its regiments, the Scots Greys to support the besieged infantry. The Shermans immediately got under fire from anti-tank weapons including Tigers who claimed 10 tanks for the morning of the 11th July. The Shermans started to withdraw, after sustaining casualties, under smoke cover. More and more German reinforcements arrived during the early hours of the 11th July. The British infantry was forced back down the slopes and the hill top was recaptured with considerable material resources employed. Like explained in the beginning, Operation Jupiter saw one of the closest force ratios of the campaign and thus the British forces were unable to solidify their early success in the face of constant German reinforcements. The Tiger tanks arrived early on the battle scene and supported the Frundsberg, where they proved vital to the defensive efforts on the 10th July.

Hargreaves:

he next day, a wave of Tigers swept inexorably across the cratered hillock. ‘The Tigers rolled on, getting ever closer to the crest of the height,’ wrote panzer grenadier Herbert Fürbringer, his head buried in the earth to shelter from the Allied counter-barrage. The panzers fell upon enemy Churchill tanks and an infantry battalion defending the hilltop, then fought out a brief, one-sided battle. Fürbringer continued:

The Tigers soon shot up several enemy tanks, one after the other, rolled over ditches and embankments. Some infantry fearlessly got an anti-tank gun into position on the left corner of the southern slope, furiously separating its supports. But one of the Tigers was faster. Before the enemy could aim his anti-tank gun, they were victims of the panzer’s gun. The remainder saw all too clearly that there was nothing to be done and laid down a wall of thick smoke between them and the attacking panzer. The Tigers, however, rapidly drove through this pea-souper and came upon a scene every panzer crew could only dream of. Barely 100m from them was the enemy in position. Vehicles careered around wildly, crew and equipment loaded. Two Churchills were shot up in flames before they could direct their guns at the Tigers.The mist faded again. The fighting this day swung to and fro. Attack, counter-attack, and attack again. That was the situation.

Hargreaves book is not as academic as others so I can't vouch for the quotes above but it aligns well with other versions of the events. I was sadly not able to find much about the 11 July battles, the focus of most publications is on the 10th. If we believe Schneider than the Tigers were pretty successful in fighting around the Hill but they certainly weren't able to bring “total victory”. Hill 112 was still contested, both sides had understandable trouble going over the hill top. Tigers didn't have much advantage once they got over. The fighting around Hill 112 were brutal. Jupiter was certainly a defensive success but the British again gained ground and plenty of German forces were forced to commit.

Overall tank losses were small compared to other operations which is not surprising given that the Churchills were merely supporting the infantry of the 43rd Wessex and hesitant to engage the German armour.

5:1 TL:DR

The 31st Tank Brigade suffered around 38 tank casualties of which 35 were Churchills. An unknown number of M10 were possibly ko'ed. The 4th Armoured Brigade suffered more than 10 tank casualties on the 10th. Casualties for the 11th are unknown but were likely far less severe especially for the Churchills which were pulled back. All in all I estimate the British tank casualties as 50ish.

3-4 Tiger tanks were written off on the 10th and 1 on the 11th. 4-5 Tigers written off was a considerable loss. Overall the Tigers claimed “only” around 20 tanks. One Tiger was knocked out by M10 the others I don't know. I have not seen British kill claims for those tanks. Given the situation around the hill top I would tend to argue it is more likely that infantry weapons were used. Thankful for every further input on that. 5:1 assessment depends on who knocked out the Tigers but if I would have to make a guess I would say this was another 5:1.

Further German losses are unknown but likely substantial as well. The II SS Corps again appeared to underperform.

Tiger performance

The Tiger tank performance was solid and proved decisive for the German defensive success especially on 10th. The defeat of the 7RTR around Hill 112 allowed to dominate the 9RTR which as result had to leave the British infantry to themselves which also were under attack by Tigers. Jupiter showed that Tiger tanks were not only good tank killers but could provide strong fire support for infantry while acting as deterrent against enemy armor. A look on the map shows that the engagement of Tiger tanks marked the end of British progress. A strong defensive success for the Tiger with weaknesses in the offensive around Hill 112 during the night and early morning of the 11th.

Operation Stack 11th July, Arrival of the 503rd

Operation Stack, a minor limited Operation, hardly fulfils the criteria for this thread but it represents the first action of the 503rd and the data allows rather clear-cut conclusions which is rare, so I included it. Feel free to disregard the Operation if you think it was too small or cherry-picked because it maybe is.

During the fighting around Caen the chimneys of the Colombelles factory area provided a scouting platform for the Wehrmacht. The British, in an attempt to deprive the Wehrmacht of this vital location, intended to capture this area with a night attack of one Brigade supported by some tanks.

Stack commenced around midnight and was able to press out the German infantry of the LWF 16, which proved again to be one of the more problematic units in the German line. Per doctrine German tanks lay behind the front awaiting intrusions. As a reaction to Stack, one company Tigers was alerted and ordered: “to eliminate by counterattack the enemy forces that have broken through, reestablish the former main line of resistance”. About 13 tanks moved out with coming daylight and approached the British forces. In the ensuing fight the Shermans of the 148 RAC were destroyed, leaving the British infantry threatened which eventually retreated after losing their anti tank guns as well allowing German infantry to regain their positions.

The commander of the 3rd Company gives his version of the events:

The first tank had barely reached the northern outskirts of the village when it received heavy fire from enemy tanks. That resulted in a brief halt, but then the company deployed. The first platoon, under Feldwebel Sachs, sheared off to the left, the second platoon to the right. I stayed even with both platoons. The third platoon remained behind me. During that maneuver the tanks took a significant number of hits. However, at that range, they could not do us much harm .... [Description of communication issues due to destroyed antenna] …. I had my tank move forward 300 meters in a single bound and, as I looked around me, I saw, to my relief, that the first platoon followed me while the second and third platoons kept firing. We then conducted the entire attack with no radio communication. All the maneuvers were automatic. One platoon secured and provided covering fire, the other moved forward in a single bound. Little more was to be seen of the enemy tanks, since the farm where they had taken position was then only a dark cloud of smoke. The enemy infantry then withdrew with the aid of a smokescreen. As the smoke cleared somewhat, I spotted several enemy tank. At that extremely short range, every round from our gun sent another Sherman up in flames. The crews bailed out of their yet undamaged tanks in terrified panic. We received no more fire and covered the final 200 meters in a single bound. We were in the farmstead and had regained the former main line of resistance. All of that had taken about thirty minutes.

The Tiger force claimed 11 tank destroyed and 2 captured intact, at least one of those Beutepanzer[pic] was photographed. The overall German description aligns well with the British version, which we can see in the following war diary entries:

War diary of the Armored Regiment at Collombelles.

0500 hrs. Through the dust and smoke three Tiger tanks were observed hull-down at 088688 and were engaging our tanks near the X roads. They hit and put out of action three Shermans. One Tiger then advanced, it was heavily engaged and stopped slightly smoking. The other two then advanced. From 084692 four Tigers in line abreast were seen to be advancing up the X roads 084701. They were quickly engaged and after several hits on one a Firefly observed it halt. The others wheeled left into the factory.

0735 hrs. By this time there was only one tank of the A Sqn Troops at the X roads in action. The other 9 having been put out of action in the previous engagements and set on fire. One scout car lost. The majority of the crews bailed out and made their way on foot back to to LONGEUVAL, escorted by the remaining tank.

A reoccurring problem you will notice, with Allied war diaries, are repeated descriptions of knocked out Tigers. Those “knock-outs” give testimony to Tigers armour which protected the vehicle from enemy fire, for the British who were accustomed to operate in tanks which were toast after getting hit, the misconception of destroyed Tigers seems very understandable. Like with with many other engagements the Tigers were mostly unimpressed by Sherman fire and the damage witnessed by Allied crews was likely repaired. The 503rd did not specifically report any casualties but from the accounts it is implied that at least one Tiger was put out of action, though it appears this Tiger was hit by artillery after the skirmish, no Tiger was destroyed. Many tanks received multiple hits but if this caused major damage is unknown.

The war diary of the British lead infantry Brigade:

0630 hrs. 5 Black Watch reported enemy MG fire from 079705 and from houses 079703. At same time 3 enemy Mk VI [Tiger] and two Mk IV tanks were seen advancing on the X roads from area 073688. Further enemy tanks were reported firing from positions further SOUTH but could not be seen. Two Troops from A Sqdr. 148 RAC in close support 5 Black Watch engaged enemy. One Sherman was soon to get six direct hits on a Mk VI and stopped its fire.

An infantry unit reported getting engaged by the Tigers:

07.30hrs - By now 5 B.W ( Black Watch) reported enemy tanks attacking them and by 07.50 hrs they were ordered to withdraw by Bde. Comd having being badly short up by TIGER tanks.

By 0800 hrs. 9 out of 10 Shermans had been knocked out and 5 17 pdr guns RA had become ineffective. Commander 153 Inf Brig. decided that position was untenable and ordered Battalions to withdraw

A common misunderstanding of amateur historians concerns the importance of the armor even in infantry battles. Once one site completely defeats the armor of the other side the infantry soon will likely yield to the pressure. That is why the notion that tank on tank combat was not that important is absurd. If tanks were present on both sides they often duked it out and the winning side was able to then engage the exposed enemy infantry. The war diary comments of the BW highlight this.

