Re: Heuschrecke And Such, What's The Point?

In article <e8jbip$2b2r$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Tero P. Mustalahti <termusta@xxxxxx> wrote:
David Thornley wrote:

In what sense did the tank destroyer concept fail?

I suppose the American TD concept could be called a partial failure,
since it was waste of resources that could have been used to improve the
actual tank forces instead.

In which case a whole lot of programs were failures, such as the Iowa-
class battleships. I'd rather make a distinction between things that
really didn't work at all well and things that worked less efficiently
than they could have.

The US tank destroyers were not cheaper than
tank in any meaningful sense and in some cases the tank destroyers had
resource preference over the tanks. The most famous case was the 76 mm
HVAP ammunition, which was allocated only to the TD's until 1945.

Right. In Germany, for example, tank production was limited and the
assorted turretless vehicles were normally cheaper ways of getting
motorized and armored guns into the field. For the US, the TDs were
not tank substitutes, but rather special vehicles. Therefore, they
got at least equal treatment with other vehicles.

They might be compared with the turretless vehicles some countries
fielded to get bigger guns into the field. The Soviet SU-100 and
German Pz IV/70 come to mind here, as well as the Archer.

Countries kept
producing lighter vehicles for the purpose of destroying enemy tanks,
and the tank destroyers were quite effective in combat.

Post-war vehicles used as tank destroyers were typically either light
"cavalry" tanks such as the AMX-13 or light vehicles carrying recoilless
rifles and later ATGM launchers.

True, a different case. For the US, the doctrine was suboptimal,
and so the tank and TD functions were considered different.

The only WW2 US tank destroyers with a similar design philosophy as the
post-war tank destroyers were the early half-tracked ones. They at least
were simple and cheap.

Although driving around in a halftrack with a 37mm gun bolted on
and playing tank destroyer doesn't sound all that attractive to me.
At least there were the ones with the M1897 75mm bolted on....

Army decided that wasn't the most effective doctrine, and it wasn't,
but that's a long way from saying it failed.

Failure is rarely an absolute. The US TD doctrine was not completely
ineffective, but it was a long way from the best practically conceivable
armored anti-tank doctrine.

Again, I disagree with this definition of failure. It was clearly
suboptimal, but very many things in wartime are.

It worked generally well enough. The outcries from the ETO to change
the policy weren't all that loud until the Ardennes Offensive, which
means that the US Army managed to fight armored warfare for six
months or so, including major armored offensives and positional
warfare, without great difficulty.

The interesting thing about the Ardennes Offensive is that it was
exactly the sort of thing the TDs were intended to deal with, by
massing into groups and brigades and destroying the German tanks.
By the end of 1944, the TD doctrine was much different, and they
were not so used.

The Tiger I on the other hand was originally a specialized break-through
tank, very similar in concept to the Soviet KV and JS series tanks. It
was needlessly complex, but I can see why the Germans in 1942 thought
that they would need such a vehicle. It was only later when the
complexity of the design became a liability.

The Soviet heavy tanks were about Panther weight, considerably lighter
than the Tiger. The JS-2 showed what they could do on that weight
allowance.

The KV tanks were considerably less successful, aside from their
shock value in 1941.

--
David H. Thornley | If you want my opinion, ask.
david@xxxxxxxxxxxx | If you don't, flee.
http://www.thornley.net/~thornley/david/ | O-

.

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