Early Tanks?, page 1

reply to post by Zakka

I just finished reading “Death Traps: Survival of an American Armored Division in WWII”
By Belton Y. Copper
www.amazon.com...

He was an Ordnance officer with the 3rd armored division and follows the fighting from Normandy up to the end of the war. He goes into detail about the nuts and bolts of Tank warfare, the problems with the Sherman tanks and experiences with German tanks. It's a really good look at the ups and downs of the U.S army experience in Europe.

A couple of quotes from the book:

Pg 175 (Appendix I)
“When the war began in Europe, a confused debate was raging between American tank designers in ordnance and senior officers in the army ground forces. In the summer of 1939, when I was at Aberdeen Proving Ground as an ordnance cadet, our main battle tank was the M2A1 medium tank with a 37mm gun mounted in the turret. After the Germans invaded Poland in September, the debate became more intense. The armored and cavalry officers favored a large-caliber, high-velocity antitank gun mounted in the turret. The infantry officers still thought of the tank as an infantry assault weapon. The artillery officers thought that if a tank was going to carry a gun larger than a 37mm, the gun should conform to artillery specifications, which required a gun to be capable of 7,500 service rounds in combat. To meet this, a 75mm gun and larger would require a relatively low velocity. It apparently never occurred to the artillery officers that few tanks would ever survive in combat long enough to fire 7,500 service rounds. The result of this was the new M3 battle tank, designed by a committee.”

Pg. 174
“Major Arrington's order to prepare final combat loss reports had given us the losses for the entire division. Of 158 M5 light tanks, we lost more than 100 percent. (Although the M24 light tank that replaced the M5 was far superior in both firepower and armored protection, it was still too light for major assaults.) Of a total of 232 medium tanks (including 10 M26 Pershings), 648 were totally destroyed in combat and 1,100 needed repairs. Of these 1,100, approximately 700 had been knocked out in battle. This meant that we lost 1,350 medium tanks in combat, or a total loss of 580 percent. It was obvious why we soon ran out of trained tank crews and had to substitute raw infantry recruits during the Battle of the Bulge.

I had mixed thoughts about the capability of Japanese armor. Japanese tanks were reportedly extremely light and much inferior to ours in firepower and armor, but the Japanese reportedly had gotten the complete plans and specifications for the German Panther tank some time ago. If the Japanese could manufacture Panther tanks in large numbers, this could pose a major threat. But even if Japanese armor posed no major threat, we had every reason to believe that if the Japanese infantry fought as tenaciously as it did in the South Pacific islands, it would inflict severe losses on us. Our men felt that an invasion of Japan would be extremely bloody and costly to both sides.”

At the beginning of the war tank design was still in it's infancy. Most armies in the 1920's and 1930's were still dominated by old school Infantry, Artillery and Cavalry officers. Even after the experience of WWI they didn't want to change their ways. As far as they were concerned a tank was still just a toy to support the infantry or artillery. Heinz Guderian was the only person that saw it's potential and ran with it. But even he had problem with the technology of the time only being able to do so much. The early tanks engines could only produce X amount of power, thus limiting them to only carry X amount of weight. That's limits the amount of armor, how big the gun is what type of terrain it can handle etc.