FROM THE BEGINNING of civilized warfare, advancing infantry—especially when outnumbered—has dreamed of finding collective protection from missile attacks, so that the fewer brave were not slain by the more numerous mediocre. Foot soldiers and horsemen thought it somehow unfair that they might perish beneath anonymous barrages of arrows, bolts, or catapult projectiles fired from afar by their military inferiors.
The fourth-century BC Spartan king Archidamus III summed up the ancient heroic lament upon first seeing a catapult: “By Herakles, the valor of an individual no longer matters.” He anticipated General George S. Patton’s moan in Tunisia in March 1943. The general looked from his trench at advancing but unprotected German grenadiers, caught in the crossfire of American artillery, and lamented, “my God, it seems a crime to murder good infantry like that.”1
Prior to the industrial age there were few methods to protect men in the field collectively against the haphazard onslaught of missiles. Heavy chariots were never popular in the wars of the Greek city-states. The terrain of the southern Balkans was too rough. Pasturing ponies in an arid Mediterranean climate often proved too expensive. Usually no more than two combatants could fit in a war chariot anyway. After Alexander the Great, some of his successors’ armies fielded dozens of elephants. They sometimes advanced like living tanks to batter infantry, scatter cavalry, and offer a mobile platform for bowmen. But elephants were costly to import and maintain. They were also difficult to train. Their skins were thick but not quite impenetrable, and their vulnerable orifices and feet were favorite targets. In panic, elephants could wreak as much havoc on their own troops as on the enemy.2
Roman legionaries were terrified of mass barrages of missiles, especially when they fought on their eastern fronts against Parthian horse archers. In response to all these challenges, they had long mastered the tactic of the testudo (“tortoise”), a sort of human tank. When archers appeared, legionaries abruptly formed a veritable shell. A roof and walls of their locked rectangular shields deflected most aerial attacks. Yet the testudo, while occasionally mobile, was mostly a static and temporary defensive mechanism, one hardly analogous to offensive armor.3
The growing use of gunpowder in the fourteenth century changed the balance between offense and defense. Projectiles were no longer defined by the limits of muscular strength. Both their size and velocity steadily increased, shattering stone walls in a way even catapults could not. Harquebuses and later musket fire usually could penetrate body armor. Mobile armor—traditional barriers of wood or hides or even metal on wheels—that might be sufficiently strong to stand up to missiles was simply too heavy to be powered by either humans or animals.4
The science fiction novelist H. G. Wells wrote a 1903 short story about steam-powered armored vehicles, “The Land Ironclads.” Wells’s massive tanks were to lumber across the battlefield protecting riflemen encased in their armored cabins, from which they would be able to pick off the enemy with impunity.5
Three breakthroughs brought the tank out of the world of fantasy into the cauldron of World War I. By the latter nineteenth century, both the machine gun and shrapnel artillery shells gave new advantages to the offense. Just a few trained gunners could in minutes now slaughter hundreds of unprotected soldiers. That newfound danger led to renewed demands for new ideas of infantry defense.
Second, relatively small, light, gasoline-powered internal combustion engines made possible self-powered armor. Gas and diesel engines were an enormous improvement on steam power and at last allowed land vehicles the same mobility as ships at sea. A third and less appreciated invention was the continuous track. In lieu of wheels, tracks better redistributed the great weight of iron and steel armored vehicles throughout the entire chassis. Caterpillar tracks opened up otherwise impassable terrain that had punctured tires and clogged axles. Suddenly self-propelled armored units might follow, or even lead, almost anywhere that infantry tread.
In September 1916 the British first used gasoline-powered primitive tanks at the Battle of the Somme. Despite the general failure of these unreliable prototypes, the tanks administered a shock to the static world of trench warfare. A handful of the strange vehicles made some inroads through German lines in a way previously impossible. Over a year later at the First Battle of Cambrai, waves of nearly four hundred British Mark IV combat tanks broke through German lines on November 20, 1917, before faltering a few days later due to mechanical breakdowns and enemy artillery fire.
In the last two years of World War I, the Allies built thousands of tanks; the British and the French alone produced almost eight thousand of them, as fighting at last sometimes was unleashed from the trenches. The Germans and Austrians deployed almost none. But armored vehicles were still too mechanically unreliable and slow to change the dynamics of trench war. For the most part, their offensive armament was not commensurate in lethality with artillery, and their armor was not thick enough to deflect most shells.6
Between the world wars, debate raged over the proper use of the new armor, as tactical theory raced ahead of the technological limitations of tanks. Traditional supporters of infantry wanted tanks, in the fashion of armored cars, to stay with foot soldiers as support vehicles. They could offer movable shields and mobile machine gun platforms when integrated within the ground advance. In turn, accompanying soldiers could spot land mines and anti-tank ambushes and thereby save the huge investments in armored vehicles.
Or perhaps tank men might instead become the ultimate manifestation of romantic mailed knights, autonomously charging through the enemy while safely encased in body armor, but now fueled by gas rather than hay. The cavalry lobby resisted independent motorized armor, just as the wooden and wind-powered warship interests had scoffed at steam-powered ironclads. Nonetheless in Europe by the 1920s, once any major land power went “tank,” others had to follow to ensure parity and deterrence, and calls went out to subject armored forces to the same arms limitations sought for ships. The result was that by the eve of World War II every major power either had armored forces or was scrambling to acquire them.7
Prophets of independent armor formations fell sharply into diverse camps, in the manner of the simultaneous fights in the 1930s over air power and strategic bombing. The new armored visionaries—Generals J.F.C. Fuller, Jean-Baptiste Estienne, Charles de Gaulle, and Heinz Guderian, and Captain B. H. Liddell Hart—envisioned armor replacing heavy cavalry as an independent shock corps. Fast-moving armored divisions in the next war would range far ahead of slower-moving infantry, as bullets bounced off their steel hides in a way they most surely did not the flanks of horses. Tanks would blast holes in enemy lines. Then they would race through or around the enemy’s rear. Panic would ensue. Such vast envelopments of enemy armies would lead to moral collapse. Supporting infantry would follow and mop up stunned and surrounded enemies.
Armor would not just protect gunners inside as they killed infantry with near impunity. It would instead win entire wars, by creating psychological havoc behind the lines to collapse armies through fear and shock—doing to infantry on the battlefield what the contemporary bombers would supposedly do to civilians at home. Tanks would cut through barbed wire, run over foxholes, and with their main guns blast fortifications, as their machines guns and cannon swept the battlefield. As with bombers, the tank would always get through.8
By the early 1930s tank theorists no longer sounded so unworldly, given the reality that armored vehicles were steadily becoming bigger, faster, and far more reliable than their plodding World War I counterparts. With the advent of the modern fighter plane, the advanced submarine, and the aircraft carrier, the world of Western warfare seemed to have been turned upside down, in a way unseen since the fourteenth-century spread of gunpowder.
The post–World War I tank was envisioned as an anti-Verdun, anti-Somme weapon. As Patton put it in 1939, “the shorter the battle the fewer men will be killed and hence the greater their self-confidence and enthusiasm. To produce a short battle, tanks must advance rapidly but not hastily.” The prewar dreams of military strategists in the 1930s hinged on mobile warfare anchored by fleets of fast-moving armored vehicles: battles would be short, mobile, and decisive, no longer static, fixed, and endless. Smoky, dirty, shell- and bullet-spewing machines were romanticized as a way to deter or at least shorten wars of the future.9
BY THE END of World War II, the effectiveness of tanks hinged not just on the quality of the machine or crew training but also on sheer numbers. Just as far-larger cavalry forces usually defeated smaller ones—even with less hardy horses and less effective cavalrymen—so too tanks became a decisive force on the World War II battlefield, especially when one side had far more serviceable armored vehicles than did its enemy. Without “armor superiority,” battle simply was transferred to more expensive, and often inconclusive, duels between tanks. Thus the value of tanks was not necessarily their armor per se, or prowess against other tanks, but the ability to be freed against armies that did not field a comparable ar-mored force.
Many weapons could stop a rapidly advancing tank: other tanks, fighter-bombers, artillery, hand-held anti-tank rockets, or mine fields. But ostensibly the easiest way was for another tank to blow up its counterpart. And when that did not or could not happen, panic among tank crews often ensued. In summer 1941, an invading Panzer regiment became terrified that none of their accustomed weaponry could stop the onslaught of strange new T-34 and KV-1 Soviet tanks. An official German army report chronicled their plight: “The heavy tanks cannot be beaten by our weaponry.… The men have almost no ammunition left and are being run down by Russian tanks.” The fright of the Panzer crewmen was akin to fears of lesser predators that a lion or tiger was roaming their jungle.10
On rare occasions superior tanks simply wiped out their armored enemies without respite. On June 13, 1944, legendary Waffen SS Panzer captain Michael Wittmann a week after D-Day—in perhaps the most celebrated, and often mythicized, single tank charge in armored history—slammed his small formation of Tiger tanks into units of the British 7th Armoured Division at the battle of Villers-Bocage. While details of the engagement remain in dispute, apparently when Wittmann’s crew and accompanying tanks were through firing the 88 mm guns of their Panzerkampfwagen Mark VI Tigers, they may well have destroyed fourteen tanks, fifteen other armored vehicles, and a few anti-tank guns. (Few standard tanks other than the Sherman “Firefly” in the American and British armored arsenal of mid-1944 could stop a Tiger tank commanded by a skilled veteran of the Eastern Front.) Yet for all Wittmann’s audacity, for all the marked advantages of his huge Tiger and the élan of German armored units, his daring led nowhere. He soon retreated in the face of Allied reinforcements and air superiority, leaving behind damaged Tigers and without materially altering the pulse of the larger battle. Wittmann, it turned out, had too few tanks. He had brought along too few accompanying soldiers. And there were too few planes of the Luftwaffe overhead and too few supply trucks to ensure him fuel and ammunition.11
Wittmann was purportedly responsible for an astonishing 138 tank “kills” before being blown up himself, probably by a Canadian Sherman “Firefly” on August 8, 1944. Yet the larger lesson from his virtuoso action was that in armored warfare the seemingly mundane mattered as much as overt battle élan. When tanks were well supplied with fuel and replacement parts, easily serviceable, present in large numbers, protected by air cover, accompanied by skilled infantry, and supported by covering artillery or anti-tank weapons, then the actual specifications of a tank’s armor protection and offensive capability, within parameters, played a lesser role. German Panzers, the war’s most seasoned armored forces, eventually equipped with the most feared tanks, were nonetheless unable to change the course of any major campaign after 1942. Tanks, like ancient elephants or modern battleships, were formidable weapons, and the stuff of deadly romance. But their achievement ultimately rested more with routine considerations than the impenetrability of their armor, the power of their guns, and the heroics of their crews.
