Tactically the towed AT guns were less sucessful than the SP. They lacked the ability to move rapidly forward as a support weapon & in the defense could not quickly displace if the situation required switching positions. The better part of my career was in the artillery & the SP weapons were usually preferable from a tactical standpoint to towed.
WI more Allied heavy tanks in World War II?
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Tactically the towed AT guns were less sucessful than the SP. They lacked the ability to move rapidly forward as a support weapon & in the defense could not quickly displace if the situation required switching positions. The better part of my career was in the artillery & the SP weapons were usually preferable from a tactical standpoint to towed.
Infantry and armored divisions unfortunate enough to be assigned towed instead of self propelled tank destroyer battalions didn't have any increase in their number of light or medium tanks as a means of compensation.
I was just comparing SP TD vs the towed TD. In effect the TD battlaions attached to the US Army divisions gave then a extra tank battalion. One with extra powerful guns and less well armored. Since most US Army infantry divisions had a TD battalion attached (36 M!0 or M36 & a company of armored cars), and a independant tank battalion (54 M4 varaiants) they were better equipped with armor than a German Pz Division of the same months. Other than a few brief moments the German armored forces were running 50% strength of less. It was rare for a US tank or TD battalion to fall below 80% strength.
thorr97
Banned
Nicholas Moran is an excellent guy to listen to for more about this.
This particular video lays waste to that whole Tank Destroyer myth as well as many others. Moran pulls his info from original source documentation - US Army Field Manuals from the era, among other resources.
FM17-10 Armored Force Tactics
Tank commanders utilize the inherent characteristics
of their combat vehicles: mobility, fire power, armor
protection, and shock.
(2) Targets.-Tanks engage targets in the order of importance
to themselves and their unit. The order of importance
is:
(a) Hostile tanks, the weapons of which are effective
against our own tanks.
(b) Hostile antitank guns.
(c) Hostile armored vehicles, the weapons of which are not
effective against our tanks.
(d) Hostile personnel and weapons, the destruction of
which will materially effect our maneuver. Medium tanks,
because of their armor and armament, may be used to support
an attack by fire.
Obergruppenführer Smith
Banned
Warning
That is outright racist and ignorant. You should be ashamed of yourself.
Towed guns suck at mobile AT duties.
Riain
Banned
At what point did Russia become a race? Russia itself is a country and the Soviet Union is more or less a heterogeneous empire.
Russia outlawed Serfdom in 1868, real-live medieval serfdom and as late as WW1 the vast majority of people in Russia had never even seen a watch which apparently was a factor why the Germans kept kicking their arses. Sure the Soviet made huge strides toward modernisation, at a massive human cost (Holodomor?), but a country just doesn't jump that gap in a single generation. This manifested itself in various ways in WW2 such as the Red Army being unable to do Time On Target artillery barrages like the US, British and Germans, the massive casualty mismatch on the eastern front and the necessity for STAVKA to go to the front to command major operations like the Stalingrad counter-offensive.
Buy hey, this is a thread about Shermans and emotive talk is the rule which is why I bailed earlier, before I was accused of racism.
The massive casualty disparity owed greatly to the fact that the Germans were murdering Soviet prisoners by the millions, but let's not let facts get in the way of our Bolshevik hordes mythology.
US Army used them that way. The tiny HE load was a problem, but massing them in indirect fire was done. Most tactical commanders used them as direct fire support weapons, the same as the tanks of the attached battalions. if there was a enemy tank in sight to destroy that was fine, but a target is a target & the 3" T7 gun & MGs were very handy against 98% of the things a infantry platoon ran up against.
While that may have been true in the deserts of North Africa, in Europe SP tank destroyers units were still found to be far superior in a defensive role. Towed guns simply couldn't react quickly enough, and lacked the survivability of their counterparts.
thorr97
Banned
Obergruppenführer Smith,
Dude, seriously? This is supposed to be a forum about alternate history speculation - not a platform for SJW denouncements. Noting the relative educational levels of the Soviet Union versus the US is hardly a racist thing. And the Soviet tactical doctrine did base itself on an expenditure of manpower that no Western nation would've accepted. That's why Red Army divisions were always larger than their equivalent Western military formations - the Soviets needed those extra warm bodies as they planned on consuming them at a faster and more frequent rate than the Western armies would. A look at how the Red Army ran its penal battalions would also make this clear. For the Soviets, the role of the penal battalions was to lead the way in any attack and thus cause the enemy to reveal its defensive positions so that the rest of the army could then concentrate on those. So, yes, the Soviets did tend to view their troops as simple bullet magnets.
Dude, seriously? This is supposed to be a forum about alternate history speculation - not a platform for SJW denouncements. Noting the relative educational levels of the Soviet Union versus the US is hardly a racist thing. And the Soviet tactical doctrine did base itself on an expenditure of manpower that no Western nation would've accepted. That's why Red Army divisions were always larger than their equivalent Western military formations - the Soviets needed those extra warm bodies as they planned on consuming them at a faster and more frequent rate than the Western armies would. A look at how the Red Army ran its penal battalions would also make this clear. For the Soviets, the role of the penal battalions was to lead the way in any attack and thus cause the enemy to reveal its defensive positions so that the rest of the army could then concentrate on those. So, yes, the Soviets did tend to view their troops as simple bullet magnets.
Obergruppenführer Smith
Banned
You do realize that the Western Allied had BIGGER divisions than the Red Army? There's a reason why the 100 division plan would have needed 8,208,000 (compared to the Red Army's more than 600 for 12 million) even when the US had a similar population to unoccupied USSR.
Also, throwing out SJW accusations, typical. Trying to hide to your "bias" (stronger words come to mind, but those would be outright insults) behind incorrect facts is quite a low tactic.
Have we stepped through the Looking Glass here?
I have seen Obergruppenführer Smith had all manner of terms applied to him (and there have been times I personally thought he was a touch too " yep "Merrica" in threads) but calling him a SJW is so far out of left field it isn't out of the stands, or even the parking lot, but from the Interstate feeding the road into the ballpark.
The Soviets did indeed have almost no concern for their troops, they were very much pawns in that chess game, but those "illiterate peasants" inflicted around 80% of the losses suffered by the Heer in WW II, and those T-34/85 were more than sufficient to drive the ROK and U.S. forces into the Pusan Perimeter.
That being the case, perhaps being totally dismissive of the troops who did most of the dying to defeat the 3rd Reich while allowing the WAllies to have around 1/3 the casualties they would otherwise have suffered, is just a bit too far.
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