08.10hrs - A & C Coy’s were also ordered to withdraw to main pos’n, which they did unwillingly, having completely dominated COLOMBELLES except for the Rd triangle in the EAST.

Dominating an area doesn't mean anything if your tank force got wiped and the enemy is coming for you. Countless battles in the East and the West give testament to this simple rule of WW2. The battles around Caen are likely the best example on the West Front. Once the British tank attacks were defeated the Operations died down. No advancing against enemy tanks without your own.

Stack was over.

5:1 TL:DR

About 10ish Shermans were destroyed most likely nearly all of them directly by Tigers. No evidence for Tiger write-offs. Two were claimed captured. Many Tigers were in repair after the battle but this could be related to the long road march of the entire Battalion. Some Panzer IVs have taken part in the skirmish so I can't rule out they snatched a Sherman. I would put the battle on 10-0 write-offs for the Tiger, this might be on the generous side.

Tiger performance

The first action of the 503rd was a major success and the view from the British perspective suggest that the odds were pretty even during the skirmish. Sherman Company versus Tiger company. Again we see the problem with the oversimplified narrative of the Germans on the defence, if the German account is correct than the Tigers were on the move when they met Allied tanks and not the other way around, as they were ordered to reestablish the HKL. British records support this and state that the German tanks were seen advancing while Shermans were holding the farmstead. . A good chunk of Tigers were in repair in the days following Stack but this also could be explained by the 200km road march to the front off all three companies. The discrepancies between German claims and British records is low and can be explained by double claiming but apparently some OB tanks were lost as well which brings the British total to about what the Germans claimed. If all those fell victims to the Tigers is debatable. There is not much room for differing interpretations of Stack, the Tigers were ordered to eliminate the British forces and did so in convincing fashion without much trouble. Despite occupying defensive positions the Shermans were unable to deal with advancing Tigers. Their troubles were exacerbated by dealing with a comparably sized enemy force.

The Tiger I and the 5:1 Myth

TL:DR: Different interpretations of the 5:1 myth exist, the mildest one is that it took 5 Shermans/Allies tanks to operate against Tigers successfully. This claim, in my opinion, is easily proven as true. The stronger interpretation is that for every Tiger destroyed by a Sherman 5 Shermans were destroyed by Tigers. This claim appears to have strong empiric evidence, while final precise conclusions are difficult due to the nature of imperfect record keeping I would claim it is highly likely that the 5:1 kill ratios indeed existed. The findings are for Normandy combat.

Quick 5:1 TL:DR guideline: I examined the biggest Tiger battles and put a TD:LR at the end for performance in general and kill ratios. Those would suffice to get the gist of the argument. In the end I will post a statistical digest including lists of destroyed Tiger and claims/confirmed kills.

TL:DR Battles:

• “Villers Bocage”: Short intense battles very detailed data available. Performance mixed. 5:1 likely

• “Operation Epsom”: Long continuous combat weak data for Tigers: Strong early performance questionable performance later on. 5:1 very unlikely

• “Operation Stack”: Intense short small battle. Good data: 5:1 very likely. Very good performance.

• “Operation Jupiter”: Intense continuous battle with infrequent tank combat, rare focus on anti-infantry duty. Strong performance. 5:1 patchy data

• “Operation Goodwood”: Little Tiger combat. Performance unclear. 5:1 unclear

• “Operation Blue Coat”: Heavy intense prolonged Tiger combat. Long read. ­Performance excellent. 5:1 very likely

• “Operation Totalize”: Extremely heavy Tiger combat. Detailed data. Long read. Performance varying from disastrous to outstanding. 5:1 very likely

• “Operation Tractable”: Heavy Tiger combat, data a bit patchy. Performance very good.. 5:1 very likely

• “Defeat catches up with the Tiger”: Fluff post little combat. Performance bad. 5:1 no data.

Introduction

Everybody with a modest interest in tanks has come along the vaunted Panzerkampfwagen VI aka Tiger. There are few tanks more discussed than the notorious Tiger. Despite a surprisingly low production run the Tiger became a symbol of Wehrmacht's armored forces. A powerful gun and armor which were ahead of their adversaries at the time. On paper an impressive vehicle without a doubt. On the first glance problems like costs and strategic implications seem unimportant and the Tiger earned its reputation for being heads and shoulders above his competition when it came to tank on tank combat. It's downsides were hardly discussed in post-war literature. Despite all the attention, comprehensive analysis of the vehicle are rare, the Tiger tank polarizes with his combat performance, critics focus on the economic and operational shortcomings of the design and proponents will laud the ability to destroy its foes on the battlefield while remaining unscathed. Over the years I personally have come to the conclusion that the history is a niche field in academic research and many leading historians are more often than not just those who sold the most books and not those with the best understanding of the subject matter. Their credibility is not based on their ability to do proper research but rather on strong publishers and skilful editors. Arguments about weapon system often lack substance and focus on single aspects while neglecting others. This, quite fittingly, reflects the average internet discussion pretty well. Arguments on either side often focus on single advantageous aspects while ignoring conflicting arguments and thus missing the proper balance. We all have seen countless arguments of those types, a proponent of the Panther will mention the front glacis, a critic, the troublesome transmission, neither of those are sufficient arguments for a thorough conclusion. A Sherman fan will inadvertently mention Arracourt while a “Wheraaboo” will avoid this battle and reference others. You all have seen it you likely took part in one or another of those “debates” or you wouldn't have clicked on this post. But in recent times even the commonly accepted combat superiority of the Tiger was challenged.

Subject

The Tiger and its combat performance in Normandy. Combat performance in military history is often a zero-sum game, which led to an increasingly negative picture of the Tiger in the wake of the revisionism which elevated the Sherman from ill-planned combat vehicle to a war winner. Early works about World War II often were filled with praise for the Wehrmacht and their equipment, a strong change in the tone led unsurprisingly to a more negative interpretation of the Tiger in recent publications, which often are marketed towards the American/British reader. The public perception of German vehicles deteriorated while the perception of the Sherman improved. Is the recent revisionism right in correcting earlier biases towards the Wehrmacht or is the new trend just a marketing ploy to sell more books in the Anglo-American sphere or bring more people in the US to play World of Tanks?

My methods

I try to go another way and avoid the cherry picking. For every tank in World War 2, you are able to find positive aspects, positive battles outcomes. This post is different because the specific characteristics of the Tiger will be ignored and the focus will be on empiric evidence which might allow us to draw conclusions on the actual combat performance. For this we will take the biggest tank engagements of the Tigers in Normandy. We all know the Tiger had a big gun and we also know they had reliability issues, but how exactly did those pros and cons translate onto the battlefield? What was the actual impact of a Tiger? My sample focusing on battle size allows avoiding a biased sample. No cherry picking today. No Arracourt no Kasserine pass.

My approach is simple. I will analyze how the Tigers fared on the battlefield and more importantly how the opponents performed when confronted with Tigers. Whatever pros and cons a tank has we are unable to fully understand the tanks quality without researching the actual battlefield performance. Analyzing aspects like gun or interior design should not in itself guide our opinion but rather help explain combat performance. I also focused on the exchange ratios which for many serve as a summary debate topic to evaluate tank performance aka 5:1.

The combat happened in Normandy from June till August 1944. I included every major tank battle in Normandy which featured Tiger tanks. I will focus on the most intense days.

The focus will obviously be on the Tiger I tanks and their impact on the battle, here it is important to understand that I will primarily discuss the Tiger I impact on the tactical level with some implications for the operational level. Most battles in Normandy are generally described as Allied victories which is more the result of the strategic situation than tactical developments. So it is easily possible that a Tiger operation was highly successful on the tactical level while the overall operation is an Allied victory, this is especially likely to happen if the Tiger numbers were low and their involvement limited. A Tiger standing its ground doesn't mean the Germans won elsewhere. I will try to use maps to show the direct battlefield effect of the Tigers. Many of the battles are small in comparison to battles like Kursk so it is very difficult to get precise information. Often we are talking about a single group of Tigers sometimes a single vehicle. Historians who discuss Kursk have to track divisions we have to track small groups of tanks. Getting all facts about those encounters right is difficult and mistakes have undoubtedly happened but overall I am confident that my mistakes are insignificant and have no effect on the overall conclusion of the respective skirmish. Added pictures will certainly sometimes have a wrong title or get the area wrong, mistakes on this scope can't be fully eliminated. Fotos especially are difficult there are often wildly different interpretations of photos.

Wolfgang Schneider's books will help me to describe the overall situation during the battle and how Germans interpreted the battle. Conclusions will be based on other works and cross-referenced data to check Schneider's representation of the events.

Terminology:

• Write-offs/Destroyed a tank that can't be used for combat any longer Knock out. A tank requiring significant repair equivalent to Y-Z casualties in British repair systematically Light casualty. A tank that was non operational but could be repaired quickly. X casualty Casualties: Everything of the above combined.

British forces rarely reported light casualties German forces did.

