the greatest things about the t34 was how easy it was to build, how any idiot could use it and how it had wide tracks to go where german tanks couldnt like not getting stuck in mud and then yes of course sloped armor and its speed and built for anti freeze and also the fact that russia didnt have a billion variants or types of tanks to build stockpiles of parts for...they just had the few types of vehicles they had in their respective roles
@@kickassandchewbubblegum639 The track issue is not that clear cut. Wide tracks gave better purchase in snow and muddy/swamp conditions. However, it required a stronger engine & beefier transmission to push the tank on any ground types due to the wide tracks. Hence why the Russian transmissions were one of the first thing to die on the tanks. Transmission slippage was a well known issue on all T-34 series even on new tanks which is why some (if they could acquire one) would strap an extra transmission to the backs. Speed was rated for 53kph but due to the poor quality of the tracks and tranny most T34's and -85's never went above 15kph except in extreme emergencies or photo ops. Higher speed meant a higher chance of throwing a track. Road trips were a risky process without a full blown repair party following you. Battalions traveled on average 50-80km. Anything over 100km risked a tank breakdown. The fact is that the T34 caught the Germans by surprise. That advantage lasted 1 year. After that it was a cheap fodder tank whose life expectancy was measured in hours on the battlefield. But they could make a lot and had plenty of people to crew it...whether they wanted to or not. Quantity has it's own quality.
Yes it was great, but why no mention of Nibelungenwerk? That was the German version of a large automotive style assembly plant. It's not even on his map.
Another things that doesn’t explain very well is that 1st: Russian quality enormously increased with the T-34/85 (since the average tank lifespan and the average distance to travel increased), and that they probably produced a lot more spare parts. Even tough they had a comparable number of tanks with the US numbers, they managed to keep numbers much higher than what the US could do in Europe
@@ferrarisuper The lecture was mainly about numbers, so while the t-34's improved quality would've been interesting to know it doesn't undermine this lecture at all. Abut Germany. It doesn't change that it was going to be overwhelmed, whether or not America kept all or half of their tanks.
The tank factory in suburban Detroit is still operational and makes the Abrams. Also, all large auto factories maintain plans and are legally obligated to transform their facilities into war machines within 45 days in times of emergency.
Lend Lease to the USSR was most important not in tanks and planes, but radios, steel, aluminum, trucks, and items that allowed them to concentrate on making tanks, their best product.
Don't forget train equipment and high octane fuel too. You are absolutely right, the greatest benefit of land lease for the Soviets was not fighting equipment but infrastructure and logistical support.
@@73Trident yes.....even stalin admitted that spam fed the red army....from what i've read, and i dont claim to be an expert, the most important items sent to the soviets were spam, trucks, studebaker trucks to carry the katyushas , locomotives , and the P-39..
@@charliesinatra1079 Trucks were, by far, the most noticeable help to the Soviets. A horse and camel drawn force was now motorized (Not fully, of course, but only the Americans and Western Allies really were). Zhukov and Kruchev mentioned the help in their mémoirs.
I wonder if the presence of American machine tools in those Russian factories didn't also produce a demand for spare parts and tooling. It is shockingly easy to break something as heavy-duty as an industrial lathe, and Lend-Lease would have been an artery for both highly-specialized parts to keep those machine tools running and for the special bitting that those tools use. I'm sure that a Russian machinist would be perfectly up to the task of sharpening a steel tool, but having access to the vast manufacturing pool of the US could provide things like cemented carbide inserts can make one hell of a difference on a lathe or mill.
I realize it's been more than 5 years since this conference. But at 45:00, he mentions that "visiting the boeing factory in seattle, you'll see a lot of stand based manufacturing". Well, I have taken that tour a few time (I recommend it to everyone). But they've almost completely shifted 737 production to a more automotive fashion, where the planes are actively moving around the plant as they're being built... and they were completing ~1.5 full 737-800s per day at the time (probably even more now)
Super interesting! On the side, even if germans managed to produce as many tanks as the soviets or the americans did, they wouldn't have been able to run them due to fuel shortage. They knew this, so maybe the focus on quality rather than quantity was somewhat influenced by the inherent problem of their economy.
