mekender wrote:Keep in mind that real BBs had multiple occasions where hundreds and hundreds of shells were fired without a hit... I think there are what, 2 or 3 actual cases where a BB was legitimately responsible for sinking an enemy ship in WWII. More often, they were credited with helping to sink an already damaged and abandoned allied ship.
What occasions? In WW2, the only direct, decisive battleship-vs-battleship fight I know of was Washington vs Kirishima. That was a night night battle, too.
I don't play computer games, but since you asked.
WWII Battleship on Battleship engagements:
1 Battle of Mers-el-Kébir (uneven as the Vichy were at anchor)
2 Battle of Calabria (Italian vs Brits)
3 Battle of Dakar (Vichy vs Brits again)
4 Battle of the Denmark Strait (Bismark and Hipper vs Prince of Wales and Hood)
5 Bismark sinking (Bismark vs George V, Rodney, et al)
6 2nd Battle of Guadalcanal (Battleships available on both sides but no direct surface action between them, lots of BB vs cruiser action)
7 Battle of the North Cape (Scharnhorst is sunk by Duke of York)
8 Battle of Surigao Strait (Japanese force with battleships Yamashiro and Fusō and 3 heavy cruiser sunk by Oldendorf's 6 battleship force - all of which were Pearl Harbor survivors)
Battle of Surigao Strait
Well, those'll have to be targets for my reading list.
Cobar wrote:I don't know how much of it is true or just war stories, but I heard something about one of the heavy German tanks during WWII that was really great, except it was really slow, got stuck a lot, and, was really just too complicated and expensive for them to field many of.
That'd be pretty much anything bigger than a Panzer IV. The German heavies sucked.
They should have made nothing but upgraded Panzer IVs. The Panther was ok, but still had issues, while the tiger and king tiger tanks were a waste. If they really wanted another tank they should have made an enlarged Mk IV with properly sloping front armor and a better gun, but that's about it.
HTRN wrote:I still say the best tank of WW2 is still the Centurion.
Can you imagine what the armor battles in Europe would have been like if the US had them instead of Shermans?
Development of the Centurion started in 1943 so unless the Brits developed a time machine to go with the new tank it would not be ready in time for Normandy.
A good question is what if in say 1940 the US immediately gone for the "Universal" tank concept and had a ton of 90mm armed medium tanks. Other possible things the could have done would be to skip the 75mm gun and gone straight to the 76mm and made allot more 76 Jumbos.
Last edited by Kommander on Mon Aug 03, 2015 2:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
HTRN wrote:I still say the best tank of WW2 is still the Centurion.
Can you imagine what the armor battles in Europe would have been like if the US had them instead of Shermans?
The US Shermans were effective against the tanks they were generally likely to meet.
Compared to the Tiger, Tiger II, and Panther, the Sherman had superior tactical and strategic mobility, reliability, and were far easier to mass produce. They also had a stabilized gun.
The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
Kommander wrote:
A good question is what if in say 1940 the US immediately gone for the "Universal" tank concept and had a ton of 90mm armed medium tanks. Other possible things the could have done would be to skip the 75mm gun and gone straight to the 76mm and made allot more 76 Jumbos.
Really interesting idea on the 90mm gun on a Sherman chassis. I don't know about the availability of the HVAP ammo that early, but if it was developed, the U.S. would be really ruling the armor scene. Plus, far less teenage whiners about how awful the Sherman was, and how wonderful German and Russian tanks were.
IIRC, in testing the 90mm wasn't that much better than the 76mm, plus like the 17-pounder, it was a bit on the large side for a Sherman turret. Like, it was enough of an improvement that it'd be worth mounting it on a bigger tank, but as far as the Sherman was concerned, the 76mm M1 was good enough without screwing up the layout of the tank. The Firefly was apparently very awkward for the gunner.
Really, all that was really needed was for there to be 76mm HVAP ammo readily available in Normandy. There could've been, but there wasn't a need seen for it because the regular 75mm Shermans had been doing just fine everywhere else.
HTRN wrote:I still say the best tank of WW2 is still the Centurion.
Can you imagine what the armor battles in Europe would have been like if the US had them instead of Shermans?
The first Centurion prototypes didn't make it to continental Europe until a month after the war ended. It first saw combat in Korea in 1950.
As for the Sherman, the biggest reason it sucked at tank-on-tank fights was the it was never designed to do that. After the Louisiana and Carolina Maneuvers in 1940 an 1941, Big Army, in the person of Leslie McNair, decided that tank destroyers were adequate for killing enemy tanks, and that American tanks should be built for exploitation and pursuit (after the infantry and artillery had blasted through the enemy's MLR.) Issues with the Sherman's inadequacies were known as early as 1943, but other issues, of higher importance, kept overshadowing it. It didn't come to Eisenhower's attention until I think fall or winter of 1944-45. (For more on this see David Johnson, Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers.