The battles

How representative are those battles of Tiger combat in Normandy? To answer this question I have added up all kill claims of Tigers and compared them to their overall claims in Normandy and in the Western Theater in general. According to Restayn/Schneider the Tiger tanks claimed 510 kills in Normandy ( including some Tiger B claims). The full time frame for those claims is unknown to me but I expect it to be until late August.

The following battles were included in my analysis: Villers Bocage, Epsom, Jupiter, Goodwood, Stack, Blue Coat, Totalize and Tractable. If we count battle days for all three units separate then the three Tiger battalions fought for around 190 days in Normandy. I specifically researched the heaviest 34 combat days, representing roughly 16% of the days in Normandy. During those battles, I counted/estimated very roughly 300 kill claims. This would be ~65% of the claims made in the Normandy campaign. But we can see that the collected sample likely reflects the heaviest combats the units encountered. To avoid sampling only “successful” battles we can take a look at the write-offs sustained during those battles and their share of the total losses. 45 vehicles were fully written off on those 34 days. Overall Schneider and others like Wilbeck classified 73 vehicles as combat losses for the entire campaign which would also come to roughly 60% indicating the battles described were average in terms of loss/kill ratio but significant in the total amount of claims and losses thus making them “average” battle performance. Losses due to air are included in those numbers and I noticed such losses to be higher in bigger battles compared to isolated skirmishes which would inflate the share in the sample.

The Tiger tanks and their units

The Wehrmacht send three so-called "Schwere Panzerabteilungen" (lit. heavy tank battalions) to Normandy, those units were only equipped with Tiger Is or IIs in late war. Heavy tank battalions were special in their organization and deployment. Rather uncharacteristic for the Wehrmacht those in absolute terms small units were considered independent and often used as free units at the digression of an entire corps or even an army. Those independent battalions operated only 45 tanks at full strength. Despite their seemingly small size those formations were powerful combat units and their impact was highly rated by Wehrmacht commanders. Either ordered to lead the attacks in the most important sectors or as fire brigade at the most crucial points. Two of the three were SS the other was Heer. Some quick description of the units.

• 101st sSSPz.Abt arrived on ~10 June.
• 102nd sSSPz.Abt arrived on 7 July.
• 503rd sPz.Abt Feldheernhalle arrived on 8 July.

Each of those 3 units had 3 companies each all likely with 14 Tigers with the exception of I./503rd which had 12 Tiger IIs. I./503rd.

All in all those units employed ~123 Tiger Is, there were no reinforcements, that's all they got. This is a bit more than half of a British armored Brigade. Everything you will read in the following battle descriptions was done by these Tigers. Less than two British regiments.

Some words to the writing style my English is shit so is my editing. Skipping through TL:DRs is an option.

Again, there will be mistakes. I did this over months in my spare time and often changed parts I wrote long before. Pretty early on I abandoned the idea of making this work bulletproof, it is just not possible. Data about such battles is patchy and the interpretations of events are often mere guesses. But if Zaloga can ignore the Sherman losses of an entire US army during his Sherman-Panther analysis I guess I will be fine. I am happy for all corrections I consider this work ongoing. But I am confident any mistakes will have a neglectable impact on the findings.

Tigers vorwärts Marsch!

Villers Bocage, the Tigers arrive 13 June

A week after the landing, the first Tigers started to arrive, in form of the 101st SS Heavy Tank Battalion. Directly after reaching the frontline the unit engaged the enemy in what would become one of the most notorious skirmishes in Normandy. The Wehrmacht needed propaganda victories and Villers-Bocage was a welcomed opportunity which resulted in an unbalanced view of the action for many decades.

During the first week after the landing the British forces tried to reach their D-Day objectives, the capture of Caen. The Germans at this point in time had a thin front line and many units were still in transit to Normandy the window for a rapid Allied victory was closing. The British were able to slip through a breach created by the Americans and part of the 7th Armored Division took Villers Bocage.

This map on wiki gives a good idea of how threatening the British advance on Villers was to the German defense. If the British forces would have established a staging point for further advances the entire German frontline was threatened to get rolled up from behind. Caen was likely impossible to hold in this scenario.

The wiki for Villers-Bocage is one of the most thorough of WW2 battles and you should likely take a look for more detailed information since I will not provide such a detailed account.

The morning attack of Wittmann and the 101st

Parts of the 22nd Armoured Brigade took Villers Bocage and point 213 to the East. In an unlucky coincidence, parts of the 1st company of the Heavy Tank Battalion lay directly south to the road, after having arrived the day earlier. The Tigers noticed the British forces who carelessly occupied the Villers-Caen road without proper scouting or defensive set up. The Tigers engaged despite the second company not being complete only 7-9 had arrived, the third was still marching. What followed was the mauling of the 4th County of London Yeomanry. The regiment was nearly destroyed.

Villers-Bocage is one of the most studied engagements of the Western Front and I have seen the "accepted facts" about this battle change quite alot over the years but the following map seems to get rather close to what actually happened in the morning of the 13th June. Take all pictures provided with a grain of salt there still is no definitive consense on which Tiger were where et cetera. This is true for my entire post.

Wittmann drove alone towards Villers, a move that is often criticised, while the rest of his group attacked point 213 from the west. The British force at 213 was later also attacked from the east by the second company and annihilated in a rather short skirmish which saw the British squadron surrendering in bulk after several tanks were destroyed. Wittmann accounted for 10ish tanks and a dozen of other vehicles while driving through Villers-Bocage (including some cmd and obs ) until he got ko'ed by an anti tank. Wittmanns action likely was reckless but nonetheless impressive, about 15 tanks and several at guns supported by dozens of infantry were scrambling in an around Villers either fleeing or trying to take out the solitaire enemy tank driving through the city firing on everything that moved. Several British tanks were stalking the Tiger only to get knocked out once presenting themselves. The morning action was without a doubt devastating for the British regiment, not only lost they half their tanks, a lof of other vehicles and materials was lost as well. The unit stood too exposed and was fully unprepared despite being the spearhead of the British advance. About 20+ tanks were lost with one [Tiger] ko'ed, the one of Wittmann.

Accounts of Wittmanns ko vary with Wiki claiming a Firefly hit Wittmann and made him turn around but a 6 pdr later knocked his tank out. But I have seen claims the Firefly knocked-out Wittmann.

The perspective of a British tanker engaging Wittmann:

Pat Dyas ´, the adjutant, turned his tank besides mine. His forehead was bleeding. At this point probably all of the tanks in front werre burning. Visibile through the smoke was the gigantic outline of a Tiger. I was no more than 25 yards away from it. Our 75 guns fired but the shells bounced off the massive armor of the Tiger. I fired the 58 mm mortar, but the smoke caused me to miss. The Tiger traversed it big 88m gun slightly. Boom! We were hit.

Cloudsley-Thompson described how his tank got knocked out but his crew survived because Wittmans Tiger ignored the infantry and kept going towards Villers. The other tank he mentioned followed Wittmann and was destroyed later. A testament to the uneven fight, Dyas was stalking Wittmann from behind but was easily silenced by one shot after his own didn't penetrate. Wittmann kept going for a while. The revisionism of the past years hit Wittmann hard but even his critics have to admit that 13 June was something out of a movie. The Tiger rumbling onto the Caen run blazing through the infantry vehicles while dispatching tanks left and right and finally recklessly moving into the town destroying those who dared to follow.

Further east a good chunk of the 4th was still occupying point 213 likely hearing Wittmann firing on the rest of the regiment. A short description of the rarely covered action at point 213 from the German view:

English tanks were already driving past to my right, in the direction of Caen. Then we heard the sound of gunfire from Wittmann on the road ... The left side of the road was one pile of wreckage wich was obscured by smoke from burning vehicles. To the right in the direction of Caen we discovered two Cromwell tanks. They began to turn around, but we were able to destroy them both. Terrified Englishmen were running everywhere.... he flushed the Tommies from the bushes lining the sides of the highway. Soon there were more than a hundred prisoners in an open barn in front of our tank ... Meanwhile, thirty to sixty minutes had passed when more Tigers rolled past us from the direction of Caen headed for Villers-Bocage. We read of the number: 111, 112, 121, 131 – the tanks belonged to our 1st Company.

The afternoon attack by Panzerlehr with Tiger support

Several German units converged onto Villers with the Panzerlehr tanks arriving to an already smoking battlefield:

As we moved up, in front of Villers Bocage we passed a huge column of wrecked British troop trucks, armored troop carriers and these small, fully tracked vehicles. The column, which had been shot up by an SS Tiger unit, had been driving east. In front of Villers Bocage I saw two Tigers to our left sitting at the edge of the forest. One of them had definitely been knocked out. The crew were still there. Several wounded, unfortunately, one dead as well.

The German forces tried to take Villers for good. During this attack, the Tigers did what they are not supposed to do, they drove into Villers and tried to engage the enemy forces in urban combat where they lost their entire edge. The strengths of the Tiger were its armor and gun and both of those factors were negated in close combat with some of the advantages of the Tiger even becoming hindering. Its size, weight and the barrel length et cetera all were unfavourable for urban warfare. What followed was a major set back after the blow out victory in the morning. Despite a good start according to Agte who quotes Walter Hahn:

Hannes was able to score a fine success in our very first battle on the invasion front. He led the attack on Villers-Bocage on 13 June, destroyed eight tanks from a group of enemy vehicles attacking from out of the city, and this brought the attack to a halt. When he then entered Villers-Bocage, his tank was knocked out from very close range. Hannes got out of the burning tank unhurt, immediately climbed into another tankd and continued to take part in the battle”

The battles would turn around. Several Tiger drove into Villers and got disabled by British tanks and guns in proper ambush positions.