Their strategic priorities were all screwed up. Tigers and Panthers use way more fuel than Shermans and T-34s. The Soviets had fuel problems too. It's why all their AFVs were diesels. The Heer made loads of stupid decisions during the war. They never built enough trucks. None of their trucks they had were AWD. All of their vehicles were overly complex. Compare an American M3 halftrack with a Sdkfz 251. The 251 is ludicrously complex for being essentially an off road capable metal box to haul Panzergrenadiers. The M3 is a basically farm truck that has had rubber tracks and some dinky armor plate added. The Germans built 15000 251s and never had enough. The US built nearly 60,000 M3s. That doesn't even count the very similar M2, M5, and M9s that were also built in the 10s of thousands for lend-lease To bring it back around Tigers and Panthers were not qualitatively that much better than a 76mm Sherman, M18, T-34, or IS-1.
What quality? Making something ginormous and stupidly heavy so it’s fuel consumption goes through the roof is not quality over quantity. It’s just stupid.
Those heavy tanks were rolled into production in 1942 when the oil of the Caucasus was supposed to feed them in 1943 onward. It took 6-12 months of headway to start the full scale production of those next gen cats. Meanwhile Germany failed in Case Blau and the oil never meterialized but it was too late to scrap those models. It would have made sense to focus solely on the Panther but the law of previous investments made the Tigers be produced for what was a war of attrition they were never meant to fight as heavy breakthrough tanks.
@@Fulcrum205 To also note: Knowing that manpower is an scarce comodity, and not having enough locomotives and wagons to transport supplies around, having to reconvert ¡6! factories to produce ~1400 Panzer III in the midwar is totally absurd. If you're to have shortage of men and fuel, but no materials, they would have needed to push for any measure to save time, load the stuff onto trains asap, and sent them the closest you can to the front so as to not erode those assets. Thus, before motorization, they needed ferroviarization; then, when they have proper supply chains (i've seen some of TIK's books and trust me, their system was nefastous too) you can start to pour more equipment on the field, using all the manpower you move away from the factories (like Britain, who employed women at factories, public services, home defence... in order to free manpower to do the fighting itself). And, for that to had been true, it would need to not be nazi germany, where "women should stay at home and nurture children" and the millions of people under nazi occupation were digging potatoes to not starve to death, or building concrete bunkers in the coast of Norway.
What a great panel and 2 very interesting topics! Bravo Gentlemen! And great questions too!! If I were there then I would’ve ask the “go on defensive” question.
The Dwarven joke is absolutely hysterical! If I was there I would have to step out and catch my breath id be laughing so hard. The way he said and the accent and then the lame crowd reaction
Yup the Soviets actually received a number of M4A2 diesel engined Sherman's with 76mm which were well liked by Soviet crews and were used by some Guards units.
They were mostly concentrated on the southern front for the USSR, They did like the 76 gun and the Sherman's reliability but they did think it's armor was inadequate
Which seems odd for them to believe, given that the frontal armor thickness+slope on the Sherman worked out to roughly the same armor effectiveness as on the T-34. The side armor on the 34 indeed better, but frontal armor is essentially all that actually matters if you use halfway decent tactics.
"Overall, this was a good vehicle but, as with any tank, it had its pluses and minuses. When someone says to me that this was a bad tank, I respond, "Excuse me!" One cannot say that this was a bad tank. Bad as compared to what?" -Soviet Hero; Dmitriy Loza on the Shermans
Some excellent points made about German problems with mass production. However, Germany could never have put many more tanks in the field, due to energy shortages and logistics problems. So maybe, quality over quantity was their only option
Even with energy shortages, they could have produced at least another 10,000 more good tanks. Fuel shortages weren't so crippling until the last year or so of the war.
The Germans reserved diesel fuel for the U-boats. The tanks were designed to run on gasoline in part because it produced lots of power, but also because they had a process for making gasoline (petrol) from coal - of which they had plenty. Fuel shortages became crippling in part once the Allied strategic bombing campaign set a focus on fuel and moreso once the Red Army overran the oilfields of Romania. Everyone speaks of the "German economy" versus Russia's, Britain's, and that of the United States. However, for most of the war, it was the German, Austrian, French, Dutch, Belgian, Polish, Norwegian, and Czechoslovakian economies, along with Italy and Japan that were fighting against the Allies. Sobering to consider.
@@amerigo88 If you're going to count the occupied and minor Axis powers (you could have thrown in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Finland, possibly occupied Greece and Yugoslavia), you'd also have to count minor allied powers, such as Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, even Brazil and African colonial possessions.
