Please excuse my terminology, I'm not an expert.
What made the Panzer so great versus other tanks? Is it true that Sherman's were almost useless against them?
I don't want to be convinced by the History Channel, so I'd like some clarification here.
Depends really, panzer just translates into tank from german. The panzer 1 and 2 were just more scout tanks with very little armor and poor armament. The panzer 3 and 4 were basically equivalent to the sherman and T34 in most aspects. The panzer 5 was mobile and had exceptionally armored and outperformed allies medium tanks pretty easily. The panzer 6 tiger 1 was exceptional when it was introduced in 1943 but became lees effective later in the war. The panzer 6 tiger 2 was probably the most heavily armored and well armed tanks in the war, so it outperformed basically anything but had poor mobility and reliability.
Mostly it was superior crews, radios and aggressive tactics. The panzers themselves weren't that great. Especially early in the war when Panzer 1 and 2's were well outclassed by British and French tanks in both size and numbers and then later when Panzer 3 and 4's started encountering Russian KV-1's and T-34/76's.
The Sherman was one the best medium tanks of the war along with the T-34/85* and in no particular order: the Panther, Panzer IV and the Comet. It was of course outclassed by German heavy tanks, but that is rather the point of a heavy tank. The two-bit "historians" on the History channel will have you believe that the Sherman remained the same all through the war, that it never received upgrades to it's gun, armor or suspension and will regularly regurgitate the German propaganda about it burning at the slightest provocation, usually pointing to the fact that it used a gas engine while disregarding that German tanks also used gas. In reality Shermans burned no more often than any other tank and most brew-ups were caused by the main gun propellant. Which is why you'll often see a square of additional armor welded to the sides of many Shermans.
*The T-34/85 and Sherman EZ8 clashed in the Korean war, they were quite similar overall but the Sherman had an advantage in crew quality and the optics of it's main gun meaning that it usually came out on top in an engagement. How it would have went if the Soviets and the US clashed at the end of WW-2
>>29896974
>What made the Panzer so great versus other tanks? Is it true that Sherman's were almost useless against them?
tactics.
no.
next question.
>>29896974
Mostly that the word Panzer just means tank in German, and when people hear that word over and over in WWII movies and vidya, they tend to think that every Panzer was formidable just because they've heard the word a bunch of times. At least that's my theory.
>>29896974
high velocity gun
slightly smoother suspension
that's all its worse in every other way
Strictly speaking "great vs other tanks", German Panzer IV-VI Ausf. B had better guns than the Sherman and the T-34.
The Panther, Tiger and King Tiger could outrange and out gun any allied tank, period.
Shermans had a low velocity gun, up until the M4A3E8, which had a high velocity 76mm, but that still had penetration problems at long range vs German tank guns, and they had to get in the lethal envelope of the Panther's 75 and both Tiger's 88s.
What it comes down to is the crew. American tank crews were, and I highly emphasize, relatively green when it came to tank to tank combat compared to the Germans, who most of their famous tank's crewmen were all eastern front vets. Don't get me wrong, the Americans and Brits had good tank crews, but they didn't use the tactics and didn't have the experience that the Germans did.
The first two responses hit the nail pretty much on the head.
You can read many different books about the tank battles on the Western and Eastern Front.
I highly recommend Tigers in the Mud by Otto Carius. His descriptions of the Tiger and its capabilities is a great testament to German design and engineering.
German tanks weren't without their drawbacks however, but that is a different post in and of it self.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/796809.Tigers_In_The_Mud
Feel free to ask more questions OP. I am by no means a certified expert, but I do know a lot about German tanks and their counterparts.
I'll stick around if you want to discuss.
>>29897332
It wasn't just the E8 that got the 76mm M1 gun, it was when the US started fielding that gun with their M4s, that the AT capability improved.
M4s of all models were capable of being fitted with the 76mm M1, from A1 to A6, and you would also find all models from A1 to A6 carrying the 75mm M3 gun.
