The Armory - Guns, Knives, and Axes

[SuburbanFarmer]

What the Spitfires did was fly inches below the V1 wingtip to wingtip which disturbed the airflow over it and caused them to spiral down into the channel or simply veer off course. Brave AF and highly skilled.
Only known image...


https://www.forces.net/radio/did-spitfi ... bs-out-sky

Well that does answer the long-standing question I had about how wings achieve lift. I always figured it was pressure on the bottom of the wing, not vacuum above it.

He removed (really, negated) lift from the right winglet, causing the rocket to most likely roll over to the right and then stall.

Right. Straight towards his aircraft. Hard to imagine that kind of courage.

[Montegriffo]

[Hastur]

I don't envy tank crews in battle. Here's some authentic film of WWII tank battle. The Cologne incident on 6th March 1945. Sherman vs Panther vs Pershing.

[Hastur]

[C-Mag]

Good stuff.

After researching it, my opinion of T-34 is far lower than what I thought it would be.

[TheReal_ND]

Probably because your understanding of warfare seems to be limited to two armies facing off with the best equipment available. The German army was advancing on Stalingrad with proto tanks and when the t-34 showed up they were blown away. Luckily almost all the Russian tanks were not t-34's they were glorified tractors.

Shock effect of the t-34 wears off and everyone realizes it's just another tank with sloped armor. It was still a fairly modern design that has not been improved on much. And I doubt the attrition rates were due to German combat I highly suspect they had no idea how to maintain tanks in the field and that they became shambling corpses after a month or two on the osfront.

[C-Mag]

The Commies fought a war of attrition plain and simple. They considered their men expendable. So having a flawed tank, produced in great numbers fit the expendable model.

[TheReal_ND]

That seems reasonable. Never would have got away with it if it wasn't for that meddling FDR hahahaha

[C-Mag]

Pro tip
Gun and ammo prices will be rising in 2019. If you have needs, get them squared away early.

[Otern]

The Commies fought a war of attrition plain and simple. They considered their men expendable. So having a flawed tank, produced in great numbers fit the expendable model.

That's a bit too simple. They fought a war of survival, so they had to resort to desperate measures in the beginning.

If you look at the numbers later in the war, it looks better. Still lost more men than the Germans, but the difference is not as insane as it used to be, and they're primarily fighting a well entrenched enemy, so it's more understandable.

The T-34 was flawed though. I'm not going to talk about armor, penetration and so on, because tanks were not primarily meant to fight tanks, but to exploit breakthroughs. And this is where the T-34, and especially the KV-1 fell short. The gear box broke down after a very short distance, which meant the operational range of the T-34 was way lower than it should be. This was not good for the Soviet deep battle doctrine, as they needed their tanks to go further in one go, without needing logistical support.

I think the Sherman was probably the best tank in the war. Reliable, good visibility for the crew, cheap to mass produce, and good enough gun to take out anything the Germans could realistically throw at them. Tigers really weren't common enough to justify adopting an entirely new tank. The T-34 really had too poor reliability, visibility and crew comfort to be considered the best tank.

German problems with their late war tanks was even worse than the T-34 though. The Tiger broke down so much it was essentially a non issue on the western front, and of very little concern on the eastern front. But their stationary anti tank guns were great, and it was those that took out most tanks, on both sides.