Tanks Are Mighty Fine Things (1946)

http://imperialclub.com/Yr/1945/46Tanks/

by smacktoward • 7 years ago

73 39 7 years ago

csours• 7 years ago

The association may not be remembered now, but Imperial was a Chrysler brand from times past. Here's another booklet I love from the site: http://www.imperialclub.com/Repair/Lit/Master/003/cover.htm

and previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15397926

Re: Tanks - there are so many things that are obvious in hindsight, but its amazing how effective US production was.

smacktoward• 7 years ago

I just watched a good talk by Nicholas Moran, the in-house historian at the shop that makes the game World of Tanks, talking about all the little ways the designs of the M3 and Sherman tanks were optimized for maximal production. It’s on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/TwIlrAosYiM

arethuza2• 7 years ago

I think it was Max Hastings in one of his books on WW2 who makes the point that there is no point having tanks that are six times as good as your opponents if your opponent has ten times as many tanks as you do!

marvin• 7 years ago

The tank crews would probably disagree; Allied tank crews sustained terrible casualties during the invasion of Europe.

And it did little good for morale to know that a German tank would knock out yours and probably kill your crew in the time it would take to fire tree rounds. (Twice to find the correct angle and the third to score a hit).

Strategically, this worked out nicely in WWII due to massive manpower advantage and the Germans’ severe weakening on the Eastern front, but the poor performance of Allied tanks was still a serious strategic blunder.

dsfyu404ed4• 7 years ago

Here's another booklet I love from the site: http://www.imperialclub.com/Repair/Lit/Master/003/cover.htm

I think the bit about doing a hone job on a single cylinder without taking the crank out is a wee bit dated, lol.

And in case anyone was wondering most of the tolerances mentioned are out of date thanks mostly to better materials but somewhat also to better manufacturing as well though the general principals remain.

michaelt• 7 years ago

One of the interesting things I've heard the Soviets did [1] was operational research: The lifespan of a tank on the Eastern front was less than 6 months, and once in combat was less than 14 hours. Less than 1000 miles driven.

Knowing they didn't need a tank that lasted more than 1000 miles let them lower the number of parts and man-hours for each tank, allowing them to get them off the production line that much faster.

You can imagine what an advantage it was that the Allies produced four times as many tanks as the Axis powers.

[1] https://youtu.be/N6xLMUifbxQ?t=2295

AllegedAlec• 7 years ago

Although it was immensely efficient, I cannot help but wonder if it was a circular reasoning: they wanted cheap, mass produced tanks, which means you're going to hand in on quality, which means that they break down faster and are less resilient, so your research shows that tanks don't last long, so you spend less on each individual tank, etc. etc.

pimmen• 7 years ago

You would also need to look at the causes of decommisioning to avoid this.

dsfyu404ed4• 7 years ago

Russian strategic thinking in the 1930s was "we don't fight wars of attrition, we fight wars of annihilation" (not 100% sure on the exact quote but the words "attrition" and "annihilation" were used and that was the gist of it). The biggest advantage they brought to the table was sheer manpower (the second biggest arguably being the Russian winter). They specifically intended to fight Verdun type engagements where both sides take massive losses because they could replenish the losses but all their potential enemies could not. They fought exactly kind of war they had been planning to fight. Once you've committed to that on a strategic and tactical level throwing in many lower quality but still good enough to hold their own tanks is exactly what you want to do.

seeker61• 7 years ago

Other people are smart, too.

reitzensteinm3• 7 years ago

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=TheNa...

coldcode• 7 years 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.

AmVess2• 7 years 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-rdp81-0...

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.

mcv4• 7 years 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.

mothsonasloth• 7 years ago

1946 - "Tanks Are Mighty Fine Things"

1955 - First Anti Tank Guided Missiles developed

2019 - "ATGMs Are Mighty Fine Things"

jeffrallen• 7 years ago

War is stupid.

LifeLiverTransp• 7 years ago

Written on a device, invented for war, send by a device ment for a war, transfered by a device, engineered for economic competition (a war in all but name forced to peace by a governments monopolizing force), read while eating food that was taken away from other critter who would prefered to have eaten it.

Stupid processes can give rise to usefull things and create intelligent incentives.

The people dieing in wars, are lost to us forever though. Thinking about all the russian mathematicians, jewish pianists, german painters and american poets who died in the war, oftenn without ever noticing there talent, one can come to the conclusion that war makes stupid.

loco5niner• 7 years ago

Yes, but unfortunately necessary.

rmason• 7 years ago

I knew that the authors name as my late grandfather was fond of saying 'rang a bell'. This guy started in newspapers at 17 and ended up editing the Saturday Evening Post.

The Post at the time was the largest selling and most influential magazine in America. They actually sold the magazine like a newspaper complete with paperboys. My father was one of those delivery boys in Detroit during the depression.

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/16/archives/i-wesley-w-stout...

Tanks Are Mighty Fine Things (1946)

Related Stories