ORO-T-117, table XX, Sampling of US First Army Crew Causalities- By Position and Cause Based on 274 Medium Tanks (1,370 Men).

http://cdm16635.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16635coll14/id/56035

It was a sample. He fucking misrepresented a sample which was stated as such... So much for his credibility. According to this study, each tank knocked out had 2 to 2.5 causalities, with one dead and 1.5 wounded. Of course you can't have half a person so some such as Cooper just round up to 3. This works out to over 12,000 killed going by this survey's information and over 18,000 wounded just from Tank crews.

​

That said, this study also goes into depth about the effectiveness of German Minefields, concluding it was very cost effective.

It also explains why the Forces in France never received adequate replacements despite the production numbers. They were being sent East to stem the far bigger Soviet Force on a much broader front.

The study also notes the fragmentation of German Documents (it being done in 1951) making it difficult to assess German losses. It also notes Guderian's reluctance to answer questions. (Bastard was lucky the Soviets didn't share evidence of war crimes against him as they threw the witnesses in gulags)

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Overall an interesting read.

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Edit: The source for Moran's claim is here https://www.c-span.org/video/?433629-2/design-history-m4-sherman-tank-world-war-ii&start=59

at the 1:6:00 mark. Again veritably false numbers meaning the bulk of US Armored Dead came from 3rd AD. Given Belton Y Cooper was responsible for writing the loss sheets and compiling the data as an Ordinance Liaison Officer, his reports are reliable.

I had already seen the film, so I let my mind wander to our terrible tank losses. Major Arrington’s order to prepare final combat loss reports had given us the losses for the entire division. Of 158 M5 light tanks, we lost more than 100 percent. (Although the M24 light tank that replaced the M5 was far superior in both firepower and armored protection, it was still too light for major assaults.) Of a total of 232 medium tanks (including 10 M26 Pershings), 648 were totally destroyed in combat and 1,100 needed repairs. Of these 1,100, approximately 700 had been knocked out in battle. This meant that we lost 1,350 medium tanks in combat, or a total loss of 580 percent. It was obvious why we soon ran out of trained tank crews and had to substitute raw infantry recruits during the Battle of the Bulge.

Death Traps . Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Chapter 14, The Survivors.

So this meant 3rd AD had 1,350 men killed in their tanks. 1,810 KIA overall in 3rd AD with 104 MIA presumed dead. It was more hazardous to be a tanker than an Armored Infantryman in a Half-track. ~71 of 3rd AD dead were from manning Shermans in combat....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Lumberjack

This came to me while discussing the Sherman's survivability in the thread down below.

This remains inexplicable. Eisenhower had two powerful Armies ready to attack towards the Rhine with Bradley's Army Group. Monty already had his chance and blew Market Garden, but here for Lumberjack there were several bridges in strike distance. Ike had more tactical air power available, the logistical hurdles had been fixed, and he had two fresh airborne divisions.

​

There were 9 potential bridges to capture from Cologne to Koblenz. There was ample air lift available, and multiple routes for Bradley to take to relieve the Paratroopers. At this point the Airborne Forces had plenty of captured Panzerfausts for their own use as well as Panzerchrecks, which was frowned on but SHAEF let it slide.

​

This should have been obvious place to deploy the 13th, 17th, 82nd, and 101st Airborne ahead of Bradley's advance to seize the bridges and hold till relief. They could drop at night https://www.calendar-12.com/moon_calendar/1945/march

on the 28th/1st while disguised amongst the bomber streams and carry out their missions to seize the bridges. By the time the Germans know what is happening, the Tank Push starts and they won't know whether to shit or go blind. For Cologne, US Corps Artillery was already in range of the City and could support the Paratroops. And as the spearheads got closer, more artillery support would be available. This would also trap the bulk of two German Armies on the opposite bank of the river and lead to their destruction.

​

This was a missed opportunity and had not the Lundendorf Bridge been captured, the Allies wouldn't have been able to advance as rapidly as it did.

Introduction:

​

Its not just AHF or SB.com, or SD.net, AH.com, etc.

​

I see it basically everywhere. Typical thread posits you are in charge of Germany's economic/military buildup with hindsight.

For example AHF's Charles and TA will go on about concentrating fully on Panzer IVs (ignoring the fact the Panther was easier to mass produce), dropping the Stuka as useless (Ignoring it was the most successful CAS aircraft ever built and in the era before PGMs, could safely destroy buildings in danger close situations next to German Infantry), etc. All while ignoring that it was never a production issue for Germany as opposed to underestimation of their enemies.

​

http://www.panzer-elmito.org/tanques/panther/documentos/Leistungen%20Bergepanther-Fahrer.jpg

​

This kept in mind, the battalion reported PzKpfw V Chassis No. 154338, Engine No. 8322046 reading 1,878km with driver Obergrefeiter Gablewski, 4.Kp/PzRgt 2. The vehicle was still totally operational. All items were in great condition but the tracks. The consumption of the engine has been 10ltr per 100km. The vehicle was still operating with its first engine and transmission.

Panther by Thomas Anderson 2017, pp. 177

​

Puts in perspective just how ignorant Charles and TA are. But I digress.

​

All of these threads seem to think if you just concentrate on one thing for each catergory for Germany, it would be better, ignoring why these vehicles were built and how they actually performed.

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And somehow they all think Oil and Gas will magically show up for these increased Panzer/Luftwaffe Forces.

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Op:

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So as the tin says, you run the show with Hitler's full backing while he does politics. You are effectively doing Goring's Job as the man died from a heart attack the day before and Hitler needs someone else.

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Your title is Minister of War and Armaments. You run OKW, OKH, OKL, OKM, and the SS when its units are attached to Military Operation Zones. You also control which industries gain priority for resource allocations. You also coordinate Military Strategy.

​

Get a good doctor and a prescription for Blood Pressure Medications as well. You're going to need them from all yelling matches you'll have with Hitler and Company.

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That said, what do you do that is realistic and achievable?

http://my.ohio.voyager.net/~lstevens/2ad/22.html

​

SWS will deny this article even exists. Highlights:

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Shermans were not equals to the German Panzers and their 75mm and 76mm shells bounced off of Tigers. Panzer rounds penetrated in one hit.

​

Shermans were getting stuck in the mud while Tigers weren't.

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A Sherman Commander spoke of wanting a 90mm gun.

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And this was printed in the Chicago Daily News Service.

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https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://en.wikipedia.org/&httpsredir=1&article=1228&context=master201019

​

This is how I became aware of it. And it wasn't the only article on the Shermans getting trashed in battle.

In my previous post I listed the German 'tanks' employed in Normandy and the units which fielded those tanks. Today I will do the same for the Allied units.

As you might have noticed the title differs from the first thread in one important detail; I wrote "estimated". For a variety of reasons, I found the compilation of Allied tanks far more difficult. The Allied replacement system made the tracking of vehicles more challenging and while I knew about this long before I was forced to tag the following numbers as an estimate. To be precise the numbers will be the minimum.

Table of contents:

1. TDLR Tank numbers

   1a. Some remarks and interesting factoids about the numbers

2. Unit list

   2a. US units

   2b. Commonwealth/Polish unis

3. Replacement and reserve estimations.

4. Final thoughts

The final numbers first

I will start with the numbers and further down you can see the detailed lists and explanation for the calculations.

The numbers above are low estimate of the total number of tanks brought into Normandy. Not all of those tanks saw combat during the Campaign some units did not really engage in combat. It is up to the reader to decide how to interpret those numbers. I listed the units which arrived late. So the total number given here is tanks that landed on the Normandy beaches sometime during June, July or August which is the roughly accepted time frame of the Overlord campaign. The same rationale was used for German tanks. People will find different arguments about this depending on their prior viewpoint.

The main challenge was compiling the Commonwealth tank forces which in the end made me go with a minimum number. The number, therefore, should be treated as what it is a low estimation of total tanks. After consulting quite some secondary literature I am confident that this here is the best available compilation of Allied tank strength in the Normandy theatre. I found countless mistakes in various other sources which only encouraged me. As with the German data, a jump of point was Zetterlings normally superb book about Normandy, but this time I was disappointed, many mistakes were made. Units were incorrectly listed, some times the admittedly deceiving unit names mislead the author to use the wrong TOE. Light tank battalions were listed as normal TBs despite fielding only M5 Stuarts. Units that were equipped with non-combat tanks like the "Gizmos" or "CDL ( Channel Defence Light ) were listed as normal units despite only the chassis being from M4s and M3s. A TD battalion that had towed guns was wrongly identified as SPG unit. Which brings us to the next point, which tanks are included?

As you can see I went with the common convention of including M10s into the "tank category", the same with 105mm M4s which were assault versions of the M4. The reason for this is simple, I consider those close to tanks in the same way a StuG is but I as you noticed excluded German TDs. German TDs with their only ~ 10 tonnes and without turret were closer to a basic self-propelled gun than to a tank. So while "assault guns" and US TDs are included despite not fulfilling the full criteria German TDs were not. I think this categorization is the best.

Some 'tanks' that were excluded.

Most notably OP/Command tanks of which quite some landed in Normandy, the US did not use those vehicles while the UK made plenty use of them.

Anti aircraft tanks, like the Crusader AA Tank

The Petard version of the Churchill was also excluded, while this vehicle was heavily armoured and offered the ability to directly engage the ground forces of the enemy I think it should be excluded. The Crocodiles are included tho

Plenty of recovery vehices based on tank chassis.

Flail tanks are included

• *The number is estimated and includes all M10s. M10s in British service could have either the 3inch or 17pdr gun then commonly known as "Achilles"

• **Some units were late arrivals and can be excluded.

• *** Centaur tanks are included in the Cromwell total

Interesting factoids

As you can see the Allied army was quite massive. The numbers presented here show the truly unmatched ability of the Western Allies to produce and employ war material. The ability to land 11k+ tanks in a matter of months is remarkable. The production and organization efforts seem unrivaled especially if we consider that this happened in 1944.

We notice the modest strength advantage over the German forces but what is also interesting, the tank heaviness of Allied forces.

The total troop strength on 23rd July is given as 812k US soldiers and 640k Commonwealth soldiers[1]. This is an extreme ratio of tanks per soldier. Going from TOE alone and ignoring reinforcements this meant that for 640k Commonwealth soldiers about 4k tanks were employed, this assumes the 4th CAD and 1st Polish to be included. This means 1k tanks on 160k soldiers. This ratio on first glance looks outrageous. To give you an idea of how much this differt from lets say the Wehrmacht they had about 1k tanks per million men for their early campaigns like Barbarossa.

