What is an "allied tank ace"? Should we care who claimed the most tanks K/O?

There are some posts that appear to try to elevate some Allied tank gunners/ detachement commander etc to the be "aces" analogous to Fighter aces. There is a tendency to reduce every activity to some form of Guinness book of records, or top trumps. . The search for "tank aces" leaves me feeling a little queasy.


The definition of a "tank ace raises some questions about reliability of the data

1. How do we know that "Claimed Kills" has a clear and reliable relationship to actual damage to an enemy AFV?

2. What exactly is a "Kill"? Does it include 1) the immobilisation of a vehicle? 2) The death or wounding of a crew member such that the crew stopped whatever they were doing? (there were many incidents of tank commanders becoming casualties from snipers or shellfire)

3. Given that the Allies did not systematically evaluate kill claims, how do we know that any of the claims were true or not double counted? What about the vehicles knocked out by the men who did not survive the battle?

4. What proportion of engagements left clearly identified K/O vehicles in front of a friendly position. After the successful defensive battles at "Snipe" at El Alamein and near Rauray in Normandy.it was possible to count the wrecks, apportion success and dole out the medals. But that meant that this had to be a successful battle in which the allies held the ground after wards. . On many occasions it was not possible to walk the ground afterwards, nor did the detachment always survive to make the claim.

5. British decorations were awarded for conduct and courage rather than as a reward for knocking out a specified number of kills.

These engagements were a team action and not super-heroics. On 31 Oct 1914 Lt Blewitt RFA deployed B Sub of 54 battery on the Menin Road and knocked out a German artillery battery deploying in Gheluveldt (and supporting a teenage Adolf Hitler) . For this action, mentioned in the Official History of WW1, he was awarded the DSO. When asked about his ward he talked about the contribution every man in the detachment made to the success of the action. " a damn fine crowd they were, every one of them.” http://www.theobservationpost.com/blog/?p=45 . .

I was introduced to Joe Ekins a few years ago. He was the gunner who knocked out four out of five of Wittman's Tigers on 8th Aug 1944.

 

to put it another way, if you ever listen to the medal winners, they always say the ones who never came back are the real heroes...for every MOH winner, there are a lot more who deserve it, but have never been recognized, but are forgotten....they are all ''aces'' in my book...
..what about the mechanics that worked on the tanks and airplanes?? they should get recognition also..
Ekins got 4 tigers in one day?

 

Ekins got three tigers and a PzIV on 8 August. His commander was Sgt Gordon for the first, and his troop leader Lieutenant James for the last three. He does not seem to have destroyed the tank of Wittman. Recent studies point to this being destroyed by a Canadian firefly.

 

But again, this is open to further investigation

 

People like stats. There are those who can rattle off a baseball players entire career stat lines. This doesn't change because the subject is war, death, and devastation.

As to why tank aces? That's the fault of everyone who repeats Wittman's name and causes his legend to grow. Those who would rather balance the perspective or glorify the allied armies ,depending on the person, look to the British, American and Russians for similar men to match his legend.

Is it right? It's no worse than elevating the fighter aces in the first place. It becomes a problem when you spend so much time arguing your side that you forget that these men had lives, loved ones, and a reason to fight. When we reduce them to statistics and glorify those statistics above the men. Then you have every right to feel queasy.

 

I thought armored/ground combat was a team "sport" anyway.

As are most air battles too, not that this stopped anyone from counting aerial victories. But every fighter ace had a wingman and/or was part of a flight that operated together.

Speaking of which, I never thought destroying a plane on the ground should count towards this total, but apparently it did.

 

From what I recall the Japanese didn't count individual kills, at least officially.

As for ground kills it depended on who you were and what theater. I beleive they were counted by the USAAF in Europe but not in the Pacific. The logic in Europe was that a strafing kill, especially near the end of the war, was more dangerous than one in the air.