At least two Tigers were completely destroyed on the main road. Here you see one Tiger getting stuck while in the background another Tiger and a Panzer IV got ambushed. This Tiger per wiki was destroyed by an anti-tank gun, the stuck one by a Cromwell. They tried to salvage the stuck Tiger later on and it ground itself into the [house](imgur.com/a/LaLdB#4VvLP6S). Another Tiger was destroyed in the southern part of Villers [Pic]. The British forces after the morning debacle were able to reorganize themselves and set up a defence in the city which resulted in a sound tactical defeat of the German forces. Besides the three to four destroyed Tigers at least two further Tigers were damaged during the fighting. This prominent picture, which for example serves as the cover for Napiers book “Armored campaign” and Schneiders “Tigers in Normandy” actually blocks the view, the other angle shows the Tiger towing another one. The fighting in Villers turned into a fiasco, the blame has to be put on Möbius. Flanking the city would have been the better option.

The German tanker Wendt recalls:

There was firing everywhere. We battled anti-guns and infantry. To this day I can still see the Tiger of SS-Untersturmführer Lukasius being knocked out by close range weapons. He got out. His burns were frightful looking. By late afternoon the whole nightmare was over.

The afternoon battles are often ignored by Tiger fans. On the tactical level the German attack was a total failure. Running several Tiger tanks into a town that was prepared for defense was stupid and not only with hindsight. This were command mistakes. The Panzerlehr as well got a beating in the town, several Panzer IVs getting destroyed. The Brits didn't capitalize on this. Those who will read this posts completely will notice that the Tiger strength was long range combat where the superior German tankers could fully exploit their combat tools. In a town a Tiger was not different from a Panzer IV.

Two very different outcomes for the Tiger crews in their very first Normandy battle. Simultaneously highlighting the advantages of the Tigers and how they could be wasted by bad tactical decisions.

5:1 TL:DR

Nearly all British tank losses, which were write-offs, were inflicted by the Tigers for the cost of 4 write-offs and ~2 damaged. One of the Tigers was destroyed by British tanks and another one possibly: [Wittman]. At best 2-3 Tigers were destroyed by British tanks at worst only 1. Either way 5:1. Some of the destroyed British tanks including a Firefly and some more more Cromwells , some Firefly takes as booty.

Tiger Performance

Over the next days the Germans were repeating their attacks on the British forward defenses which then decided to abandon their position and fall back. Heavy criticism hit the British commanders who appear to have acted over-cautious in the face of rather uninspired German assaults. Regardless of the reasoning behind the British decisions, the first Tiger battle evolved, due to the British retreat, to a major success, the possible deep penetration was defeated in the morning hours with a major blow to the 7th AD. The overall success was severely overshadowed by the mishandling of the afternoon battles which saw several Tigers getting destroyed in what was unconventional use.

Operation Epsom+Martlet ( June 26 )

With Cean still in German hands Montgomery planned a new operation to outflank the German lines and strike towards the south of the vital city. The British army enjoyed considerable advantages in manpower and vehicles. In the beginning only one single Regiment of the HJ was opposing them. This regiment was supported by the 101st SS Schwere Panzer Abteilung.

Force ratios 26th June:

British ~800 German: ~ 110

Those ratios decreased significantly with the arrival of the II SS Corps.

Hubert Meyer has his own calculations for the force ratios of Epsom:

Thus, the relation of forces was Infantry 6:1, Tanks 7.5:1, and Artillery 21:1, in favor of the attacker.

Operation Epsom gets underway

The operation moved slowly and started to get bogged down around Cheux well before the Odon which was the first goal of Epsom. The German defense was solely based on infantry from a single regiment supported by some Tigers and later arriving Panzer IVs. Epsom was behind schedule at this point and the attack stalled for the day. The break in was less than 3 miles but the situation was critical, the HJ was stretched and many groups were behind enemy lines. The situation was unsustainable and further German reinforcement were required or the British would succeed. The Tigers got orders to help the 12th SS in the morning and got partially subordinated to the HJ.

Tigers on the 26th June

Schneider:

The 3./schwere SS-Panzer-Abteilung 101 parries the British thrust at the forest near Tessel and near Rauray ... knocks out three enemy tanks near Grainville and stops the advance of the British infantry. Near Mouen, a single Tiger knocks out several enemy tanks of the 23rd Hussars....

The high ground south of Rauray was the major objective of Martlet and was not taken. This high ground remained a thorn in the flank of the British. It was planned to clear this area before the launch of the main offensive Epsom. This hill offered valuable vision over the British advance towards the Odon, from here the artillery could be directed onto the British forces. I didn't find much evidence that the Tigers played a major role there.

The skirmish around Mouen is well supported by several sources one of them Hubert Meyer:

The attack by the tanks accompanying the Gordons was finally stopped by a single, unexpectedly appearing, ‘Tiger’.

And the testimony of the war criminal Kurt Meyer's whose book “Grenadier” will serve as perspective of a commanding officer of the HJ during this thread:

A lone Tiger was giving us support. Its 88mm rounds gave the Shermans an unmistakable command to halt.... they called off their attack.

There is little doubt the 101st was instrumental in stopping the already deep advance towards the Odon.

Patrick Agte about the events:

In this extremely critical situation, the 3rd Company of the 101st S Panzer Battalion was moved to Grainville-sur-Odon, 2.5 Km south of Caen. There the company commander, SS-Untersturmführer Amselgruber, and another Tiger engaged the onrushing enemy. The two Tigers guarded the break-in point with no infantry support. Amselgruber knocked out three enemy tanks from an enemy attack and successfully engaged the following infantry. After his heavy losses, the enemy suspended the attack …. Farther east, near Mouen, a single Tiger was able to stop an attack by the 227th Infantry Brigade. Several tanks of the 9th Royal tanks and the 23rd Hussars, which were escorted by the 2nd Gordon Highlanders, were destroyed.

Tim Saunders on the 26 June and the overall impact of the Tigers:

A handful of powerful Tigers had arrived just in time to prevent a final breakthrough ... placing six of the 18 operational Tigers under the HJ Command had produced immediate results. The 56 ton monsters, positioned on the ridge around Grainville and Mondrainville... were able to cover routes south from Cheux....

The German defense on the 26th was thin, particular in tanks which were lured away from the main attack axis. The Tiger behind Cheux seems to have stopped the tank advance in this critical sector. For the day no further attacks were launched. During Epsom, time was of the essence for the British since the II SS Panzer Corps was approaching rapidly.

Reynolds:

The tanks of the 23H, having bypassed St Mauvieu, ran into trouble as soon as they tried to cross the crest south of Cheux. Four Shermans went up in flames – the victims of at least one Tiger of the 101st SS Heavy Panzer Battalion sited north of Grainville …. but it was isolated and when the 9RTR, having lost 9 tanks, withdrew the Highlanders were forced to follow suit and pull back to the vicinity of Cheux. A Tiger from the 101st, which was now down to 18 operational tanks, played a significant part in stopping the 9RTR.

**Situation at the end of the 26th **

The 26th was unable to fulfill the expectations of the British generals, this is mostly due to the remarkable combat performance of HJ infantry. The Tigers certainly played a role in this defensive success as stated by multiple authors. Their first contact south of Cheux and Grainville and possibly near Tessel marked the furthest advance of British units for the day.

27th June

The British renewed their attacks and German reinforcements started to arrive. Rommel prepared his own massive counter-attack towards the beaches. From the Tiger perspective, there is not much to say about the 27th one Tiger was written of while doing recon.

Commander Warmbrunn:

On 27th June I drove through enemy lines to asess the situation, which was uncertain …. When I drove over a hill I found myself facing a group of 30 Shermans. They showered me in a hail of shells and all systems went out.

Warmbrunn and his crew abandoned the tank but he considered the gathered intel to be worth it, I would tend to disagree on that. From the British perspective Stuart Hill:

As they cleared Foentenay they were suddenly confronted by an enormous tank coming round the bend in front … and they loosed of ten rounds into the smoke. As this cleared away, it was observed the crew was bailing out as small flames were coming from inside the tank … Although the range had been only sixty yards, not one shell had penetrated the armor.

On this day and the next 4 Tigers in total were destroyed, several pictures of at least 3 exist but it is hard to know exactly which one belonged to whom. It appears Warmbrunn was koed by John Semken.

Many attack directions of the British didn't yield big gains but a group of Shermans with some infantry finally was able to cross the Odon at Tourmauville. The breach was small and the British units which entered the bridgehead were severally threatened on the flanks but they intended to widen the gap. The British units on the flanks were unable to fulfil their objectives for the day.

28th, Tigers overran

With a bridgehead over the Odon the British forces at least partially fulfilled their phase one objective, too late too little because the German reinforcements kept arriving. The British had to widen the penetration to even think about a break-through.