WHEN WORLD WAR II started in 1939 no one quite knew what defined a tank. Peacetime tank field trials, as well as the experience of the Germans, Italians, and Russians in the Spanish Civil War, raised operational controversies well beyond the proper tactics of armored warfare. Such confusion would never really be resolved until nearly the last two years of the war.12
The variables of tank design appeared almost endless. Unfortunately, usually one asset came at the expense of another in a zero-sum trade-off. The thickness and quality of armor were important requisites to ensure that the tank was immune from ground fire, bombing, mines, artillery, or other tanks. But if so, the thick-skinned, huge, weighty, costly but underpowered and unreliable German Tigers should have been the war’s most effective tanks.13
Tanks were also evaluated by their own offensive power. But there were lots of ways to calibrate the optimum tank gun beyond the diameter of the barrel. Just as important were the barrel length, the quality of its high-grade steel construction, the amount of propellant in the shell, the nature of the projectile (e.g., HEAT [high-explosive anti-tank] or APDS [armor-piercing discarding sabot] rounds available late in the war along with other variants), the gun’s recoil and sighting systems, the speed of loading, and shell-carrying capacity. The problem for gun designers was that the war came upon them so suddenly and without much of a tradition of technological experience that no one quite understood the complex relationship between projectiles, armor, and internal combustion engines.14
A tank’s speed (20–35 mph) and mobility—perhaps epitomized by the well-rounded Russian T-34—were essential to armored success, to entrap the enemy or to escape other tanks. At first designers were unsure whether tanks should have machine guns and one gun or, like the French Char and American Lee/Grant, two. There was no consensus whether the most effective tank engines were the more common gas-powered power plants. Such engines were certainly more familiar to American mechanics. They usually started more easily in cold weather and traditionally they had run on a fuel more plentifully refined (though at greater cost) per barrel of oil. In contrast, diesel engines—standard in the T-34 and a few models of the American Sherman—offered more torque per horsepower. Diesel engines were usually also more reliable and longer lasting, and were not beset with the problems of ignition or gas-engine carburetors that so often plagued German tanks. They were somewhat less flammable (although 25 percent of diesel T-34s on the Eastern Front caught fire after being hit), and more fuel-efficient. In this regard, the rate of fuel consumption and the range of the tank (60–150 miles) before the need to refuel were key.
As important was less-glamorous mechanical reliability, as expressed by the ratio between the hours of tank maintenance needed per hour of actual deployment on the battlefield. In that regard, the much-criticized American Sherman was perhaps the most easily maintained and repaired of all tanks, enjoying an extraordinary high percentage of deployed units staying operational. The far-fewer-produced Panthers or Tigers were more often under repair or out of fuel, diminishing the importance that they could outduel the ubiquitous Shermans. Per unit cost affected all the above criteria, and thus fielding lots of mass-produced good tanks, such as Shermans and T-34s, proved more advantageous than relying on fewer but finely crafted and superb Panthers. Clearly, a single tank could not meet all the desiderata. Yet at the outbreak of the war it was still debatable whether it was wiser to produce different models for different tasks—such as light, medium, and heavy tanks—or to focus on a generic multitask tank and produce it in the thousands with standardized parts and maintenance regimes.15
Ironically, Germany’s war against its mostly ill-prepared European neighbors had started with the simple premise of quantity over quality: lots of light, vulnerable tanks such as Panzer Mark Is and IIs were apparently preferable to having a few with superior characteristics comparable, for example, to the heavy French Char B1. But as the war progressed beyond Denmark, Norway, Poland, and France, and as the Third Reich met the Russians and British, the pace of the evolution of armored fighting vehicles was soon taking on a life of its own.
The German Mark I tankettes 9 (less than 6 tons, 2 light machine guns, and less than an inch of armor) that rolled into Poland in September 1939 bore little resemblance to the so-called Tiger IIs (“King Tiger”), the huge monstrosities that appeared just four years later (70 tons, an 88 mm cannon, and up to 7 inches of armor). In between the two models were hundreds of thousands of dead tankers and their victims, from whose fatal lessons would finally emerge a rough consensus at war’s end as to the properly designed tank. If the war had broken out with little affinity among French, British, German, Russian, or American tanks—some with cannon, some not; some with small guns, others with large; some with one, multiple, or no turrets; some with wide, some with narrow treads; some gas powered, some diesel—by the end of the war everyone’s ideal tank oddly looked about the same. The Americans, who reviewed the shortcomings of their ubiquitous Sherman, thought they knew exactly what was needed in an improved tank by 1945. As the commander of the 2nd Armored Division, Major General Ernest H. Harmon, put it in 1945: “First: gun power; Second: battlefield maneuverability; Third: as much armor protection as can be had after meeting the first two requirements, still staying within a weight that can be gotten across obstacles with our bridge equipment.”16
That archetypal tank by 1945 was expressed in various ways by the upgraded Russian T-34, the German Panther, the American Pershing, and the British Comet. The apparent common minimum denominators were weights over thirty tons but less than fifty; a long-barrel, high-velocity cannon of between 76 mm and 90 mm; relatively low silhouettes and cast turrets; wide tracks, and sloped armor of about 100 mm thickness or over. Indeed, seventy years after World War II, and despite revolutions in armor and armament, a twenty-first-century T-90 Russian tank or an American M1 Abrams does not look all that much different from a German Panther, while, in contrast, a 1945-vintage P-51 Mustang bears little resemblance to a twenty-first-century F-22 Raptor.17
Once the war began, universal tank design soon reflected two realties. One, for both Allied and Axis designers it was hard to discover and quickly collate common experiences in various theaters from outside Moscow to Libya to find an optimum consensus. The Americans, for example, had little idea that their new and much heralded Shermans that often reigned supreme in autumn 1942 in North Africa (largely due to the fact that many German Panzers before mid-1942 were still not yet up-gunned beyond 50 mm) were already outdated, given the knowledge learned from the Russian front. Two, long-held practices and national attitudes about industrial production and technological design sometimes warped practical empirical decisions: Germans sought craftsmanship and size, Americans reliability and practicality, Russians mass production, and the British specialization. Consequently, distillation of diverse lessons from the battlefield, especially on the Eastern Front in late 1941 and 1942, took about two years.
Armor designers unfortunately often ignored the uncomfortable conditions of battle inside a tank. None were more uncomfortable than the superb Russian T-34. Yet a cramped and poorly designed interior, along with accompanying operator fatigue, were intangibles that could affect overall armor efficiency. Tanks were, after all, designed to protect soldiers from machine guns and artillery shells while spitting out both to devastate unprotected infantry. If they were too crowded (e.g., too many soldiers in the turret posed problems in early American tanks), their interior air noxious (particularly in early tank designs), the interior quarters poorly laid out, the engines unreliable (designs from the 1930s had insufficient horsepower), the tracks prone to premature wear, and the fuel consumption excessive, then crew performance suffered to the point of rendering good armor and offensive punch less relevant. It proved almost impossible to square the circle of ensuring crew safety and comfort when trapped in a riveted or welded steel shell of stored gasoline, high-explosive shells and machine gun bullets, sparking engine plugs, and incoming projectiles.
TANK FLEETS WERE not always worth the enormous investment in strategic materials and production costs that often came at the expense of ship, plane, and small-arms output. Artillery and armor brought little advantage to the battlefield if these weapons were easily neutralized by cheaper hand-held anti-tank guns, mines, tank-destroying artillery, fighter-bombers, or even other—and especially more cheaply produced—tanks. The key, as in the use of air and sea power, was to ensure that armor was liberated to collapse or destroy vulnerable infantry and fixed positions. The Germans had proved that fact in their serial border wars between 1939 and 1940, when even poorly designed early Panzers were not seriously checked by either opposing tanks or artillery, and therefore rolled over enemy resistance. “Armor superiority” determined the cost-to-benefit worth of tanks, and even a tankette could win a battle if unopposed by enemy armor.
Given poor French morale, it brought the French little advantage that their advanced heavy Char B1 tanks on paper were superior to any armored vehicle that the Germans brought into France in May and June 1940. In addition, the French were reluctant to form independent offensive armored formations and did not coordinate their fuel-hungry French tanks with fleets of refueling trucks. French tanks, like French fighter planes, might be better than their German counterparts, but French armored forces, again like French air forces, were usually worse, given their organizational, operational, and morale problems.