The Germans had better AT guns, tactics, and more experience. Some tanks were okay. Some were fantastic. For example the Tiger 1 and the Panther both outperformed basically every tank the Allies mostly used.
>>29896974
The reason the Germans were so successful in early WW2 was because they pioneered armored maneuverer warfare, the Brits had been playing with the idea for a while but the Germans took it into reality. You can argue all you want about which tank is slightly better but none of that matters when your battle group is surrounded and cut off.
Panzer 3s and 4s had problems with the M3 Lee. The Sherman outclassed the Panzer 3 and early 4s. The 4 gained some parity with the Sherman when they got the long 75mm but that didn't last long do to changes with The Sherman.
The Gun wasn't even the problem with the Sherman when fighting heavier tanks. It was the lack of HVAP rounds. Tungsten was in short supply and those rounds went to the tank destroyer units. TD Doctrine being mostly defensive didn't give you the help when at the time you needed it.
Now in Korea when there was no tungsten shortage. Shermans even with the 75 could disable a T-34-85 in one shot.
The principle problem of the Panzer IV is that while it was heavily upgraded over the course of the war it was still a mid-1930s tank in terms of overall design and layout. The armor was made thicker, they fitted a high-velocity antitank gun, better radio, more powerful engine, but there's only so much you can do without significantly changing the chassis of the tank, which the Germans weren't willing to do since they were focusing most of their efforts on developing newer tanks.
When the war started, the Panzer IV had better optics and the most modern interior layout of any common tank in its weight class. After encountering T-34s and KV-1s in Russia, it was upgraded with a much more powerful gun and had its armor thickened as well. By 1944 though you had Shermans that had fully sloped front armor, better off-road mobility, better sighting devices, and a similar amount of firepower (with greater availability of high-quality armor piercing shells). Basically, because it was a much newer tank to begin with, the Sherman had more room for improvement. There's a reason why the things were still being used in Korea where they could reliably destroy even IS-2 heavy tanks thanks to the proliferation of HVAP ammunition by the 1950s.
Big problem with the Panzer IV was that the German high command initially wanted an 18 ton tank. (lighter than a Chaffee)
It also had a leaf spring suspension, which while relatively cheap is not ideal.
The (uparmoured) Ausf D was 20 ton, and later versions were 23-25 tons.
The increased weight up front and the leaf spring suspension meant the later war versions were pretty much always tilted a little forwards because it simply could not take the weight.
The Panzer 3 was a more modern design with a torsion bar suspension and the latest versions which were almost 23 ton took the weight better than the 4.
The problem with the 3 was that the turret ring was simply too small for the long 75.
The front of both tanks also had a lot of angles which makes production harder.
Compare the front of both tanks to the Sherman or T-34.
The 3 and 4 had numerous plates on the front, meanwhile the Sherman and T-34 both had 2 big plates which made up the front.
See pic if my wording is off
The real advantage of sloped is not weight savings (there's basically none really unless you want big weak spots) but the ability to manipulate internal space and increasing simplicity.
>>29898087
This became laughable when the Panzer IV's suspension on the Ausf. H/Jagdpanzer modifications became so overloaded that breakdown rates surpassed that of the Panther in those particular modifications.
Krauts had to jury-rig a lot of shit and didn't want to retool factories too often, but even if they did they'd still just be kicking the can down the road. That's not considering the endless nepotism which the nazi's procurement system suffered from.
>>29896974
German tanks had radios, great crews, awesome guns and superior tactics.
The only good german tank designs were the panzer 4/5
>>29897090
More correctly, Panzer translates into armour in German, or panzerung does, but panzer denotes it as armoured. Panzerkampfwagen really just becomes armoured battle or combat wagon, loosely translated.
Granted I'm mostly basing this off the similarities between languages from Danish to German.
Also >>29897243 is very much correct, IIIs and IVs were slower than T-34 and weren't sufficiently armoured to protect themselves from the T-34s main guns, but they fared rather well against them thanks to having better crews, radios and sights.
