Faith in Government: JUSTIFIED???

Well, I gave it a shot.





I don 't speak German, but I'm pretty sure that "panzer" means a battle tank.
Among those, thay had Panthers and Tigers.






Hence, my observations qua Roosevelt's chosen "human wave" labor-intensive warfare.

He was willing to make the great sacrifice
of OTHER men's lives.





Thank goodness for air power!




Yeah; thay needed to flank the Tigers
and then get close enuf to kiss them.

Risky, but not for Roosevelt.





David

You're right about the panthers and panzers I think.

I really can't go along with the human wave thing, I think it's a distortion.
The speed was really important from the American viewpoint.
Eisenhower's army was all about speed and mobility.
If anyone cost unneccessary American lives it was Monty.
Roosevelt didn't suffer from that sort of timidity.

Yeah, speed, but with the guys arriving at the Tigers,
naked and helpless. Those 75mms had no effect on the Tigers,
unless thay flanked them and put a round into a tread,
or hit the turret. Our guys had to get it exactly right, like cutting a diamond.

Roosevelt put them into positions of near suicide,
if thay did their job and attacked the Tigers.
That is unAmerican for Roosevelt to have done.





I know, but HE was loyal to the King of England, not to Americans.

Ike favored Monty, at our expense.




He was safe enuf.





David

It's starting to sound like maybe you don't care much for Roosevelt
I don't know anything about his personal thoughts, so I can't say that you're wrong. Just that I hope so.

I do think you're wrong about Ike favoring Monty though.
Monty was like a spoiled child and simply refused to do what he was told.
Ike got pretty pissed at him.

Herb Jacobs was a Sergeant X-ray technician at the 4th General Hospital in Melbourne. He took some routine x-rays of Jean MacArthur and Arthur MacArthur during their short stay at the hospital for a medical checkup. Shortly after doing these x-rays, Herb was asked to do routine X-rays on 2 US soldiers, who were brought to the hospital under Military Police guard. Herb asked them why they were under guard and they told Herb that they had been in the Philippines when General Macarthur gave the order to leave ..... "FEND FOR YOURSELVES". They said that MacArthur then boarded his plane with his wife, son and Filipino maid, together with all his furniture, and departed for Australia. These 2 enterprising soldiers said that they had stowed away on the planes, and were then charged and incarcerated for overloading the aircraft.

Candor moves me to admit that he did some (strategic) good qua WWII, and he put his heart into it,
but this matter of passively neglecting the life n death needs of the guys in American Armor
qua the Tigers is a scandal. Thay trusted him.
He did not deserve to get away with that, but he did.





Ike took his role as the BIG DIPLOMAT to an extreme; an unnecessary extreme.



Conspicuously.





He almost lost his job.
The English needed us, more than thay needed Monty.
Churchill was very aware of that.
I have a hunch that he was pleased when we joined the war on his side.
(Of course, Hitler made that decision for us.)




With good reason.





David

Yep, he shoulda put his foot down long before he did.

I don't know at which point we really discovered the weakness of the sherman, do you think that producing a better tank would have delayed d-day? Or would we have bogged down in France waiting for the numbers we needed?

American soldiers 'd have been better off.
I don 't think there 's much chance
that the English woud have undeclared war.




Well, a lot of things were getting done CONCURRENTLY,
while we were hanging around in England.
Eventually, thay actually DID provide decent new tanks, with 90mm artillery.
Thay shoud have done it SOONER, earlier in the war.

It was NOT OK,
for Roosevelt to incorporate an enforced suicide policy into American battle strategy,
but de facto that is what Roosevelt DID; treachery.

At least the Japs overtly KNEW what thay were doing,
and from what I 've heard (allegedly) thay were not actually ordered
to join the Kamakasies; that was (allegedly) voluntary.

It says a lot about American bravery, that our guys took it in stride,
and accepted the situation, when thay actually found out about it by contact with the Tigers.

I do not believe that Roosevelt's War Dept. mentioned it,
when thay sent the bad news home to American mothers;
I doubt that thay told them that thay used American Armor as suicide troops,
with quick replacements, to bleed the nazis by slow attrition.





David

As George has already pointed out, the Sherman was equal to the task of dealing with the PZKW IIIs and IVs. By the time the Tiger and it's superiority were known, we were already committed, and that commitment was not just to England, it was to the Soviet Union, and to the people of occupied Europe. The Pershing was in the pipeline, and there was not only no reason to delay, there were very many good reasons to proceed with the invasion as rapidly as possible. Holding off until the Pershing was ready would basically have condemned nearly all of western Europe to being Soviet satellites, and that was something about which neither Churchill nor FDR had any illusions.

You're making too much of a single television program which either itself did not understand the mathmatics of the situation, or which did not explain it well enough for you to understand it. Both Patton and Hodges rolled over the German defenses like a pair of run-away freight trains. In most armored engagements, the Germans were so badly outnumbered that they got a handful of Shermans and tank destroyers before they were swamped and either destroyed or had to get the hell out of there fast. The Tiger and the Panther had to be trucked to the battlefield on railway cars, because they'd have eaten up their own tracks before they were even engaged. They were so high maintenance that if they were pulled out of the battle, it was necessary to withdraw them a hundred kilometers or more in order to safely put them in a condition to fight again. Hodges and Patton were eating up the map so fast that in initial engagements, tanks withdrawn for maintenance were overrun by the Americans before the Germans could put them back in the battle. They pulled them farther and farther back with each engagement. They only dared travel at night or in a heavy overcast because the Allies owned the skies. They were operating on ersatz fuel, and every other consideration, civilian and military, was subordinated to that. The Germans would have starved to death in 1945 if the Allies had not fed them, because the entire 1944 potato harvest had been seized to make alcohol fuel for the tanks and the fighter aircraft.