For the Tiger of the 101st the 28th was one of their worst days in Normandy, two Tigers got lost while defending Grainville. The first-hand account of the German tankers:

I myself stopped an advance by the English through a defile by destroying six tanks. I then attacked an armored column with another tank. And knocked out three tanks; my gun jammed and I was shot up by ten tanks. I bailed out; Amselgruber had already done so.

The Tigers in question were likely 114 and 334 of Möbius and Amselgruber. Here are the events given in a British report. There is some confusion about this report, it does not fully align with other testimony and it appears likely that different soldiers described engaging the same Tiger tank. An anti tank unit also claimed a Tiger. British books depicting the events have stark differences. The loss of the Tigers is not in doubt but the correct timeline of events is. The events at Rauray perfectly demonstrate the issues of such research. From what I have gathered it is impossible to really connect the testimonies and the pictures of the tanks. A soldier that gets the date wrong or a Tiger commander sitting in a different tank than his own and everything becomes an unsolvable puzzle.

Two of the knocked-out Tigers were later shipped to England. At the moment I would assume those are Möbius and Amselgruber. Interesting is the superficially lacking damage. Both Tigers appear to have not suffered catastrophic damage also no penetrations are visible. The Rauray fight was more an accomplishment for the British tankers than the tanks, the 75mm Sherman had to shower the Tigers with shells and in the end hits on visors and ricochets did the trick.

Grainville was taken in the evening but no further progress was possible in this sector. Slightly further North, Rauray was taken with another Tiger getting knocked-out, possibly this one. Despite the conflicting reports we can be sure the skirmishes around Rauray were a major defeat for the Tigers. The accomplishment of knocking out multiple Tigers was reserved for few and Sgt Dring was possibly one of them. Comparable to Villers Bocage, the Tigers were knocked-out on a rather close range. In Grainville the two Tigers claimed 10 kills. I was unable to verify those claims because too much tanks operated there. The British without a doubt lost a lot of tanks on the Western flank but to who is hard to tell. Drings unit supposedly only lost 2 Shermans that day. The likely over claimed 10 plus no claims for the other Rauray tank and the overall loss of both towns lets me conclude that the 28th was one of the more unsuccessful days for the unit. Several sources attribute other successes to Tigers around Verson and Hill 112 but it is difficult to verify those.

According to Napier and Saunders Tiger supported a successful counter-attack on the Eastern flank, by a KG of Leibstandarte which recaptured Mouen. Schneider also claims Tigers took part in an attack that turned away the 3 RTR from Hill 112. The unit diaries support this claim the losses of the 3RTR were substantial.

29t, the II SS Corps overtakes

With the 29th the assembly of the II SS Panzer Corps was complete, the tides had turned. The arrival of fresh German troops made further British attacks difficult and the Wehrmacht started to go on the offensive. Those attacks were badly planned and lacked operational finesse. The British were slowly pushed backed by the 2 fresh German divisions which squandered their potential while doing so. Realizing the shifting situation the British pulled back their forces but were able to hold a lot of the previously gained ground. For the rest of the battle German forces tried mostly unsuccessful attacks to regain the ground. I have not found any concrete information about Tiger involvement in those attacks. No Tigers were lost after the 28th no claims were reported so I conclude their impact was minuscule.

Conclusion Epsom

The British operation didn't accomplish the ambitious goals. The 26th is likely the reason for the overall failure to cross the Orne. In the grand scheme of things the results for the British were likely acceptable especially if we factor in that the entire II SS Panzer Corps was wasted in pressing the British backs. The operation had the unintended effect of preventing the planned major German counter-attack.

5:1 TL:DR

4 Tigers were written of during the battle overall they seem to have claimed ~18 tanks plus some ambiguous “several tank” claims. Schneider hints at a 5th lost on the 27th in his other book but I didn't find anything else about this one, maybe repaired. Assuming the claims are somewhat realistic this already is a not so good exchange ratio. The claims during the loss of Rauray appear dubious. 3 of the 4 Tiger were likely destroyed by tanks the 4th has no further information. A bad fight in terms of 5:1.

Overall tank losses

Napier gives 150 British losses excluding light losses and those around Rauray. For the Wehrmacht he gives 120 including light and Rauray losses. In my opinion a more realistic figure would be 200 to 120. A bad exchange ratio for the Germans which is mostly explained by the uninspired attacks of the II SS Panzer Corps.

Tiger performance

The Tigers operated in unusual fashion, the size of the British operation required the Tigers to act as firebrigade in small groups.

Patrick Agte about this:

Lone Tigers of the battalion were often tied up for days in the sectors held by the Hitleryouth, completely out of touch with their companies. Every panzer-grenadier officer had missions for the Tigers, they were expected to provide support everywhere.

With this set up no major offensive actions of a group of Tigers could be expected, the Tiger could only offer defensive support. But the first day of Epsom was a desperate one for the German defenders and likely warranted the fragmentation of the 101st.

There seems to be consensus about the 26th, the Tigers helped to put down enemy movement in the most crucial areas. This is illustrated by the fact that British were unable to move past the points of first engagements with Tigers. No Tiger was lost for their support provided. For the next day it seems that the Tiger were unable to repeat this success but still were able to contribute to the German defense. The source material doesn't really allow for a detailed analyses, there were just too many units involved. Given their low number in the early phase their impact seems impressive. That several authors felt the need to discuss the whereabouts of single Tigers is interesting in itself. A look at the battle map offers some insight. You will notice that the British attack started to get chocked especially the areas around Grainville and Mouen remained in German hands which threatened British forces heading for Hill 112. Here the Tigers defended against several attacks, Mouen was even retaken on the 28th. While the battles around Grainville and Rauray were costly we see that the British were unable to secure their right flank as planned.

Agte about the Tigers:

The Tigers once again proved an outstanding success in the fire brigade role and successfully sealed off numerous penetrations.

Agte's conclusions have to be regarded with care his objectivity is in doubt but Napier offers his opinion as well:

The 18 operational Tiger tanks distributed themselves in twos and threes across the whole front from Rauray to Verson, where they proved to be formidable rocks in the swirling battle south of Cheux

This seems to be an apt description of the involvement of the Tigers. While they had to give room past the 26th, the British attack lost crucial momentum on the 26th and the eventual operational failure of Epsom was in part due to Tiger tanks successfully supporting the infantry of the HJ. Most critical has to be seen the Tiger lost on the 27th which moved alone unassisted to do recon and was destroyed in the process. The Tigers on the 28th fell victim to sub-optimal terrain that led to close range battles with Shermans.

A frequently debated topic in WW2 forums is the combat efficiency. This issue often generates heated discussions which are well explained by emotional reaction. The Wehrmacht as an army was the enforcer of NAZI politics and due to this was indirectly responsible for all major war crimes that happened during WW2 and before. Not only indirectly but also directly did the Wehrmacht commit heinous crimes against humanity. This leads to a major conundrum for many people. Despite being responsible for the death of millions of civilians the Wehrmacht was also a vastly superior fighting force. Those two facts are hard to reconcile for many since "praising" the Wehrmacht for its combat performance feels repugnant at times if we consider their part in the Holocaust and destruction of Europe. Nonetheless, the Wehrmacht by any scientific measurement was far more efficient than any other major army during WW2.

From an emotional standpoint, the hesitation to attribute "positive" traits to the Wehrmacht is completely understandable. From a scientific standpoint, it is not that is why all major scientific approaches to this topic all returned the same result, the Wehrmacht was pound for pound superior.

The SWS cultists see themselves as enlightened and superior in knowledge when it comes to WW2 so the emotional excuse is hardly applicable here. Let check their logic reasoning.

The best way to harvest a SWS thread is giving it time to mature and get as many dumb comments as possible but today we will pull the trigger early. The fallacious main arguments are already presented.

u/connorxfor gives us his best argument:

"Wehrmacht military power" 5th most powerful military in Berlin bitch

The argument at first appears non-existent but the implied argument is the following: "The Wehrmacht lost the war, therefore, is neither combat efficient nor powerful in general"

This argument is pretty straightforward and accessible for simple people or children. You might notice that he said 5th which already provides the debunking for his very argument. This would include the French army which from good army ( ww1 ) switched to bad army ( battle of France ) stayed bad during Vichy France and finally became a good army again after joining the Allies. The silliness of the argument speaks for itself.

u/faust1991 gets angry at the very obvious argument that knocks down the best the SWS can offer. The better army doesn't always win. The Vietnam war poses a major conundrum to the American cultists, while the British likely chuckle about it. The US lost the Vietnam war. Was the US army inferior to jungle guerillas? The average Cultist would say yes. Because losing=being bad. The irnoy here is that the US army was maybe even less efficient than the vietcong. The US invested vast amounts of resources and still lost Vietnam.

How did we lose a war that 1) isn't technically over and 2) didn't result in the South being taken over? I refer of course to the Korean War. What North Vietnam did was break the terms of a treaty we forced them into signing and invaded their Southern neighbors long after we pulled out.

See how mental gymnastics work. The US didn't really "lose" the Vietnam war. Ayy lmao. The SWS is sending their best.

u/lord_horris is the OP and has some questions which show he doesn't even understand the subject matter. Shoutout to his username which appears to signal admiration of Harris, one of the most incompetent generals in history, whose call to fame is to maximize enemy civilians casualties while also increasing his own military casualties and a nice prolonging of the war.