 

Ok. The Japanese may not have claimed individual claims but this didn't help their massively inaccurate accounts of air battles, or of Pacific air battles in general where methos of confirmation were very, very loose. They rival the American bomber gunners in sheer nonsense.In either case the opposing force was wiped out several times over.

Pacifist is right, stats were kept by individuals in combat as well as armies,. I am unsure why this forum would be of interest to someone who deplored this method of assessing capability. No matter how inaccurate.

To contribute other than by a frankly sixth year prefect opinion on war as a waste life seems a bit pointless. If your opinion is that war is bad then you are right, well done. If you don't want to discuss it other than give an moral perspective then don't waste our time.We know, most of us aren't children. We are arguing individual and collective decisions which shaped (however minor) acts of war. History is changed by minute investigations of major confrontations, and the acts of individuals. The British soldier is particularly poorly served by memoirs and therein lies my own personal interest. As a result British soldiers pale beside the heroic adventures of Audie Murphy (250 German killed - who counted these?) and many, many others is surely an indication of the fascination of peace-time historians for wartime paticipants.

By the way"Sport" is exactly the sort of term used by soldiers in every conflict from the Napoleonic Wars until today. American claims in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq resemble those of the Archduke Ferdinand and with equally less humanity- but given demographic information much less likely. Roy Farran of SAS fame refers to his own "personal bag" as being a German soldier killed in Italy. American citations of WW2 and the overblown memoirs of Macarthur and Patton, are replete with counts or accounts of dead Mexican. Phillipine, Japanese and German soldiers.

This is tiresome. Contribute information if you have it, and put it out for debate.

 

I'm not sure that the rant was really warrented at least on this issue. In many ways the claims of tank kills would seem to be more problematic than air to air kills as it would often be hard to tell if someone else was firing on the opposing tank or even if it was already dead or abandoned. A valid question is do you learn more from looking at performance of the team be it a crew or a plattoon or an even larger unit than you learn by looking at the performance of individuals? Especially in the case of tank kills a platoon leader who positions his tanks well may be responsible for a large number of kills but since he isn't a gunner not get "credit" for any of them if you are looking at kills by gunners or no where near the number he deserves even if you are looking at kills per tank.

As for the British soldier being underplayed. Perhaps in some quarters but most here know they were fighting for years before the US entered the war and in every theater the US fought in as well and in more theaters than the Germans fought in. Part of this seems to have been the "fault" German propagandist who emphasized the actions of individuals perhaps to support thier contention of racial supperioirity. I don't think many of us here buy into that though.

 

I thought this when those posts went up.
All a bit gauche really, all a bit 'Signal!'.

And down the line, will trigger the same old tiresome nonsense about these blokes as constantly swirls around the German PANZER ACES! in crappy Barbara Cartland-esque books like Kurowski's and the fanbois Internet. Add to that all the teeth-grinding kill-ratio sort of arguments that rumble on ad-nauseum... 'My Army's better than your Army', 'My tank's bigger than yours'. Urgh.

I like to mention Pool, Ekins etc. occasionally, when the fanbois run too loudly, but not to attempt to create a parallel or top trumps game. Maybe more to underline that others served perfectly efficiently without the propaganda shouting of silly-bugger-Goebbels whipping up rather pointless and ahistorical legends that exist to this day.

There was no real culture of allied land-based aces.
Why create one now...

 

Indeed it seems to me that one of the greatest weaknesses of Nazi Germany was the tendency to have multiple organizations with essentially the same charter that were in rather intense competition with each other. Certainly that existed to some extent with the allies but in general the allies did a much better job of fighting as allies i.e. part of the same team. There was a fair amount of cooperation even with the Soviets who looked to be on the other team up until Germany attacked them. IMO one of the key features of allied equipment (such as tanks) is that it was well designed to function as part of a team not to facilitate the compliation of individual records. Likewise the tendency, especially in regards to aircrew, to rotate them off the front lines and into training roles worked against them compiling the greatest individual "kill" records but produced a stronger force.