Historical battles can be a complex event. The Battle of Brody was a larger tank battle. German logistics were inadequate (non standard rail gauges, industrial base shortages, parts shortages, fuel shortages, taking over the rail system, etc.). The German Army was still using horses as prime movers, but Russian grass was not nutritious, so feed had to be shipped in. The German high command actually planned that units should "live off the land" because supplies were inadequate. As supply lines failed, German soldiers were starving (2 pieces of bread/day and maybe some watery horse soup), so horses became food. Eventually, the loss of horses meant units couldn't move heavy equipment. Hard to capture all that complexity in a short presentation.
2022 , just watched a scene in Band of Brothers in which this enraged American was shouting at the lines of retreating Germans shouting," say hello to Ford,and General Motors...." as well as some other choice words....Jonathon Parsnall (sp?) nailed it.
I personally think the remark at 45:09 underlines so elegantly how Germany lost the war. The Americans were spending less building the plane to bomb the German tank factory then the Germans were spending to build the tank to defend it. Eye opening!
Yeah. About The Battle of Midway. He's a part-time naval historian, his main gig is at a software company, and, as he said, his MBA is operations/production.
His comments at 36:00 regarding USA involvement in building Russian tractor factories that turned in tank factories is correct. In the early 1960s I was hired as a sales trainee by a Cicero, Illinois company. We'd been in business by then for more than 100 years, having been, for a while, the factory source making the revolutionary McCormick Reaper that changed world wide agriculture. As the US auto industry arose and gradually concentrated in the midwest, the company evolved away from the Mc Cormack relationship. although a beautiful, shiny, meticulously made, 3-foot-long, working, model sat in a glass case in the company offices through the 1960s. They soon became what was - at that time - this country's largest manufacturer of industrial cleaning productions lines. Making things of metal inevitably involves grease, oil and other contaminants that must be removed at various stages in manufacture to prepare them for whatever follows, right up to packing and shipping. Performing that on a production basis involves a lot of non-human, material handing, pumping, heating, cooling, feeding of chemicals and then their removal and disposal. Designing and installing these cleaning systems was the company's profitable specialty. As part of my training, so I would know the machine intimately, I was put in charge of the parts department. That meant I was also in charge of the blueprints for every machine we had ever made. I was soon fielding orders for obscure gaskets, pumps, motors, cables, belts, couplings, valves, control panels, switches and even small light bulbs for specific machines and huge 50 foot long systems we had made decades before. Often that item's source had stopped making it. Often an operator seeking to rebuild a machine was not the original owner. All they had was our name and the machine's serial number. It was my job to dig through that specific machine's blueprints and the related parts list - and sometimes our source's manual we'd filed away 40 or 60 years ago - and specify a suitable modern replacement at the right capacity, voltage, sizes, etc So, - and the point of may story is - in 1963 - I got an order from the Ford Motor Company for parts we had supplied as part of a group of large parts washing production lines that we had built to their order but shipped directly to the Russian tractor factory Ford built for them back in the 1920s. Those are the factories that had been converted to making tanks during WW2. Our machines were still in service. With the help of our engineers I bought or remade the required parts, often upgraded thanks to the decades of development of better electric motors or pumps, packings, seals, switches, etc - and shipped them to Russia. I suspect some of those machines are still in use making tanks.
One of the things that made Stalin realize how valuable capitalism was for creating industrialization was when they saw how much more Canadian farmers could produce with mechanized tractors. From that point on they made it a focus to replicate those capabilities and brought over Canadian/American consultants to set it up. So much for USR creating all its toys.
@Abrasax Palante You sound like the absolute pinnacle of the stereotype of a fear-mongering American. It must've taken up the majority of your intelligence, personality, skills, and time to sound as annoying and stupid as you do now.
Dr Cintino, (had a friend named Dintino, lol) talks about German military intelligence being bad. Yea it was, it was totally compromised as the head of the Abwehr ( German M.i.) was anti-Hitler, that being Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. And he purposely put out bad reports, wrong reports, misleading reports. The Germans naturally had a hard time believing an Admiral like Canaris would betray the fatherland. But he was eventually caught and hung for his treason in late 1944.