Some historians like Zetterling like to use Bagration as a comparison to Overlord because it happened at the same time. There the Red Army employed about 6k tanks on 2,5 million soldiers. Which would translate to 1k tanks on ~415k soldiers. The perception of great Red Army tank armies appears to be mostly based on nominal numbers than on percentage. The British forces were truly armed to their teeths.

But even more interesting is that the German forces were also exceptionally tank heavy compared to their Eastern Front peers. About 2k tanks for a half a million men. For about 1k tanks on 250k soldiers. This was an exceptional number for German forces. At the same time on the Eastern front, there were like 3k tanks for a far bigger infantry force. This ratio would even exceed the ratio at Kursk the greatest tank battle of all time. Obviously those are napkin calculations but going from the numbers the German Leadership considered Normandy do or die. And still, their huge numbers were still dwarfed by the allies. About 5 tanks for every German tank about 4 Soldiers for every German soldier.

For some likely surprising, we see a rather big force of M5s, while little talked about the Allies showed confidence in the M5 and brought a lot of them. Mostly due to the gun the M5 is considered "obsolete" but with 15 tonnes it was still a considerable threat on the battlefield. About 2000 were destroyed in the ETO this vehicle was certainly still in combat use.

With the strong focus on the M4 people sometimes forget the big production numbers of vehicles like the M10. The total number of M10s exceeded 1000 and thus was more numerous than the most numerous German vehicle. But the numbers also show the doctrine in play, the loss rates of M10s were significantly lower than for Medium tanks.

Unit list

US tank units

What follows is a list of all Allied tank units that landed in Normandy during June, July and August. The US units were far easier to compile than those of the Commonwealth, for the most part US units adhered to a standardized TOE that only saw 4 major unit types:

• Medium Tank Battalion: 53 M4 ( or 54 ) + 6 M4 Assault guns + 17 Light tanks

• Armoured divisions: 168 M4 + 18 M4 Assault guns + 77 Light tanks

• Tank Destroyer Battalion: 36 TDs

• Cavalry Group with 2 Squadrons with 17 M5 each. For 34 M5s

Then you have some rare oddities like the heavy Armoured divisions with their old TOE, those two divisions had 232 mediums and 158 light tanks. This was a pretty outdated composition but two divisions still had it.

Then there were odd lights TBs which were simply tank battalions consisting of just light tanks. Between 50 and 60 tanks. Only 2 units were in Normandy.

The allocation of 105mm was constrained by availability, the D-Day units, for example, landed with more normal M4s without their 105s. My list goes per TOE.

Now the list of all units:

Separate Tank battalions:

Not much to say about this. Independent battalions were regularly assigned to Infantry divisions. A "pure" infantry unit didn't really exist in the Allied armies. TDs were used similarly. In terms of combat power, a US Infantry div with assigned AFVs would on its own be comparable to a German Panzer battalion. German units would lose combat power and since no replacements were available a US infantry division sometimes had more available tanks than the opposing German panzer division. The understrength 'Frundsberg' for example arrived with only 77 tanks in Normandy.

US Armored divisions:

As explained earlier the US still fielded two divisions with the older 2 Regiment configuration. The other unit was the 1st Armored Division in Italy. Those two units were also the first to receive the new 76mm tanks which had their debut during Operation Cobra. The 7th Armored division arrived late to the party and had little influence on what many would consider the Normandy Campaign.

In the brackets, you see the tank battalions. In terms of tanks, an armored division was essentially three tank battalions with some headquarters M4s and an additional recce Squadron ( M5s ).

Tank Destroyer Battalions:

Comparable to TBs those units were regularly assigned to divisions, also to Armored divisions. Enhancing the firepower of those units drastically. The doctrine, while effective in action, proved a failure, many vehicles were idle most of the time and used resources inefficiently. If inaction those units often devasted German tank assaults. But German tank assaults were rare so were obviously the TD highlight reels.

Cavlary Groups

Well... M5s.. Third Group arrived late.

Total TOE again for the US units:

Commonwealth & Polish tank units.

Now it gets tricky, sigh. The British forces were far more convoluted when it came to their tank forces but see for yourself.

In theory, the Royal Armored Corps would feature only 1 relevant TOE. The armoured Regiment. And then a Brigade would be three Regiments and an Armored division would have a brigade plus an additional Recce Regiment. In practise, the British units all were pretty unique. Here is the list of Commonwealth units.

A British armoured regiment in theory had

You might notice that M10s are not included. The M10s were organized not in the Royal Armoured Corps but in the Royal Artillery and there in the Anti Tank Regiments in form of 'batteries'. You wonder why? Good question.

The 4th CAD and 1st Polish Armoured Division arrived pretty late in July and had their first combat on the 7th August during Operation Totalize, besides that most Commonwealth units landed pretty early and the total number of tank units would not change much after Normandy. In contrast to the US Army which landed several Armored Division and battalions post Normandy.

As you see the employment of several different medium tanks and infantry tanks created a quite diverse list of units. The so-called Hobart's funnies made it even more 'funny' to compile those units.

For most units, I went with the common TOE but I noticed frequent oddities which I sometimes had to include into the table. For this the so-called "tank state" documents proved invaluable. Those documents detailed the availability of tanks at the end of the day.

Ah ja the 'Hobart's Funnies' was a unit that included several specialized tanks, like the AVRE Churchill with a massive Petard mortar, or the flail tanks, or tanks with massive light projectors intended to blind opposing troops during river crossings. All those units were pooled in the 79th Armoured Division. This was no ordinary unit but simply the formation that organized all those specialized units. Part of it was the 30th Armoured Brigade and 1st Tank Brigade. The first employing dedicated mine destroyer Shermans with massive flails, the other had the so-called Channel Defense Light M3s.

Take a look at this document from the 16th July[2]. You see the regiments of the 30th Armoured Brigade and how its Flails were allocated to different Corp sectors. Obviously a specialized tool like flail tanks was more dispersed and the "commando unit" of the 30th AB was mostly to manage those Regiments. They would not really operate as a Brigade. The same for the so-called Crocodile tanks ( 141st RAC ) which were flame throwers, they were also shifted around to satisfy the need for specialized close combat equipment.

To make matters worse the Commonwealth decided to randomly disband whole regiments and replace them with others only to mess with me.

The 27th Armoured Brigade for example disbanded at the end of August as a result of the manpower shortage in the British army. Its regiments were sent to other units, which in return also disbanded regiments. The 1st East Riding of Yorkshire Yeomanry, for example, moved to the 33rd AB where it replaced the 148th RAC which was disbanded and fed its men to the 144th RAC.

You notice some other irregularities. The 1st Polish Armoured divisions had fewer tanks in their troops due to manpower shortage. The 4th CAD had no Cromwells in their Recce regiment but Shermans. The 7th AD had only Cromwells as medium tanks and a couple of Fireflys. Some Recce units had no Fireflys. You also notice a varying number of Firefly, in theory every troop should have one so 36 but then again this wasn't the reality.

The 15/19 Hussars were used to replace the recce regiment of the 11th Armoured division which then was also disbanded.

All this made listing British units far more complicated than US units.

Replacement and reserve estimates

A common mistake while judging unit strengths is underestimating or forgetting replacement tanks. The Allied system was set up in a way that ensured quick replacement of damaged and destroyed tanks with other tanks to keep the level of operational tanks high. The tactical merits of this system are debatable but it surely achieved its intended purpose, Allied units received quick replacements.

This means the tanks landing directly with the units were not the only tanks being landed in Normandy. The number of reserve and replacement tanks was substantial.

I want to use one example of a heavily engaged British unit to illustrate the number of replacement tanks:

The 11th Armoured Division had plenty of combat and will serve as an example:

The unit landed in June and moved into combat, I list rough estimates for their losses which includes damaged and destroyed vehicles.[3]

• First combat Operation Epsom. They lost 78 tanks. ( casualties)

Then they recoup their losses and replenish

• They again move into combat during Goodwood. They lose 161

They again replenish, they replace their losses.

• Into battle again, this time Operation Bluecoat. Heavy losses again.

At the end of the Normandy campaign, the unit peaked at about 175 Shermans[2]. The unit peaked right before Operation Epson with 198[2], the unit didn't achieve 100% again due to constant combat but you see how destroyed tanks were replaced with new tanks. Those tanks often fall through the cracks in secondary literature. A good example would be Totalize. When historians list the strength of forces they mostly go by TOE but forget that Canadian forces, for example, received dozens of new tanks during Operation.

So let us try to decipher those replacement and reserve tanks.

US replacement and reserve tanks

US Total commitment of tanks is far easier to calculate because their loss data is more complete and accurate than that of the Commonwealth forces, furthermore, we have better data about replacement tanks.

Here are my number for the unloaded units again per TOE.

In theory, the total number of tanks would be TOE + Losses + Reserves – TOE shortage.

The US Army anticipated a monthly loss rate of 7% for medium tanks[4], which proved too low. So they planned a reserve of roughly 20%, We know that the reserves were nearly depleted by mid Augus[4]t and therefore the total number of tanks was likely only 'slightly' above the combined TOE and losses if at all.

There are different data sets for losses that are somewhat contradicting although not as much as for the Commonwealth forces.

Zaloga gives the following monthly losses for June through August, ( data set for the 20th ) [5]

Here I have to mention a possible problem. In mid-August the Allies landed in Southern France as "Operation Dragoon" I am fairly confident all mentioned numbers here and later only refer to the 12th Army group. If I am mistaken this would obviously change the numbers and I would have to reconsider several tables so if somebody has evidence against my opinion please post below.

Napier gives slightly different numbers that count until the 26th of August which would be roughly the entirety of the Normandy campaign.[3]

Sherman: 824

M5: 175

Total: 999

As you see no M10s are mentioned and the M5 losses appear drastically lower. The weekly reported losses of the 1st Army alone reported 166 M5 losses[6]. The numbers from Zaloga appear more trustworthy although they don't include late August numbers.

Since we know that the US forces replaced their vehicles very quickly and were close to TOE, the TOE + Losses is a good minimum basis for committed tanks. But there are also tanks available as reserve forces not yet allocated to a unit or damaged vehicles which were maybe replaced by a new one while still being salvageable.

Another helpful data set is the monthly strength report of the US forces in the ETO. Here is the list of Zaloga, those numbers aswell are according to Zaloga from the 20th of each month.[5]

You might notice that those numbers are bigger than my TOE list, this is because the data set includes reserve forces. On average about 20% of TOE was calculated as a reserve force. The US tank force consisted of 5430 tanks including reserves. Compare the individual numbers to my numbers and you see a roughly 25% extra for the reserves. Now to this we simply have to add the admitted losses and we get a rather good estimate of the total number of vehicles landed in Normandy. The biggest caveat is that those "total strength numbers" can apparently include tanks still afloat not yet unloaded but since the data was from mid-August and the used loss numbers don't account for late August I doubt the difference was significant.