The German blitzkrieg of September 1939 and the invasion of France (May–June 1940) were proved the antitheses to the later static tank duels on the Eastern Front from 1943 to 1945, where German and Russian tanks ground one another down without being unleashed on infantry. The key was mobility and the ability to hit exposed infantry. Or as General Rommel put it about the great armored thrusts of the North African campaigns: “Against a motorised and armoured enemy, non-motorised infantry divisions are of value only in prepared positions. Once such positions have been pierced or outflanked and they are forced to retreat from them, they become helpless victims of the motorised enemy. In extreme cases they can do no more than hold on in their positions to the last round.” In contrast, when tanks blasted apart tanks or were destroyed by foot soldiers before attacking infantry, or found themselves mired in impassable terrain, manpower and capital devoted to armor simply proved a lost expense.18
At the epic tank battle of Kursk (Operation Citadel, July 5–16, 1943), both the Russians and Germans deployed quality tanks to prevent their enemy from slicing through infantry. But given that superior Russian numbers were matched by German marginal quality and training advantages, the two armored forces neutralized each other without either side achieving a breakout. The Russians suffered three times as many casualties and seven to ten times the number of tank losses. Yet they still ensured both a tactical and strategic German defeat, a fact that might suggest numbers rather than the quality of Russian tanks and the training of the crews were pivotal. Of the masses of Russian infantry and armor at Kursk, a despairing Panzer crewman thought Russian tanks were scurrying “like rats” all over the battlefield.19
General Erhard Raus saw the armored stalemate at Kursk as the turning point of the entire Eastern Front: “Victory was once again in the offing, but it turned out to be a Russian one. Our eleven panzer divisions—reconstituted during a lull lasting three months—could not come to grips with the Red Army’s reserves to annihilate them because Hitler threw all of the German armor into Operation Citadel in July 1943 and bled it white upon running into a fortified system of hitherto unknown strength and depth. Hitler thereby fulfilled Stalin’s keenest hopes and presented him with the palm of victory.” Kursk proved to be Germany’s Pyrrhic battle of Heraclea (280 BC) or Asculum (279 BC), when Greek invaders won battles in Italy only by suffering losses and erosion of morale that would preclude ultimate strategic victory. Generals Model and Manstein, to paraphrase Pyrrhus’s lament of Asculum’s strategic consequences, might have sighed, “if we prove victorious in one more such battle with the Russians, we shall be utterly ruined.”20
THERE WAS NOTHING in the immediate German past to suggest that the Nazi government would produce the most lethal tanks by the end of World War II, at least as narrowly defined by their superiority in tank-on-tank battles. Germany had produced just a handful of its clumsy A7V tanks in World War I. In 1939–1940 German tankers startled the world with blitzkrieg victories, due not to superior tanks but to their better training, unit cohesion, officer corps, and morale. On the Eastern Front, their inferior German tanks achieved impressive kill ratios over clearly more lethal Russian T-34s, and continued to do against the late and vastly improved Russian models of 1944–1945.21
However well-trained the crews, however visionary the officers, however great the global reputation of blitzkrieg, the vast majority of early German (and Czech) tanks before 1942 nonetheless were no better and often worse than Russian, American, and British designs. The thinly armored PzKpfw I (approximately 1,500 built) tankette had no main battle gun and was originally designed as a trainer. Its replacement, the PzKpfw II (approximately 1,900 built), was initially outfitted with only a light 20 mm gun of the sort used for anti-aircraft duty. Even the prewar American M2 light tank, obsolete when the war began, was outfitted with a much larger 37 mm main gun. The envisioned successor to the PzKpfw II, the PzKpfw III, was slated to become the backbone of the new armored corps (some 5,700 built). But even its updated gun—a longer-barrel, high-velocity 50 mm that replaced the original 37 mm—did not ensure superiority over most Allied tanks of the time. There was no valid reason by late 1941 to believe German armor should have proven the terror of the European continent.22
Blitzkrieg played on the myth of German technological superiority and industrial dominance. But the successes of early Panzer divisions were instead predicated on the poor preparation and morale of Germany’s enemies. The PzKpfw Is and IIs, Stuka dive bombers, and horse-drawn artillery and transport were formidable only against European border enemies whose militaries were not battle ready, such as those of Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Some of the German generals were aware of their Panzer mirage. As early as mid-1940, veterans of armored encounters were warning Hitler’s staff that the Wehrmacht was in no shape to invade any country that possessed tanks comparable to their Panzers and air support.23
One of the most inexplicable facts of World War II was the chronic poor quality of German tanks that entered Russia in 1941, almost twenty-two months after the war had begun. Not only were the Panzers (over 50 percent of them obsolete Mark Is and IIs and Czech models) little better than most of their Russian counterparts, and often quite inferior to growing numbers of T-34s and KV-Is, but they also were outnumbered. This lapse, and the utter German failure to acknowledge it prior to the invasion, was astonishing, given that the success of Operation Barbarossa was predicated on rapid armored assaults achieving a “shock and awe” victory within a few weeks, in the fashion of those earlier triumphs of 1939–1940. German tank inferiority in 1941–1942 did not necessarily mean that the largest armored invasion in history was doomed. But it did ensure that there would be no quick collapse of Russia.24
Hitler reportedly understood the Wehrmacht’s dilemma. He supposedly remarked to General Heinz Guderian at Army Group Headquarters on August 4, 1941, “if I had known that the figures for Russian tank strength which you gave in your book were in fact the true ones, I would not—I believe—ever have started this war.” It was a stunning admission that the single issue of tanks had altered the entire course of World War II. Hitler had just sent almost four million Axis troops against a former ally in hopes of a quick victory spearheaded by tanks, but without any appreciation of the quantity, quality, or production capacity of his new enemy’s armored forces—information that was known to his generals as early as 1937. Guderian, infamous for his ex post facto, self-serving revisionism, nonetheless may be right that he had “estimated Russian tank strength at that time as 10,000; both the Chief of the Army General Staff, Beck, and the censor had disagreed with this statement. It had cost me a lot of trouble to get that figure printed; but I had been able to show that intelligence reports at the time spoke of 17,000 Russian tanks and that my estimate was therefore, if anything, a very conservative one.”25
Only with the updated later models of the PzKpfw IV did Germany first produce a good tank in respectable numbers (approximately 9,000). With sloping armor and a reliable engine, the PzKpfw IV would eventually become the most widely produced German tank of the war, a workhorse continually updated with increased armor and a more powerful gun. Yet when even a few of the improved PzKpfw IVs entered Russia in the first German waves of Operation Barbarossa, their crews were still astounded at how an otherwise poorly organized and deployed enemy matched up evenly, and how hard it was for Germans to knock out even the small numbers of new T-34s with the PzKpfw IV’s still underpowered gun.
One veteran anti-tank battery crewman’s recollection of first meeting a T-34 proved surreal: “Half a dozen anti-tank gun shells fire at him which sound like a drum roll. But he drives staunchly through our line like an impregnable prehistoric monster.” In a December 1941 shootout with T-34s, a German tanker said of the effect of his 50 mm gun on Russian tanks: “But there was no visible effect. Damned peashooter!” The fright of German Panzer crews at unaccustomed Russian weapons was a trope throughout the history of warfare. It was felt just as much by Philip V’s confident Macedonian cavalry, who on first encountering the lethal swordplay of Roman horsemen, were shocked at the carnage that a Spanish gladius might inflict on supposedly invincible troops such as themselves: “For men who had seen the wounds dealt by javelins and arrows and occasionally by lances, since they were used to fighting with the Greeks and Illyrians, when they had seen bodies chopped to pieces by the Spanish sword, arms torn away, shoulders and all, or heads separated from bodies, with the necks completely severed, or vitals laid open, and the other fearful wounds, realized in a general panic with what weapons and what men they had to fight.”26
Official reports from the Russian front as early as a few weeks into the invasion suggested similar widespread panic on the part of German crews when confronted by superior Russian tanks: “Time and again our tanks have been split right open by hits from the front, and the commander’s cupolas on the Type III and IV tanks have been completely blown off.… The former pace and spirit of the attack will die down and will be replaced by a feeling of inferiority, since the crews know that they can be knocked out by enemy tanks while they are still a great distance away.” Note again that Type III and IV tanks (Mark IIIs and Mark IVs) were the best models of German tanks that entered Russia; over half the Panzer fleet was far worse.27
As a result, many German officers by late 1941 hoped that German industry might in desperation quickly reverse engineer or outright copy T-34s to produce them in similar numbers. But the obstacles to duplicating the T-34 were not only German pride in engineering. Guderian, an original German architect of Panzer doctrine and later inspector-general of armoured troops, claimed, probably correctly, that by 1942–1943 Germany lacked enough strategic materials (especially bauxite) to copy the T-34 aluminum diesel engine and high-quality steel armor. It may be a damning concession that in the very first months of Operation Barbarossa—a gamble predicated on armor dashes—the Third Reich’s tanks were not only inferior to Russian T-34s, but that German industry did not have the wherewithal to copy superior enemy models in sufficient numbers.28
A tank race followed that ultimately reached absurd lengths. The shock of the T-34 also suggested that there might be further Russian surprises on the horizon. Russian armored production also now brought into doubt the entire ideological premises for invading Russia in the first place: to take Russian territory from inferior and backward peoples and to give it to those more technologically sophisticated, who, by their intellectual superiority, deserved it. Hitler failed to grasp that the antidotes to the T-34 (and to the heavier Russian KV-I) were not just to be found in thicker armor and bigger guns, although he would eventually accomplish both those traits with the deployment of the Tiger, the so-called King Tiger, and the more versatile Panther. To thwart Russian armor, prototypes of improved German heavy tanks were suddenly rushed into production, most famously the Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger. A few of the so-called Tiger Is appeared in August 1942. They usually handled with ease the offensive and defensive challenges of the early models of the T-34. Equipped with a seven-hundred-horsepower engine, a vastly superior 88 mm main gun, and up to five inches of sloped armor, the early Tiger models had good odds of destroying Russian tanks at ranges of well over a mile. And at that distance it was largely immune from penetrating counterfire. But the Tiger’s record weight (almost 60 tons), size (20 feet long and over 12 feet wide), and cost (over twice that of an updated PzKpfw IV) often nullified what advantages it offered over the T-34.
In contrast, the T-34’s success came from the Russian ability to produce it in enormous numbers, while ensuring that it remained mostly reliable and continually upgraded. As a general rule, then, the answer to strapped German industry by late 1942 was not to produce a few good weapons, but plentiful adequate ones.29
Gigantism—the psychological disorder that ever bigger is always better—had been historically a bane of military technology, from Demetrius the Besieger’s outlandish Heliopolis siege engine to the Japanese super-battleships Yamato and Musashi that likewise led to a colossal waste of men and material, and yet were scheduled to be superseded by a “super-Yamato” of ninety thousand tons with 20-inch guns. Hitler suffered especially from the disease that seems to infect autocrats with a special vengeance. Tigers were too large for many bridges and roads, and wore out their tracks and transmissions quickly. They were expensive to transport. They gulped fuel at record rates. They were costly and time-consuming to produce, built to exacting specifications, required extensive training to operate and maintain, and ultimately were produced in too few numbers (1,350) to make much difference on the Eastern Front, despite their feared reputation among enemy tank crews. Most important, they took over ten times as many man-hours of labor to produce as American or Russian medium tanks.30
Nonetheless, German gigantism continued with the upgraded Tiger II, or so-called King or Royal Tiger—an impractical monstrosity, ten tons heavier than its predecessor, four feet longer, and with two inches of additional armor. Yet if Tiger IIs were the deadliest tanks in World War II, they were also rare on the battlefield, given that fewer than five hundred were produced. The fetishes of German tank design with regard to firepower and armor led to even more absurdities. Prototypes of the so-called Maus tank (PzKpfw VIII) were to reach thirty-three feet long and two hundred tons in weight, armed with a 128 mm cannon, and protected by over ten inches of armor in places. They were similar in spirit to the huge Krupp rail guns and V-weapons that might have been technologically impressive but otherwise proved a poor investment in terms of cost-benefit ratios of delivering effective explosives to the enemy.31
The Panther was a far better answer to the T-34 than the huge Tigers. The Panther was heavier (45 tons) than the T-34, and better armed (a lethal, long-barreled, high-velocity 75 mm gun) and armored (over 4 inches, on average). Its reengineered transmission finally proved far more reliable. The quality of its steel construction was superior. Yet the Panther was not as unwieldy, underpowered, or inordinately expensive as the Tiger, which is not to say it was ever reliable or as easily maintained as the American Sherman. Still, its sudden appearance in summer 1943 raised the question of why the Nazi hierarchy had not rushed something like it into production by mid-1941 to coincide with a vast invasion predicated on superior armor.