>>29897243
You forgot to mention that the Ronson myth comes from the brits, who stuffed the tank as full of ammunition as possible. Carry too much ammo and as soon as you take a hit anywhere, you've got a good chance of them all going off and kabooming your tank.
The problem disappeared when they carried less ammunition like they're supposed to
Fun fact, the Sherman was more heavily armoured than Panzer III and IV. 100mm front armour vs 90mm. The T-34 was the heaviest of the bunch, and somehow still the lighest armoured and fastest.
>>29899151
>fastest
on road.
Christie suspension is not the nicest to have on bumpy ground
>>29899160
That's only if you count having an intact skull as a requirement when going fast.
>>29899165
God bless the fact they were driven by Slavs
>>29896974
They were good because germany opted to produce fewer high quality tanks, as opposed to america and russia preferring to mass produce medium priced tanks.
While panthers and tigers were beautiful machines, they were too expensive for what they did.
Occasional crews pulling off 30+ tank kills looks good, but at the cost they were, every crew needed to achieve those results.
A good starting point for learning about WW2 armour based on collected reports:
tankarchives.blogspot.com
>>29897266
This guy gets it.
>>29897266
At least mention the radio, which enabled those tactics. There's a reason why the man who basically wrote the book on how to use tanks effectively was originally a communications officer. He made sure that every German tan had a radio in them and a dedicated crewman to work it. This allowed shitty Pz Is and Pz IIs to crush the massively superior French tanks, and even Soviet tanks. It's important to note that on paper the T-34 was probably the finest medium tank in the world at the launch of Barbarossa.
>>29896974
Crew awareness.
Everyone had a hatch to bail from. Not everyone used those hatches (with vision slits) for bailing. Wireless radios. The fact that the early stages of the war did not involve mechanized infantry do to lack of effective handheld or tow-able AT guns made it so sentry work for tankers had less risk of buttoning small-arms fire. The fact that the Panzer III was made by Mercedes Benz and had torsion bar independent drivewheel suspension that will be used in the later Tiger, Pershing, and T44.
>Is it true that Sherman's were almost useless against them?
No. The M4 pushed out the Panzer III in Africa. The Panzer IV, being an economized chassis of the Panzer III only had a slight advantage do to better optics and bigger cannon. Most Sherman kills were by Stugs or Pak 40's that pretty much used the same gun with optics in camouflaged positions. However the Panzer IV was worse in mobility because it was heavier, had leaf spring, and used the same Panzer III engine. The Sherman surpassed the Panzer IV just because it was the only one left that had a gun stabilizer, or in this case less lens shaking on the move.
>>29899141
I thought the problem went away when the ammunition was stored in 'wet storage' bins, so if the bins were penetrated the water would dampen the charges. Makes the rounds unusable but means no fire and no loss of a Hull.
>>29899141
To add on, the British first used the M4 in the deserts of North Africa, where supply depots were few and far between. It's understandable that they would load as much ammunition as they could.
>>29899365
That is also true. A number of factors actually made later models of the M4 into the least flammable of WW2 tanks.
>>29899365
The biggest advantage to "wet storage" was moving the shells into the floor of the hull rather than the more vulnerable position in the fenders. This made them harder to hit directly.
Something else that should be mentioned here is the fact that as the war went on the US switched to a less flammable propellant for tank gun ammunition, which made shells less likely to spontaneously detonate during a fire.
The Russians also stored shells in the floor on the T-34, but their propellant was designed to be easy and cheap to manufacture and was relatively unstable, leading to more catastrophic hull losses where a tank being set on fire would blow up in short order.
Considering OP's question was what made the Panzers great, I feel sort of guilty about focusing on the Sherman. In a head to head comparison, the Panzer IV was roughly equal to the M4 in capability. German crews tended to be more experienced and better trained than their American counterparts. The Americans had a far better support and logistical train, though. It wasn't just that the Sherman was sent into Europe in staggering numbers. It's that, more often than not, even when an M4 was knocked out, it was recovered. If it had not burned and the turret ring was undamaged, the damage would be repaired, the interior would be washed down with formaldehyde and repainted, and the tank would be sent back out with.a replacement crew. There are some individual M4,s that were knocked out, recovered, repaired and sent back into battle several times.
