The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.
No Comments Allowed for Anonymous, please register
Re: The Tiger Tank was...(Score: 1) by mad2physicist on Tue Aug 05, 2008 12:01 am (User Info | Send a Message)
All excellent points. But in the Ardennes, let's not forget that part of the failure was due to the really phenomenal defense put up by the American airborne and the green army troops, especially in their denying the Germans important fuel dumps.
However, the overall strategy was also a big reason for the failure. Focusing the main thrust south to get behind Patton would have created major issues for the Americans. I don't recall it being discussed by von Luck though; do you remember where he talks about it?
The Tiger I was still in many ways an example of a tank which was good not through good design, but through making a mediocre design bigger - it was basically a big heavy steel box. The Panther and T34 on the other hand used good design to achieve excellence. The Sherman used bad design badly executed to achieve.... a bad result (actually the Sherman wasn't as bad as it is sometimes made out to be I think. In many was it was probably not much worse than the T34. The problem is that whereas the T34 made its reputation against early Mk III and Mk IVs, the Sherman faced mid-to-late war Mk III and Mk IVs, which had learned from the lessons of the Russian front).
But the Tiger still did achieve very good combat results, because despite being just a big steel box... a big steel box with a big gun is still formidable (also of course, Tiger crews were always hand picked to be the very best).
In August of 2004, Zappi, Homba, Bambam887, RedScorpion and MOOXE all pitched
in to create this Close Combat site. I would to thank all the people who have visited
and found this site to thier liking. I hope you had time to check out some
of the great Close Combat mods and our forums. I'd also like to thank
all the members of our volunteer staff that have helped over
the years, and all our users that contributed to this site!