Initial reliability problems led Hitler at first to compare the Panther to the innovative but problem-plagued Heinkel 177 heavy bomber (“the Panther is the crawling Heinkel”), but the Panthers in the last two years of the war were considered by armored commanders on both fronts as the best all-around tank. Perhaps had Hitler waited to invade the Soviet Union until 1943 (and had he not been under Allied bombing attack) with the final combined production numbers of seventeen thousand PzKpfw IVs, Tigers, and Panthers, then his own strategic blunders might not have so quickly nullified the excellence of his soldiers and officers.32
Germany was faced with an enemy alliance that was capable of producing nearly a quarter-million tanks in American, British, and Russian factories: five times the eventual total German output. Russia was able to move much of its entire tank industry eastward; the Third Reich was never fully able to exploit operating tank factories in France and Czechoslovakia in occupied Europe to maximize German output.
The solution to that problem on a multitude of fronts was perhaps not six thousand Panthers, but in theaters from Anzio and Normandy to the Crimea either to field fifty thousand Panthers and PzKpfw IVs, or a corresponding enormous production of 88 mm anti-tank guns and fighter-bombers. What best illustrated the ultimate fate of the German Panzers was that by 1944 there were no longer proper Panzer divisions at all, with each division having only one or two tank battalions of well fewer than ninety tanks each, while American armored divisions typically deployed three battalions of anywhere from two hundred to three hundred tanks each.33
After the war the Nazi production minister Albert Speer claimed that he had sought both to simplify and expand tank production to match the Allies. For all his later mythmaking and contradictory recollections, he probably did cut out duplication, end waste, and focus on fewer models of weaponry, so much so that even after the bombing of 1944–1945, by war’s end Speer was producing four times the number of weapons from each ton of raw steel that Germany had managed in 1941. Nonetheless, by 1944 even Speer’s efforts were too late, given shortages of strategic materials, Hitler’s ingrained interference in industrial policy, labor shortages, damage from Allied bombing, and fuel disruptions. Germany ended the war with a relatively small number of excellent tanks after beginning it with a relatively large number of mediocre ones. The one constant to German Panzer forces over forty-four continual months of fighting was not quality tanks, but superior crews, who achieved astounding kill ratios over the tanks of all their enemies—an impressive, but in the end, irrelevant achievement.34
A MYSTIQUE ABOUT Russian tanks inspired awe on the Germans, who were forced to confront them, and among the Russians themselves, who rightly equated tanks with their national salvation. Some Russian couples wrote to officials offering to use their own money to buy a tank, so that they could operate it in tandem. Indeed, one Russian patriot Alexandra Koitos commanded a huge forty-five-ton IS-2 Stalin tank, with her husband serving as mechanic and they fought through the Baltic states all the way to Berlin.35
It was not just Soviet propaganda that made claims that Russian heavy tanks were vastly superior to German models. Until 1943, German officers had wholeheartedly agreed. From Hitler on down there was praise from the German High Command for the T-34. First Panzer Army General Paul von Kleist summed up the early T-34s that he had encountered with the simple declaration, “it should be clear to us that the infantry, at this time, runs away from every Russian tank because they have no defence against them.”36
Part of the problem in initially assessing the T-34 was that Western powers—both Allies and Axis—knew very little about Stalin’s military capabilities. Most of what was written about Soviet industry in general proved to be untrue, emblemized perhaps by the writings of the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist for the New York Times, Walter Duranty, who falsely reported about the successes of the Soviet state in the 1930s. But along with misinformation about the starvations, show trials, and purges, Westerners and the Japanese also vastly underappreciated the extent of the Russian prewar arms buildup. Even if they were to grant that Soviet factories could turn out lots of munitions, they could not yet conceive that the finished products were comparable to Western quality.37
The initial and problem-plagued models of the T-34s nevertheless shocked the Germans, not unlike the manner in which unfamiliar Parthian mounted archers flummoxed supposedly superior Roman Republican legions in the East, or the massed ranks of longbowmen stunned the French crossbowers at the Battle of Crécy (1346), or improvised explosive devices had stymied Americans in Iraq when such mines began shredding thin-skinned Humvee transport vehicles. General Guderian best summed up German confusion: “We believed that at the beginning of the new war we could reckon on our tanks being technically better than all known Russian types; we thought this would more or less cancel out the Russians’ vast numerical superiority.” Such arrogance was bolstered by successes of German armor so far, despite the demonstrable inferiority of Panzer Mark Is, IIs, and IIIs. German armored divisions had lost only 1–2 percent of their crews to enemy action, and seen only 2–3 percent of their early-model light tanks destroyed in the conquest of Poland (in addition to numerous damaged and worn-out tanks), and later, despite heavier losses in the West, had easily found ways to counter some of the heavier, better-armed and better-armored French tanks. The lesson from France was that superior morale and training allowed German tankers to ignore the quality of enemy armor. But, in fact, the Russians had at least as much experience in tank battle as had the Germans prior to Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet border fighting with Japan (1938–1939) and against Finland (1939–1940)—fought in diverse landscapes and climates—had taught the Russians more about the limitations of undergunned and underarmored light tanks than the Germans had learned in the relatively rapid and easy blitzkrieg victories over Poland and Western Europe.38
The new Russian T-34 tank that reached widespread production by late 1942 reflected a decade of adapting imported German, British, and American suspensions, engines, and armament technology, and was constructed on American principles of mass production, using simple designs that were of moderate cost, easy to operate, and simple to maintain. After only a few weeks in Russia, German tank crews were already meeting some of the nearly one thousand newly produced T-34s, and the experience made them almost immediately shed all the confidence gained against mostly outnumbered and inadequate European tanks in 1939–1940. One Panzer regimental commander, Hermann Bix, noted in an October entry in his diary, “and then we saw something that we heretofore would not have considered possible: We saw our tanks pull back by the company, turn around and then make haste to disappear over the high ground.”39
The T-34’s strengths were manifest in a variety of characteristics. Its lighter aluminum diesel engine was often less likely to ignite when hit than the otherwise dependable gasoline engine in the German PzKpfw IV tank. It offered a good degree of power for its weight. A high-velocity 76.2 mm gun was better than the PzKpfw IV’s 50 mm cannon, and, in fact, perhaps superior to almost any 75 mm or 76 mm tank gun in the world in 1941–1942. The Russian tank’s sloped armor and wider tracks meant that it was both less vulnerable and more mobile than the Mark-series German tanks that entered Russia’s decrepit road system in June 1941—if not also more cramped and sometimes dangerous for crews.40
Most important, by focusing on just a few models, and eventually moving most tank production out of harm’s way beyond the Ural Mountains, by the end of 1942 the Soviet Union was exceeding German tank production, and yet was deploying tanks, at least until the arrival of Tigers and Panthers, of comparable and often superior quality. Despite poor tactics and inexperience, Russian armored forces were able to hold off German Panzer forces by early 1943 at Stalingrad, and began to grind them down six months later at Kursk.
For all its clumsiness, limited production, and inexperienced crews, the even-heavier KV-I (Kliment Voroshilov) tank (45 tons, 90 mm of armor, a 76 mm main gun, and a 550 hp engine) outclassed any heavy German tank until the appearance of the Tiger in late 1942. A Panzer brigade commander, Heinrich Eberbach, summed up the typical German reaction at meeting a few KV-Is in January 1942: “Our tanks encountered a Russian tank brigade, which was exclusively outfitted with heavy tanks—T-34’s and KV-I’s. The steel giants were overwhelmingly superior to our Panzer III’s and Panzer IV’s.… I had to give my soldiers, who were accustomed to victory, the order to pull back twice in order to avoid being destroyed.”41
On average, the Germans destroyed somewhere between three and seven T-34s for each German tank lost. Yet the successful deployment of armor forces rarely rests on the premise of tank-versus-tank battles, or Panzer “aces,” however dramatic and deadly particular tank crews could be. If such principles won armored battles, the Germans would have knocked out Soviet armor by the third year of the war. Indeed, in any given one-on-one tank battle by mid-1943, the initial models of the T-34 proved mostly inferior to both the Tiger and Panther, and perhaps no better than the late model and updated PzKpfw IV (or for that matter latter models of the American Sherman, especially the ingeniously adapted “Firefly”). Its optics were mediocre and accuracy questionable. The 76 mm gun itself was large enough with good velocity, but was surpassed in size by the Tiger and in quality by the Panther. The two-man turret of the T-34 ensured slowness in aiming and firing. Most early models lacked reliable radios. The advanced design of the sloped armor also meant reduced space for crews and poor visibility. Early T-34 engines were powerful for their weight but had a short life, and were plagued by poor air filters.
Despite the parity of late-model T-34s and the superiority of heavy Stalin IS-2s, German Panther tank crews on average tended to be more highly trained and skilled even late into the war. In March 1945 in a not-unusual tank battle, two Panthers near Danzig wiped out an entire column of Russian heavy tanks. During the three days of fighting, twenty-one heavy and super-heavy enemy tanks were destroyed by German Panzers without a single loss. By late 1942, T-34s were more vulnerable to updated German wheeled and hand-held anti-tank guns than were German tanks to Russian counterparts, especially because German hand-held Panzerfausts and Panzerschrecks were the most effective hand-held anti-tank recoilless rifles and rocket launchers of the war.42
The Soviets deployed an astonishing four hundred thousand tank crewmen in World War II. Perhaps three hundred thousand perished—an eerie testament to German skilled air, artillery, and tank crews. Yet Russian tank forces grew each year of the war, analogous to the increase of the US merchant marine fleet, which expanded in size even in the depressing months of 1942 as U-boat kills reached all-time highs.