Left wing professors used to prattle on in the 1960s and -70s about how the Germans reached their peak of production after the Allies reached their bombing peak. But that ignores two crucial factors. The first was that when Ike got his transportation plan approved, the bombers were sent to attack physical communications systems in Germany and France. By the time the bombers were released to go after Germany and Austria again, there were more bombers (and escort fighters) than there were targets. The other thing that it ignores is that it doesn't do you a hell of a lot of good to have a high level of production if you can't get what you produce to the people who need it. The transportataion plan pretty well assured that they couldn't deliver the goods.

The only thing that slowed down Hodges and Patton was that we couldn't get supplies to them as fast as they burned them up. The Germans didn't slow down the American advance, the inadequacies of the Red Ball express did. Every bullet, every can of gasoline, everybox of rations had to come clear across France from the invasion beaches because we had been unable to secure a large port facility in a condition to serve our needs. That's why the whiny jackass Montgomery wheedled Ike to get the wherewithal for his Market-Garden disaster. And even that didn't stop Hodges and Patton, it just slowed them down. It's a cinch that the Germans weren't holding them back.

You need to get a sense of proportion here. When you're fighting a war, you work with what you have at hand, you don't sit around waiting for something better to come along. The Germans produced a few thousand Tigers and Panthers; we produced more than 50,000 Shermans. Yeah, Tigers were better than Shermans--when they could get enough of them into the fight, if the railroads hadn't been blown to hell the day before, if they had enough spare parts to keep them running, if they had enough fuel to keep them running, and if they weren't caught in a tsunami of Shermans the first time they rolled up to the firing line.

The Germans produced almost 6,000 PZKW IIIs, and almost 9,000 PZKW IVs--the Shermans made them useless to the Germans. The few thousand Tigers and Panthers were all they had that could deal with Shermans, and they had to use a lot of them to deal with the truly superior Soviet tanks. Get some perspective, David, and stop judging events by your political prejudices.

By the way, soldiers in combat have pretty realistic attitudes, if they survive. The Germans has two sayings which say it all about the numerical disadvantages under which they fought. The first was about air power, they would say: "If you see a black plane, it's the Tommies (the Brits), if you see a white plane, it's the Amis (the Americans). If you don't see any planes at all, it's the Luftwaffe." The other had to do with the mathmatics of the armored war. They said: "A Tiger tank can take out ten Shermans before they can get it--and the Amis always have at least eleven." They understood the numbers.

The United States Army won about three out of four armored engagements with the Germans. They simply overwhelmed them.

Yes; that was clever.



Yes; Roosevelt chose to fight a labor-intensive war, qua engagements of battle tanks.
It worked because America was so rich in numbers of available personnel.
Hence, my observation of the "human wave" tactic.
From Washington, Roosevelt fought suicidal warfare, like the Japs. It worked.
In earlier wars, thay called that "cannon fodder" for the victims.
Unlike the Japs (whose Kamakasies at least ostensibly were volunteers)
American citizens were drafted into the Army
and then into the Armor. So far as I 've ever heard,
no one ever refused to proceed in the Armor
after he discovered the very stark differences
between the Shermen and the Tigers,
as to armor and as to artillery power.
Roosevelt relied on their personal bravery
and willingness to take chances, optimistically hoping for the best.

Roosevelt required conscripted American citizens (in effect) to play Russian Roulette.



Thay did.





David

There's really no point in continuing this discussion. I point out the numerical realities, and you start your response: "Yes; Roosevelt chose to fight a labor-intensive war, qua engagements of battle tanks." That is so divorced from the reality of what a President does as commander in chief, and is so obviously based on your unreasoning hatred of FDR, that i see no value in continuing to discuss this with you. Really, you need to learn to see the world without the distortion of your political prejudices.

I tend to agree.
At this point, I 've fully expressed my point of vu.

Unless I think of something else that I deem
worthy of posting, I 'll leave it at that
except to admit that Roosevelt did a lot of good,
very important good, qua both the nazis and the Japs in WWII,
other than in regard to armor.





David

That pretty much sums it up.
Once we got past the hedge rows, the Shermans were pretty much ideally suited to the situation.
The lack of realistic info on the hedgerows was the real problem early on.

Well, when the Shermen met the Tigers,
I don 't believe that " ideally suited " was how our guys on the ground described it.





David

You mean when the Shermans overtook the Tigers, don't you?

Yeah, when thay met and the Americans discovered that thay might as well be on bicycles,
for all the good the "armor" did them and that their 75mm cannon
on the Shermen was as good as throwing rocks at the Tigers.





David

You're getting farther from the truth all the time.
The odds against the Tigers were 50 to 1, such engagements were rare and meant the death of the Tiger crew as well. We never placed our eggs in one basket either, the Jabos did the job against German armor very effectively.

At any rate, the Pershing wasn't available until the very end of the war, the fact is, the American army had Zero heavy tanks at the time of our involvement in WWII.
Just what do you propose had been done? Send our troops without armored support? Ask the Germans to wait while we finished development of some heavy armor? Hey guys, we got no modern tanks so could you hang on a minute while we design and build some?

Let's see, hmm, didn't the guys who opted for the heavier, more expensive, less mobile, high maintenance, resource hogging, over engineered tank lose the war?

I still haven't seen you answer my question the first time I asked, what would you have chosen, from the available options, to do?
If you're going to convict Roosevelt on his decision, you should at least tell us what you think should have been done, in detail.

Develop the Pershing tanks faster,
on an emergency basis, even if that meant delaying D Day somewhat.

That 's better than having an American suicide corps, like the Japs.

The delays to the production of the Pershing were primarily due to opposition by the army ground forces who felt that speed and manuverability were preferable to armament.
In other words, the Army wanted the Sherman because it better suited thier tactics.