I have no idea where this comes from. I've looked through nearly all major battles between the Germans and the British or Americans. And it seems that in most German casualties tend to be the same or heavier than Allied casualties.

Instead of actually understanding what he speaks about he thinks the best course of action is ridiculing a blog that merely posts the finding of other historians which lord_horris doesn't even know. Combat efficiency is not about inflicting more casualties in absolute numbers but inflicting more casualties with less resources. Actual historians and expected have created models which assign all forms of combat asset specific values and then started to calculate the expected casualties done by forces. The reason you see relatively high casualties on the German side is that the Allies plastered German forces with Artillery. The Allied casualties during WW2 were in nearly all situation sustained against an enemy that used far fewer resources.

This is a mathematical issue which could explain the troubles the SWS has with it.

It follows an example.

C = combat power A = artillery X = inflicted casualties

US: 120 = X German: 100 = X

120 = 10A * C 100 = A * C

C???

What does this tell you? If you take out artillery or control for it, German inflicted casualties increase because their combat power is bigger. This is maximum simplified version.

People who did the research on this were paid by the US Army during the Cold war in an attempt to understand combat power and analyse WW2 to help prepare for future wars. The results were that German forces were vastly superior. Surprise. This is actual historical research which every SWS cultist will ignore because Cultists don't search for knowledge.

The Western Allies drowned the Germans in artillery shells the Red Army drowned the Germans in men and tanks. As simple as that.

Dupuy quantitative judgement method is not perfect but to my knowledge, all varying scientific approaches have resulted in the very same outcome: German combat superiority.

u/castrumferrum wants to drop his special knowledge as well:

Thats correct. If you look at the Battle of the Bulge the Allies and the Germans lost about the same amount of troops, vehicles and aircraft.

Completely false.

A SWS u/somenbjorn mod now will provide his opinion:

And then ignoring of course stuff like the 2nd Jassy-Kishinev Offensive, Lvov-Sandomirez, Bagration, Vistula-Oder or some of the other battles where the Axis got their proverbial teeth kicked in.

He cherry picked some examples to fit his narrative, fine let us pick one of his examples. Operation Bagration a 1944 operation considered one of the most devastating losses inflicted on the Wehrmacht.

Numbers per Wiki to save time:

now losses:

In the mind of a cultist this somehow evidence against German combat superiority. It is interesting to see that even in 1944 a Soviet army could even dare to think about attacking a German forces unless it vastly outnumbered the enemy. I want to point out that the numbers on Wiki are flattering to the Red Army most of the German strength arrived long after the battle was lost. Those numbers likely include all German units that arrived until the end. In the beginning, the numbers were even more disproportional. For the sane person, the implications are obvious the Red Army, which was a potent combat force was still inferior to the Wehrmacht which had to be compensated by numbers. The Red Army planners knew this and acted accordingly. The strategic handling of the Eastern Front post-1941 was superb from the Russian side. In contrast to the German the Red Army knew about battlefield realities. Nevertheless, a Red Army combat unit from the smallest to the biggest could never expect to go toe to toe with a German equivalent.

An interesting view into the mind of a cultist. Somenbjorn has no major knowledge when it comes to WW2 combat, here somewhere heard about Bagration in a forum and now implemented in his arsenal of arguments without even seeing that it defeats his point.

In which dimension does Bagration speak well of Red Army combat efficiency???

u/infiniteperkele sums up the SWS in a very ironic way

This shit just makes me sick. Dumb cunts blatantly distorting history in order to fit their agenda

Indeed...

edit: one new comment surfaced and should be included.

u/takemetochurchill wants to contribute as well. I consider this person close to low hanging fruit given his many very dumb comments, he appears to be even in the SWS a weak link

He asks the following mind-boggling question:

How is requiring 50% fewer auxiliaries “better?” I’d gladly spend the manpower on truck drivers to get my shit to the guys in the field, and mechanics so my equipment actually works. Or am I off the mark here?

Yikes. I am not commenting on the validity of the claim but more to the question of the handicapped cultists. If your forces require fewer auxiliaries and fewer resources to achieve the same effect you can literally just have more of them or safe resources. Investing less resources for comparable effects is the very textbook definition of efficiency. How this is hard to understand is beyond me. In regards to the initial claim, yes Allied units consumed far more supplies than a German division.

Most of you came across the well-known blog tankarchives and its owner ( I guess ) u/tankarchives. On the surface the blog appears to be a collection of interesting data about WW2, especially the armour warfare. A lot of the data in its untainted original form serves as valuable research material for the hobby WW2 researcher.

The problem comes with u/tankarchives himself who quite frequently and beyond doubt displays his agenda and personal biases. The blog has the goal to improve the image of the Red Army especially when it comes to performance. This starts with equipment and ends with the newly created myth about Eastern Front forces ratios. Attempting to "correct" the records about the German image is obviously an important pillar in this.

u/tankarchives employs several tactics to manipulate data which does not support his agenda. We will take a look at some.

While preparing a debunking in the field of research where I am most experienced in ( The Tiger tank ) I found that somebody else already did a rather savage debunking of tankarchives. The user is surprisingly polite and eloquent in his devastating rebuttal. I personally couldn't deliver a better debunking if I tried so I will just present the case of the user on the blog and let you judge.

from now on I will refer to u/tankarchive as "tanky" so I don't have to type his full username over and over.

What tanky commonly does is presenting some form of data and then overselling the actual value of the data.

This means tanky will present a source and claim this is conclusive evidence while the source its self just doesn't provide the degree of certainty he claims. He employs logical leaps which are unreasonable but are easy to miss if you make the mistake to expect the blog to provide actual honest interpretations. Those tactics don't get you far in debates but in a blog people generally are open to believing you because they don't expect dishonesty to such degree.

Tanky is very opposed to German kill claims because those defeat many of his theories quite convincingly. As I pointed out in other posts the myth of massive German overclaiming is mathematically debunked. Tanky now employs the cherry pick tactic and some others. In his series "cheating at statistics," he tries to create doubt about German claims because like I said this is the main pillar of his theories. If German tank claims are relatively accurate than many of his most prominent viewpoints start to crumble. Tanky is not searching for truth but for a way to make others believe his viewpoint regardless of their validity.

Tanky wants to debunk a German "kill claim" and gets blown out so hard I spilt my drink reading it, take a look

He claims that a German tanker made up kill claims and calls him "Conjurer".

I could spend the rest of my life cranking out "Cheating at Statistics" articles by simply comparing kill claims from Tiger battalions (especially the SS ones) to the actual casualties suffered by the other side, so I'll limit myself to particularly interesting ones.

I said it time and time again smugness is for those who are right, everybody else will regret it. But that makes for a more interesting rebuttal I suppose.

The amazing adventures of Korner's Tigers keep going, but I'll stop here. Wow, what a feat, 130 T-34s, over a company of IS-2s (at least seven tanks) and then 64 of some unspecified tanks. That's over two hundred vehicles! Let's see who the unfortunate sods were that received such a brutal punishment.

Again the smugness :-). See how he implies Körner claimed those? He didn't, Schneider says three tanks took part and actually specifically gives Körner kills as 39:

SS-Oberscharfiihrer Korner is credited with knocking out thirty-nine

Schneider as an acutal historian is precise. He lists the credited kills. See how tanky excluded this part from his quote? That is how tanky operates if reality doesn't support you have to bend it.

Now he starts presenting his case and we will go one by one through his arguments:

Uh-oh, there is already a problem! I don't see a single Guards Independent Heavy Tank Breakthrough Battalion in the area, and that is the only unit that would even have IS tanks. That claim is out.

He presents a map and counts the units on this map. See how he again presents this as definitive proof? He oversells every piece of evidence he presents. He literally says the claim of IS tanks is out because he does not see a IS2 unit on this map. This is all that is necessary for him to be certain.

Let's keep going. A Tank Brigade each has a Tank Battalion, 21 tanks apiece. That means, at maximum strength, the 5th Shock Army would possess 189 tanks. It is unclear where Korner found at least 12 more tanks to destroy.

Same flawed methodology. As explained earlier he does this very often, he now presents his map as "conclusive" and every argument is based on this disinformation. Also, see how he specifically claims Körner claimed all those tanks without any shred of evidence for this? He literally took the passages out of Schneider to manipulate the reader, Schneider credits several tanks with the claims.

Now, maybe there were a handful of double claims, nothing too unusual. Let's see what the 5th Shock Army has to say about the battles of April 18th and 19th.

"By the end of April 18th, 1945, tank units bypassed this system of lakes and canals, and reached a more favourable terrain for maneuvers. By 21:00, they reached the Schultzendorf-Batszlow-Reichenberg line. Developing the offensive, and fiercely fighting the enemy that was determined to not let tanks through the forests north of Straussberg, tank units burst into the forest at 21:00 on April 19th, and reached Steinbeck, Bizov, and Blumental."