ACCEPT TWO PARADOXES and then the controversies over the American M4 Sherman tank’s effectiveness become somewhat irrelevant—or rather emblematic of the entire American approach to total war. First, when Shermans initially appeared in 1942 and early 1943 in North Africa and Sicily, they were perhaps the best tanks in the West. Yet by the time Shermans were deployed in the thousands in 1944 and 1945 in Italy and Western Europe, they were clearly inferior to most German models, with traumatic psychological effects on the entire American armor corps. Typical was the experience of Sherman tanker Corporal Patrick Hennessy, who watched his tank round bounce off a Tiger tank: “I thought: ‘To hell with this!’ and pulled back.” Another Sherman tanker noted: “The Sherman was a very effective workhorse, but as a fighting tank it was a disaster.”43
Second, Shermans in American rather than British sectors did not often encounter superior German Tiger and Panther models in tank-to-tank battles, and they outnumbered German medium and heavy tanks in Western Europe by ratios of about ten-to-one by late 1944. Later accounts of British and American analysts found that the great killers of Sherman tanks were not German Panzers but rather anti-tank guns and the Panzerfausts. If the reputation of a tank rests on its ability to support infantry rather than overcoming enemy tanks, then the Sherman proved invaluable—a fact that was never fully appreciated during and only rarely after the war.44
Americans should have entered the war with well-armored vehicles. After all, despite not producing tanks in World War I, the United States had invented the idea of assembly production of tractors and automobiles. No country was more familiar with the internal combustion engine than America. When the war broke out in September 1939, the still-neutral Americans had over two years to learn from the strengths and weaknesses of blitzkrieg. American strategists noted that French tanks were well armed and well protected but lacked cohesive tactics, radios, mobility, and reliability, while the German PzKpfw I-III tanks were wanting in the former and yet formidable in the latter characteristics.45
The Americans fulfilled their hope of at least entering the fighting with tank superiority, an impressive achievement given that in 1940 there had been only 440 obsolete tanks in the entire country and a mere 330 new tanks produced that year. In just two years, the Americans would build tanks at the rate of more than twenty thousand per year, and go on to produce more tanks and general armored vehicles than any other nation. In addition, the new M4 Sherman that appeared in late 1942 at the second battle of El Alamein was felt to have easily matched the undergunned, underarmored, and unreliable German PzKpfw I-III models, in a way that the British Churchill, Matilda, and Valentine models had not. And the Sherman was a vast improvement over early American light M3 Stuarts, medium M3 Lees, and Grants.46
The Sherman’s 75 mm short-barrel gun was a practical dual-purpose cannon. It had long barrel life, proved ideal for high-explosive rounds against infantry, and with anti-armor rounds was superior to the existing 50 mm gun of both the upgraded PzKpfw III and the PzKpfw IV. At a little over thirty tons, the Sherman was heavier than the early model PzKpfw IV, with roughly about the same amount of armored protection. The heavier Sherman was as fast and mobile as early German tanks, with a larger, more powerful and durable engine. More important, the Sherman was more dependable mechanically and easier to maintain and repair than any of the German tanks. In many categories—radios, crew comfort, and ease of maintenance—it was superior to the Russian T-34. Unfortunately, such advantages did not always impress crews on the battlefield. The popular perception was that by 1944 Shermans when hit by most German tank guns had a tendency to burn up like “Ronson lighters,” albeit due more to earlier poor ammunition-storage systems than to intrinsically inadequate armor or poorly designed gasoline engines. Yet of all tanks, the survivability ratio inside Shermans when hit by anti-tank fire was not inordinately low. Of the more than six thousand Sherman tanks in the European theater of operations that were knocked out, on average one of the five crewmen was killed, one wounded, and the other three (60 percent) were unscathed. Later applications of ad hoc armor and improved escape hatches likely increased survivability.47
Whereas the PzKpfw IV would shortly be upgraded with more armor and a much improved 75 mm gun, the more versatile Sherman for 1942 and 1943 remained largely static, as if it had met armor requirements and could rest on its laurels. In most cases, the classical German 75 mm tank gun (mostly known as the 7.5 cm KwK 42 L/70)—with a longer barrel and a more powerful shell—could usually penetrate thick armor at long distances in a way that the Sherman’s 75 mm could not.
Yet other American strategic and tactical principles would explain why Shermans could survive against German upgraded PzKpfw IVs, Tigers, and Panthers after the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944. Even if a superior German tank might encounter a Sherman, the Americans assumed they could rely on excellent support from heavy artillery (often in direct FM radio contact with Sherman crews), fighter-bombers, and a nearby fleet of roaming “tank destroyers.” The latter were lightly armored but fast-moving gun platforms that supposedly were on call to race to the front to meet enemy tank advances, fire their more lethal shells, and then scramble out of harm’s way. In fact, tank destroyer doctrine only made some sense by autumn 1944 with the haphazard introduction of the late-model M36 “Jackson,” (1,400 built), which replaced the lighter M10 “Wolverine” and fast M18 “Hellcat” with their underpowered 76.2 mm barrels. The M36’s 90 mm high-velocity gun and new anti-tank shells could penetrate most German tanks at great distances. Yet far earlier (and far more effectively), the Germans had mastered the idea of using their more numerous 88 mm flak artillery as anti-tank weapons. Later, when motorized as “tank destroyers” (Jagdpanzers), they proved even deadlier than the ubiquitous 75 mm Sturmgeschütze III assault guns. By 1945 the heavier armed Jagdpanzers were superior to most models of tank destroyers, due to larger gun calibers and superior shells, far better frontal armor, better training (at least initially), and mostly because they were seen as supplements to rather than replacements for tank-to-tank dueling.48
Soldiers and civilians wondered in late 1944: Where was the American tank equivalent of the P-51, the M1 carbine, or the Pacific aircraft carriers that were not just produced in great numbers, but proved qualitatively as good or better than individual enemy models? The fear that American tank crews were literally roasted alive in their rare encounters with Tigers and Panthers spread a sense of depression among tankers. Outrage followed back home that was not necessarily predicated on strategic realities. Upgraded and “jumbo” Shermans (the M4A3E2 and later M4A3E8 models) proved only stopgap measures that on occasion offered tank parity.
An American tank’s best chance by summer 1944 in a tank duel with German armor was to catch a Panther or Tiger by surprise and then floorboard ahead to fire quick volleys at point-blank range at the sides and rear—a rare but not impossible scenario. General Patton once related such a Sherman victory: “Our tank had been coming down the road, hugging a high bank, and suddenly saw slightly ahead, in a hollow to its right, two Panther tanks at a range of about two hundred and fifty yards. These it engaged and put out of action; then, apparently, charged to finish them, and by so doing, uncovered three more tanks, which it engaged at a range of not more than forty yards. All the German tanks were put out and so was ours.”49
Patton may have been right about how Americans might find ways to knock out Panthers and Tigers, but usually in these rare tank-to-tank battles the cost was far higher than Patton suggested, especially in France in summer 1944:
During the First Army breakthrough battles in July and August, the 2d Armored Division tankers had learned how to fight German Panther and Tiger tanks with their M4 Shermans. They knew that the ammunition of the 75-mm. gun with which most of the M4’s were armed [a low-velocity shell about 13 inches long, as compared with the 28- to 30-inch high-velocity 75 mm shell of the Panthers] would not penetrate at any range the thick frontal armor of the Panthers and Tigers, but could damage the sides and rear. Therefore, the tankers had used wide encircling movements, engaging the enemy’s attention with one platoon of tanks while another platoon attacked from the rear. They had suffered appalling losses: between 26 July and 12 August, for example, one of 2d Armored Division’s tank battalions had lost to German tanks and assault guns 51 percent of its combat personnel killed or wounded and 70 percent of its tanks destroyed or evacuated for fourth echelon repair.50
The “Sherman” became an abstraction as the world’s first modular tank, given that its sound foundation offered limitless opportunities for experimentation and variation, from “rhinos” that ploughed through the hedgerows to “funnies” that swam and exploded mines. Sherman models were eventually upgraded with both a 76 mm higher-velocity gun and, more famously, the British “17 pounder” (76.2 mm/3-inch barrel), whose muzzle velocity and large payload could at last match the feared German 88 mm gun of the Tiger I and Tiger II or the high-performance 75 mm Panther barrel.
The American armor tragedy was the failure by the June 1944 Normandy landings either to have an up-gunned model or to have fielded an additional heavier tank to supplement the Sherman and match the Tiger or Panther—and to have done so in far greater numbers. The United States could have produced at least a few hundred of the heavy M26 Pershing tanks by mid-1944 had General Lesley McNair and other advocates of tank destroyers and light tanks not opposed the idea. As a consequence of this lapse, Sherman tank crews were reminded to avoid tank-to-tank duels. Most by late 1944 needed no such admonition, given that they considered Shermans with even the 76 mm gun a “deathtrap.” A certain paranoia about meeting a rare Panther or Tiger set in among American crews, prompting many to stack sandbags to add protection to their inadequate armor, a habit that infuriated General Patton: “I noticed that all the tanks were covered with sandbags. This was very stupid. In the first place, it made the soldiers think that the tanks could be hurt; in the second place, it overloaded the machinery; and in the third place, it added no additional protection. I ordered their removal at once.” Barring the mass production of a new heavier tank, there should have been more of an effort to replace the Sherman’s main 75 mm or 76 mm gun with either a longer, higher-velocity barrel, or a 90 mm gun, an idea that was raised and then quickly dropped. As in the case of Britain, but quite unlike the Russian or German experience, all American tanks had to be transported by sea to the front, making shipping weight, handling, and offloading important criteria.51
All these problems notwithstanding, American armored forces in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Western Europe ultimately defeated enemy tank and infantry forces. The United States prevailed in Europe because of ubiquitous and reliable Shermans that more often fought Axis infantry rather than enemy armored units. And when they met superior German tanks, Shermans could often rely on close air and artillery support. It prevailed in the Pacific, where armored thrusts were not a part of island and amphibious warfare to the same degree as in the European theater. Shermans proved superior to all Japanese tank models, and provided invaluable support in the major landings from Tarawa to Okinawa.
