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I've been to the tank museum in Munster (not to be confused with Münster if you ever decide to go!). Looking up close, comparing the American and German WWII ta

I've been to the tank museum in Munster (not to be confused with Münster if you ever decide to go!). Looking up close, comparing the American and German WWII tanks to the Russian ones is absolutely night and day. The alignment of the panels and the welding on a Tiger tank looks (to an untrained eye) pretty much as good as you could make a mass produced vehicle back then. A T34 by contrast has haphazard misalignments connected by welding that looks like mine did when I was learning in high school. So you can see with your own eyes that they essentially put the bare minimum of quality in to them. This is a very interesting talk on the manufacturing efficiency of the US, Russia and Germany in WW2, which drills down into the details of how the factories were organized and the difference in man hours spent on each (which I'll spoil the bottom line of here: US 10k, SU 35-50k, DE 300k). We've all heard stories about how Russian tanks in certain cases were driven out of factories partially completed straight in to combat, but up until I watched it I hadn't heard of Tiger tanks being rejected by the Wehrmacht because they didn't latest gear stick design. I highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6xLMUifbxQ&ab_channel=TheNationalWWIIMuseum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6xLMUifbxQ&ab_channel=TheNa...

coldcode 8y ago
If you wanted to win a battle, you'd want a Tiger or Panther, if you wanted to win the war the T-34 would do. A Tigers might kill 30 T-34s, but eventually the weight of numbers would do you in. Same thing with the Sherman, 1 on 1 the Tiger generally wasted it, but with enough Shermans the Tiger would be doomed.
- baud147258 8y ago
  But with 30 tanks vs 1, you need to have a good access to a lot of fuel, which Germany didn't, whereas the allies didn't had this issue, so having less tanks, but more higher-quality, could have been a sound decision (maybe the same with manpower?). On the other hand, fuel used for tanks might make up only a small part of the overall fuel used.
  - mcv 8y ago
    Could be, but they weren't actually higher quality. Tigers were powerful, but the first batch was very unreliable, and they still consumed enormous amounts of fuel. Most tanks the Germans had were PzIVs, StuGIIIs and Panthers.
AmVess 8y ago
The T34's were designed this way on purpose. They purposely skipped on making things perfect so long as they were functional. The guns worked. The engines worked. The transmissions worked. This is what they needed, nothing more. See the CIA document regarding this tank: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp81-01044r000100070001-4 https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp81-0... The German tanks, on the other hand, were designed and built meticulously...at least in the early days of the war. The downside is they were expensive to build and maintain...and they were not reliable. For instance, the M4 was designed to be simple and easy to maintain, and required 3 times less the amount of man and materiel than the German tanks required. The engine and transmission in an M4 could be replaced by two men in four hours. For all the fear the larger German tanks (Tiger 1 and II, Panther) caused, the reality is, they did not construct very many because they were expensive. At any one time, half of them were broken and needing time consuming repair.
- tomohawk 8y ago
  The German tanks were put together by highly skilled craftsmen. Often, the parts were hand machined or finished for each tank. This meant that the tanks did not have interchangeable parts, and were difficult/impossible to fix in the field. Being unable to fix equipment in the field was a general problem for the German army, as a very large proportion of their trucks and other equipment was captured from other countries, and they had no spares. Once the Soviets moved their factories beyond the Ural mountains, the Germans, who lacked heavy bombers, had no way to knock out the factories. They stood no chance against the Soviet T34s and tank destroyers at that point. If you're interested in digging deeper into this kind of history, take a look at "The Second World Wars" by Victor Davis Hanson.
  - osullivj 8y ago
    Fascinating. In Britain it's long been recognised that our frequently innovative design engineering is often let down by poor production engineering. Many exmples can be cited: most F1 cars are UK built, but we no longer have an mass market car producer. Everything built by Jaguar and Land Rover! Spitfires took four times as many man hours to build as ME109s. The Rolls Royce Merlin was the best aero engine available to the Allies early in the war, but was effectively hand built. When Packard started building Merlins for the P51 they had to retro fit the production engineering tolerances to the design [2]. So I'm surprised to learn that tank production engineering was so poor. I wonder which models were most affected? Panzer III or IV? King Tiger? [1] Stephen Bungay - The Most Dangerous enemy. [2] https://www.tested.com/art/makers/492418-packard-merlin-how-detroit-mass-produced-britains-hand-built-powerhouse/ https://www.tested.com/art/makers/492418-packard-merlin-how-...
mcv 8y ago
It's not like all T-34s were necessarily bad, it's just that Russia had to build so many of them that they had to accept poor quality tanks. At the start of the war, Russia had a lot of very different tank designs. Many of those were crap, a few were really good. The T-34 was one of the good ones: it was fast, had a powerful gun, and armour that the German tanks at the time couldn't penetrate. On top of that, it was fairly simple and easy to produce, unlike the heavier KV-1, which was another very successful, but more expensive design. Once Russia realised they were fighting an existential war, they had to churn out as many tanks as possible to stop the German tide, and the T-34 was simply the most obvious choice. Simple tractor factories were quickly retooled to produce T-34s, and unavoidably, the people making them weren't always properly trained. There just was no time. If it could drive and shoot, it was needed at the front. And having something that looks like a T-34 but isn't as tough as a good T-34 is not necessarily a bad thing; the Germans can't see the difference from a distance, and they're going to treat it like any other T-34. Swamp them in good and bad T-34s, let the Germans waste their time on the bad ones, so the good ones can kill some panzers. If you think this is stupid, look at how Russia fought some of the early infantry battles. Desperate measures for desperate times.