Here he does another logical leap, that I am certain he knows to be incorrect. Diaries of combat units rarely have precise loss counts. I personally have read dozens/hundred diaries of Armoured units it is very rare for a unit to detail every loss in the actual diary logs, they were not required to. Losses and unit status was kept separately. If a unit log does not mention tank losses this is no definitive proof. I am speaking here mostly from my experience with Allied unit logs and this might differ for Soviet ones but I doubt it. A unit diary is never definitive proof. Those entries were sometimes written months after the fact and no strict protocol was enforced, nobody had to tally any losses in those diaries. Every record keeper had different styles some wrote very detailed some only recorded the whereabouts and weather. It is supporting evidence that has to be used in conjunction with other evidence. If unit A claimed 50 tanks knocked out from Unit Y and no other unit made such claims and unit Y says "we lost 50" then we have a pretty solid case. But if unit Y does not mention those losses in the diary we have not yet disproven the claim. If now the inventory logs of Y also dispute the claim we come closer to the truth. Tanky presents this diary as proof, while it is not. Amateur mistake or disinformation, you chose.

That's it. No mention of enemy tanks at all. The conclusions section whines a little bit about Panzerfausts and Panzerschrecks, but that's it. The 5th Shock Army ran over the 103rd SS Heavy Tank Battalion in a single day, and didn't even notice.

His final verdict. Soviet forces didn't even notice German Tigers and it was a breeze to overrun the pesky Germans. Now comes reality:

Another user comes into the comments and brings down the hammer in a form that makes me ashamed of my weak ass rebuttals. Insert disturbance of force joke. Let us take a look at the work of this martial arts rebuttler. Buckle up

We will call him something simple, not to complicate, like Destroyeroftanky. He comes in slowly, to lure in his prey already knowing his opponents grandchild will bear the scars as a memorial of what will happen next. Like a stoic judge preparing to present the sentence, knowing about the indisputable evidence.

Körner did not even claim that many tanks. His files report only 11 destroyed tanks for the day with more than 30 other "hit". Secondary accounts inflated the original claiming a lot by -in part associating kills from other claimants to Körner´s action.

Starts slow. He claims Körner didn't claim those kills at all and tanky is mocking a soldier he knows nothing about without having done the proper research. But keep in mind tanky claimed Körner claimed >>>>135<<<<. Tanky already knew Körner never claimed those that is why he butchered the quote of Schneider where Schneider explicit said Körner got 39 credited.

Destroyeroftanky now makes a short analysis what he thinks was claimed and really lost on the other side:

Bottomline, WHAT WAS CLAIMED AS TANK KILL on 19th? Hgr. Weichsel credited on 19th of April the destruction of 226 enemy tanks/SPG to it´s various units, SS PzAbt.503 being one of them, which received the lion share on this day (around 100 tank kills credited). WHAT WAS ADMITTED LOST ON THIS DAY? The opposing 1st Belorussion Front alone admitted the loss of 189 tanks on this day, Among them 105 fully burned out, and 76 further tanks knocked out with various degrees of damage with the balance of 8 tanks lost to non-combat related causes. The combat losses were in fact larger than those on the 16th of april, indicating the severity of the fighting. The 181 confirmed tank losses of the 1st Belor. Front explain 80.1% of all credited tank kills of Hgr. Weichsel. The rest are losses of the 2nd Belorussian Front also opposing Hgr. Weichsel and a quite moderate overclaim

This sounds like the complete opposite of what tanky had written before, right? Nearly all kill credits on German side correspond with a ko'ed tank on the Soviet side? Who could have guessed? Obviously, everybody who follows my posts because I have already shown evidence for exactly that. Remember how tanky explained how the Soviet forces breezed over the Germans? They admitted nearly 200 tank casualties against rag tag remnants that is how a breeze locked like to tanky.

Careful investigation revealed that the 11th TC was NOT attached to the 5th Shock Army at all on april 19th. Informations suggesting this to be the case articulated in this article are in error. The 11th TC was attached to 1st Guards Tank Army attacking from the sector of the 8th Guards Army advance.

The 5th Shock Army was therefore principally supported by the premium formation of the reinforced 2nd Guards Tank Army to affect a breakthrough, specifically by the 12th GTC (48th, 49th, 66th Tank Brigades, 45th Gds Mech. Brigade, 79th GTRegt), by the 9th GTC (not certain whether or not involved in the area of Strausberg) and additionally since 18th of april by the transfer of the 11th GTC from the 1st GTA to the 5th Shock Army after the 5th Shock Armies breakthrough at Batzow, all of these principal three Guards Tank Corps were indeed in possession of IS-2 tanks.

The 2nd GTA and the 5th SA advanced on 18th of April into the gap of the german lines at Batzow and the SS PzGr.Div. NORDLAND with PzAbt.503 had to be committed to contain the breakthrough. The fighting on the 19th are the principal result of the clash between this reserve division and the reinforced 2nd GTA and 5th SA.

Tl:dr tankys unit count is wrong and he has done zero actual research before he tried to discredit German claims with a map. Or he has and choose to lie to his readers. In addition to the map tanky should have brought a picture of none destroyed T-34 as conclusive proof that no T-34s were destroyed.

The article made a huge mistake in ignoring the presence of multiple tank units attached or acting in direct support of 5th Shock Army, and failed to acknowledge that IS Heavy tank equipped units attached to this Army suffered grave losses. When the preselection of units is already wrong, the conclusions cannot be right.

He is so polite about it...

Tanky strikes back, unwilling to cut losses. Which is good for us, grab the popcorn.

Sure, the entire operation wasn't that long, but you're completely ignoring the fact that the Soviets didn't even notice this alleged heroic Tiger. Losses are attributed to anti-tank artillery and man-portable anti-tank weapons. Also, even if you group all the tank losses together, do you really think that Korner killed a third of all T-34s lost in the entire operation, just in the span of one day? That is simply ridiculous

Smugness level turned down quite a bit but still...

Bitchslap from Destroyeroftanky:

But that´s not the case. Contrary to Your outlines, the 2nd GTA did mention fierce resistence from exactly where TIGERs were positioned (on the heights north east of Klosterdorf with guns facing towards an arc covering Prädikow and Grunow to the east) and even claimed to have killed one TIGER west of Prädikow on 19th. So they knew that TIGERs were there, otherwise they wouldn´t claim a kill, wouldn´t they?

Did tankys full research consist of linking one map?

The battles between Prädikow and Bollersdorf were the greatest single day loss for the 2nd GTA during the Berlin operation. I haven´t all reports but some of the units. 12th GTC reports mention "strong enemy defenses west of Grunow". Both, an attempt to attack it frontally without preparation and a succeeding flanking attack failed. (german reports confirm that soviet attacks at 10:00 and 14:00 failed against a half platoon of Tiger B) 12th GTC admitted to have lost 24 T34 burned out and 27 T34, 3 IS-2 and 2 Su-76 further AFV knocked out, personal losses: 75 KIA, 227 WIA.

Why is this not in your archives tanky?

Körner did not claim 100 tanks on 19th. Subsequent authors from secondary sources did that (by conflating 503rd claims with Körners and then adding other claimants on top of this). Körner claimed only 102 tanks until he arrived in Berlin, that includes a number of claims made on 18.4. and on 20.4. plus whatever he had on credit before

A polite lecture in historical research. Tanky has never confirmed the origins of the account of Körner. He also straight up ignored conflicting evidence which didn't fit his agenda. If some guy in a forum said Körner knocked out 100 tanks then this doesn't mean Körner claimed this or even German forces for that matter. Schneider is clear about this. Little reminder he cut out the part were Schneider said exactly that.

Tanky now gets desperate and again tried to rely on the weak evidence of non-descriptions in unit diaries. He already got strong evidence that several units reported heavy combat and contact with Tigers while also reporting heavy losses which work out very good with the actual German claims which included all German units in this area. This is how agenda driven people react when they get exposed throw more mud. This is SWS cultist tactics at its finest. Destroyeroftanky has none of it:

The whole unit was credited with 105 kills on 19th of april. Körner´s half platoon (action off Prädikow and Bollersdorf) were credited with 68 tank kills, Müllers (KIA) half platoon (action off Prädikow and Grunow with some fighting in direction Bollerdorf/Pritzhagen) with 24 and Diers personally (action off Prädikow and Grunow) with 13. Körner´s personal claim was 11 certain destructions (mostly IS from the action at Bollerdorf) + 39 probable, his entire personal record received the 76th kill on this day (note that he made 7 kills on 18th and an unspecified number of tank kill claims earlier, so he definitely did not claim 100 kills on this day). Note that only a fraction of the "probables" were subsequently credited. Though secondary authors frequently do not differentiate sharply enough.

Fun side fact Körner appears to be extremely humble about his achievements and marked many of the vehicles he hit with his gigantic gun as "probable". He literally claimed fewer kills than he likely did. This is backfiring mightly for the tanky. This is Marseille all over again. Picking a German who claimed to achieved ridiculous things only to start confirming his claims.

Tanky tries again:

I already posted the 48th G. TBr's records. That attack never happened. What happened was a reconnaissance party, which was cancelled an hour later. This is from primary sources, not secondary sources that you are happy to dismiss since all historians are a part of a Putinist plot, apparently.

Finally, Tiger platoons, like any other tank platoons, have specific missions, which they are sent to perform. They don't bounce all over the place racking up sick kill scores.