Still, the rare but horrific encounters with German heavy tanks were such a searing experience for US armored units that the Americans vowed never again to put their crews into a tank that could not easily outfight all enemy armor. That conundrum was not perhaps solved until the early 1980s with the emergence of the Abrams tank, which would prove clearly superior to its rivals for over three decades. During the First Gulf War, US Abrams M1A1 tanks, in the last major tank-to-tank duels of the twentieth century, helped to destroy well over 160 Iraqi Russian-built tanks in a series of engagements on February 26–27, 1991, without losing a single American tank to enemy tank fire. It was as if the Americans had finally married the reliability of the Sherman with the lethality of the Tiger.52
THE BRITISH INVENTED the tank. Their prewar theorists were among the most sophisticated advocates of armored tactics and independent tank units. Before the D-Day landings, the British, guided by Major General Percy Hobart, adapted the Churchill, and to a lesser extent the American Sherman tank (as a mine flayer and amphibious tank), to a variety of ancillary duties, from bridging ravines and streams to flamethrowing and clearing barbed wire. When the American Sherman tanks in summer 1944 proved undergunned against German counterparts, it was the British who brilliantly reengineered the lethal 17-pounder gun into a Sherman turret, creating the deadly “Firefly” and allowing an otherwise inadequate Allied tank force emerging from Normandy to obtain some parity with German Tigers and Panthers.53
Given such technical genius and experience, it was surprising that the British entered the war with mediocre tanks and did not build first-rate models until the end of the conflict. Part of the reason was that, like the Americans with their flawed concept of “tank destroyers,” so too the British clung to their own tactical fallacies, especially a dual-use system of tanks that complicated design and production. So-called infantry tanks—plodding, well-armored tanks within infantry formations that would blow holes through enemy lines—would be reinforced by faster and less protected “cruiser tanks,” which in independently operating units would rush in to exploit breaches and achieve encirclements. All this was too clever by half, and analogous to the flawed British naval idea of large, fast, and vulnerable battle “cruisers” like the HMS Hood and HMS Repulse partnering with better-protected battleships. In fact, even British cruiser tanks were often slower than their German counterparts, and their infantry tanks even less protected. Such bifurcation likewise retarded the idea of a single versatile tank being integrated with air support, artillery, and infantry to break through enemy lines.54
By dispersing British talent and industrial resources on a variety of designs—Centurions, Challengers, Churchills, Comets, Cromwells, Cruisers, Crusaders, Matildas, Valentines, and a host of others—the British failed to incorporate lessons from the battlefield into one standard model. It was not that British industry was incapable of turning out thousands of good tanks. At war’s end, Britain’s total tank production had reached nearly thirty thousand, quantitatively comparable with that of Germany’s Panzer output. There were other considerations that hampered initial British efforts to produce by 1943 a basic tank comparable to the Sherman, the T-34, or Panther. Like the Americans, the British fought not only the Germans but also the Japanese, who never produced an adequate tank. As a result, there was less pressure on the British to upgrade their tanks, given that their earlier models were still superior to the Japanese light types that the British met in Burma. And, of course, as in the case of the island Japanese and the North Americans, British military doctrine in general was not predicated on ground combat across borders, but rather on expeditionary forces whose transportation challenges favored lighter armor designs.55
Finally, after mid-1942, continuous battles on the Eastern Front had begun to sap German Panzers. British and American strategic planning was beginning to be envisioned as a specialized zero-sum game: the huge Soviet tank force, with its tens of thousands of T-34s, ensured that the majority of first-rate upgraded PzKpfw IVs, Tigers, and Panthers would never be used in full force on the Anglo-American fronts. Assuming that by 1944 there would be a British battle tank appearing in quantities and quality comparable to the T-34 was analogous to expecting the Soviets to deploy thousands of four-engine bombers. In a way, for the British, the superb Lancaster heavy bomber was their version of the T-34 tank; by late 1944 they did to German cities and industry by air what the Russians did on the ground to German infantry and armored forces. In fact, British strategic bombing of German plants—particularly the near destruction of Kassel—probably did as much to reduce the presence and operability of German Tigers as did T-34 Russian tanks.
The initial British infantry tanks—the Matilda Is and IIs—despite their satisfactory armor, were equipped only with light machine guns or small turret guns. They were barely adequate against infantry. German 88 mm artillery could easily blow apart the Matilda IIs at over a mile distant. By the time of the second battle of El Alamein in October–November 1942, most Matildas had been destroyed or worn out during the prior year of fighting.56
Faster Cruiser Mark I and Mark II tanks (A9 and A10) also had little luck fighting German Panzers and were built only in limited numbers. The hope for the newer Valentine tank was to restore British parity with the Germans. Although over eight thousand Valentines were produced—an impressive achievement that exceeded all German Panther tank production—and proved mostly reliable, they weighed only half of what the Shermans did. Their 40 mm and 57 mm guns were inadequate, and their armor remained insufficient.
Improved Cromwell cruiser tanks (4,000 built) soon followed. For the first time they seemed to offer the British an excellent all-purpose medium tank. Although they were slightly lighter than Shermans, Cromwells at least enjoyed a lower profile and more frontal armor than did early Sherman models. Cromwells were extremely fast and mobile. Their new Rolls-Royce Meteor engines were reliable. Yet even with increased armor and a 75 mm gun they did not marginally supersede the American tank.
Heavy Churchill tanks (7,300 built) were rushed into deployment in late 1942. The Churchill’s weight (39 tons), substantial armor (up to 4 inches), and excellent suspension made it comparable to German later model tanks. But constantly upgraded Churchills soon proved underpowered. They were not as reliable or as easily maintained as Shermans. Their armor was not sloped, and even their improved main gun (75 mm) was not effective against Panthers and Tigers.
The British finally reached parity with the best German models in late 1944 with the Comet (A34). It fired the same caliber projectile as the Sherman 76.2 mm gun but was vastly upgraded with improved shells and velocity. The Comet’s improved armor and Rolls-Royce Meteor engines made it in some ways superior to all models of the Sherman. The Comet, however, came too late, with only about 1,100 tanks produced by war’s end. And when the British finally mastered the idea of a standard universal tank with the superb Centurion, the first British tank that was clearly superior to both Panthers and T-34s, the war was over.
The fact that the British received and deployed over twenty thousand American Stuarts, Lees, Grants, and Shermans—a sum almost greater than all British front line tanks produced during the war—was a reflection of its own inability for the first five years of the war to produce an adequate tank in large enough numbers to equip British armored divisions. But that fact perhaps was an understandable lapse given Britain’s insistence on fighting in all the wars of World War II—on and below the seas, in the skies, and across Asia, Europe, and North Africa—often in places where tanks were irrelevant.57
ONE PARADOX OF armored warfare during World War II was that a vehicle designed to protect its crew from shells and bullets often became the focus of such overwhelming concentrations of fire that it proved as much an incinerator as a refuge. Seventy-five percent of Soviet tank crews did not survive the war. Over 80 percent of all T-34s, possibly the best all-around tank of the war, were destroyed or disabled.
It is easy to see why tanks proved to be deathtraps. Tanks had limited visibility. They were neither especially fast nor particularly mobile. They were relatively easy to spot, and were targeted by lots of other tanks, anti-tank ground and shoulder-fired weapons, fighter-bombers, mines, and artillery. They were hard to climb into and even harder to escape from. Early riveted models encouraged “spalling,” in which interior rivets dislodged to become lethal projectiles under the pressure of incoming enemy rounds. But the worst threat was the presence of stored high-explosive and armor-piercing shells and large-caliber machine gun ammunition inches away from an internal combustion engine.
There were lots of ways to stop a tank: blow it apart with another tank or artillery gun, destroy it from the air with bombs or rockets, have individual soldiers attack it with anti-tank projectiles or crude incendiary devices, lay mines and obstacles to block its passage, or simply deny it fuel. As a general rule, on all fronts by mid-1943 German tanks were not effectively stopped by Allied shoulder-mounted infantry weapons (unless the infantry was using captured German stocks), or even often by other tanks unless they were updated Russian T-34s and Stalins. Neutralizing Panzers instead required close air support, artillery, or disruption in German fuel supplies and deliveries—or occasionally by mid-1944, British up-gunned Sherman tanks.
The reason that the Russians lost most of the T-34s produced was not because of Soviet fuel shortages or mechanical difficulties, but rather because Luftwaffe fighter and dive bombers, Tigers and Panthers, Panzerfausts and Panzerschrecks, and 88 mm mobile artillery all were especially effective against even excellent Russian armor. In contrast, the British and Americans relied mostly on tactical air superiority and a clear numerical advantage in artillery to meet the threat of German tanks. Modified Sherman “Firefly” tanks were produced in greater numbers than were the Tiger I and Tiger II combined (over 2,000 Fireflies were sent to France), and offered parity in rare tank-to-tank encounters on the Western Front. The Sherman “Firefly” proved a far more efficient investment in delivering a lethal shell to a heavy tank than were the huge Tigers.58
Amid the triumphalism of blitzkrieg, few remembered that it almost always was predicated on air dominance and superior numbers but otherwise was only possible for brief periods without reliable supply lines. Breakthroughs also usually required blunders on the part of the enemy to preclude timely retreat, or at least to mass on a narrow front with exposed and vulnerable flanks. Implicit to the success of armored encirclements was also finite area. Pity the poor enemy without the space to retreat before German armored advances, in hopes that the Panzers would outrun their supply lines.59
Rare armored dashes nonetheless might advance at rates of thirty miles per day and thereby through shock collapse entire enemy fronts. In their initial armor sweeps of summer 1941, for instance, the Germans altogether probably destroyed about five thousand Soviet tanks. They may well have captured or killed three million Soviet soldiers, and perhaps occupied territory responsible for about 40–50 percent of Soviet industrial production. In summer 1942 German armored forces of Army Groups A and B of Army Group South advanced over five hundred miles, and nearly reached the Caspian Sea—only to find their spearheads too far from supply lines and offering the Russians attractive salients for counterattacks. The German armored advances were almost always spearheaded by updated PzKpfw III and PzKpfw IV tanks, but also assumed absolute Luftwaffe superiority, plentiful mobile artillery, adequate fuel supplies, better tank crews, and superior numbers. Yet note that the two longest and most successful armored thrusts in history—in southern Russia and North Africa—did not lead to strategic victory.
