German tanks were basically all garbage compared to the Russian T-34 anyway.
Yeah but they LOOKED super badass, which is all that counts when youāre playing Company of Heroes. :-)
More or less. They were still vastly superior machines for the most part, but Germany needed numbers not super weapons, which is exactly the opposite of how they did basically everything.
T-34s werenāt that special either really. They broke down all the damned time and the crew was pretty much guaranteed to die if you could penetrate it, but the thing was they had soooo many of the things. Early in the war they were amazing, mostly because of the sloped armor and crappiness of German AFV weaponry. The 34/85 was probably the best tank of the war overall, the right mix of cost and firepower and by then theyād worked out most of the kinks of the design.
It was just an expensive, inefficient morass of models and variants and competing departments and design teams. The Germans would have been better off zerging Stug IIIās but that wasnāt the Nazi way of doing things.
Pretty much. WWII was a war of mass production and mass armies. Systems like the Sherman and the T-34 were what was necessary, not complicated if technically superior things like the Panther and Tiger that were difficult to manufacture, wasteful of resources, and logistically grotesque.
The aesthetic design of the Panther and the Tiger tanks was just so good though! Spartan exterior, long parallel lines.
And of course, the downfall of the Tiger and other armored vehicles, is that they need fuel to run.
And America hit them where it hurt.
Luftwaffe Field Marshal Erhard Milch, referring to the consequences of the Oil Campaign, claimed that āThe British left us with deep and bleeding wounds, but the Americans stabbed us in the heart.ā
Read a lot about this in High School, I had a great-uncle that was a gunner on a B-24. Near the end, Germany was forced to use horses and carriages to move things around, it got so bad.
Germany used horses for logistics throughout the war.
This, absolutely. The German āBlitzkriegā front used mechanized means to quickly and efficiently move their elite units around and do their thingā¦ but the vast, VAST majority of the Wehrmacht transportation was horse-powered (foot-powered later in the war) once you got off the railways.
True enough, but when you start running out of fuel to scramble planes, or run tanksā¦
I remember hearing about how basically the luftwaffe slowly stopped sending out fighters to hit the bombers, and near the end it was just flak.
They may have been out of fuel and lubricant and aluminum, but they sure had all the ball-bearings in the world. Stupid Schweinfurt raidsā¦
Because of the loss of human life all around, or because you couldnāt get those ball bearings anymore, or what?*
*because the mission to bomb the factories in The Mighty Eighth was a PITA, for instance (I seem to recall there was a mission like that)?
No, no, the Wehrmacht had the uber-geheime Pferde flugzeugen!
Because the Germans had previously produced and distributed all the ball-bearings they could ever possibly use, and the 8th wasted hundreds of planes and lives in two successive totally pointless raids. They had something like 25% losses in the second raid, and as a result they lost strategic air dominance for months.
The question then is, what did they know, and when did they know it, to borrow something from another time and place. There are a ton of SNAFUs from WWII, but not all of them were evident at the time. Hindsight gives us a lot of clarity.
Oh sure, they didnāt know that destroying ball-bearing factories would be pointless. But after the debacle of the first raid, a second raid which would be unescorted at the destination was obviously foolish.
One would think. In the press of the war, and the political need to keep doing stuff, plus the bureaucratic pressures that tend to shove organizations down paths of least resistance and to insure that resources once allocated are all used, whether that use is efficient or even productive, though, I can definitely see how things shook out the way they did.
538 takes a look at r/the_donald (and controls)
r/The_Donald has repeatedly been accused of offering a safe harbor where racists and white nationalists can congregate and express their views, much the same way that Trumpās campaign is said to have mobilized and emboldened those same groups. And indeed, r/The_Donald is home to some pretty vile comment threads. The subredditās moderators declined to talk to us about their community and accused FiveThirtyEight of being āfake news.ā Regardless, we think thereās a way to get at the nature of r/The_Donald that is more rigorous than doing a quick scan of its comments (and certainly more objective than simply soliciting the opinions of the groupās fans and detractors).
Some good news this morning
Interesting, but the type of person who inhabit forums like that is obvious - trolls, cowards, etc etc etc. Weāre all too familiar with that type of shithead.