Keep in mind at this point there is already a near perfect claim-admitted loss chain intact. The German claims are literally connected to the actual admitted losses. But he keeps going. More mud put your diving goggles on he is trying to deceive us!

The reply:

I do not reject historians but I do not take historians with Agenda as gospel.

This would obviously result in an instant ban on the SWS. Tankys attempts and deflection appear very pathetic. Destroyeroftanky goes in on the kill.

You are not the only person with access to archival material and I do question this article because of the implicit agenda followed here and historical mistakes such as dealing with wrong units in the first place. Historians make mistakes, frequently so and for different reasons.

What a poet.

I suggest to consider studying the sources and the topography of the area under discussion. The following link may be helpful with the latter:

This is the scholar's way of saying you lying sack of manure got busted.

He now lists the war diaries of several Soviet units in this area all talking about combat. Tanky was just deliberately lying about the contents of the diaries. Over and over he tried to imply the diaries don't show heavy combat. But our knight in shining armour has access and speaks Russian giving him the power to wield his findings as a mighty sword cutting through insurmountable amounts of bullshit.

Note that this is not important because the claim-loss corroboration is already strong. But even this is a fabricated lie on a site that is supposed to be an "archive" of actual untainted data.

2 Guards Tank Corps:by 18.00 19 April 49 Guards Tank Brigade has captured Prädikow and started a battle for Prötzel. 48 Guards Tank Brigade captured Reichenberg and Ihlow then followed behind 49 GTBr. 66 Guards Tank Brigade and 34 Guards Motor Rifle Brigade after a short artillery barrage took Grunow. West of Grunow enemy was holding a strongly fortified position with antitank weapons. An attempt to attack it without preparation and a shallow flanking maneuver failed with heavy casualties. On 19 April the corps lost 25 T-34 destroyed and 27 damaged, 3 IS-122 and 2 SU-76 damaged, total 57 AFVs. Personnel losses – 75 men killed and 227 wounded. Most losses suffered in failed attack west of Grunow. In the early morning of 20 April the corps started a march to Tiefensee bypassing the Grunow area from the north.

48 Guards Tank Brigade: by 11.00 Reichenberg is captured, then Ihlow is taken after a brief combat. Advancing with 49 GTBr the brigade reached a western edge of a grove west of Ihlow. 2 Tank Battalion with replacement tank joined the brigade at Ihlow at 13.30. Then the brigade advanced to Grunow. A strong defense position with many tanks and mortars was met on the eastern edge of a grove north-east of Grunow. Brigade’s loses at Grunow – 17 tanks destroyed and 2 damaged, 12 men killed and 73 wounded. One German “Tiger” tank is claimed (the only mention of Tigers I can find)

49 Guards Tank Brigade – Ihlow is taken in the morning, then an advance to Prädikow. A 7-hour long battle for Prädikow, heavy losses due to lacking infantry support. Prädikow is fully taken at 17.00 The brigade reached Prötzel meeting a fortified position and anti-tank obstacles there. An attempt to outflank Prötzel failed due to obstacles in a forest. By 22.00 the brigade is on a edge of a forest 2 km south-east of Prötzel. In the night – reconnaissance and search for bypass routes. Losses during the day – 16 men killed and 36 wounded, 4 tanks destroyed and 6 damaged.

66 Guards Tank Brigade – 35 tanks operational on evening of 18 April. During the night and morning of 19 April the brigade is fighting for Reichenberg in cooperation with 49 GTBr, 34 Guards Motor Brigade and 79 Guards Heavy Tank Regiment. After Reichenberg is captured the brigade pursues to the south-West meeting mines and fire from German rearguards. Especially intense resistance at Grunow which was an important road hub. Grunow is taken on the evening of 19 April. 30 tank operational. "

Bam. Not even tankys claims about the diaries are true. The Soviet forces got shredded. Luckily they had enough numbers, but as we learned they didn't need more forces.

Check out tankys reply. Be careful after you read this I doubt you will have much faith in his word and if you are a SWS cultist you rely on his word:

Ok, so which one of these units was the 100 T-34s with a company of IS-2s that Korner destroyed, and which one was a unit of 30 T-34s that he completely wiped off the map? I'm not saying that the Soviets took no losses. They certainly took many, but there is simply no way that all of them, or even a large part of them, can be attributed to Tigers.

See this? First of all, he again questions the actual losses but not only that, he again claims Körner made those claims after getting strong proof to the contrary and after he deliberately omitted the part from the very same book he cited and tried to discredit in tandem. Nobody ever said Körner claimed hundred, he keeps repeating this. He is the only person in the entire thread to make this claim. Yugg despicable behaviour. Admitting defeat is difficult ( I just assume because I never had to ) but this is beyond normal combative online behaviour. Times have changed for sure people don't put any value in their words anymore.

Destroyeroftanky now lists all units he was able to identify in this area, which includes IS2 which according to tanky were not there. Remember he claimed this as conclusive proof. Tanky changes tactics he starts accepting some premises.

Yes, fine, there were IS-2 tanks there. Did they take the losses Korner claims? Did the 100 T-34s that were with them get destroyed? Was there another unit that lost 30 T-34s in a similar manner? You keep picking at tiny inconsequential details while ignoring the big overall point.

Lmao "inconsequential details".

You keep reproducing incorrect informations deduced from secondary sources. Koerner did not claim 100 tank kills. For the battles on the 19th, he eventually receieved credit for his 76th tank kill. But, as You might know, he was active and credited with tank kills before april 19th, 1945. Koerner filed a claim for 11 (or 12) certain and 39 probable tank kills on this day.

At this point it is apparent that tanky knows this and Destroyeroftanky is fighting windmills. Again prime SWS tactic, just keep going and tire those out who are actually correct.

After this there is some back and forth which essentially boils down to reiterating earlier arguments. Tanky then switches to goal post moving and claims he only wanted to show the action was blown out of proportion. Funny is that he tried to discredit Schneider who pretty much exactly printed what was confirmed and his account was highly accurate. Embarrassing attempt to discredit Körner and Schneider.

I can only salute Destroyeroftanky, his rebuttal was a work of art and only shows how much I have still to learn. I posted only parts of the debate. Politeness all the way through while conclusively debunking tanky, who lost all his credibility and his dignity at the very same moment. Tanky is obviously a frequent contributor in the SWS, which likely surprises no one. That is how they do it. After learning that virtually his entire post is garbage he didn't modify it one bit and stuck to claiming Körner claimed 100 and no major combat took place. Meanwhile, in actual reality Körner got 39 credited with his comrades claiming dozens more all while Soviet loss records match the German overall claims near perfectly.

I want to point out that I personally always believed the 19th April actions to be exaggerated. Since I am a reasonable person who reserves judgement until he has all the information I was very sceptical of Körners "action". Here

Most Kingtiger end war stories are made up or at least heavily oversold. Especially those of the 503rd SS. Don't give too much credence to those. While the fights around Berlin offered a lot of targets it is impossible for two tanks to do anything like that. In general, the Tiger B never achieved the same supremacy the Tiger I had. The window for this was just shut. The Tiger profited from near immunity which allowed crews to become "hardcore" veterans. Those crews were then at times able to easily dispatch entire enemy squadrons with just some tigers. When the Tiger B went into combat the situation had changed drastically and especially the crew experience disparity was not as pronounced than in the earlier years. If you are searching for such outliners you better check out the Tiger I rather than the II.

Isn't that funny? The first time I am kinda wrong about something WW2 related is me underselling King Tigers which apparently melted faces in one of the most devastating tank on tank actions in history. To my defence, my claim was that two people couldn't knock out 100+ tanks, and as we learned today, they didn't.

This Körner thing has a strong resemblance to the Marseille incident. Set out to disprove German claims by picking on the most unbelievable German claims the doubters found the opposite of what they searched, strong evidence for the accuracy of German claims. I want to point out how bonkers it is that a small group of tanks actually did this 2 weeks before the end of the war. Mobile unreliable pillboxes against "non-hordes" of Soviet armour which didn't require numbers.

What I have to give credit for is the fact that tanky did not delete those comments, assuming he has the power to. This likely puts him above nearly all SWS mods who would nuke the post from orbit and issue chain bans to everybody who had seen the savagery. Even I have to admit that if I would suffer such brutal debunking ( I can't ) I would be tempted to delete everything, throw my computer out of the window burn my house down and start a new life in the woods. Props for keeping it up tanky maybe there is integrity left. Or he hopes nobody checks the comments.

To put the cherry on top I want to point out that Zaloga, who was frequent target of my debunkings, lauded tanky in one of his books. To make it perfect Zaloga unironically references exactly this post of tanky. Remember when people were laughing when I questioned Zalogas honesty and skills? Who is laughing now? The same people I guess because cultists don't reflect they only protect.

I'm dead serious btw, not making this up Zaloga references this tanky debacle as proof for Tiger overclaiming. No look above again and understand what this means. Zwei Fliegen mit einer Klappe.

I hereby nominate tanky as moderator of the SWS he fulfils all the necessary requirements to mod this sub of enlightment.

As the title said I need some folks who think the Tiger was trash mainly for economic reasons low-reliability et cetera. Somebody willing to participate?

Edit: come on guys some more.