Shiny new British Army tank unable to reverse over 20 cm high sleeping plods!

[Angilion]

[..]
Russian tanks were just thrown out, the t-34 tank was only good due to the numbers in service and the early days before the Germans up gunned , they got eaten up like flies in battle afterwards with a massive K/D ratio against them.
[..]

The early T34s, made carefully by skilled people from decent materials, were very good at the time.

The later T34s, made by unskilled people in a mad rush from whatever was available and obsolete and with the design degraded from the original design (which would still have been obsolete anyway) to simplify manufacturing were crap. But they could be made in silly numbers very quickly and that mattered. 5 crap tanks can beat 1 good tank. It wasn't a nice decision, but it was an effective one. Probably one that the Germans should have been more aware of, since they defeated the superior French tanks in the early days of the war the same way.

 

[ianh]

But they could be made in silly numbers very quickly and that mattered.

I can't remember who said it - "Quantity has a Quality all of it's own" - said when referring to the technological superiority of the smaller armies in NATO in the mid 80's vs the huge numbers of inferior WP equipment IIRC.

 

[Blackjack Davy]

The early T34s, made carefully by skilled people from decent materials, were very good at the time.

The later T34s, made by unskilled people in a mad rush from whatever was available and obsolete and with the design degraded from the original design (which would still have been obsolete anyway) to simplify manufacturing were crap. But they could be made in silly numbers very quickly and that mattered. 5 crap tanks can beat 1 good tank. It wasn't a nice decision, but it was an effective one. Probably one that the Germans should have been more aware of, since they defeated the superior French tanks in the early days of the war the same way.

They were based on an outdated british design, one thing they had going for them was they kept going during siberian weather when the german vehicles simply wouldn't run at those temperature.

*5 crap tanks can beat 1 good tank"

Like the german tiger tanks which were light years ahead of the american shermans the difference was the americans could produce them in huge numbers and the germans couldn't. The british tanks were were so likely to catch fire if hit the germans called them tommy cookers.

 

[EdGey]

Really?

All the British tanks in ww2 were terrible compared to the german and Russian designs.

I'm struggling to think of any British designed weaponry in ww2 that was super effective, sajs the firefly but that was simply a bodge ...

Spitfire and hurricane were okay, but the hurricane first flew in 1935 and spitfire in '36

Ironically both German and Russian tanks are excellent demonstrations of weapon modernisation during the war. The Sherman is also an excellent example... with more variants than you can shake a stick at.

The Spitfire was introduced in time for ww2, but the MK1 was a mere shadow of what the aircraft was capable of by the end of the war. Largely because the MOD could call upon companies like Rolls Royce to further develop the Merlin engine to keep pace with the 109, which was modernised in turn. Without that knowledge, the MK1 spitfire would have stood absolutely no chance against late-war 109's, never mind the likes of the Fw 190.

 

[Angilion]

They were based on an outdated british design, one thing they had going for them was they kept going during siberian weather when the german vehicles simply wouldn't run at those temperature. [..]

When were they outdated? The impression I have is that the original design was good at the start of the war and highly competitive against German tanks of the same time. That rapidly changed, partly because the T34 design was changed to make it easier and faster to build at the expense of making it worse, partly because German tanks improved greatly over the course of the war, partly because the skilled Soviet workers were largely replaced by unskilled workers (and in many cases forced labour) and partly because the quality of the materials available reduced. Is my impression wrong?

Being able to function in the required conditions is a huge factor in how good a tank (or anything else) is. A mediocre tank that can be used is far better than an otherwise superb tank that won't run at all or can't traverse the terrain because it gets bogged down or is otherwise non-functional. There are other less extreme situations, such as a tank that's too heavy to cross many bridges or too large to use many roads or not mechanically robust enough to reliably travel any significant distance under its own power. A tank you can only move more than a few miles if you put it on a train and which can't enter built-up areas might be hugely effective if you can make use of it, but overall it's pretty poor in the context of WW2.

There were some reliability issues with some WW2 German tanks, excacerbated by their progressively worsening shortages of high quality materials. A tank that's great when it works but breaks down too much is crap no matter how good it is when it works.

And, of course, there's the massive (and often overlooked) factor of fuel. Oil was a massive factor in WW2. Germany had to try for smaller numbers of more powerful tanks because it couldn't fuel larger numbers of tanks. A tank without fuel is just a mediocre and hugely expensive gun emplacement. A lot of the much vaunted German weapons technology development of WW2 was driven at least in part by an inability to compete on numbers and thus a requirement for massive technology advantage and fuel shortages were a large part of that.