Best tank in WWII?

[Paul_9686]

I personally tend towards the T-34/85 as "best all-around" WWII tank, but if I'm to be a German, give me a Panther G.

Yours,
Paul

[trebizond]

Great - I love specific questions to which I can give long rambling answers :)

I always did have a weakness for the Panther G and the King Tiger, but in retrospect that's mainly because they were so obviously superior to the Allied tanks. Problem is, German tanks were so horrendously over-engineered and (sometimes) under-powered. I wonder what would have happened if they'd picked the Daimler-Benz Panther prototype for production instead of the MAN.

Then I fell in love with the T-34, both 76 and 85. Those sloping edges, that Christie suspension. . . phwoar.

And then I found the best tank to see service in WWII*. The tank that forced a shift in all tank-based military thinking, that produced a design philosophy that lasted for 60 years, that panicked Western observers beyond reason.

I am, of course, alluding to the IS-3. Hemispherical cast turret, 200mm hull armour, 122mm D-25 main armament (which even in prototype phase was able to destroy a Tiger at 1.5km). Fantastic.



* Alright, alright, I'm not working off official reports, although can you really tell me you wouldn't have wanted to see a IS-3 face off against a King Tiger? Apparently some were used in Manchuria against the Japanese too. Poor buggers. Was there ever a Japanese tank that had more than 75mm of armour?

[maschinengewehr42]

I remember reading an account from the German side of an IS 3 encountered in combat (and destroyed) by a Panther in the fighting for Vienna near the end of the war. The account didn't name the vehicle, but stated it was an unknown type like an IS 2 with a flattened, rounded turret. It was knocked out with a shot to the turret ring below the main gun across a bridge from the other side of the Danube.

So it would appear that an IS 3 and a German tank did meet in combat in the closing weeks of the war, but since the German crew shot first, the superior firepower of the 122mm gun was unable to be brought to bear.

I've been searching my library for the account but to no avail! I wish I could find the source. I vaguely remember that the writer belonged to the Waffen SS Das Reich division, but I read it years ago.

Can anyone pinpoint the book?

[von_noobie]

the most armour a japanese tank had that i know of was from 12mm to 75mm, They actually had a 75mm gun aswell, But only 6 Type 4 Chi-To tanks were built and only a prototype of the Type 5 Chi-Ri. Thank god for us they started building these tanks late in the war.

[trebizond]

Now you come to mention it, it's quite odd really, isn't it? We know that the Japanese manufactured what was basically a ME-109 copy under license, and didn't they also have/were getting ME-163s and ME-262s to produce themselves?

Why didn't they also license German tank designs? The only thing I can think of is that they didn't have the raw industrial capacity to produce them, but I reckon if you can produce Zeros and the tanks they already did, surely a Mark IV wouldn't have been beyond them, even if Panthers and Tigers were?

[phylo_roadking]

japan had an aviation industry, and producing items like this under license were not out of the question. But it still required a lot of retooling. AND in the end the aircraft wud fly using the same reserves of aviation spirit as the home-designed types. Tanks however - her tanks were light, rivetted early to mid-30s types really VERY primitive compared to a PIV - reproducing soemthing like THIS would have required creating a production line and industry basically from scratch. They couldnt have attempted that during the war.

phylo

[von_noobie]

Maybe not the Pz IV but what about the Pz III,

[phylo_roadking]

Very possibly the same. tho one advantage would have been that the PIII was Germany's last rivetted design, wasn't it? So more chance of building it.....but by 1941-2 apart from Honeys, and Matildas and Valentines in New Guinea the japanese were meeting Shermans and they would have known the PIII was definitely outlcassed.

phylo

[von_noobie]

But the Pz III would most certainly have been better than the Jap tanks, True...

[trebizond]

Did the Japanese have much of a requirement for sweeping formations of tanks, though? I'm not up much on the Pacific Theatre, but I'm thinking that tanks weren't in their element in much of the fighting there.

[von_noobie]

Tanks in the Pacific werent as good as they would be in open ground, But a smaller tank linke the Pz III would obviously perform better than the sherman,
Try getting a Sherman through Guadalcanal, Although the Sherman did perform good in other operations in the pacific these were on strips of sand such as Tarawa and on islands like Saipan and Okinowa were there was open ground.

[Reb]

Trebizond

Stalin III is pretty sinister looking - I've climbed over one at Aberdeen Proving Ground and indeed, all the Soviet tanks have that sort of Asiatic look superimposed upon that sort of Orwellian chassis. The T-34 / 85 seemed to me to be the scariest. S III wasn't as big as I'd anticipated.

There are considerations other than looks and stats. S III couldn't carry much ammo - tank small, rounds large. It was small because the Soviets didn't have the industry to build the kind of motors that would move muchy more weight. That problem continued into the Cold War - something to do with metallurgy IIRC.

Additionally - it sucked to be in one. Very unpleasant for the crew. I was crew on a T55 and it was dreadful - yet much superior to S III as far as crew comfort.

Von Noob - as to Japanese production - theirs was much more of a cottage industry than ours - harder to bomb out of existance since it was more spread out - but correspondingly hard to re-tool and supply. Tooling up to build even a Pz III would have been a major undertaking with neglible result since sinceJapan needed weapons that mattered in the strategic realm.

They did indeed have jets and missile weapons in prototype or in some cases, production, by the end of the war. Didn't matter though, because their production never got any where near even replacing losses.

Ships and Planes where naturally the priority. Even to fight a land battle the Japanese had to move people from Island to Island, or from China or from the Homeland. A decent tank would have not helped much, and would have detracted from other endeavors.

Japan fought a come as you are war - they had a lot of ships and plances at the begining of the war, and experienced people. Like everyone else they failed to understand how resource intensive modern war had become
and as long as their enemies simply didn't surrender the Japanese were going to lose.

cheers
Reb

[phylo_roadking]

VN, Only in SOME locations in Burma would tanks been have any use to the japanese, as indeed events point out. Shemans in the islands very VERY valuable as "gun" tanks, as a way of getting HE rounds and flamethrowers to pointblank range of bunkers and pillboxes. The japanese had a LOT of artillery but very little in the way of cannon AT weapons. However, in pure jungle environments, like New Guinea....The Australians used matildas and valentines there, I think I remember reading the record longest ever trip for one of these was a MILE - then it bogged down and became a glorified pillbox itself! More use for their bulldozer effect LOL.

Theres only ONE case of the japanese ever coming out on top in modern tank to tank combat, in Burma in early '45 when a section of 6 mediums managed to get in ambush on a column escorted front and rear by British Grants; they got ONE grant by remaining in cover and hitting the Grant from the rear, but the other Grant accounted for four out of the six Japanese tanks in the reaction not just its 37mm AT turret gun was enough to open up the Chi-Has, the sponson 57mm HE literally overturned them. The japanese commander survived to give an account of events - he and ALL his men realised they were on a suicide mission, even from ambush!

phylo

[Rich Yankowski]

While the Russian T-34 and the German Panther usually get the vote for best all around tank of WW2,the American M-26 Pershing could have been a serious contender for the title.If the U.S. had landed at Normandy equipped with Pershings instead of Shermans,the Pershing would have been a much more respected tank(in my opinion).But since it was introduced so late in the war,it is often overlooked.

[von_noobie]

The Pershing was a great tank, i love it but it was way to underpowered.