Blitzkrieg ended in 1943 with the surrender at Stalingrad and later stasis at Kursk, not so much due to considerable German losses in both battles per se, as to the appearance of hundreds of new T-34 tanks each month, the end of Luftwaffe dominance, and the sheer number of new Soviet infantry divisions and artillery units. By latter 1942, the Eastern Front was costing the Third Reich a hundred thousand dead each month. In that year alone, the Germans lost 5,500 tanks, eight thousand guns, and a quarter-million vehicles.60
On a lesser scale, Rommel and his Afrika Korps were to meet the same fate, at about the same time as the 1942 German blitzkrieg stalled at Stalingrad. The causes of these failures were hauntingly familiar, despite the vast difference in ability of the two respective senior commanders. Rommel, like Paulus, was forced to assume that German experience and expertise might still trump enemy numbers and material advantages, or that success in individual tank battles translated to strategic momentum. Instead, both German advances were again far from sources of supply. Neither had ever quite calculated how to be adequately provisioned with fuel, replacements, and food, even had they won respectively the landmark battles at El Alamein and Stalingrad.
On the Eastern Front, armored vehicles often returned to their late World War I role of accompanying and protecting infantry advances or slowing enemy assaults. As both the Germans and Soviets continued to deploy better tanks to the front and were terrified of being trapped by mobile pincer movements, all the more did armored warfare descend into a war of attrition. Still, a few of the most dramatic Allied armored advances of the war occurred in its last full year, when Axis air power nearly vanished from close ground-support roles and Hitler’s serial orders of no retreat to trapped armies gave the Allies new opportunities. The late July 1944 breakout of the US First Army in Normandy (Operation Cobra) was predicated on massive bombing of the German front by the Eighth Air Force. A hole was blasted in German defenses on two back-to-back bombing missions by three thousand aircraft, marked by waves of 1,500 American B-17 and B-24 strategic bombers used for the first time on a large scale as tactical aircraft, with help from over a thousand medium American B-25 and B-26 bombers, and assorted fighter-bombers.61
A second breakthrough occurred after the collapse of German forces at the Falaise Pocket and the cumulative destruction of some forty divisions in the two-month battle for Normandy, followed by the mad dash toward the German border of Patton’s Third Army for much of August 1944. Patton’s unexpected breakout shared the same characteristics of Germany’s early armor advances. Later, Hermann Goering, in his Nuremberg interviews, had that dash to the German border in mind when he stated that Patton was the most effective of the Allied commanders (“your most outstanding general”), and the breakout at Avranches the Americans’ greatest achievement in the West. General Fritz Bayerlein, a Panzer division commander in Normandy, in grandiose language summed up Patton’s armored thrust:
Not even the battles of annihilation of the 1940 Blitzkrieg in France or in 1941 in Russia, can approach the battle of annihilation in France in 1944 in the magnitude of their planning, the logic of their execution, the collaboration of sea, air and ground forces, the size of the theater, the strength of the combatants, the bulk of the booty, or the hordes of prisoners. Its greatest importance, however, consists in its strategic effects, that is, that it laid the foundation for the subsequent final and complete annihilation of the greatest military state on earth.
The German breakout phase of the so-called Battle of the Bulge (December 16, 1944–January 25, 1945) worked for just ten days (December 16–26), given that it was predicated on achieving initial surprise, on the superiority of a thin line of Tigers and Panthers on a limited front initially aimed at green troops, on bad weather that would ground Allied fighters, and on obtaining captured fuel. After a few days, all that proved too many ifs. Understandably the German offensive quickly lost steam once the weather cleared and Allied fighters returned, fuel shortages slowed the Panzers, and the Allies got over the shock of surprise and systematically brought to bear their advantages of manpower and equipment. After the war, General Gerd von Rundstedt, still bothered by the fact that Hitler’s hare-brained scheme (“Watch on the Rhine”) had been popularly labeled the Rundstedt Offensive, supposedly was reported to have scoffed, “Moltke would turn in his grave at Hitler’s military tactics, particularly his tactics in the so-called Rundstedt Offensive, which Rundstedt said should be known as the Hitler Offensive.”62
Nonetheless, rare massed tank assaults against infantry that were not supported by comparable tanks, or air and artillery, remained an almost mythical combat experience, analogous to the rare unleashing of heavy lancers against retreating nineteenth-century foot soldiers. During the Polish campaign, German officers observed that “numerically superior German tanks had such a demoralizing effect on enemy tank crews that they often jumped out or showed the white flag.”
Such a specter of unchecked armored blitzkrieg had collapsed not just Polish, Dutch, Belgian, and French armies, but also their entire war efforts. The battles that involved the greatest number of captured soldiers almost always followed from armored encirclement or an unchecked armored advance: the Battle of Bialystok-Minsk (June 22–July 3, 1941), the Smolensk encirclement (July 6–August 5, 1941), the Battle of Uman (July 15–August 8, 1941), the First Battle of Kiev (August 23–September 26, 1941), Vyazma-Bryansk (October 2–21, 1941), Operation Uranus and the destruction of Axis forces near Stalingrad (November 19–23, 1942), the Falaise Pocket (August 12–21, 1944), and the destruction of two US divisions during the first days of the Battle of the Bulge (December 16–20, 1944).63
Every great tank breakout at some point ran out of fuel. Partly this was because World War II militaries put far more emphasis on a tank’s defensive and offensive capability than on its fuel consumption, range, and logistical transport. During the battle for France, German Panzers often found themselves out of fuel and stalled waiting for tankers to catch up. The same was true after the first two weeks of Operation Barbarossa, and of Rommel in his race across Libya into Egypt. During Patton’s August 1944 drive through France, his Third Army had outrun its supply lines and his Sherman tanks ground to a halt. Patton’s army alone consumed 350,000 gallons of gasoline per day; collectively, the Allied armies in summer 1944 in France were burning eight hundred thousand gallons per day. The entire German strategy in the Battle of the Bulge was predicated on capturing Allied fuel supplies, a gambit that only half succeeded and was not enough to keep the gasoline-starved Panzers going. It was striking how both the Allies and the Axis accepted the dependence of tanks on steady fuel supplies and yet how often both sides found their offensives sputtering to a halt due to gasoline shortages.64
TANKS HAD HELPED to radically change the course of a conflict in only a few of the many theaters of World War II: in North Africa (1940–1943), and in Eastern (1939–1940) and Western Europe (1944–1945). In the first case, the coastal deserts, unobstructed terrain, clear weather, and sparse population proved ideal for armored operations between evenly matched British and Axis forces in periods when one side had not yet achieved air superiority. In the second, the good roads of Western Europe, rich infrastructure, and the short distances from border to border meant that it was less challenging to supply tanks with fuel and air support, and their crews with water and food. In contrast, the vast expanse of the Soviet Union, its primitive roads, and general impoverishment often meant that even huge armored encirclements did not always lead to enemy collapse, while the availability or shortage of fuel, food, and spare parts—not just armor and arms—spelled victory or defeat. Other than the British pursuit of the Italians in North Africa in late 1940, and the subsequent chase of Rommel in 1942, or the American breakout from Normandy in early August 1944, it is hard to cite the use of British and American tanks—in contrast to motorized infantry, artillery, or tactical and strategic air power—as the chief causes for the Allied success.65
Blowing a tank track off a T-34 with a Panzerfaust—a weapon that an American tank officer dubbed the “most concentrated mass of destruction in this war”—was a far better investment than building and deploying a seventy-ton Tiger II to outduel a Russian tank. By war’s end, heavy tanks were increasingly risky investments of capital and labor; the Americans and the Russians best squared the cost-benefit circle of the expense of tanks versus results achieved in enhancing infantry by focusing on just one or two simple designs, mass-producing them and at relatively cheap cost, and ensuring that they were reliable and easy to maintain.66
The great bloodbath on the Axis battlefields came in 1944–1945, when the Allies achieved tactical air superiority and were free at last to attack ground forces as they pleased. Germans suffered more military deaths just in 1944 than they had between 1939 and 1943, when the Luftwaffe had near parity with the Allied tactical air forces. Also, as important as the quality of tanks was the number of truck transports, fixed and mobile artillery pieces, the availability of machine guns, anti-tank weapons, mortars, and land mines, and effective radio contact with artillery batteries.
DESPITE THE MOBILE nature of combat in World War II and the romance of armor assaults, the great killer of Axis and Allied soldiers remained artillery. The exact percentages depended on the year and theater of operations, but at least half of the combat dead of World War II probably fell to artillery and mortar fire. The paradox of both greater mobility and also greater numbers of men killed by semi-stationary artillery is probably explained by the sheer number of shells fired in World War II: well over eight million field guns and mortar weapons were produced during the conflict. With the death of blitzkrieg at Stalingrad, much of the fighting from early 1943 onward on the Eastern Front—the great incinerator of Axis and Red Army soldiers—turned more static in the fashion of World War I in the West, and often regressed to artillery, rocket, and mortar barrages aimed at fixed infantry positions. In some sense, the trajectory of World War II hinged on the side that placed the greatest number of artillery pieces on the field of battle. Each of the three major Allied belligerents produced more large guns than did Germany, Italy, and Japan combined. The most significant statistic of the war was the ten-to-one advantage in aggregate artillery production (in total over a million large guns) enjoyed by the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States over the three Axis powers.67
Over one billion artillery shells were produced in the United States alone. In addition, there was far more variety and specialization in artillery than just two decades earlier. Rates of fire increased along with greater accuracy and range. A plethora of smaller and more mobile projectiles made the life of the foot soldier ever more hazardous even as he himself became ever more lethal. New technology also put into his hands the ability to take out tanks and artillery platforms themselves. If the infantryman was buffeted by howitzer, mortar, and rocket attack, in turn he sometimes had the means to destroy artillery, tanks, and other armored vehicles with shoulder-fired artillery, in effect through a single cheap shot cancelling out hundreds of man-hours of labor invested in armor and artillery production and training.
The Germans produced both too many types of large artillery and in aggregate not nearly enough to fight on multiple fronts against the Allies. As was characteristic in World War I, Germany still pursued the evolutionary dead end of constructing huge, immobile Krupp rail guns: capable of firing five- to seven-ton projectiles, with a range of twenty-four to thirty miles. As we have seen at the siege of Sevastopol, such behemoth 800 mm (31-inch), 1,500-ton guns (“Gustav” and “Dora”) proved largely wasted assets, given their slow rates of fire, immobility, enormous maintenance and transportation costs, and easy vulnerability to motorized infantry, tanks, and air power.
