badgerx16

No you've all got it wrong, he was really a visiting chiropodist - William the Corn-Curer.

Signed

Just imagine you're in a Sherman knowing your shells will simply bounce off the Tiger, and that bloody great cannon is trying to locate you.

That WAS a public holiday up to 1859.

Who was it who said the other day that they preferred to use the EuroStar when all the French passengers coming here had to disembark at Waterloo.

Liberated by whom ? The descendents of the Normans still provide the bulk of the upper class. And the Angles were just another bunch of incomers, anyway.

PS - Bazza : I know that you work tirelessly to disprove the possibility of a connection between you, but this thread is typical of the sort of thing old Dunce would start.

Of course, when the World Cup starts, absolutely nobody will be attaching a St George's flag to their car, hanging the free give away from the Sun on their bedroom wall, or going to the pub to watch the match with a red cross painted on their face. We can get as Nationalistic as anybody else, when we need to.

Is St David's day a public holiday ?

As long as you remember not to load the shells filled with paint !

"Any good young players Pompey had have been forced into the senior team due to their financial troubles." Err, isn't that what we did under Poortvliet ?

Or they are not up to date with their inoculations.

Would that apply to Sunday league footballers ?

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=78a_1384909185

Plus vulnerable ammunition storage in the turret.

No, unless you compare it to the T-34, the Panther, or even the PzIV Ausf G. The basic Sherman's main advantage was that it was being manufactured in the USofA in the automobile factories and could therefore be turned out in huge numbers. That, and the fact that in Italy and France we had overwhelming air superiority and the Germans were short on fuel. The later variants, such as the British Firefly with the 17 pounder gun, got to a point where they could try to go head to head with the German tanks, but it wasn't really advisable.

And we had the Sherman. LOL.

I'd probably take the T34-85 head to head if the crews had the same level of competence.

That's a bit of a fatuous argument, as the 'best tank EVER' is probably the Abrahams 2 or the Challenger 2 - the argument should be put in context. In which case comparing the PzVI Tiger with the T-34 is comparing apples with bananas; the Tiger was not a divisional MBT, it was deployed in special 'schwerer' battalions as a support unit, a more accurate comparison would be the JS series of Soviet heavy tanks. The T-34 as the divisional MBT should be more directly compared to the PzIV, to which it is superior in almost all areas, or the PzV Panther, which it inspired.

See the second part of my post, you may have missed the edit And extremely unreliable and difficult to maintain due to the German propensity to elaborately over-engineer their hardware.

Or even luring them onto pre-prepared killing grounds for the anti-tank guns, especially the 88mm Flak Kanone.

"Very worrying", Colonel-General Heinz Guderian, Commander of Second Panzer Army. "We had nothing comparable", Major-General F.W. Mellenthin, Chief of Staff of XLVIII Panzer Corps. "The finest tank in the world", Field-Marshal Ewald von Kleist, First Panzer Army. "This tank (T-34) adversely affected the morale of the German infantry", General G. Blumentritt. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CBJbQLTbArAC&lpg=PA138&dq=encounter+T-34+KV&pg=PA139&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false On the second day of Operation Barbarossa : "Half a dozen anti-tank gun fire shells at him (T-34) which sound like a drumroll. But he drives staunchly through our line like an impregnable prehistoric monster... It is remarkable that lieutenant Steup's tank made hits on a T-34 once at about 20 meters and four times at 50 meters, with Panzergranate 40 (caliber 5 cm), without any noticeable effect."

That's like saying the inventor of the shock absorber invented the VW Golf. We also used it on the cruiser tank series from the A-13 up to the Comet - were they 'American' ? It scared the bejesus out of the German tank crews.

Err, no. It used a Christie suspension but wasn't an American design. As for the technical comparison of the 2 sides - Sources suggest that the Germans had the following numbers : PzKpfw I - 410 PzKpfw II - 746 PzKpfw 35(t) - 149 PzKpfw 38(t) - 623 PzKpfw III - 965 PzKpfw IV - 439 Total - 3332 Of these the PzI and PzII were recce vehicles and not used for tank v tank operations, and the P35(t) was pretty much obsolete by 1941. The P38(t) and PzIII had moderate armour and main gun ( 37mm ), and were slower than the Russians, and the PzIV versions at this time ( up to Ausf F1 ) were intended for infantry support and had a low velocity 75mm gun. For the Russians, the bulk of their vastly superior numbers were, indeed, obsolete, but they still had several thousand BT-7s, which in theory were a match for the PzIII etc, with weaker armour but a better gun ( 47mm ), and faster. In addition there were the first tranche of the T-34, far better armour and gun ( 76mm ) but unreliable, and the KV-1 heavy monster. However, as with the Brits in the western desert, Russian tactics tended towards the cavalry charge with firing on the move, whereas the tactically more experienced and astute German crews would halt to fire - a far more accurate and effective tactic. Even with their limitations, contact with the Russians taught the Germans some hard lessons and they very quickly pushed through a process of upgrading the armour and main weapons on the PzIII ( Ausf J got a 50mm gun and thicker armour at the front ) and PzIV ( Ausf F2 got a long barreled high velocity 75mm main gun ). They also very quickly ditched their PAK 37mm anti-tank guns in favour of 50mm systems, or even captured Russian 47mm & 75mm guns, of which they had amassed thousands in the opening weeks of the invasion.

I would suggest that is not the main reason, the Soviet command and control capabilities were atrocious - for instance in the tank regiments only the unit commander had a radio, the rest signaled with flags. As with previous campaigns, the principle of BlitzKrieg in Barbarossa was deep, fast, penetration, which disrupted the enemy's rear echelon and command troops, with vast encircling moves to 'kettle' the bulk of the enemy and leave them to the PBI. The scale of the success of the pincer movements was aided by the immobility of the Russian armies, and the reluctance of commanders to act on initiative for fear of the NKVD.