The Germans generally didn't do this.,
>>29898087
>better sighting devices
US tank sights were pretty horrible all the way through the war. Atleast Germans and Soviets used adjustable reticles instead of fixed ones.
>>29899365
>Makes the rounds unusable but means no fire and no loss of a Hull.
That's not really true.
Generally it will just slow combustion down to give the crew time to escape, but the tank will still end up burning.
Wet storage was good but there are plenty of reasons why nobody bothered with it postwar.
>>29899523
>moving the shells into the floor of the hull
I wonder what effect that had on the tank's rate of fire, having to haul 76mm up through the turret basket must have been fun work for the loader.
>>29899695
The loader had a ready rack in the turret with enough shells to keep him going in most engagements and if he had ro go longer than that the radio operator would start handing them up to him.
>>29899601
it's not that the Germans didn't do it - they recovered hulls whenever they could. it's that it's a lot harder to recover vehicles when you're losing ground to the enemy
What would you guys consider to be the most superior tank of all tanks to date?
>>29896974
the only reason nazis had better K6d because they were on the defensive nearly all of the war
>inb4 some pol naziboo retard calls me a jew or tell some autistic conspiracy
>>29899639
Wasn't one of the German's big weaknesses the fact that they didn't have non-telescopic sights for their gunners?
>>29899735
But they had a better k/d at kursk on the offensive
>>29899711
I didn't think M4's with wet storage would have any ammunition accessible to the assistant driver.
>>29899735
Take it to /pol/.
>>29899762
Not at all.
I think you probably have gotten it confused with the lack of periscopes and/or direct vision hatches in German heavy tanks.
>>29899789
That's against slavs, not real humans
>>29899803
The ammo was in the floor next to the AD, as I recall.
>>29897243
>best medium tanks of the war along with the T-34/85
I'm just here to say that this definition goes by the entire tank production as a whole rather than on individual basis.
In which case T34 series would be by far the worst with their horrible quality, unreliability, bad optics, terrible ergonomics and poorly thought out safety for the crew and Shermans amongst the best if not the best with their great crew comfort, good equipment decent reliability fantastic quality and one of the few tanks that had not got fuckup retarded escape hatches, which meant being in a sherman was(contrary to popular belief) one of the safest places you could find yourself during the war.
>>29896974
It's mostly bullshit.
Operational data shows that Shermans achieved 1.4:1 kill ratio against Panthers(so totally out of their league, performance and weight wise) while in offensive.
Shermans were easily the best tanks of WW2, Russians loved them, Americans loved them, British loved them. History channel uses several myths and half-truths against them but while they've had their problems which should've been addressed(they didn't mount M1 AT gun in them for quite some time, put it in M10 instead, and M10 was plain worse performer than M4, it was basically waste of gun, for example) but most of the time they provided very reliable drive train, effective armour(that is, it was good enough to render commonly-used German 37 and 50mm AT guns almost completely useless against them), state-of-the art economics and optics(Shermans gave their crews enormously good visibility even when buttoned-up) and relatively good gun for the time.
Sometimes the half-truths are hilarious because they say that Shermans burned a lot, while the "great" German tanks burned much more - I recall seeing figure of Panzer 4's being cooked 40% of times they've got penetrated. It's easy to claim something when you don't compare it to anything else.
However the reality is that it all doesn't matter that much
Tactics, reconnaissance, ability to cooperate with other branches - these are war-winners. Russians had better tanks(at least on paper) than Germans and they've started to win by the time when Germans had several designs much better than whatever they could get. Numbers don't really win wars either - numbers only allow you for performing more risky(and more rewarding) operations.
>>29899639
The Germans had a higher-quality scope for the tank's gunner with variable magnification and a very precise gas-filled tube that made long-range shots much more probable - something further assisted by the high velocity and mechanical accuracy of most German antitank guns.