...a duet of lucid, info-rich presenters regaling a keen, multi-aged audience, including steady-eyed veterans...I wish my father, ex-Luftwaffe, and I had been there!...
when it comes to analyzing production figures, and man-hours, wouldn't a better apples-apples comparison be the Sherman:t-34:PzKw IV? That tank was produced throughout the war and was consistently upgraded.
Yes. Those three tanks were remarkably similar in capability. There were about 9,000 Pzkw-IVs built. About 50,000 M4s in a shorter period (mid 1942 to 1945) and about 80,000 T-34s.
I really enjoyed this video. I wish I was there for I myself have a lot of questions that wer not answered in this video. Anyway it was very productive. My grandfather was in WW2.
"Armor steel had a special place in these shipments, especially in the production of tanks, self-propelled guns and other equipment. Mobilization reserve of armored steel in the Soviet Union before the war was small and did not cover even 6-month industry needs. According to some data, 525.4 thousand tons of rolled steel of all types was delivered to the USSR under Lend-Lease. Every month, the country received about half of average amount of Soviet production of armored steel. Special steel for gun barrel drifting was also delivered." page 118 "During the war, 622 thousand tons of rails were delivered under LendLease. This represents about 56.5% of the total domestic production of rails from mid-1941 to the end of 1945. If excluding narrow gauge rails that were not supplied under lend-lease, then the American supplies made 83.3% of the total production of the Soviet broad gauge rails." page 119 Food and other strategic deliveries to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease Act, 1941-1945 pdf
Shockingly, one of the few American academics I know is a US Army / Vietnam veteran. That is David Glantz, and you could expect him to be totally biased against USSR because he is from US Army. Not at all. He is a beast, reads Russian and German in the direct sources. He does know about Prokhovka being a Stalin's myth, but he knows also that Kursk was just a massive German fail. Just as the biggest German defeat in the WHOLE history of Germany is Operation Bagration (June 1944), however unknown that is for so many historians-wannabees.
By that time, D-Day had launched and the Germans were pre-occupied with Normandy, France. Mid 1944, the Germans were already finished. Why they didn't retreat and shorten their defensive lines, is what most military historians question.
@@melvinbennett444 Hitler was convinced the Soviets main offensive in the summer of 1944 was going to be in the south. That is where he kept his reserves. The Soviets did a good job of hiding their attentions which was to destroy Army Group Center.
@@etwas013 They were defeated because the Soviets knew for a long time that is where they were going to attack and even knew the start date thanks to the British and Ultra. They had several lines of defense prepared and there was no way the Germans could succeed.
@@TDL-xg5nn That's true too. Hitler was rightfully concerned about defending his only Oil source (other than synthetic which they couldn't produce enough)......the Ploesti oil fields in Romania. You are right also, German military intelligence was terrible, as mostly always. Perhaps because Canaris was in charge.
@@melvinbennett444 Right you are -- I must have typed in the time wrong. One of the shots of the crowd shows @Chieftain clear as day in the back. Edited it with the correct time, an hour later during the Q&A.
The soviets called the Grant "a coffin for seven brothers" so, not exactly a machine they had high confidence in. They were apparently pretty keen on the Sherman, though I believe they criticised its abilities with crossing snow and ice in comparison to the T-34. In terms of reliability, erganomics, and chances of bailing out if hit it was considered to be very good.
Though General McNair's philosophy of fast and mobile tank destroyers is often criticized as short-sighted, the M-18 Hellcat had the highest kill ratio (over 2 to 1) of any American armored vehicle in WWII, and saved the day at the Battle of Arracourt and Noville (Bastogne).
The comments about US tank use are just wrong - the M4A2 had significant use - over 4000 of them - by the Soviets especially in their mechanized units where it was valued for its reliability - which matters if your the exploitation force. Also, wrong is that its hard to find pictures of Lend lease Shermans in action. And there's a whole book by a Soviet veteran that fought in them too: Commanding the Red Army's Sherman Tanks: The World War II Memoirs of Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitriy Loza. Citino is also off by a factor of 10 on how many trucks went - more like 300-500K. The picture of where and how each made their tanks was very good though - had heard all that on the Tiger - more expensive by far than the Panther to make.
Yes they were way off on Lend Lease numbers. That's never been an area of interest for academics or really anyone else who would rather focus on personalities and battles. You know what they say: Professionals study logistics. Amateurs study tactics.