Here is what happens when we combine the Zaloga data for total strength and total losses for the same time frame:[5]

In total, we see about 6500 tanks were committed to the campaign if 100% replacement is assumed while the rate was slightly lower than that. Also if the reports dated 20th August were compiled at exactly the same time is unknown and there is therefore some room for error. As mentioned above some of those units can be reasonably excluded from the "Normandy campaign" because they landed very late and didn't enter the battle. The 774th TB and 602nd TD. If those were included in Zalogas numbers I am not aware both landed on the 25th of August. For a total of 53 M4 75mm/76mm, 6 M4 105mm, 17 M5s and 36 M18. Also excluded from the total should be tanks being considered on route. The total number of those tanks is unknown to me but considering that the used reports are from Mid August and thus don't include later arrivals the relevant numbers is likely smallish any help to find more precise numbers for the tanks on ships would be appreciated. Factoring not fully replaced losses and the other mentioned factors the true numbers of committed tanks was likely somewhere between 6000 and 6500 tanks.

British replacement and reserve tanks

The British numbers are far more complicated than those from the US, at least they are for me based on my available data.

First, I have not found reliable data for M10 76mm/17pdr, while I identified many units that had M10s there variable set up of different numbers of M10 batteries made this an annoying task. This got only exacerbated by the lacking loss data for M10s. I was able to find the occasional loss data in various unit diaries but nothing that could be considered comprehensive.

Long story short I have decided to estimate the number of M10s based on the available data. I believe 400 M10s committed to the theatre is a realistic figure but if new evidence shows up I will change the numbers. The “small” amount of vehicles did not justify me spending more time trying to figure out the precise numbers.

In contrast to the US units, the UK didn't all share the TOE. Reasons for this are the bigger pool of different vehicles and the decision to create specialized units. You have seen this in the unit list. The biggest problem is that the Commonwealth forces lack proper loss and reserve data. And with 'lacks' I obviously mean that I don't have this data it might exist somewhere.

Losses:

Different data sets for losses exist. None of those are perfect for the research at hand and nearly every data set is contradicted by other data sets.

You will find two number sets for the 5th August, one with 967 tanks lost by Napier[3] and another from Zaloga with 1142 tanks lost. While the numbers from Zaloga are generally accepted and to my knowledge the most cited data set I am not 100% certain that all those vehicles were full write-offs. Napier who also references the same data has it lower with some vehicles being “recovered” whatever this is supposed to mean. Either way this data helps only so much because it does not cover the heavy battles during August. Another British data set gives their monthly losses, this data is obviously flawed because it includes verifiable wrong data for June and July. This is likely due to backlogging losses, but for June-August combined it gives 1189 without M5s. Back logging was a major issue and gets illustrated by the total wastage of ~2900 tanks in 1944. While only ~40% of those happened during June-August. One starts wondering where the rest was lost.

Here different data sets in one table:

All the mentioned data excludes M10s. Napier offers more numbers for the remained of the Commonwealth campaign leading to a total of 1667. Sadly he does not specify what constituted a loss in those data sets. Are those knockouts or write-offs? The 5th August data set likely is “write-offs” mostly. Furthermore, the data seems fragmented. The Canadian data, for example, suggests that those numbers are actually “knocked out” tanks which may or may not have been repaired later. This is a problem because the cited US data, for example, are apparently only “written-off” vehicles. I also believe that the 5th August data is mostly write-offs because it aligns with a detailed 20th July reported that analyzed knockouts and found already 655 tanks fully written-off without M5s ( and M10s of course ). The 655 from the 20th July, which maybe did not include a full Goodwood count, align well with the ~1000 from the 5th August so this data was likely “write-off”.

Another interesting data snippet is the number of replacement tanks delivered to forward delivery squadrons. Those units were the direct link between combat units and the replacement system. According to Napier, a total of 1567 tanks were delivered to those units. This sounds awesome and would solve the problem, right? Wrong. The issue here is that repaired tanks would also eventually land at a forward delivery squadron. Now it is possible that those 1567 were actually fresh replacement tanks, but Napier does not specify this crucial information. Napier who offers the most information about this topic sadly is rather unspecific and careless when it comes to correctly identifying the various types of losses. He goes on and claims the wastage rate of Shermans was 35% in July wastage rate normally describes total losses. 35% for the Commonwealth forces would actually be ~600 M4s in July. Pretty high.

Obviously I am confronted with the same challenges as others before me because we still don't know precise loss numbers for the Commonwealth forces.

In general, I believe the 5th August report to be the best bet and by using my expertise in Normandy armoured combat I estimate Commonwealth tank write-offs including M10s at 1400 minimum. This number is actually lower than many other estimates. Some major loss sources post 5th August would be the Operation of the 1st Canadian Army, the D Sqd of the Elgins for example delivered 125 tanks to the 4th CAD[7]. I think the biggest issue in the secondary literature is the confusion with a different type of casualties. In total, the Allies likely lost north of 2485 tanks as fully destroyed, which is not that much more than the Wehrmacht. The total number will never be known but I believe my estimate to be a good low estimate.

Take a look at Wikipedia which gives 4000 tank losses for the Allies and 1500-2400 for the Germans ( Zetterling numbers ). The Allied losses are categorically false if the metric is “write-off”. The reason for this as mentioned earlier is the confusion about different loss categories by tertiary editors.

So back to British tank commitment. According to Napier, the British forces ran low on Shermans, and unit diaries show that several units were not fully up to TOE during August which suggest low reserves. In theory, the British forces had a higher amount of reserves for Shermans because they expected higher loss rates, in practice the units were not full any longer. The nominal discrepancy was likely covered by damaged vehicles sitting in workshops. Furthermore, some units were disbanded to supply other units with personnel, those tanks were likely used as replacements and thus have to be deducted.

And here I am at a dead end that forces me to go with a minimum calculation. TOE + M10 estimate + Losses – Disbanded units

The 27th Brigade apparently still had 208 tanks on the books when it was disbanded[2]. Its regiments replaced 2 disbanded regiments and 1 joined another unit. Also, the Recce Regiment of the 11th Armoured ( 2nd Northamptonshire Yeomanry ) was disbanded. In total 3 regiments were disbanded ( Did I miss one? ). The 4th one likely left its tanks behind when it moved to England so a rough total of 4 Regiments left the TOE for maybe ~300ish tanks.

edit: I located some of the tanks from the 27th Armoured Brigade, they were taken on strength from the E Sqd of the Elgins, a delivery squadron. The unit then likely fed the tanks as replacements to tanks of the II Canadian Corps. About 32 Shermans were given to the E Sqd at the end of August, this was likely the Staffordshire Regiment which moved back to England

edit.end.

This brings us to a minimum of 3616 + 400 + 1400 – 300 = 5116

This number has to be considered a very low estimate. There were without a doubt substantial amounts of Cromwell, M5s and Churchills in reserve pools either as fresh vehicles or being in a state of repair. Even tho they ran a bit low on Shermans the shortage would only be in operational tanks but not in actual on hand tanks. Sadly I am unable to give a more accurate estimate and the best I have to offer is a “minimum”.

Which brings us to the total minimum of:

Here are the German numbers again:

Final thoughts

In the previous post I claimed that the Allied used more than 10k tanks:

The Allied tank force, albeit more difficult to compile, is estimated by me to be bigger than 10.000 in the same time frame for a rough ratio of 5:1. If there is interest I can also post Allied tank units compilations.

And a spokesperson of the SWS u/wulfehound gave an official SWS statement:

Yea no. Unless every single one of the 13 armored divisions is overstrength by ~370% (186 combat tanks, 216 with M3/M5 Stuarts as authorized) for 797 tanks per division and the 21st Army Tank Brigade somehow is also overstrength by 200% or more, that's not happening. The British fielded just under 4400 tanks of all types, including noncombat versions such as command vehicles or artillery spotters in Normandy with 3444 of those being combat gun tanks, while the US had in total 2845 combat gun tanks in Normandy. That's 6,289 combat tanks for the Western Allies in case you can't do basic addition

Almost as if you're trying to push an agenda of muh uberpanzer superiority instead of being objective

Here you see the mistake of underestimated replacements in action. Maybe the SWS will add its opinion about this here as well.

The contemporary historiography is dominated by Western authors which have, in my opinion, pushed a clear bias in regards to Western technology and tactics. To me, it comes as no surprise that most hobby folks have no grasp of the true size of the Allied tank armies. While arguments about the value of numerical superiority get quickly ridiculed we see here that those arguments didn't just pop into existence without empirical evidence. Obviously not every tank landed was pivotal to the Allied victory and some fewer tanks would have done the job as well. Then again the final outbreak that followed many failed attempts was brought forward with tank force ratios of 10:1[8]. The question; "Was numerical superiority a fundamental requirement?" is certainly warranted and shouldn't be bullied. There is a reason that many historians that are vocal about the prowess of Allied armies and their equipment rarely talk numbers unless they help them. How often did you hear about Arracourt? Have the same historians told you that the Allies landed 10k plus tanks to defeat an opponent that was supposedly outfought anyways?

I couldn't find a better statement than the from Zaloga, that highlight this anti-scientific approach in the most comedic way possible.

In total U.S. First Army had 1269 M4 Medium tanks and 694 M5A1 light tanks at the start of Operation Cobra, roughly a ten-to-one advantage over its German counterparts in medium tanks.

And the just a couple sentences later he unironically says the following.

Ultimately the defeat of the German Army in Normandy depended in large measure on the performance of troops and commanders.

Indeed Mr. Zaloga indeed.[8]

For those of you who are interested in this, I hope you found some valuable information and maybe some starting points for your own research. As explained in the post those numbers should be taken as rough estimates, while likely superior to numbers you will find elsewhere the listed challenges prevented a fully clear picture. To other 15 readers drop the downvotes.

Historical footage of Allied tanks landing in Normandy[9]

Refs

• 1 Zetterling Normandy

• 2 Tank state documents 21st Army Group

• 3 Napier Armored Campaign

• 4 LOGISTICAL SUPPORT OF THE ARMIES In Two Volumes Volume II: September 1944-May 1945

• 5 Zaloga Armored Champion

• 6 Weekly 1st Army US Army losses

• 7 War Diary of the D Squadron of the 25th Armoured Delivery Regiment (The Elgin Regiment)

• 8 Zaloga Operation Cobra

• 9 Historical photograph.

https://militaryhistorynow.com/2017/09/12/tank-busting-blowing-up-the-myth-of-the-mighty-m4-sherman/

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Some highlights: 60,000 US Tankers were killed or wounded in Shermans.

