Thank you so much! I appreciate your input.
How did Afrika Korp get to Africa?
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I am pretty sure who ever dropped a tank by accident got a firing squad for treason.
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Interesting - I just noticed…
On the top photo it appears that they shipped the tiger tank separate from it’s turret? Looks like a Tiger chassis to me?
I wonder if it was a weight or just plain awkward shape issue?
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Good eyes, Garg. (I use my phone amd my eyesight is atrocious.) That is definitely a Tiger chassis . Must have been a weight issue.
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It could be replacement parts or maybe Germany used the Tiger body for something else like a bulldozer?
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Tiger tanks were loaded straight from manufactoring onto Railway.
They had a separate pair of tracks for this reason. Then arrived in Italy where they were shipped right to Tunesia.The Tiger you see in the pic has a dummy plate mounted and the tubes had been removed wich they had for the Desert to keep the Air Filter clean.
Also the Tigers for Africa were indeed lighter then those who served at the Ostfont.A lot of those shipped Tigers didn’t even see any action since they broke down shortly after the shipping due to some issues they had to begin with.
The tank was “untermotorisiert” wich means he would def. need a more powerful engine.
A main issue for all bigger german tanks.At this time Germany did not have mobil repairstations and troops dir the job.
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Thanks AetV.
It is funny, as I never imagined that pic was a late war one. Was only the Tiger that proves it is. U thought it was probably pre Tobruk. Glad Garg spotted my best (tank) friend! -
@aequitas:
A lot of those shipped Tigers didn’t even see any action since they broke down shortly after the shipping due to some issues they had to begin with.
And on a related point: German tanks, especially in the second half of the war, were hampered by vicious circle related to their design and production. Tanks like the Panther and the Tiger were formidable weapons, but they were mechanically complex; this made them difficult to produce (compared to the much less finicky T-34 and Sherman), and one of the side-effects of these manufacturing difficulties was that, compared to the Americans in particular, the Germans tended to allocate less of their production capacity to the manufacturing of spare parts for tanks rather than to complete tanks. As a result, it wasn’t uncommon for German armoured units to abandon broken-down tanks that could have been fixed and returned to combat if spare parts had been available. The Americans, by contrast, usually had plenty of tank spare parts available for maintenance and repair. And what compounded the problem for the Germans was that the complexity of their tanks not only caused manufacturing difficulties, it also gave their tanks a greater propensity to break down in the first place. The Tiger, moreover, had the additional problem of being extremely heavy, and this placed an enormous strain on its tracks, its running gear and its suspension, which likewise caused a maintenance burden; the lighter Panther didn’t have that problem to the same extent, though like all tanks it needed lots of maintenance attention.
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Man - looking at those rickety boats, sketchy cranes, and the (wooden?) decks; it’s a wonder that any personnel or equipment made it across the Mediterranean at all. Let alone whilst it was being shot at by the Allies.
I would go to jail if I told people on site to operate in the way that these photos appear.
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It should also be noted a big problem for Germany that USSR and US didn’t have was the fact that Germany didn’t use Diesel for their tanks, they ran off unleaded gas.
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I knew they unloaded them since they were in theatre in the org chart. Those are PzIIIs on the crane, the Tiger is heavier, could also be a bergestiger or ARV etc. Some of the African ports would have very rudimentary methods of getting close to the unloading area, I suppose that 1-2 just fell in the ocean for some collector to retrieve in the 21st century.
To second CWO Marc’s point, the Tiger is a defectively designed tank–it has too many flat 90 degree surfaces that don’t take advantage of sloped armor. The Russians consistently led in these tank-design innovations in both manufacture and application.
There is a myth that the Germans were the most advanced, technologically, when in reality their most useful advance was in the USE of armor on the battlefield.
The book I’m reading now (Tank Tactics, Stackpole) argues that of the Western Allies, only Canada took the correct lessons away from the use of tanks in WW1 and that even after Normandy and the early cold war, only the Russians had internalized the german Schwerpunkt method of massed attacks and decisive action. The US and UK continued to apply misguided lessons (tank destroyers, use of strategic bombers to support armor attacks, ineffective massing and coordination) even into the 60s and 70s that meant that they would have lost the conventional war over the Fulda Gap and would have required the Western Allies to use nuclear weapons to stop the Soviets, who had correctly learned the German mobility tactics and strategy, and beaten them with it.
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Good points. German armour was technologically sophisticated in some respects, but not in others. To give just two examples, both related to the T-34, it featured a Christie-type torsion-bar suspension, which gave superior mobility, and it had a diesel engine, which had some benefits in terms of crew survivability because diesel fuel (unlike gasoline) burns but doesn’t explode when hit by an enemy anti-tank shell. Germany, for all its technical prowess, had not yet developed a diesel engine powerul enough to power a tank, so this element of the T-34 was quite a shock to the Wehrmacht (as were other features, like the sloped armour mentioned by taamvan). And as taamvan also mentioned, the T-34 was designed for ease of manufacture, which proved to be another crucial advantage.