@@henryj.8528 At one point Citino says “..we sent them fifty thousand studebaker trucks!” Try 380,000 - and ALL their aluminum, quantities of explosives, steel, fuel, list goes on and on. We doubled Soviet production. This wasn’t bad. But not great either.
@@stsk1061 regardless, he said 40k or something similar**. And he’s a historian.. I’m just some dumba$$ watching a RU-vid video. He can’t be that f’ing wrong and have any credibility. ** - 50k. iirc,not rewatching it.
1:02:42 - guy asking about the M26 and McNair had me irk a little bit having watched Nick Moran’s “Myths of American Armor”. If only he were there I wonder what he’d think? Then I realized his talk wouldn’t happen for another year and a half. Also, 1:04:22 well lookie who we have here!
So, every country produced their tanks following their respective automotive industry model: The Soviet Union: rough, unsophisticated, cheap (an agricultural tractor) The USA: massively produced, not too technologically complicated, standard products (a Chevrolet) Germany: complex engineering, highly skilled workforce, specifically designed, short production runs (a Mercedes-Benz)
Recommend ,it is here in youtube,the conference of Dr.Roman Toppel,he paints a different picture about Prokhorovka and the myths that sourrounds it,very interesting
Whenever the turning point (25:38 to 25:44) in favor of the allies was, the Red Army made a statement at Stalingrad and added the exclamation point at Kursk.
I heard a story about a UK engineer who was taken to a US tank factory. He couldn't understand why he never saw a bench with a vice,, where stuff could be filed. Of course the answer was everything came in to tolerance so nothing ever needed to be fitted to anything else. Bravo USA. A different bravo USSR. You did it your way.
To simplistic. It says absolutely nothing abut the battle, only the German propaganda. The truth is that some vehicles have been repaired three or even four times. When the Germans pulled back in the south, they lost all the damaged vehicles forever. In one hour the had more irrecoverable losses in vehicles than in the previous six days, around 300 tanks and at least as many TDs. The Soviets also recovered hundreds of damaged vehicles.
The importance of Kursk was just over stated as even the Germans expected (especially Hitler himself) little out of it. The Germans were hoping, judging from their past experiences, to have a chance of destroying the salient thus providing themselves with other “opportunities” such as reaching a deal in Switzerland or prolonging the attrition or delaying the Soviet initiatives... they knew by then that they could not win the war or even turn the tide in their favor. Therefor one of question of moving back 100-200 miles or even back to 1941 border was out of question as Germans needed not only resources, Soviet territory (men power living there) but also the room to trade for time. Second speaker is excellent from tank production perspective! Well done!
If you ask me, Jonathan Parshall's talk's contents were of much more significance than that of Robert Citino's, simply because the combat effectiveness of armies in WW2 were so very closely tied to the ability of one nation in out-producing another. To be brutally honest, Kursk was an offensive operation on an obscure salient, to allow for another offensive operation onto Moscow to take place, generally agreed upon by historians such as David Stahel, that another offensive operation after Moscow would be required to win. Rather than the 'successes' of Barbarossa (1941), the historical community should focus on the economics and logistics of warfare as topic that deserves more attention. For ultimately an army without food is no army.
As obscure as the Kursk Salient was, the Soviets saw it as the blindingly obvious target that it was. Little surprise that Zhukov was sent there to turn a few hundred square miles of farmland into a deeply-defended killing zone. I think there were as many as eight distinct defensive lines in a few sectors, all subdivided into fields of mines and tank traps and machine gun nests.
I could help noticing the quotes around "successes" when mentioning operation Barbarossa. IMHO Op. Barbarossa was an overall failure and should have brought to light that the warnings about logistics were ominously correct. I think that Germany lost the war against the USSR in 1941 when their logistics breakdown became the reason for not attaining their objectives. Also this coincided with the drying up of the supply of Pervitin (Methamphetamine) that had so far had kept the Wehrmacht and SS hopped up top to bottom and from loof to lee. Then came the winter and as may we well know: Meth and Winter are not a good combination.
Certainly not an "obscure" salient. It was a huge salient and it was blindingly obvious that the Germans would attack there. Zhukov predicted it in the first week of April 1943. There was nothing obscure about a place that was the center of gravity for the entire front.