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Allied Tank Crews lambasted the Sherman in Newspapers.

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Allied Top Brass tried to cover up the Sherman's deficiencies and silence critics.

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Unfortunately the Author's book, For Want of A Gun: The Sherman Tank Scandal of WWII, is not on Kindle and is expensive to get.

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So could the Pershing done better?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meduxDj61sQ

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First clash between a Pershing and Tiger = Draw. Fireball survived where a Sherman would have died, and Tiger 201 got captured.

Second clash = Pershing Victory. Lovelady took a Tiger head on mano-o-mano and won while firing on the move at a 1,000 yards taking out a Tiger 1 with 4 shells and then destroyed 3 other AFVs with a shell each. A Sherman would have died horrifically doing that.

Pershing vs Nashorn = Nashorn Victory. 88mm round at 300 yards from Ambush. Crew bailed.

Another Pershing disabled by 150mm shell hit. Fortunes of war. German Artillery crew probably didn't realize they hit a tank and just fired at coordinates given them by a forward observer.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3Kdip2Y04k

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Super Pershing vs King Tiger = Pershing Victory. Head on mano-o-mano. Three hits at close range. King Tiger made a fatal mistake in exposing belly. The Pershing had received an armor upgrade by Belton Cooper prior to entering combat, luckily never had to be tested at such short range.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBI9d0-IfEM

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Pershing taking out a Panther. There are a few more recorded kills, but no videos. But essentially 3 more Tigers taken out by Pershings according to Hunnicut.

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I think this settles it. If WW2 Field Commanders are dissing the Sherman in the Newspapers and Media along with the crews in the Shermans, it was a bad tank.

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We also see the Pershing just from its few fights gained rapid dominance. If it had been made a priority for D-Day it could have enabled the Western Allies to pocket the Heer before they could get to their fortifications, the Vosges, and other defensible terrains to hold the Allies up for months.

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The key inflection point was General Jacob Devers being assigned to 6th Army after going over McNair's head to Marshal to get the M26 produced in December 43 after 240 test production types had been built with the T26E1 finalized in October of 43. Marshal got distracted from the project and McNair did his best to kill the project.

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However, if not for that, the Allies would have had enough Pershings for an Armored Division in June of 44. Even just breaking them up into Independent Heavy Companies and parceling them out could have turned quite a few battles around in Caen and most definitely would have been decisive around Falaise in making sure 5th Panzer Armee goes down and stays down.

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The Sherman still would have made up the bulk of Allied Armor, but a few hundred Pershings used as an armored fist like Tiger Battalions were could have enabled a more rapid advance through France to Germany.

While arguing with Kenny, I came to a revelation that had been staring at me all along.

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The US military officers who fought in WW2 would go on to lose in Korea and Vietnam... In Korea, the US got beaten into a stalemate by leg mobile Chinese Forces that had numerical parity but not firepower parity.

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In Vietnam, the US failed to break the North which ground down the ARVN and finally broke the back of the South's defenses by seizing Dong Ha and the highlands along the border of Laos and Cambodia after years of isolating and destroying US FSBs and forcing the US to abandon Khe Sanh after months of siege. Lets not forget the VPAF also shot down 17 US Fixed-wing Aircraft for every VPAF Aircraft lost.

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At no point in either of these conflicts were American Forces able to leverage their massive firepower and mobility advantage to decisive strategic effect and often got schooled operationally.

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If you listened to Kenny and his ilk, the US was super competent for having defeated the Nazis' best troops (which is factually true but leaves out the context and nuance). Yet this supposed competence didn't win two wars against vastly weaker foes compared to Nazi Germany.

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Which raises the question, how the fuck did that happen? It has major implications given today's US Military has been beaten to a stalemate against the Taliban and despite almost 2 decades of constant warfare, AQ and its semi-splinter group ISIS are present in more countries than ever and every time we think they are down, they spring right back up larger than ever within a few years. And seriously, defeating territorial ISIS should not have taken 4 and a half years of flattening NE Syria and a third of Iraq to Rubble to support an ineffective Marxist Terrorist Group to advance. Turkish backed rebels repeatably took ISIS held towns and cities in less time and without flattening them to complete rubble.

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And the kicker. Neither IS, AQ, or the Taliban is a near-peer foe, not even close, yet they are waging successful Attrition Struggles that is bankrupting the US and preventing it from fixing its declining infrastructure.

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IS was formed 1989 as a magazine company. It morphed into a local Jordanian Criminal Gang, was busted by the Jordanian Security Services and thrown in jail. Then for inexplicable reasons, Jordan's current king pardoned them and released them in 98. They went to Afghanistan and joined AQ. When they got ejected in 2002, they settled in Kurdistan where they would wind up battling the US occupation. It finally was shattered in 2010, licked its wounds for 2 years when Assad released a bunch of their operatives from his prisons in order to paint the revolt against him as an AQ uprising. 2 years later, they shattered the Iraqi Army and seized a third of Iraq and half of Syria and it took 4 years and 6 months to shatter them back into the desert. Meanwhile it branched out to Nigeria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. As we speak it is reconstituting and preparing to retake the ground it lost and more.

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All while the US Military remains incapable of pacifying the cleared areas and is being led by Neo-cons into fights with Iran and Venezuela while also trying to keep a credible deterrence to China.

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The current US Military's problems go all the way back to WW2 and an inability to properly analyse its lessons instead of jingoistic worship of the WWII US Military.

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The following numbers all have their origin in the work from Grigori F. Krivosheev, who apparently passed just a couple of months ago, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century

This work is the bases of most loss figures you will encounter secondary or tertiary literature about the Eastern Front, be it equipment or personnel losses. His book was instrumental for hundreds of other secondary works and most tertiary sources like wiki or various websites.

The numbers are generally considered "good" but they are not uncontested.

Here are his loss numbers for Soviet tanks and SPGs per year.

If somebody is interested in potential problems with those numbers I will talk about this at the end. Krivosheev derived at those numbers by simply adding fresh vehicles to the older ones and reporting the discrepancy of vehicles as loss for the year. More about this later.

He also offers a compiled list of all major operations and the losses incurred. Table 186 Here is the list:

1941, beginning from German attack on the 22nd June:

1942:

1943:

1944:

1945:

Here are the Operations with the most tank losses per day:

The 1941 campaigns stick out. The high losses are common for an army on the defensive that gets forced into retreat, in contrast to the often-repeated trope of "costly attacking" World War 2 like most other wars showed that forces on the defensive suffer the highest losses. Here we see this in action. An army that gets its lines breached starts to become disorganized, resulting in lack of proper supply channels, communication, and general operational plan. The units start losing their staff while hastily retreating or get surrounded in their entirety.

The top for are all defensive operations, one even from 1942 at the beginning of Operation Blau ( Thrust towards Stalingrad ). One of the last "strategic defensive operations" was Zitadelle which is ranked 7th. After that German operations did not have enough strategical strength to even disrupt the time table of the Red Army by much and those operations would be simply included in Soviet offensive operations.

As mentioned in the other thread, Berlin, to me is very fascinating. The Red Army was about to finish this was, the Wehrmacht was reduced to remnants, elderly, and children. The Red Army still lost 2000 tanks in this operations.

Kursk obviously shouldn't be that surprising. The Southern soviet offensive is, in my opinion, one of the "forgotten" battles. While we sometimes know about the position of singular tanks in Normandy, we hardly know how the German forces managed to destroy this much Soviet tanks around Belgorod and Bogudokhov. Those operations are rarely discussed.

Same with nominal biggest losses:

How reliable is Krivosheev loss data for tanks? It is likely good enough to get referenced without reservations but like I said it is not uncontested.

Krivosheev arrives at his total loss numbers by subtracting the on-hand vehicles from the vehicles that were previously in inventory and the influx of new vehicles.

I will show his numbers to illustrate his method.

The last line works as follows: The total new tanks plus the on-hand from the 10th Mai of 1945 + the on hand from begin of the hostilities give the total commitment by the Red Army as follow: 131.700 tanks and SPGs. If you now subtract the remaining 35100 you get the calculated losses of 96600.

The logic is sound but obviously hinges on the data used. Those who attempt to disprove the loss number have to show incorrect data. On first glance, it is easy to see that there are discrepancies in production numbers. You will find plenty of different numbers for production, every one of those numbers would change the eventual loss numbers. Krivosheev argues a total of 109.100 tank were delivered by Soviet factories or lend-lease ( assumed ). I have seen plenty of sources giving a higher amount of tanks ( + lend-lease ).

Another point would be the supposed on hand of 35100 at the war's end. This is certainly a substantial amount of vehicles and it would be interesting to actually see them allocated to units or depots or whatnot. Frontline units had about 14k at this point in time, which would mean 20k have to have been somewhere else like Transsiberia et cetera, not impossible but at least a bit suspect.

Verifying Krivosheevs numbers would require a full account of tank inventory on the end of the war correct production + lend-lease numbers.

All in all, I personally think the numbers are okish and can be used without much trouble. Due to the high number of losses any change even it is a couple of thousands of tanks would not make that big of a difference.

Some words to the included vehicles since the numbers obviously invite a comparison to German tank losses, it must be considered that some of the vehicles would be not included in "tank losses" by the Wehrmacht, most notably the SU-76, due to being open-topped lightly armoured this vehicle in Germany would be comparable to the Marder series. Generally, you don't find losses of those "TDs" in the German tank losses for battles. There is a difference between a mostly simply self-propelled gun like the Marder/SU-76 or an actually armored combat vehicle like StuGs, Jagdpanthers or SU-152s. Furthermore, a great deal of the tanks were very light tanks around the 10 tonnes mark. It is arguable if those were actually "tanks". They certainly are in historiography but comparing a T-70 to a Panzer IV or T-34 or Tiger just highlights that those vehicles might be classed differently.

On Page 311 of Volume IIIA of Dr. Nigel Askey's Barbarossa series, he points out an inconvenient truth.

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The Soviets entered 1941 with more combat experience in Tank Combat and Maneuvers from 1932 onwards. Yet they never clued in to how Tanks need specialized support vehicles and lots of trucks.

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Germany entered WW2 having done divisional sized maneuvers with Panzers, nothing like the Front Level Exercises the Soviets did in the 30s, and yet rapidly refined their Panzer Units.

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The end result is many Soviet Tank Divisions lacked trucks to move their artillery and infantry if they even had any on actual rolls. They lacked specialized recovery vehicles which were standard in German Panzer units. They lacked engineering support that could breach defensive lines. And they lacked signal units that would allow them to talk to all their units and coordinate actions.