Yet all that said, the Germans nevertheless produced the most practical and lethal artillery pieces of the entire war: some twenty-thousand 88 mm flak guns of numerous varieties. The Allies may have produced anti-aircraft guns with greater ranges than the twenty-five-thousand-feet effective killing range of the German 88 mm, and anti-tank guns with larger and more lethal calibers. But no gun in World War II was as versatile as the German 88 mm. It could be set up in minutes, fire rapidly (15–20 rounds per minute), had superb accuracy and easy sighting, and in theory could with adjustments alternate between targeting bombers or tanks. For the two years of Operation Barbarossa, the long and high-quality barrel of the 88 mm offered about the only consistent German means for taking out Russian T-34 tanks. For just the cost of constructing two mostly irrelevant battleships, the Bismarck and Tirpitz, Hitler might have instead produced about 7,500 additional 88 mm guns, well over half the number that were transferred from the Eastern Front to protect the German homeland from Allied bombers.68
Toward the end of the war, the Germans began installing great numbers of high-velocity, long-barrel, rapid-firing, and high-powered fixed 75 mm assault guns on supposedly obsolete Mark III tank chassis. The resulting turret-less but up-armored Sturmgeschütze IIIs were highly mobile, low-profile, and easily maintained anti-tank guns that survived on average seven times longer on the Eastern Front than did late-model German tanks. Over ten thousand were built at costs far cheaper per unit than tanks.69
Even more impressive than the unique 88 mm gun, the Germans finally saw the wisdom of mass-produced, cheap weapons as they turned out some six million Panzerfausts (“tank fists”). At close distances, these cheap, single-shot, disposable anti-tank weapons in their final incarnations proved deadly to most Allied tanks on either the Western or Eastern Fronts. And when taken together with another three hundred thousand Panzerschrecks (“tank frighteners”)—a German up-engineered copy of the American bazooka—single German soldiers often had the ability with an inexpensive weapon to knock out thirty- to forty-ton tanks. German foot soldiers with such weapons probably took out 10 percent of all enemy tanks that were lost in the war, despite the late entrance (1943) of the Panzerfaust in the war. The simple, reliable, cheap, and deadly Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck were the forerunners of the later rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) that likewise tended to level the playing field between sophisticated armor forces and poorly equipped foot soldiers.70
By 1943 the Wehrmacht’s armor was outnumbered on every front, but its infantry’s superior hand-held anti-tank weapons and mines mitigated some of the consequences of that numerical imbalance. General Erhard Raus related how desperate German soldiers, on the retreat in winter 1945, often could disable or destroy Russian T-34 tank columns with simple disposable Panzerfausts: “The NCO knocked out the last tank with one Panzerfaust, whereupon the second tank turned toward the group of houses, firing as it moved toward the spot from which the tank commander presumed the resistance had come from. But using bushes as cover, the NCO had already crept up to the tank and from only a short distance knocked it out as well, using his second and last Panzerfaust.” Russian infantrymen sometimes could likewise take out early-model German tanks through use of their own anti-tank weapons. At Stalingrad a Soviet major in a Russian rifle regiment related how one of his subordinates, a single shooter, Igor Mirokhin, destroyed in succession four German tanks before being decapitated by a German tank shell.71
The Russians focused on the most effective infantry support weapons that they could build well and in great numbers, producing more artillery pieces and mortars than any other nation during World War II, perhaps four or five times as many as Germany alone. At the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union (approximately 33,000 guns) already had over four times as many artillery units as the German invasion forces. And by war’s end, the Soviets often enjoyed artillery superiority of seven-to-one, which mitigated the frequent loss in quality of Red Army replacement infantry units during the last two years of the war. Indeed, by 1945 it was not uncommon for particular Soviet offensives to muster over forty thousand artillery and mortar tubes, such as in January assaults on Silesia and East Prussia, and the final April assault on Berlin. Artillery was the sole category of weapon in World War II in which the Soviet economy roughly doubled the production of each of its other two major allies, Britain and the United States.72
Yet perhaps the most innovative artillery platform of the war was not even a barreled gun, but rather multiple, self-propelled rockets, or Katyushas (also known as “Stalin organs”). They were usually mounted in groups of fourteen to forty-eight launchers, on either trucks or tracked vehicles. Their advantages over artillery were chiefly ease and cost of production, given that there was no need for the precision craftsmanship required in making artillery barrels and shells. Even more important, the multiple and simultaneous launches of rockets resulted in a larger payload delivery with far less need for expertise and training in comparison to artillery, even if the Katyushas lacked the accuracy of traditional howitzers and large guns. The truck-mounted Katyushas could fire and leave from the launching site far more quickly than could even the most mobile artillery. Over ten thousand Russian Katyusha platforms were produced during the war, in calibers most commonly ranging from 82 mm to 300 mm.
As in the case of the T-34 tank, the Germans were shocked that the supposedly less sophisticated Russians had deployed a completely new but effective weapon that was cheap, simple, and easy to use. As a general rule, emulation proved the best indication of weapon efficacy. Just as Germans, British, and Americans eventually sought to copy many of the characteristics of the T-34 tank, so too the other belligerents rushed into production their own rocket batteries.73
As was also true of US plane and tank production, the Americans soon produced standardized artillery platforms in enormous numbers. Perhaps the best were the light M2A 105 mm and the longer-range M1 155 mm howitzers. Both were mobile, accurate, and easily towed by trucks, or in the case of the 105 mm, were occasionally self-propelled. In many ways, the motorized 105 mm howitzer was the most versatile all-around infantry-support gun of the entire war. But the real American contribution to artillery lethality was not to be found in artillery pieces per se, but rather in shells and a sophisticated system of targeting. Quite surprisingly for an isolationist nation that had assumed air and naval power would project power abroad, the United States entered the war with the best system of synchronized artillery fire in the world, eventually to be known as a time-on-target (TOT) methodology that allowed different batteries in varied locales to concentrate their fire on shared targets, resulting in near instantaneous arrivals of a variety of different type shells from multifarious distances, thus catching enemy infantrymen unexpectedly and out in the open in the first vulnerable seconds of a huge barrage. Fire Direction Centers immediately behind the front coordinated radio requests from infantry (and tanks) for artillery support, and then allotted requisite artillery pieces, while reviewing accuracy by forward spotters and light observation planes. Thus America entered the war prepared to ensure that its greener soldiers were usually covered by artillery barrages more accurate and numerous than those of their enemies—and as effective as the far larger arsenals of the Soviet Red Army.
By late 1944, most prominently at the Battle of the Bulge, US forces were allowed to begin using top-secret new proximity fuze shells—theretofore limited largely to bombs, anti-aircraft shells, and artillery in the Pacific—that could be reliably programmed to burst at predetermined heights above enemy targets, making it extremely difficult for troops to find safety from shrapnel in foxholes or field fortifications. These innovative radar-directed fuzes had earlier proved particularly useful for American anti-aircraft batteries against kamikaze attacks in the Pacific, given that radio transmitters set off the explosives in the shell when they sensed a target roughly within a general preprogrammed distance. When used against land forces in Europe the new proximity fuze shells showered shrapnel downward and shredded German troops in the way that even older, preset proximity fuzes had not.74
American artillery proved critical to the success of the GI. He entered the European and Pacific theaters with the least amount of military experience in comparison to the German, Italian, British, and Japanese soldier. And yet he was to be deployed in the most diverse theaters and at the greatest distances from his homeland of any combatant of World War II. The United States, also unlike Germany and Japan, did not have enough prior wartime experience to discover which of its prewar assumptions about tactics and weaponry were valid, but instead sent its green troops head-to-head with those who drew on years of hardened campaigning from Poland to the Soviet Union to Manchuria. Without superior armor or air support in the early going, Americans relied on their artillery; it proved a great equalizer for American soldiers, until they acquired greater expertise and reliable air cover.
Japan was not known for either tank or artillery innovation. While the Japanese may not have designed the best mortars of the war and in comparison to the Allies produced them in limited numbers, they focused on types that were ideal for close-in fighting during the Pacific island campaigns and in Burma. The Japanese Type 89 grenade launcher, also known as the “knee mortar” (although it was never to be fired from the knee), was a cheap substitute for artillery support and could fire a variety of generic Japanese grenades. Its light weight (about 10 pounds) and easy assembly made it an ideal weapon for the dense brush, heavy rains, and fluid fronts of Pacific island fighting, where even light artillery proved cumbersome and difficult to deploy. Quite different was the strange but more frightening 320 mm Type 98 “spigot” mortar. It weighed about 675 pounds and its barrels wore out quickly. But at a fraction of the cost of large artillery, it gave Japanese troops singular heavy artillery support in the same difficult terrain and weather.75
Historians understandably focus on landmark innovations in air and sea power, and armor: the B-29 Superfortress bomber, the Essex-class carrier, or the T-34 or Tiger tanks. Less-dramatic breakthroughs in time-tested technologies such as artillery and rifles were not so romantic or heralded. Yet most soldiers were killed or wounded by either artillery in all its frightening manifestations or by small-arms fire. In both categories, the Allies, and especially the Russians and the Americans, found almost immediate parity with, if not superiority over, their Axis enemies, despite the latter’s terrifying all-purpose 88 mm artillery piece, MG 42 machine gun, or the landmark StG 44 assault rifle. The huge imbalance between Axis and Allied artillery production in large measure explains why the vaunted German army could never compensate for its inferiority in air ground support and vehicle production.
MACHINES WERE NOT automatons; they had to be built, produced, and used by people, who had a myriad of choices concerning their creation and application. The reason why the United States produced superb aircraft carriers and Germany did not reflected quite different policies enacted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler and their respective advisors. Why the United States won the Battle of Midway was not just due to superior intelligence or luck but is also explained by the respective admiralship of Admiral Raymond Spruance and Chuichi Nagumo. That British prime minister Winston Churchill did not order something as comparably foolish as the Axis surprise attacks on the Soviet Union and Pearl Harbor ultimately ensured that the Allied forces, not the Germans or Japanese, would win the war. The American worker could build a four-engine heavy bomber far more rapidly than a German or Japanese assembler could produce a medium two-engine bomber. The nature of leaders and the manner in which they mobilized their followers was every bit as important as scientific discovery and technological advance.
The following four chapters of Part Six return to the human themes of Part One that concerned the ideas of leaders, elites, and the masses that prompted and shaped the conduct of the war. People as supreme leaders, warlords, and factory workers determined how their fellow citizens were armed, equipped, and led on the field of battle—decisions that in turn explained why and where sixty million died in World War II.