The destruction is incredible. In nearly every image where buildings are visible, they're utterly ruined. But if you take the war material out of the picture and imagine the scene whole and undamaged, these places must've been so beautiful. It's heart breaking to see such devastation and to think of the thousands of civilian dead.
Do you realize how much oil and high grade steel were thrown away/used up. How much oil went into the seas. And how many lives were wasted. And nowdays the Chinese are digging up war graves. The ships and crews from the the Battle of the Java Sea, rhe Chinese are disburbing *those* war graves for profit.
Even if a large part of the destroyed armored vehicles had been scrapped in the years following the end of the war, there were still a good number of them in the Normandy countryside until the middle or end of the 1950s. For years these wrecks had brought joy to the local kids who had transformed them into playgrounds. The last known armored vehicle to have been extracted from the Normandy countryside is a Tiger 1, which had been left in a ditch until 1975, next to the town of Vimoutiers, and which has since been exposed to the outside, surrounded by a barrier, just next to the National Highway where it had been cleared, using two large construction vehicles. It is the local attraction for years, visited by many tourists. Today there are absolutely no armored vehicles left in Normandy, except in museums.
Interesting to see an Ausf D Panther at 11.45.This will likely have been deployed at Kursk 11 months earlier in July 43.Most of them broke down and abandoned.The Panther suffered from its rushed development for the rest of the war.
That's a myth. In fact at Kursk there were far more Panthers in the workshops with battle damage than mechanical issues. The report from von Lauchert even stated that after a few days, engine problems actually decreased greatly once the new engines had been run in properly. You can read the full report in Tom Jentz's book on the Panther.
By the way, the Panther D seen at 11:45 was not deployed at Kursk. It's a later D. The 1st Abteilung 12th SS had some old Ds from when they were being formed. Ausf D production continued up to September 1943. The Kursk Panthers were spring 1943 production.
They didn't have air superiority when a small number of Tigers and Panthers took out 44 Shermans of the Canadian 28th Armoured Regiment at Estrees la Campagne on 9th August 1944 during Operation Totalize. Not a single Tiger was lost. They sniped the Shermans from 1,000 metres plus.
If you take brand new good equipment and invade Festung Europa then of course insurance payouts will be refused. Lot of Nickel alloy hardened steel sitting about. German insurance companies must have also refused payment