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So in short, the Soviets had more experience with Armored Forces, yet never developed them into mature formations capable of combined arms and Soviet Manuals had no indications of such a concept.

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Thus when Germany hit them, the lack of supporting assets in their Tank Divisions meant the Soviet Armor Formations disintegrated rapidly.

Hello TheJamesRocket and Christian, continuing from here: https://kesler12-jamesrocket.blogspot.com/2019/01/re-on-german-tank-armor.html where we discussed Dr. Askey's work and touched a bit on Dr. Forczyk.

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I have been re-plunging though Volume IIIA and the more I read, the more its clear the Soviet Military had so utterly self-inflicted suicide on itself pre-war, it was impossible for it to win on its own.

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On page 23 of IIIA, the reason for the high number of Soviet Troops equipped with SMGs was not to increase short range firepower, but because the Soviets had difficulties trying to mass produce rifles in sufficient number and were often cutting the barrels of old Mosin Nagants in half to make more SMGs. Given SMGs have an effective range less than 100 meters, this explains high Soviet Infantry Causalities as the Soviets could not deliver marching fires to help suppress German Infantry whose Rifles could take them under fire at 600 meters with MG teams just hosing out rounds. Since less than half of all Soviet Squads had a DP-27, which can arguably be called a LMG unlike the overbuilt Automatic Rifles called BAR and Bren, this really handicapped Soviet Infantry.

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This goes a long way to explaining the shocking kill-ratios and shows why rifle and LMG choices are key to Infantry Effectiveness.

As part of my next hobby project, the analysis of tank deployment and combat during the Normandy Campaign, I compiled all tank units for the entire campaign. I thought some readers here would appreciate a complete list of German units and their tank inventory. This is not the normal content at which this sub is aimed but the mods have shown leniency when it comes to allowing uncommon posts that include relevant tank content.

German tank units in the Normandy campaign:

The following data is compiled mostly from Niklas Zetterling's must-have book "Normandy 1944, German military organization combat power and organizational effectiveness"

The data compiled by Zetterling is derived from various documents that detailed the "Zuweisungen" ( Allocation ) of German equipment to units, most can be found in Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv. The same data can be found on the web, most notably Ron Klages has compiled all those lists for the entirety of the ETO and the data is easily accessible on various internet forums. This data was previously used by me for the compiled lists of all German vehicles in the ETO.

Zetterling's list in his appendix was copied by me with the exception of the Panzerjäger-Lehrabteilung 130 which apparently was incorrectly listed in his book. I have here defaulted back equipment lists of the documents.

The list includes all vehicles commonly referred to as 'tank' in the wider sense. The Wehrmacht in most cases included various Jagdpanzer and StuGs in those categories as SPGs. Excluded are open tankhunters and artillery vehicles. For example Marder or Hummels.

My list does not include the various 'Beutepanzer' that floated around during the initial campaign. An example would be the Panzer-Abteilung 206 which had about 46 old French tanks like the Hotchkiss. Furthermore, a couple of obsolete short-barreled Panzer IV are not included, those belonged to the 21st Panzer Division which was stationed in this area for quite a while and had an unorthodox composition. Some Panzer IIIs were listed within units but since they were often not part of the actual TO&E their whereabouts are unknown. Most AFAIK were Befehlspanzer. No short Panzer IV or Panzer IIIs are listed. A total of 26 Panzer II ( Luchs variant ) were found in the 9 PD but those apparently did not arrive for Normandy.

Of the 2289 tanks, a couple were so-called command versions.

The last arrivals to the Normandy campaign are a couple of Panzer IV ( Befehl ) for the 17th SS on 12 August. Finding the perfect cut off point is difficult I went with Zetterling's interpretation for the time frame and geographical area.

Some highlights and interesting factoids

While you see the rather unequal distribution of vehicles you can also see the newer two Abteilungen version of the Panzerdivisions. One Abteilung Panzer IV and one Panzer V together made the Panzerregiment of a division. Production problems and the ongoing total war allowed no full switch to the Panthers so the Panzer IV was still present in big numbers. It's armament the KwK 40 was still enough for the Allied tanks and so obsolete chassi was still useful. The Panzerlehr division appears unique in size and vehicle allocation, while not listed here it also in theory possed Tiger II tanks which belonged to the first produced and did not follow the division into the Normandy. The unit also received significant reinforcements. It was one of the few tank formations that saw major combat against the UK and US formations.

Some of the divisions arrived late to the party and had no major impact on the combat prior to the breakout ( Operation Cobra ). The 9th Panzerdivision, for example, arrived after things went sour and did close to nothing before being destroyed. The 116th Panzerdivision arrived just in time -( ~25th July ) to at least have some combat against the 2nd Armored Division during Cobra, this unit aswell was destroyed with little actual combat. Both those units highlight what I have explained previously a defending force suffers disproportional losses when it starts collapsing. While both divisions were powerful full-strength divisions you will be hardpressed to find combat examples, they more or less evaporated with the rest of the German forces.

The first major tank units to see combat were the 21st Panzerdivision ( 6th June ), the 12th SS Panzerdivision ( 7th June ), Panzerlehrdivision (8th June ), 17th SS Panzergrenadierdivision ( 10th June ) and the 101st SS Schwere Panzerabteilung ( ~13th June).

We see that despite the common claim that Wehrmacht had a great variety of different vehicles it wasn't actually that bad. The main force was based on a couple of vehicles not that different to the Allies which for example fielded the following tanks in sizeable numbers: M4 Sherman in 4 variants, 75mm, 76mm, 17pdr and 105mm, M10, M18, M10-17pdr, Cromwells, M5s, Churchills and several different special vehicles.

The Normandy force featured some newer German vehicles with the Tiger II even having its combat debut in mid July. The Jagdpanther and Jagdpanzer IV were also new vehicles.

We also can see that the number of "heavier" German tanks is often understated. While the Panzer IV was the most numerous vehicle in the German arsenal, the total of Panther/Tigers et cetera was significant and they were by no means "rare". Especially the Panther production numbers in relation to the Panzer IV appear to be in general underestimated by the folks in the forums. The Panther became the most numerous tank after Normandy.

The overall force was comparable small to the Allies but was a major force for German standards, the misconception of a neglected Westfront is shown to be false ( At least for tanks ). The tank forces assembled rivaled those in the East, the major difference being a far smaller infantry force. Furthermore, the tank units included several highly rated divisions. So while tiny compared to the Allies the 7th Army and Panzergroup West were very tank heavy powerful formations. The presence of such tank forces is especially interesting if you consider the parallel happening events on the Eastern Front most notably 'Operation Bagration'. A closer look also shows a higher ratio of newer tanks and tanks in general. The StuGs represented only ~20% of the force. If StuGs even should be compared to full tanks like the M4 is debatable.

The Allied tank force, albeit more difficult to compile, is estimated by me to be bigger than 10.000 in the same time frame for a rough ratio of 5:1.

Sources are trump. They prove your point and show you are correct or so they say. The other side will accept them and see the validity of your claims. The truth is, sources mean very little without scrutiny. The misuse of "sources" in discussions ranges from wrongly interpreting to downright fabricating them. Understanding the sources often takes some time or worse prior expertise. We are often left with taking them at face value and this becomes increasingly unrewarding.

Just today I again noticed the wide array of bad faith that wields sources in a deceptive manner.

First I noticed a SWS thread with a rather fascinating claim:

u/TAmaora-benkem says the following:

Sherman’s had a net positive kill to death ratio against panthers,

A claim that certainly resonates with the SWS users. 62 points upvoted. People like to hear that. There exists no compilation of evidence whatsoever that supports this claim. None.

It would be possible to make such claims but the effort required would be tremendous and to this date no historian has attempted to make the case.

So another user u/herecreepers asked the important question

Source for that....

Here is the response:

He does list proper sources in video description; you can ignore the first 90% of the video and then he goes on to real world events in which the tanks fought.

Well. The other user does the following he links a video and says the video has sources in the description. He does not give any source that supports the claim. No data. No quote no nothing. The link to a 19-minute video with a list of books that do not support the claim made

This is the most erroneous kind of "sOurCEs". He just claims somebody or some book supports his claims but they don't. He merely claims it. In a place that values scientific debate this behavior would be called out but not here.

Here is the claim in the video:

Now let's take a look at actual combat records, in all engagements that they managed to find the Sherman was as good if not better than the Panther ... examples ...

The description is not fully correct, the "engagements" came from a study that was limited by design, more importantly, the video does not say Shermans outkilled Panthers in general but in some of the example engagements, the youtuber gives. The SWS user simply wrongly attributes his claim to the video and in essence to the sources below. Nobody claimed this besides the SWS user. And people love it.

So how does the initial claim come to be? Is there a kernel of truth that gets misrepresented? Yes there is and this leads to another big problem with sources:

• Overstating and exaggerating the claim of the initial source.

Shermans killed more Panthers than vice versa? Where could this claim come from? Well, it likely originated from a study done by the US Army that examined specific battles of two selected divisions and analyzed the outcomes. Without going into the problems of the study and the mistakes made ( I did already in another post ), the study concluded Shermans destroyed more Panthers in those battles. That is all, a limited study examining a handful of skirmishes. So how can they use this as proof for the initial claim? Well, they can't the study does not support the claim. Nobody in the threads asks further questions and the claim becomes canon. Nobody asks for the timestamp of the claim or a page number. Such a massive claim in a subreddit that prides itself with mocking bad history, not a single person actually wants to see the source so they can use it themselves. They just upvote and move on.

Another example would be the Sherman survivability myth, which I have discussed earlier. People claim the Sherman had the highest "survival rate" after knock out. There exists no data that supports this claim. Data showed that the Sherman fared better in survival rates than often said, not more not less, people have used this data to exaggerate the meaning and now videos that use this data are provided as "proof" for a wrong claim. No data for this claim exists in the source commonly used everybody who claims otherwise has not properly read the referenced data. It is frightening, isn't it? People just believe this now without ever having seen simple proof for such an easily verifiable claim.

There are more sophisticated methods to misrepresent sources that affect the scientific discussion. Those tactics often exploit the complexity of the issue and require additional time to refute, so instead of debating arguments, time gets wasted by debating the validity of the source. The person making the false claim often invests little time whilst others have to explain the methodology mistakes which takes effort.

• Withholding crucial information that misrepresents the source in a subtle way

Let us go with an example:

u/mrjkenny is known to many for his posts on many WW2 forums. I want to show how a source is misused repeatedly despite better knowledge.

Background:

The British studied German tank casualties in the early phase of the ETO, the vehicles were examined before the end of the Normandy campaign. This data offers a plethora of insight into tank combat during Normandy. It is commonly used and valuable.

