German favour Mark IV as main battle tank?

He is Right, look at the P-51 Mustang A vs D, similar changes same name.

Er.. no.. where is this shortage of men coming from? 44 and 45 yes but in 42? More often you had crews sitting out with lack of machines.

What is your idea?

I think we could also poll the people who have responded in this thread and most of them would say that Germany never had a chance.

 

Not until late 43 was Germany's industrial base placed on a war footing. It is true that every thing you make requires material and time, but by streamlining the process you cut down on the use of both of thes comodities. I am not saying that I think the PzKw IV was the right or wrong tank to focus on. From an engineering and manufacturing point, a single design (or two) would have been better in every aspect. On one product you will never have as many bottlenecks as you would on countless more product lines.

100 engineering hours is nothing. Every company worth its salt has crazy projects that it works on becasue it lets the engineer think outside the box and come up with new things.

Hitler put his finger in the pot too many times for the recepie to come out right. He medled too much but this is not news to anyone.

 

The shortage was meant to refer to Speer only and his actions.

However now that it was mentioned I do think Hitler lost the best of his men during the winter 41-42 in the Ostfront and also this can be seen in the fact only an attack in the AGS section was made in the summer of 1942, not another large scale attack like the beginning of Barbarossa.

 

Look at the effect of fielding a larger proportion of Panzer Divs, rather than Infantry divs. ( a possibility given the extra production gained through producing just Mark IV)

You get more flexebility/mobility/firepower per division than before, and if you take a dwindeling manpower into account the idea doesn't seem stupid does it?

 

Does the expression 'fuel availability' ring any bell to you?

 

I´d also add the Luftwaffe´s position to allow the flexibility here. Moving by night is reducing the flexibility by 50% at least.

 

I don't think it's stupid but would'nt it take more trains to get more Panzers to the front. As mentioned, with limited rail lines that are always under partisan attack.
Also, 5 men per tank vs. 5 more troops that could protect them with Germany's limited manpower. Even Tigers were vunerable without infantry support.Not to mention, they would need more trucks to carry all the spare parts and gasoline for the additional armor.

 

In spring of 1941, a Soviet military delegation arrived at German tank schools and factories. This was done on the specific orders of Hitler as a deception in keeping his word in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

When the Germans showed the Russians the Panzer IV, the Russians protested that this couldnt be their newest and heaviest tank as their hosts claimed. In fact it was the best tank that the Germans had at the time. As a result Guderian and German experts recluctantly concluded that the Russians must have something better in their own production line.

Soon enough Guderian would be able to confirm that for himself.

 

That may be so but essentially the Mk IV was a very good tank as many who used them loved them as they were reliable and no so difficult to maintain on the battlefield, while on the otherhand the Pz Mk's V, VI and VII were rushed into production with the addage of fixing the problems on the battlefield, many hundreds of Panthers, Tigers, and King Tigers were left intact as they broke down, the Panther would have been a potential war winner if production had allowed faults to be ironed out before being deployed, but the Tiger and King Tiger though devestating were eventually white elephants, overall their drain on the Panzer production was more trouble than they were worth, it would have been something had the German Armies had an additional 7,000 to 10,000 Pz Mk IV's on the battlefields, but one failure even on this largest scale is where do you get the fuel.

 

A well thought out post and you will get no argument from me here.

 

I thought about the fuel problem, and although i still see massive problems what would be the result had the Pz Mk IV was powered by a diesel engine and not a petrol ones, considering that the Germans could produce a sorta bio-diesel from rubbish oil.

 

Or massively increasing the artificial fuel program without the 8th AF noticing it...

 

Hmmm, methinks that the only thing that could have rescued Germany from the coalition of enemies accumulated in 1941 would be a superweapon like The Bomb. The technological improvements of the mid and late war tanks were not quantum leaps. German production increases may look impressive measured against previous German achievements but are a bagatelle compared with Allied industrial performance.

Such increases that occurred were limited by Allied bombing from early 1943 and were partly negated by the need for ever more defences against bombing, dispersion of factories (which put even more pressure on German railways) and the loss of quality and efficiency in manufacture consequent on removing German workers to the army and replacing them with slaves.

Speer and Milch were able to squeeze more production out of the German war economy by the resort to wholesale barbarity but only within the constraints of raw material and energy availability, increasingly negated by Allied bombing. This wasn't much more than rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

 

Here is something to ponder, had the Panther, Tiger and King Tiger being converted to basic weight of materials and converted to the 25,000 kilos per Panzer Mk IV the Germans could have produced a further 11,500 Panzer Mk IV's for the battlefields, giving a total strength of 20,000 Panzer Mk IV, this is with the 20,000 or so other models running around. Imagine the German Panzer force with 40,000 panzers on their books.

Before anyone finds faults with my numbers this is in theory though, and theory and the real world don't exist.

 

Im a little confused, to my understanding what made the Panther, Tiger and King Tiger's so heavy was the extra armor and larger guns they possessesd. Wouldnt reducing their weight and guns just extinguish the very purpose for which they were built?

 

Well yes i can understand your confusion, and i intended none, it is just i reduced it down to weight of material and overlaying it to the 25 tonnes per Panzer Mk IV which equates to something like 11,500 Panzer Mk IV's, but having said that the issue of large guns could be negated with say reducing the Panzer Mk IV stregth from a hypothetical 20,000 to say 14,000 and build 6,000 Nashorns which were built on the Panzer Mk IV chassis and armed with the mighty 88, this number of Nashorns would still outnumber Tiger and King Tiger.

Plus we have the the various Panzers, Panzerjeagers and self propelled guns of other models running around, or that we could simply remove obsolete designs and smelt their steel and convert their weight of materials into Panzer MkIV and Nashorns, simplify design and variety.

 

Bar the already proverbial fuel availability problem, I agree.

 

It occurs that had the Germans gone for a mass fleet of PzIV*, akin to the Allies' mass Sherman-T-34 fleets, the Allies could have introduced a relatively small number of 'Tiger-like' vehicles to theirs!

*Assuming there were the crews, fuel and transport for them.

 

Trouble is it doesn't just come down to base steel weight. I tried to illustrate before that each component from Guns to sights may require special materials or treatment. Increasing the available lump of steel does not necessarily increase the amount of vehicles/guns that industry can physically produce by that amount, given finite special materials, tools, space, manufacturing bottlenecks etc.

Cancelling one Tiger may theoretically give roughly enough base steel to produce chassis and superstructure for 2XMk.IVs but it only frees up material/production of 1XGun, 1Xengine etc.

I've spent the last few years carefully picking away at the 'wunderwaffe' reputation of Germany's vehicles as I think it's been most important to redress the balance of opinion and try to get a more realistic assessment of the panzerwaffe's tools. However on production I'm now having to accept (or even concede!) that Germany did exceptionally well at producing what they could with limited resources & that the logic of the heavier vehicles must have seemed inevitable to their situation. There was still much wasted and misdirected effort but where it really happened and it's true effects are much harder to pin down.
(I place the Jagdtiger outside of any thinking on this... just plain loopy as far as I can see, the one at Bovington just makes me giggle).

Cheers,
Adam.

 

In Buckley's book he calculates that 70% of the German tank fleet in Normandy was no better than the Allied counterparts.