Quote:
Originally posted by Major Destruction:
There were also 98 Panzer III and 211 Panzer IV but many if not most of these were experimental models that probably never made it to the front. There were also 200 - odd Czech tanks.
These numbers are a far cry from what Guderian had asked or hoped for. He wanted 22 PzIII in each light company and 22 PzIV in each heavy company but neither the mark III or mark IV panzers were put into mass production until after September - after the Poland campaign had ended.
When we think of mass production we think maybe of a Henry Ford manufacturing plant with a new car rolling off the end of the production line every few minutes but German tank manufacturing was entrusted to companies that had built steam locomotives; companies that were used to a production rate of 1 per week or less.
By the time of the France Campaign there were only 344 Panzer III's ready for action. That amounted to about 250 built between October 1939 and June 1940 or about 10 tanks per week! This is hardly mass production!
As proposed in 1935, the Mark III tank would have been one of the best tanks in 1940. With a 250 HP engine and weighing 15 tons it would be armed with a 50mm gun. It entered service 4-5 tons heavier (mainly due to the heavier 320HP engine and the puny 37mm doorknocker gun. So the state-of-the-art German panzer of 1940 was overweight, underpowered and undergunned and had insufficient armour to stop the standard AT gun carried by tanks of the UK or USSR. Those French tanks looked mighty good in comparison.
Add to this the PzIV production of less than 100 units between September 1939 and June 1940 which was barely enough to cover losses suffered in the Poland campaign.
In May 1940 the Mark II panzer was unlikely to be considered anything less than obsolete as a MBT. It certainly had no hope in combat against a Matilda, for example. By June 1941 it clearly had little value on the battlefield yet by this time there were still 746 PzII's in service in front line Panzer Divisions. Why? German industry was still producing fewer than 80 Mark III's per month. This rate of production did not permit for Divisions to be completely rid of those old obsolete armoured machine gun carriers otherwise known to the world as tanks.
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The German armor manufacturing industry, like much of their heavy industry in general, was still dominated by very strong labor unions that demanded that hand work by highly skilled journeymen remain the primary system of production. This was at the heart of the low production rates the Germans were experiancing prior to and early in the war. Combined with a reluctance by the government to go to more shifts (up through 1942 most industry remained in single shift or at most 2 shift production) it was inevidable that low rates of productivity would result.
In addition, high standards of peacetime workmanship were retained in the manufacture of most military items. This gave German tanks a very high level of quality in workmanship but added alot of labor hours unnecessarily to production time.
As for the Pz II's utility, as I stated earlier, it was a much better vehicle in terms of crew efficency and interoperability within the platoon and company orgainzation than anything the French fielded. The French use of the one-man turret, lack of radios in many vehicles and, poor use of vision devices more than offsets any advantage they may have had in armor and gun power.
Likewise, the Soviets were primarily equipped with vehicles little better in armor or gun power to that of the Pz II. As I noted also, the Soviets remained in the same boat with the French in terms of crew layout, radios and, visibility. And, like them, the Soviet vehicles often blundered about the battlefield looking for a place to explode and burn as a result.
With the British, true the Matilda II was singularly a dangerous and hard to kill opponet in 1940 - 41 but, the bulk of British armor at the time were not these vehicles but rather such highly vulnerable and unreliable vehicles as the Mk VI light tank or A-13 cruiser.
The former was armed with machine guns (or in some models a 15mm BESA HMG) while the latter had a 2 pdr. Neither had more than 25 - 30 mm of armor anywhere and in most locations much less. Thus, the Pz II remained viable as a combat vehicle against such tanks.
Would the Germans have liked better tanks across the board? Certainly. But, the Pz II wasn't much worse than much of what opposed it through the end of 1941. One must remember that the quality of a tank is more than just the statistics of gun, armor and, automotive performance. This is too often forgotten. Against the opponets it faced through 1941, the Pz II stacks up as sufficently capable to fight most of them on a reasonable basis.