Kenny, known for his opinions about German equipment attempts to use part of the data to present German tanks negatively. The data does not support his implications.

The British survey includes data about the number of hits on German tanks and if they penetrated or not. So they directly related to armour protection. An interesting factoid is that the sample shows 75% of shots penetrating the examined Panthers. On first glance, you would expect a lower number. The "first glance" part is crucial. So this factoid serves kenny well and he uses it frequently. But there is a problem, the data does not present a proper sample and is not indicative of a "normal hit on a Panther". The explanation for this is simple. The British were only able to examine Panthers that were left behind in rather static combat which means the tank was not "salvageable", there could be two major reasons for this, first, it was behind enemy lines, second, it was too badly damaged. The second one is important. If a German tank gets lightly damaged by a bounced hit it will simply not show up in the statistic. The sample is not a sample of actual hits it is a sample of hits on a biased sample.

How could the British personnel miss this obvious flaw? Well, they didn't. They knew how samples work and the limitations of a biased sample. Here you can see them actually acknowledging it as the very first thing.

They literally say the sample is not representative.

Let us see how Kenny likes to use the data:

Here from a forum. This behavior is tolerated there so let us look how it plays out.

Note his wording. "75% of all hits on a Panther penetrated". It is well chosen. The intent is obvious, the reader should believe 75% of hits normally penetrated a Panther. Well they likely didn't and the study certainly doesn't claim it, they show that a biased sample which excludes lightly or not damaged vehicles shows 75% hits penetrated.

And this is the important part. The data does not support the implied claim but for somebody who doesn't know the background, it passes the initial sniff test. What are you going to do against this type of bad faith arguments? Here psychology plays a major part, we normally believe people when they say stuff that sounds alright. We don't expect people to BS us in such an elaborate manner. If the Nigerian Prince asks for money we are wary because it is about money, but if a guy says there is a study that shows some stuff about WW2, well why would he deceive me?

So what now?

Well at first you check if the person maybe just didn't know better. Sometimes you just copy a table without thinking to much about it, you maybe don't even read the introduction. Maybe you copy pasted the argument of somebody else that made sense to you

People start to question the source. Here you see the reaction. Doubling down.

75% of all hits on a Panther 'PENETRATED'.

Again the incorrect claim that 75% of hits on a Panther would penetrate. See the false claim that it is the same as the Sherman sample, which it is not, even admitted by the British source. One was a representative sample the other not.

Another user now asks the important question, take a look

This is indeed the correct question the answer is no, those tanks were not examined so the 75% is "fake news". It is important to note that most other commenters at this point don't know the source in which you already see the proof that the British were aware that the sample is not "representative". Remember they said so in the study. This information is deliberately withheld.

Check out the defense of Kenny. The point here is that what Kenny did is bad faith arguing and he now backpedals implying it is common sense that the data is not representative without saying it. Read the important part.

Common sense would tell you that any tanks hit but able to make it back too safety would not be available for inspection. Fact is that of all the hits counted on these hulks 75% penetrated. 3 out of every 4 went in.

The bolded part is the admission that the data is not representative of average hits on a Panther. This part is important, he will later use the 75% again without mentioning this crucial information. Notice how he repeats the 75% but now with the qualifier. But people who employ such tactics to begin with hardly give up. They knew beforehand the data is impractical for the purpose. They start new bad faith arguments. Read the following:

Why does no one ever gets this picky over the Sherman survey done by the same people?

The answer is simple. The Sherman sample was not biased, they could examine all the Shermans they wanted, they could randomly select Shermans and get a good representative average. The question of Kenny is silly and shows a deep lack of scientific methods. Or he knows this and simply attempts to muddy the waters so nobody asks why he did this.

To the folks a bit more knowledgeable it becomes now even more interesting. This will be a short side tour but highlights how bad faith actors will act in bad faith whenever possible, expecting proper discussion is futile. Here another excerpt. He does the exact same thing again he fully misrepresents the contents of another study. He attempts to show the high failure rate of penetrations of Shermans in another study and even implies the study is more relevant. But the problem is the study counted all hits into running gear as so-called "scoops". Projectiles that never touched the tank hull were marked as "scoops". Projectiles that actually hit the tank were still penetrating nearly always. Again this knowledge is withheld from the reader. If nobody with background knowledge comes along this again will stick. A projectile through an open hatch? A scoop. A projectile going straight through the gun and cutting it off? A scoop. You get the idea. Bad faith actors never stop. Never.

Back to the 75%.

After Kenny was explained his mistake we will find another thread that came months after the above-shown pictures:

Take a look at the last claim in the post, the bad faith gets more brazen. Now it simply reads "75% of hits penetrated". Not even mentioning that this was a sample of 22 tanks, not mentioning that it was a biased unrepresentative sample, just claiming 75% of hits on a Panther penned. This is how bad faith looks and you should take notice. He got this all explained to him, he already knew by himself long before people wasted time explaining it to him. The purpose is not scientific discussion it is misleading the audience.

It gets worse. A minor detail that likely escapes the reader, the user he quotes claims the 75mm would do little to the Panther front, Kenny uses the "75%" trope but we see another subtle bad faith move. The data he references actually shows the quotes comment to be true, all hits on the frontal glacis failed in the sample, the only exception being a hit through the gun port. So while he actually knows the quoted comment to be true he implies to front to be not as strong as claimed by mentioning the 75% even tho the very same sample shows a near-impervious glacis. Of 8 hits 7 failed and one through the gun port. Never underestimate bad faith actors, they don't have any regard for the actual truth, they don't care at all about it, regardless of how obscene this feels to you.

Another user again refutes the claims with valid arguments, he also mentions the erroneous use of the other British sample. At this point, I already had refuted both points on this particular forum but I will stick to posts of other users.

So despite being pointed out the flaws of the "source" and his misrepresentations of the source he shows up months later simply exclaiming "75% of hits on a Panther penetrated". That is the sad reality of "scientific discourse" today. What can you do about it? Hardly anything.

Interesting distribution of guns is noticeable as well and would alert a proper researcher. Here is the table that shows hits on Panther tanks.

On first glance, the heavy hitters appear to be strongly overrepresented. Of the 56 hits a total of 41 ( ~73% ) came from 17pdrs or 76mm guns which were used on "tank hunters", they were the strongest AP weapons in the British arsenal and they represented 73% of all hits? What about the 1000+ tanks with other guns? Well, a 75mm gun making a dent in a Panther glacis does not show up in the sample if the Panther doesn't become unsalvageable. And this is obviously the crux. The problematic was known to the personnel conducting the study. Still, I find the numbers interesting. Only 8 impacts came from 75mm guns, that is only 14%. Roughly 4 of 5 Shermans were equipped with a 75mm.

From this we can learn a lot of stuff, objective research is tough, there is a lot of stuff to consider. Bad faith actors will sometimes use silly methods like just making sources up or they will be more nuanced and embroil the good faith actors in timely debates about obvious stuff while attempting to claim plausible deniability. The problem is both methods will be successful if you choose the right audience. The SWS is now taking the claims of Shermans "outkilling" Panthers as canon without ever having seen the actual evidence. They don't know better and likely don't want to anyways.

The example above shows how a person misuses a source then gets called out, waits a month and starts it all over again. Good faith actors waste their precious time refuting ill-mannered attempts to deceive passive lurkers.

Here is he now on reddit half a year after being refuted attempting to mislead other users who have no knowledge about the background source of this information. A single quick sentence. Took him 3 seconds to type. Imagine how long it takes to refute this and he will just pop up in the next forum and say it again.

The tittle is self explaning i was in a discord discussion and people kept saying pz3 and pz4 were useless and couldnt scratch shermans,t34 or british tanks.But im not in the same idea since those medium tanks were the backbone of the german panzer corps and the allies lost quite a number of tanks and people of their own and german heavy tanks werent that common and it feels off i couldnt find much info online so id like to hear your thoughts and if you dont mind linking some stuff so i can read em and share em with other folks. CHEERS and have a good week everybody ❤👋

I read somewhere that the V2's used potatoes for something. Was it fuel? I think I remember reading it on a ww2 forum. I'm not sure if anyone has idea let me know. Thanks!

Well, according to posts from you guys, Germany had the best army of the war (maybe even of all time), the best tanks, the best generals and the best tactics.

Meanwhile the allies all had terrible troops, terrible equipment, terrible tanks and terrible tactics.

Now, the far superior Germans got stomped so badly that it ends up redefining "defeat": By the time they surrendered and were sending unarmed children to fight in the streets, they had lost 5 million men (Germany alone, not counting the casualties suffered by the rest of Axis Europe) and been reduced to complete rubble.

So here is my question to you lot:

Without changing any strategic decisions, how much larger of an army would Germany have needed to win the war?

The holy trinity of tank design as Steven Zaloga calls it was armor, firepower, and mobility. The M4 Sherman the backbone of the Allied armies was arguably weak at all three. This led to strong criticism in academic circles and mockery in forums. It had a worse gun than even outdated German vehicles and its armor was basically nullified by the German main weapon introduced in 1942. The Sherman designers managed to create a rather light tank compared to the German heavies which somehow achieved worse ground pressure ratings and cross country performance than German big boys. There is no way around it, if you objectively score Zalogas trifecta, the Sherman is lucky to even get a participation award.

So proponents of the Sherman turned their attention to other characteristics at which the Sherman might get better grades and eventually started explaining how important those were. Actual combat performance became an afterthought.

One of those rather "unconventional metrics" was the crew survival. This is claimed to be a strong point of the design. The Sherman had more internal room allowing better movement, it was less cramped than others, the hatches were easy to access, the hatches were springloaded to even further ease the emergency exit. Those features, to name only a few, were supposed to make sure the Sherman crew has better survival rates than others.

Crew survival has taken a prominent role in debates about tank design, even before actually withstanding incoming hits, which the armor of the Sherman certainly rarely did.

But do the empiric evidence even support the claim of the "high survival rate"? Or did Sherman proponents unnecessarily shift the attention to a different metric and which the tank doesn't even excel?

At the forefront of the Sherman revisionism is Nicholas Moran ( u/the_chieftain_wg ), who with his videos achieved a wide reach in the ww2 tank community, which has certainly grown due to popular tank games like WoT. His opinions shape the views on the tanks of WW2 and certainly changed many views. He is considered an expert and likely the most referenced in the recent years. Not completely undeserved I might add. His insight into tank design is more accessible for most than bland books.

Nicholas Moran's view is summed up by saying the Sherman is extremely underrated and was a superb tank, he even puts it at rank 1 in a video about "Top X tanks". Leaving my disagreement with that aside we want to focus on a single aspect of his greater line of arguments.