Parshall's presentation was brilliant. Answered many questions I had about World War II tanks. A major question is how the Sivirts with a much smaller heavy industry sector managed to outproduce the Germans in tanks. Parshall addresses this with important points, but does not give adequate importance to the war in the West.
@@blazodeolireta Yes I see your point. As a result of the NAZI-Soviet Pact, Eastern Poland was in Soviet hands. You are absolutely correct. And not fully understood is that Soviet occupation in the Baltics, Poland, and northeastern Romania, was extraordinarily brutal with massive NKVD killings and deportations that too often are just associated with the Germans. Katyn was just the tip of the iceberg. The only major difference was the NAZI Jewish obsession.
@@dennisweidner288 Why capitalize every letter in nazi? It's not an acronym, it was an insult that alluded to Ignaz, a name understood at the time to belong to the stereotype of a stupid person and became common parliance later among their opponents. I suppose calling your opponents nasos would have sounded a bit silly.
Excellent stuff. One small objection to what Jonathan Parshall says -- though my objection confirms his larger point: He points to the German tank-production lines as having constant adjustments made, so that no tank would be exactly the same as the one half-a-dozen behind it in the production line. American mass production, he seems to imply, did not have this problem. Elsewhere though, he points to American adaptability as one of its strengths. In this he is emphatically correct. Buckminster Fuller, who at times worked as a production engineer, has said that a bomber on the production line in Witchita could be hit with 50,000 change orders in the course of assembly and that no two bombers were ever the same. The number 50,000 seems high to me: it is a common trope of engineers when they want to go all goo-goo over something to multiply all the possibilities together, and then to present the theoretical maximum as though it were normal. Still, the "no two bombers the same" claim seems to me possible. New metals were being developed, new guns (and bomb-sights!) were being designed. Change was in the air. Making change normal -- and in this regard making "the change order" a normal tool of production -- has always been an American strength.
My understanding is that a lot of those changes were joined into blocks of upgrades. The basis for the M4 sprouting into things like the "Easy 6" and "Easy 8" model designations. Makes life a hell of a lot easier if you implement five or six changes at one time, work out the kinks, and then move on.
Jon Parshall: “You got peanut butter on my chocolate!” Rob Citino: “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!” Two GREAT tastes that taste great together, whom you don’t often get to see presenting together, given their respective areas of expertise. Just an excellent use of time watching this video.
Too many who analyze WW2 and Kursk tend to not look at the factors that were at play during the period. 1. Hitler's assessment of the Soviet Union, Stalin, the Red Army and Nazism. 2. Hitler's dodged determination to remain on the offensive and not take the advice of experienced military advisors who felt that Operation Zitadelle was a huge waste of Germany's men and material. 3. At the time of Kursk, there were obviously too many in the German Command that believed that a victory was not out of the question. While bloodied at Stalingrad, there was nothing that said that the Germans could not duplicate Operations Barbarossa and Blue. At Kursk, the Germans faced an entirely new Red Army...they were better in both the TACTICAL and STRATEGIC sense. The Soviets led in every category of men and material, and were closing the gap with Command and Control. The Red Air Force was far and away better than '41. Soviets tank models were so much better by the time of Kursk, e.g. the SU122 and the behemoth SU 152.
why would be victory out of the question? the sovjet army could have collapsed meaning a peace in the east , with that the allies never would be able to land in the west and possibly would have been pushed out of italy
Victory out of question because, at that time, the Soviets were better for 1) the combined use of tanks and infantry 2) the use of artillery 3) the use of aircrafts and particularly bombers (I'm not talking about the quality of aicrafts, even if Yaks were not bad planes) 4) the use of counter-intelligence and fooling the enemy (maskirovka). Some historians have proved that Germans have constantly been fooled upon the real directions and aims of Soviets' offensives, from 1943 to final battles in Germany 5) the generals' skills (Zhukov, Rokossovski, Vassilevski, Vatutin, Rybalko, ...) Chukov, who was no fit for commanding large Armies, was still the greatest specialist of urban warfare of its time, thanks to the experience he got in Stalingrad. 5) The number (although, to be fair, the Germans and their allies had the number superiority in 1941 and 1942 : 3,2 Million soldiers at the beginning of Barbarossa). The only two main defaults in the Red Army were : 1) total lack of skills or many lieutnants, captains, commanders or colonels, because most of them were there because of their Communist-compatibility, not because of their skills... even if they were skilled, they would have been fucked up by Political Commissars who snooped everywhere 2) lack of initiative, intelligence and discipline among many soldiers. Many soldiers were drasticaly lobotomised by so many years of Communist dictatorships (no free press, no free thinking, no criticial mind, no right to foster any new idea...), and many peasants were strong and endurant, but not particularly fit for leading. As a result, the paradox was that Rokossovski or Vassilevski, excellent commander-in-chiefs, were often giving orders to unskilled soldiers, who prefered to restrain any initiative because it was contrary to their (Soviet) mentality to do so.