coldcode 8y ago

If you wanted to win a battle, you'd want a Tiger or Panther, if you wanted to win the war the T-34 would do. A Tigers might kill 30 T-34s, but eventually the weight of numbers would do you in. Same thing with the Sherman, 1 on 1 the Tiger generally wasted it, but with enough Shermans the Tiger would be doomed.

baud147258 8y ago
But with 30 tanks vs 1, you need to have a good access to a lot of fuel, which Germany didn't, whereas the allies didn't had this issue, so having less tanks, but more higher-quality, could have been a sound decision (maybe the same with manpower?). On the other hand, fuel used for tanks might make up only a small part of the overall fuel used.
- mcv 8y ago
  Could be, but they weren't actually higher quality. Tigers were powerful, but the first batch was very unreliable, and they still consumed enormous amounts of fuel. Most tanks the Germans had were PzIVs, StuGIIIs and Panthers.

AmVess 8y ago

The T34's were designed this way on purpose. They purposely skipped on making things perfect so long as they were functional. The guns worked. The engines worked. The transmissions worked. This is what they needed, nothing more. See the CIA document regarding this tank: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp81-01044r000100070001-4 https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp81-0... The German tanks, on the other hand, were designed and built meticulously...at least in the early days of the war. The downside is they were expensive to build and maintain...and they were not reliable. For instance, the M4 was designed to be simple and easy to maintain, and required 3 times less the amount of man and materiel than the German tanks required. The engine and transmission in an M4 could be replaced by two men in four hours. For all the fear the larger German tanks (Tiger 1 and II, Panther) caused, the reality is, they did not construct very many because they were expensive. At any one time, half of them were broken and needing time consuming repair.

tomohawk 8y ago
The German tanks were put together by highly skilled craftsmen. Often, the parts were hand machined or finished for each tank. This meant that the tanks did not have interchangeable parts, and were difficult/impossible to fix in the field. Being unable to fix equipment in the field was a general problem for the German army, as a very large proportion of their trucks and other equipment was captured from other countries, and they had no spares. Once the Soviets moved their factories beyond the Ural mountains, the Germans, who lacked heavy bombers, had no way to knock out the factories. They stood no chance against the Soviet T34s and tank destroyers at that point. If you're interested in digging deeper into this kind of history, take a look at "The Second World Wars" by Victor Davis Hanson.
- osullivj 8y ago
  Fascinating. In Britain it's long been recognised that our frequently innovative design engineering is often let down by poor production engineering. Many exmples can be cited: most F1 cars are UK built, but we no longer have an mass market car producer. Everything built by Jaguar and Land Rover! Spitfires took four times as many man hours to build as ME109s. The Rolls Royce Merlin was the best aero engine available to the Allies early in the war, but was effectively hand built. When Packard started building Merlins for the P51 they had to retro fit the production engineering tolerances to the design [2]. So I'm surprised to learn that tank production engineering was so poor. I wonder which models were most affected? Panzer III or IV? King Tiger? [1] Stephen Bungay - The Most Dangerous enemy. [2] https://www.tested.com/art/makers/492418-packard-merlin-how-detroit-mass-produced-britains-hand-built-powerhouse/ https://www.tested.com/art/makers/492418-packard-merlin-how-...

mcv 8y ago

It's not like all T-34s were necessarily bad, it's just that Russia had to build so many of them that they had to accept poor quality tanks. At the start of the war, Russia had a lot of very different tank designs. Many of those were crap, a few were really good. The T-34 was one of the good ones: it was fast, had a powerful gun, and armour that the German tanks at the time couldn't penetrate. On top of that, it was fairly simple and easy to produce, unlike the heavier KV-1, which was another very successful, but more expensive design. Once Russia realised they were fighting an existential war, they had to churn out as many tanks as possible to stop the German tide, and the T-34 was simply the most obvious choice. Simple tractor factories were quickly retooled to produce T-34s, and unavoidably, the people making them weren't always properly trained. There just was no time. If it could drive and shoot, it was needed at the front. And having something that looks like a T-34 but isn't as tough as a good T-34 is not necessarily a bad thing; the Germans can't see the difference from a distance, and they're going to treat it like any other T-34. Swamp them in good and bad T-34s, let the Germans waste their time on the bad ones, so the good ones can kill some panzers. If you think this is stupid, look at how Russia fought some of the early infantry battles. Desperate measures for desperate times.