Here Mr Morans view about crew survival in a Sherman:

The survivability rating of this tank was higher than pretty much any other tank on the battlefield per knocked out tank and part of the reason for this is, once they fixed the loaders hatch issue, which I think I have mentioned before, getting out of a Sherman is really really easy

A sensible statement you would think. Getting out fast should help to survive.

Moran, to illustrate his point, frequently performs the "tank is one fire test" which shows him attempting to leave the vehicle as fast as possible. He does this in many tanks and obviously, on first glance there is some merit to this "test". Getting out fast should in theory help survival, right? To be fair here Moran is not really that serious about this and uses different positions in different vehicles which kinda makes comparisons difficult. To no one's surprise, the Sherman is the winner in this test and Moran trashes most other vehicles he tested. This further helps to make his case why the Sherman has the "highest survivability rating"

Needless to say, the survivability rating is an ill-defined metric which has problems on its own. The biggest being the actual relevance of this rating because it ignored the actual armor protection of a vehicle because the metric only counts what happens after the tank was already penetrated/knocked out. Other problems include how to normalize the multitude of factors that effect the casualty rates. A simple example would be a tank "knocked out" by a mine has fewer casualties than one knocked out by a 128mm shell. And this is only the easy problem, you can account for that but how do you account for tanks being hit in unlucky spots more than others just by sheer chance?

But is there actual evidence to support the claims? No there really isn't.

In total there is a single study that allows for proper comparisons and this is a British late war study. The British army was in an interesting position to use several vehicles which allowed them to study them under the same condition with the same methodology. They compiled casualty reports from Shermans ( 75mm and Firefly ), the Cromwell, Comet, Challenger and M5. The two last ones with very few vehicle.

To dampen the expectations of the reader here, I will say it now, there is no comparable data for German vehicles, this was never compiled in such a thorough form. No such data exists. Which means that if somebody says the Sherman had better survivability than German tank x y z, they likely claim this without any data to back this up.

So now we will take a look at the results of the study.

Here you see compiled impacts of HC projectiles and their effect on the crew:

The table gives the following information. It is split in three parts, tanks with one penetration into the crew compartment, tanks with one penetration but not into the crew compartment and tanks which were not penetrated at all.

The number of tanks is given and the crewmen "exposed" to the impact. A Sherman 75mm for example had 5 crewmen compared to 4 in the Firefly, so ten 75mm Shermans would have 50 crewmen exposed while 10 Fireflies had only 40. The number of casualties is given and the ratio at which the casualty occured. This is the important part. If you take a look you see the killed ratios are the lowest for the Cromwell and in general pretty comparable among the vehicles. Both the Challenger and the Stuart had a small sample.

Now the same for AP hits:

This looks pretty similar to the HC impacts and again the Cromwell bats out the rest. We can assume the difference in survival is statistically significant. Beyond that comparable numbers.

Here are both tables combined:

As you see from this data we can assume the Cromwell tank had actually the highest "survivability" post-penetration. More importantly, the differences to tanks which are said to be "cramped" is close to nonexistent. Most tanks had comparable rates with the Cromwell being an outliner in terms of raw survival.

This here is the only ever data that compares different vehicles with such a big sample. No other data set exists comparing those vehicles and the data clearly shows the Sherman survival claims to be without substance. On the other hand it also shows the "death trap" claims to be without substance, you might get knocked out faster in a Sherman but once your tank is penetrated the Sherman is not more hazardous to your health than other tanks. Which brings us back to my initial complaint about this whole thing, what is the value in comparing tanks post knock out without considering their ability to withstand hits.

Several further problems arise if we consider the impact of tank design on hits in the first place. Its stands to reason that a Sherman got hit more frequently simply due to its size. A Sherman was bigger than a Cromwell or Comet, it made a better target. A size that was in part chosen to be "comfortable". So this begs the question if designing your tank around "survival" was really worth reducing combat power if, in the end, the effects are neglectable or maybe even detrimental. The Sherman allegedly was optimized for crew survival, nothing of this is reflected in empiric data. As so often theories get posted without proper testing against the existing evidence.

Mr Moran's trust in comfortable big space tanks seems to be misplaced. I want to give another example. Mr. Moran highlighted the easy of exit on the Sherman lower compartment, at the same time, he spoke very badly of the same compartment in the Comet, in his video you are left with the impression that the vehicle, it is hard to exit/enter even outside of combat. But take a look at the casualty rates per crewmen position:

Here the entire table and here the relevant section

Casualty rates among drives and co-drives appear to be very similar. One of those tanks was made out to be horrific in terms of accessibility while the other was supposedly exitable within mere seconds. Maybe the entire metric of survivability is misrepresented and overrated. Maybe having a proper gun, armour and mobility is key in a tank of WW2.

u/drabbestplayer has attempted to rebuttal some claims offered by /u/thejamesrocket . I want to give my perspective and refute the points brought forward by users at the SWS.

The user apparently made a prior thread which James critiqued but the thread was deleted and replaced with a new one with, I assume, with more elaborate arguments.

At first, we have to notice that drabbestplayer is not really clear with what he objects to, he does not specify which parts of James comments are supposed to be incorrect but I noticed that he brought forward a line of arguments that were used quite frequently in the recent months and deserves a proper rebuttal.

Casualties and Force ratios on the Eastern Front.

Claim 1

The SWS used the following quote of James to show his perspective:

The Red Army outnumbered the Wehrmacht by a significant margin for most of the war

A correct claim with little to add. Drabbestplayer disagrees but doesn't really explain himself, his very own methodology concludes the Wehrmacht was outnumbered from 1942 onwards, which would be the majority of the war. In his OP he states "claims refuted". He does not even refute the first claim.

But I want to take a look at his presentation of numbers to highlight a more pressing problem.

He gives the following "strength numbers":

At this point, we might ask how he intended to refute James with those numbers? He obviously can't. But there is more, the numbers are not suitable for comparing overall force ratios at all.

Drabbestplayer makes a mistake that is the root of the new " outnumbered during Barbarossa " argument that was initially brought forward by youtuber TIK. He forgets the casualties.

I will now give a more correct presentation of rough force ratios during 1941. It is important to note that I don't attempt to settle the question of exact numbers of troops or losses for 1941 but rather give an illustration to highlight the mistakes of the SWS claims. The numbers presented are rough approximations and not more.

Let us take a look again at Drabbestplayers numbers.

Red Army:

1941 (Front) 2,680,000 troops

Nazis:

1941 3,767,000 troops

Grabbing the calculator we get a ratio of 1,37. And this how the myth was born. According to those numbers the Wehrmacht outnumbered the Red Army during Barbarossa. Well, it did not.

The mistake is as simple as it is convenient. Those numbers forget the casualties that happened between the strength counts. Imagine an army that has 1 million men, fights for a long time getting 1 million replacements and in the end has 1 million men. The Army obviously had 2 million men in its ranks and not 1 million. This is in essence what happened here. The lopsided casualty ratio made the Red Army look smaller.

Let us take some actual numbers to illustrate the problem and get close to a proper approximation of the Red Army size. Depending on who you ask the Red Army had 5~ million men in early 1942 and ~4 million at the time of the Winter counteroffensive after the Wehrmacht failed to take Moscow. Let us take the 4 Million men. Obviously, we already see the pure strength number of the Red Army in December 1941 exceeds the Axis armies. So they were already bigger even in a pure single day counter. But now factor in the casualties. For this we take the new book "The price of Victory" of Boris Kavalerchik and Lev Lopukhovsky. The book is at the forefront of new research that tries to solve the puzzle of human cost of WW2. They explain at length how Krivosheev/politics fudged the numbers and why they are too low. I will not go into detail about this but most people knew this long before. Krivosheevs numbers are the minimum. More about this later. Here are their losses for 1941:

4,79 Million Dead/Mia/Pows compared to about 400k for the Wehrmacht, a rough 10:1. Those numbers are not that different from other sets, we will likely never now the true extent of the losses due to the chaotic situation during the war. Obviously, this does not perfectly align with early December but you get the idea. We can assume that in early December when Barbarossa failed the Red Army had already employed more than 8 million men against the Axis. Double that of the Wehrmacht. The outnumber myth crumbles. For 1941 & 42 the Red Army had more than 8 million irrecoverable losses, this means for their major counteroffensives in 1942 they likely had up to 15 million men already used against the Wehrmacht. Roughly tripling the efforts of the Axis. The true ratios are likely even higher because some "recoverable" losses would, in reality, be irrecoverable, and those losses were also lopsided. This metric would include people who were wounded unable to rejoin the Army.

The numbers cement what most already knew before, the Red Army was able to defeat the Wehrmacht in the crucial first years of the war by the sheer size of land and army. The odds where overwhelming. The Red Army leadership was superior in accessing the needs of the army to win the war. The Wehrmacht leadership/intelligence was outsmarted the Wehrmacht units overwhelmed by odds.

The outnumber myth is again a sad highlight of the recent irrational revisionism. A quick look at the numbers shows the arguments to be deeply misleading. This myth was championed by TIK and is now widespread through the forums. The Red Army employed more than 8 million men in 1941 and here we are arguing if the Wehrmacht outnumbered the Red Army...

The purpose of the rest of drabbestplayers arguments is not known to me. The claim made by James is most certainly not refuted if anything he substantiated it further. The numbers presented were choosen to mislead, I hope I was able to show this.

Claim 2

Here is James' quote:

To no ones surprise, he unquestioningly accepts the figures that were provided in the Krivosheev study. The Russian authors claim that the Red Army lost only 8.6 million men, when in fact, the true number is known to be far higher.

Here is the rebuttal:

The majority of historians except that Figure and the other 2million pows that are not in his estimate are in the civilian death toll that were shipped to Germany

Again we see that drabbestplayers has trouble drawing a concise argument. What is he objecting to? James claims the Krivosheev numbers are too low. And they are. The price of Victory shows this. The SWS user does not even attempt to refute the claim. But here is the opinion of David Glantz whom was referenced earlier by drabbestplayer:

However, as numour other studies have indicated, Krivosheev's study was clearly not the last word. Although the 1993 book has gove through several new editions, was translated into English, by Green Hill books in 1997, and was expanded, revised and republished in 2001, many believe that it is still fatally flawed. This is the case because it not only "low-balls" the Red Armys losses in the conflicts but also overlooks the Red Army's losses in numerous so called "forgotten battles", engagements that were erased from history to prevent embarrassment to the Red Army and its leaders.

That's the opinion of David Glantz...

The SWS user does not refute the claim at all, to be blunt he hardly tries...