That being the case, optics in the rest of the tank were extremely meh. Take the Tiger II for example. While an undisputed king at long range shooting attacks, the optics layout otherwise leaves much to be desired. The driver and radio operator both have fixed periscopes that look straight forward, as does the loader, while the gunner has no additional optics at all - he's totally blind except for the tank's main sight and is completely reliant on direction from the commander, who is at least provided with a cupola with vision blocks that look in all directions.
In a Sherman, meanwhile, literally everyone has a periscope, and most of them fully rotate as well. On the later model Shermans the tank commander enjoys his own rotating periscope on top of the cupola too, so he can more easily track moving targets while the tank is "buttoned up" - the T-34-85 and IS-2 have the same configuration too.
When you get into a mobility battle, having such a heavy emphasis on accurate long range shots can be a serious problem, especially when your tanks are as massive as a Tiger or Panther and with a fairly slow-rotating turret too.
>>29899839
The Germans also loved them and went out of their way to capture them when possible.
>>29899839
Tank has to be versatile combat platform, if you compare it with other tanks and only see "huh, this one has better armour, it must be better!" without looking at other important things, you are fucking retarded, Tiger II often cited as the "best" tank of WW2, apart from being unreliable gasguzzling 70-ton monster had slow turret traverse, poor all-around visibility and relatively weak HE round(especially for the size and weight of the tank).
It was great at killing other tanks, especially when hiding, except most of the times it simply couldn't get on the site where it was supposed to actually fight the other tanks because - to no surprise - operating 70 ton big tank in 1940's was very, very maintenance and planning-intensive. Majority of infrastructure simply crumbled under it.
In fact, to this day Russians only field tanks that weight less than 50 tonnes and NATO doesn't go anywhere near 70 unless we're talking about up-armoured Challenger/Abrams used in patrols(which can be planned so it won't fuck up roads or bridges - although there was at least one incident when M1 Abrams broke some bridge in Iraq, killing its crew as a result) and almost whole WP/USSR and NATO doctrines for use of armour are from the cold war and revolve around operating in Germany and western Europe. Tiger II was designed to operate in Russia, where those 70 tonnes were far, far more troublesome.
All that means that the tank was not-very deployable(unable to provide support where needed) and not very versatile.
Compare it to Sherman which had great all-around visibility, fast turret traverse(not to mention hull traverse, also faster), was much, much lighter(I think the heaviest, post-war modifications of it ended up at 32 tonnes but correct me if I'm wrong), always had effective anti-material round(in fact the most soldier-favoured weapon Sherman ever had was 105mm howitzer) but also relatively good AT gun(especially if loaded with HVAP)...
>>29899933
...and something that may sound trivial in the age when everybody on the battlefield has radio - infantry telephone
Accompanying infantry could communicate with the crew very, very easily which allowed them for better combined arms operations.
It was also far better vehicle for various combat engineering conversions, and it was overall example of extremely practical design - Americans watched what worked and what didn't work in early WW2 campaigns and then designed a tank that was supposed to work better than any other in the world - and that tank was Sherman.
>>29899828
There is no floor beside the assistant driver, to the left is the transmission and on the right is a sponson.
The only image I've ever found of the wet storage layout is from Warthunder, so it's dubious as fuck.
>>29899841
> while the gunner has no additional optics at all - he's totally blind except for the tank's main sight
That's pretty debatable.
On 2.5X magnification the gunner's sight has an FOV of twenty four degrees, which is adequate for searching for targets.
Once a target is spotted, the gunner then simply switches to high magnification.
The M4 on the other hand only had 1.44X magnification and 9° FOV necessitating the gunner find his targets through the unity sight before reacquiring with his primary sight.
>On the later model Shermans the tank commander enjoys his own rotating periscope on top of the cupola too
That's not quite correct, the commander's rotating periscope was ommited by the cupola, as the periscope was integrated into the hatch on the earlier, cupola-lacking, models.
>>29899839
>M10 was a worse platform than the Sherman
Lies and slander. These M10s achieved 6:1 kill ratios in the bulge.