Germany has long been a leader in producing some of the best machine tools in the world. Their lack of them for tank production in WW2 may have had something to do with their lack of the very hard metals required, such as tungsten. Also, the Americans had the luxury of stocking a factory with hundreds of highly specialized machine tools with full knowledge that those tools would contribute to long production runs with very little interference. If I was running a German tank factory that was subject to bombing raids, I would lean towards more general purpose tools like lathes that could be replaced or repaired if damaged. Also, the Heeresamt's lack of commitment to long production runs works against private companies like Henschel, Krupp, or MAN investing in highly specialized machine tools. A tool entirely dedicated to pressing certain bits of stamped steel in a precise shape could be rendered useless if some colonel determined that a new shape was needed "on the fighting fronts." Between bombing disruptions, potential slave labor issues, and the myriad of required changes, why bother investing in specialized machine tools? In contrast, Ford's Willow Run megafactory in Michigan that peaked at one B-24 Liberator produced every 60 minutes had special machine tools that produced entire wings. Of course, no one was bombing Michigan or anywhere else in the U.S. of A. during WW2.
Samuel Thompson Overall your insights make sense, but I have to disagree about the threat of bombing discouraging specialized tooling. If you can manufacture extra general purpose tools to replace those damaged by bombings, the same is true for specialized tooling. You’ll need replacements anyway as tools get worn out. Sure, it would drive the initial investment up, but as was shown in the lecture the Germans weren’t exactly shy of high production costs. I believe the lack of commitment to longer production runs you pointed out is the main factor in their aversion to specialized tooling.
@@theczman007 this is old but... Mr. Parshall over states the effect of the bombings in Germany. Other than one instance, the bombings really didn't have an effect. Because the German system wasn't really centralized (parts were made all over the place and brought together for construction) if you bombed a factory it only set things back a day to two for clean up and then building would resume. It's why the Allies didn't really focus on tank production and instead focused on oil plants and small parts factories. This series eventually gets to this subject: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_oLY4FOrnjc.html Operation Think Tank covers a lot of ground and is worth the watch. The panel is full of people who know their stuff.
@@davidmiller9485 you're mostly correct until about 1944. The early raids on Germany were largely inaccurate and very ineffective. The systemic repeated attacks on important facilities were though, Germany's largest synthetic oil plant in 1944 managed only 23% of maximum output of 1943 over the entire year. Allied bombings during, before and after D-Day were extremely effective in disrupting German supplies and reinforcements and played a crucial role in the Normandy campaign. Also goes without saying the Luftwaffe was losing a lot of aircraft and production potential just defending Germany's air space. Plus the manpower and production of the AA crews, reconstruction teams, fire crews etc.
@@DmitriPolkovnik Yeah but were not talking about any of that. We are talking about production of armored vehicles (mainly tanks) and the biggest issue there was ball bearings. Outside of that production continued because it wasn't a "factory" type production line. (Only one exception, the Maus and that wouldn't have made a difference anyway since it was so late)
Albert Kahn, great back story, born a German-Jew, migrated to the U.S., a classmate of Henry Bacon (1893 Chicago Worlds Fair, Lincoln Memorial) studyed reinforced concrete, Packard plant 1903, Ford Highland Park plant 1909 (consolidating model T manufacturing and assembly line), Ford River Rouge 1917, work with the Soviet Union 1929-1932, Detroit Tank Arsenal 1940, and Willow Run Bomber Plant (Ford). The bomber plant despite Ford mismanagement early on (planes don't assemble like cars, wouldn't hire women), by 1943 they were producing one B24 every hour, 24/7
Big picture view in my opinion: the tide against the axis not at any one battle but in June 22 through December 8, 1941… the minute the axis combined added the USA and USSR to the war.