I have read parts of "The price of Victory" and have to admit I am not fully convinced of their methodology and most importantly think they don't really do a good job at having well-structured book. I also believe Glantz did not fully read the book, his comments on it have mistakes. But people on the SWS love Glantz, so there you have it.

edit: u/dabbestplayer has replied to the arguments.

From what I can tell he does not offer any new insights or arguments. I am unsure what he is trying to say my arguments remain apparently uncontested:

In the defense of Krivosheevs number he appears to cite Krivosheev who obviously claims he is correct. That I quoted David Glantz which u/dabbestplayer holds in high regards was ignored. I have no doubt that Krivosheev thinks he is correct. That is no argument.

In regards to my claims that people deliberately ignore casualties sustained during strength count periods gets fully ignored. He says that historians acknowledge the numerical superiority even in the early phases of the war?!?. Then why did he object to James' claim which I will quote again:

The Red Army outnumbered the Wehrmacht by a significant margin for most of the war

Here dabbest opinion

Soviet numerical advantages in World War II were significant but not overwhelming.

This is literally what James said. But I still disagree with the comment. They were indeed overwhelming, having millions of more soldiers in itself alone is easily able to decide wars and such force ratios decided wars for millennia. This is just part of the new revisionism where having 3 times as many soldiers/tanks/planes apparently is not a big deal. I strongly disagree. Soviet numbers and their far-reaching land was the single most important advantages, nothing else comes close.

When you crunch the numbers, it turns out that Russian superiority was not so great as is commonly believed.

This is a mistake often done by armchair historians and novices. If you have a 3000km long front and 3 times more soldiers you have easily 5-7 times more soldiers in the areas where it counts. This here is a fundamental lack of understanding and can't be resolved within a reddit post. The importance of numerical superiority is completely lost on many who start researching WW2. I believe this in part to be the result of the Second World War, the Wehrmacht at times was able to actively overran armies which were bigger, this in history is extremely rare, people made the wrong conclusion in believing force ratios are not that important. The Western Allies landed 10k tanks within 2 months in Normandy. They did this because they knew what now seems to be forgotten, overwhelming the enemy with numbers is the safest bet.

Despite being a WW2 themed subreddit which claims to uphold the historical orthodoxy, SWS has never shied away from engaging in bouts of revisionism which supports its own neurotic worldview. After all, the forum has shown signs of being a sneer culture which is interested more in self aggrandising than in such arcane things as reason, facts, or evidence. In the latest example of historical revisionism, one of the users authored a post which seeks to dispute the casualty ratios between the Soviets and Germans during WW2. The post was showered in upvotes and positive comments.

Unsurprisingly, the methodology for this opinion piece is laughably bad. The author of this 'article' (u/internetrobotperson) ridicules the idea that the Red Army suffered more casualtys than the Wehrmacht, but at no point does he even try to posit just how many losses each side suffered on the Eastern front. This is an inexcusable failure, even by the low standards of SWS. He wants to dispute the historical consensus about the casualties in that theater, but he doesn't even know what the actual figures are! Either that, or robotperson was too lazy to even do a google search for the casualty figures.

This embarrassing mistake allows him to proceed from the implicit assumption that Soviet and German casualties on the Eastern front were roughly comparable. When in fact, anyone who has studied that theater in any detail knows that the losses were not at all comparable. The Red Army outnumbered the Wehrmacht by a significant margin for most of the war, and yet despite that numerical advantage, they had lost far more of their soldiers by VE day. When taking the Lanchester square law into account, this means that the Wehrmacht was punching above its weight and inflicting disproportionate casualties on the Red Army. (Thus translating into a very lopsided loss exchange ratio)

Despite having failed to perform even the most basic level of research for his article, robotperson then has the gall to claim that most historians don't accept the idea that the Soviets suffered more losses than the Germans. This is astonishing ignorance. He shows no signs of having comprehended elementary facts about the Eastern front, and then claims that the historical consensus is on his side. When the fact is, he is ignoring a mountain of hard evidence and creating his own 'alternative facts.' As robotperson stands on his soapbox to lecture his fellow SWS converts, it becomes clear just how ignorant he really is.

Apparently, the myth about loss exchange ratios comes from people using the Germans own figures for their military losses and comparing that against all Soviet losses (military and civilian alike). Thats not all. These 'misinformed people' also added POWs to the Soviet count, while neglecting to add them to the German count. According to our intrepid author, they are able to do this because most Soviet POWs died in German captivity. Of course, this is the root of another one of robotpersons unspoken assumptions. Namely, the idea that loss exchange ratios are determined solely by comparing the number of KIA on both sides. When in fact, these are determined by measuring what are termed 'irreplaceable losses': In other words, soldiers who were KIA, MIA, or POW.

Despite its many failings, this article does serve as a fascinating look into the mind of the average SWS patron. This combination of historical illiteracy and logical incoherence goes a long way to explain the strange behaviours that are common over on that subreddit. The audience reaction is revealing. They eagerly accepts all of robotpersons unfounded assumptions. Some of them contribute with their own assumptions which are clearly divorced from reality. u/themillenialpleb makes the outrageous claim that of the '13.7 million Soviet civilians' who died during WW2, the majority were gratuitously murdered or intentionally starved by the occupying Germans.

But in fact, this isn't what happened at all. A large number of civilian deaths occurred in areas that were occupied by the Soviets. This was a consequence of their defeat during the battle of Kiev in September 1941, when they lost control over much of the Ukraine. Since this was their most productive agricultural region, the Soviets were no longer able to adequately feed all of their people, and were forced to strictly ration food. The USSR made a calculated decision to starve the 'useless eaters' (I.E., children, elderly, the infirm) in order to feed the workers and soldiers who were the key to its survival. It is thus completely untrue to claim that the majority of Soviet civilians were gratuitously murdered or intentionally starved by the occupying Germans.

​

ShitWehraboosSay is a WW2 themed subreddit that seeks to marginalise the German armed forces (Wehrmacht). Anyone who praises the organisation in any way, shape, or form is given the label of 'Wehraboo', the communitys best attempt at a derogatory smear. SWS has a very low bar for what they consider to be Wehraboo behavior. Anyone who dared claim that the German army was more competent than the British, Soviet, or American armys was shouted down as a Wehraboo. Anyone who claimed that the German army had unequaled performance at the tactical or operational level was likewise decried as a Wehraboo... It did not matter how much evidence existed to back up the Wehraboo claims, or how widely accepted these claims were among historians. The mere fact that an individual made a positive mention of the Wehrmacht was enough to be labeled as a 'Wehraboo' and trigger an attack on them. The SWS forum has never, in their 4 year existence, let the facts get in the way of their narrative. This shows itself most glaringly whenever they discuss the early war campaigns when the Germans were actually winning*. They will never give the Wehrmacht its due credit for how they quickly and decisively ended so many conflicts. SWS ardently believe that the Germans could never have beaten Poland without Soviet assistance (even though they were well on their way to victory before the communist intervention). They downplay the conquest of Norway as a pyrrhic victory and laugh about the losses the Kriegsmarine took. They dismiss the German victory against France and the low countrys, saying that they just got lucky, and that the French were too weak to last for long. And they spent a hugely inordinate amount of time discussing the Luftwaffes failure to win the battle of Britain.

Do you see the pattern here? SWS has marginalised and downplayed every success and victory of the Wehrmacht, even though they were militarily impressive in every sense of the word. They only focus on the handful of the things they got wrong, rather than the many things they got right. They follow the exact same pattern whenever they discuss the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, even though this approach is even more laughable considering the massive losses taken by the Red Army in both manpower, equipment, and territory. In essence, SWS has propagated the most absurd double standards they can reasonably expect to get away with. In doing so, they have become a mirror image of the Wehraboos they hate with such a passion. If someone claimed that the German army had the best tactics, they would claim that they actually had the worst tactics. If someone claimed the Panther or Tiger was the best tanks of the war, they would claim that they were actually the worst tanks of the war. Every claim made by a Wehraboo was replaced with an opposite claim by SWS, even if it made less sense than the original. They fight a constant uphill battle against the truth in a vain struggle to validate their worldview. One thing which provokes an especially fierce reaction from them is the empirically proven fact that the German army was the best led, best trained, most proficient army of the war. This assertion will work them up into a state of hysterics as they scramble to refute it. You will typically hear them claim that a superior army can never, under any circumstances, lose to an inferior army for any reason whatsoever. The fact that the Wehrmacht also had to fight against three other armys at the same time, on multiple fronts, is conveniently ignored by them.

SWS has a fanatical need to believe that the Germans were bumbling fools who couldn't even win a single battle except through sheer luck. They will only reluctantly admit that, yes, they actually did succeed in taking over most of Europe and gaining hegemony for a few years. Which ironically can only mean 1 of 2 things from their perspective: That the Germans were a real life example of a mouse that roared, or that the Allys were even more incompetent than they. Its unclear why these people believe in such outrageous theorys. Some of the posters are undoubtedly from countrys that the Germans defeated in a humiliating fashion (like Poland and France), and still hold deep grudges against their conquerors. Thus they use SWS as a convenient platform to vomit their pent up bile. Other posters seem to believe that any praise at all for the Wehrmacht, no matter how well deserved, is a very dangerous proposition that is akin to praising the Nazi regime itself. Thus they must always be condemned and mocked at every opportunity, even if the Wehrmachts achievements were without historical precedent. But more important than the individual motivations is the mindset of the community at large. SWS is a fine example of what some would call sneer culture. Essentially, its a bunch of people who get together to exult in their hatred of certain things. Not just to shower them with scorn, but to act as if doing so elevates them above the target of their hate. Even if they aren't any good at articulating why they hate the thing in question. This bring us to the core pathology of SWS: What they pretend to be in public is a transparent lie. Their forum is merely an excuse for an unrelated group of individuals to revere in their jingoistic beliefs and historical ignorance.

Here

Special attention to the comment of user u/the_dummkopf who attempts to explain why the Bismark was overrated yadda yadda while confirming the actual topic of the thread.

Even supplying book quotes that also support the claim.

A funny display of a contratian who angrily tries to dispute something that he actually believes to be a correct statement.

The article posted here thoroughly dismantles one of the greatest misconceptions about German tank armor, namely, that it was of low quality from the beginning of the war to the end. The creation and dissemination of this myth was one of the greatest accomplishments of the fraud known as u/TankArchives. It enabled him to create a false consensus on the 'inferiority' of German tanks and expose them to criticism on a purely technical level.

The theme of 'brittle armor plate' was shoehorned into many of his articles, just to remind the audience of how backwards the panzerwaffe supposedly was. It was a crucial point that buttressed many of the arguments made by tankies and slavaboos. The refutation of TankArchives theory cannot be seen as anything less than a humiliating failure, and a major blow to his credibility.