
Tanks Are Mighty Fine Things (1946) - smacktoward
http://imperialclub.com/Yr/1945/46Tanks/
======
michaelt
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](https://youtu.be/N6xLMUifbxQ?t=2295)

~~~
reitzensteinm
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...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6xLMUifbxQ&ab_channel=TheNationalWWIIMuseum)

~~~
AmVess
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...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-
rdp81-01044r000100070001-4)

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
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
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-...](https://www.tested.com/art/makers/492418-packard-merlin-how-detroit-
mass-produced-britains-hand-built-powerhouse/)

~~~
reitzensteinm
I only learned this while studying German, but King Tiger is actually a poor
translation.

The German nickname for the tank was Königstiger, which is the German name for
a Bengal tiger, but if translated literally it would instead be Royal Tiger.

------
csours
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](http://www.imperialclub.com/Repair/Lit/Master/003/cover.htm)

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

~~~
arethuza
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
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.

~~~
jcranmer
The M4 tank is an underrated tank. It does have one major flaw: its main gun
is undersized--but the tank crews themselves were saying "we don't want a
bigger gun" when the tank was being designed, and no one realized the mistake
until late 1944. It also excels in other areas, most notably reliability and
survivability (it's incredibly easy to exit the tank in a jiffy if it's on
fire, especially compared to German tanks). German tanks notably had a
deficiency in reliability--they may look powerful on paper, but if a tank is
spending half its time awaiting repairs, it's not contributing to your actual
war effort.

~~~
mcv
It wasn't a mistake. US tank doctrine was to use specialised tank destroyers
against Tigers; the Shermans were there to support the main army. And a few
Shermans had the more powerful 76mm guns which were better against Tigers. But
the 75mm guns were fine against the vast majority of targets they were likely
to encounter. Tigers were incredibly rare.

The Brits did put a 17 pounder gun on the Sherman to create the Firefly, which
was much more powerful, but also too large for the small turret of the
Sherman, making it a cramped, uncomfortable and impractical tank. The basic
Sherman was fine. Arguably the best tank of the war.

------
mothsonasloth
1946 - "Tanks Are Mighty Fine Things"

1955 - First Anti Tank Guided Missiles developed

2019 - "ATGMs Are Mighty Fine Things"

------
rmason
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...](https://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/16/archives/i-wesley-w-stout-is-
dead-at-82-i-edited-saturday-evening-postj.html)

------
jeffrallen
War is stupid.

~~~
LifeLiverTransp
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.