Regarding battlefield doctrine, the May/June 1940 campaign is an excellent illustration of taamvan’s points about faulty Allied disposition of armour (dispersed in an infantry-support role) versus German concentration at a decisive location (the Ardennes). Regarding that campaign, Kenneth Macksey has argued that another German advantage was something very modern-sounding: electronics (in reference to the fact that German armoured forces made significant use of radio to coordinate their actions).
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@CWO:
… another German advantage was something very modern-sounding: electronics (in reference to the fact that German armoured forces made significant use of radio to coordinate their actions).
This is why Syrians and Iraqi’s are banned from using Teamspeak. Teamspeak is a voice chat service my gaming group has used online… on occasion members or friends/visitors from certain areas of the globe are regionally barred from using it because it has been deployed on the real life battlefield…
Voice chat is a big deal!
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I don’t buy the idea that USSR took notes from German armor and tried to rely against NATO. NATO always put heavy strength into aircraft because the USSR couldn’t match technology against the west so NATO knew it would have air supremacy over USSR and the USSR traditionally ran numbers over firepower to destroy their enemy. Something like it took NATO up to the 80’s to finally have a combined number strength to match USSR armored numbers before they fell. Reason why the 3rd world continues to buy USSR tanks because they are cheap and they are everywhere so upkeep is easy as hell.
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Believe it or not, but the USSR had sometimes better stuff then the Nato.
Don’t underestimate the russians.
And they still have.What the Wehrmcht needed was a tank wich was able and fitted for:
Most terrains - wide tracks
Cheap to build - outproducing the enemy
A solid and one caliber only gun - a 7.5cm would have done the job
Running on a strong engine - Maybach 12 pistons engine 700 HP
Better transmission - helical teeth instead of vertical onesYou prob. get the idea…
But this would only solve one of many problems. -
I don’t underestimate Russian Armed Forces or the Red Army in the day however I am a realist and I can see BS when I see it. Obviously I can’t say USSR is weak because they beat the US until the 60’s when it came to missile and jet technology when it came to nuclear weapons. By the time USSR could drop a nuke from a jet, we still had problems dropping it from strategic bombers.
However USSR never had great tanks against the west and used numbers to overwhelm NATO firepower. One of the reasons why Warsaw Pact was created was to shield USSR against western aggression because they know that NATO would have great initiative over them but then again you can say that France and UK did the same with Germany and Turkey to shield them against USSR.
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The Nato was created to prevent Russia from having and using a harbour anywhere near the Atlantic.
That was the only purpose, same as the Berlin wall.The Warsaw pact was the opposite.
At that time manpower and tanks were useless because every big nation needed to make new plans for an upcoming 3rd World War and the way it would be fought; because the knew it would be fought way different then WW I and II combined.Back to topic!
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I once believed in the Conventional superiority of NATO, but its conceptual strategies (including multinational forces, aluminum AFVs, no easy tack on kit based reactive armor, quality over quantity, tactical use of armor, using armor at all to stop a massed armor invasion, trying to ship 30-40 divisions across the atlantic during a war…) are all failures.
The Euromissiles crisis was my undergrad thesis, the basic outline of this is that by 1977 or so the bright guys in the US govt. all realized that nukes were not a fallback plan, but THE plan, because trying to stop 10000 tanks riding over tank country without having 10000 active tanks and helicopters of your own isn’t workable (unless you tac nuke them), and in that era, the USA didn’t keep more than a modest proportion of its active, ready units in Germany (et al), but in the DMZ, Japan, and especially, the US, where they are normally marshaled and organized!)
There is a tremendous myth of Western Allied military strength, because it has never been tested against a true adversary (like Germany, or the Soviets) We defeated the remnants of Nazi Germany, but the USSR defeated it, period.
USSR learned the schwerpunkt (blitz) method from it being used to slaughter them for 3 years
USSR under pressure generated a finer engineering/production regime than could possibly have been expected from the Tsarist era’s myth of Russian incompetence and graft.
USSR had political unity until it ran to failure whereas NATO as a confederacy was a train wreck from 1965 on.USA came to rely more and more upon technologies that have limited applications in limited war (nukes) and limited application (attack helicopters vs MANPADS, expensive stealth aircraft that cannot be mass produced) in unlimited (total) wars.
Ok, back to topic—where is the Wehrmacht issued Sun Screen?? SpF what?
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I once believed in the Conventional superiority of NATO, but its conceptual strategies (including multinational forces, aluminum AFVs, no easy tack on kit based reactive armor, quality over quantity, tactical use of armor, using armor at all to stop a massed armor invasion, trying to ship 30-40 divisions across the atlantic during a war…) are all failures.
I’ve also read that NATO’s strategy for dealing with a Warsaw Pact armoured invasion of Western Europe (launched from then-East Germany into then-West Germany) was partially dictated by political considerations which undermined its military effectiveness. Conventional wisdom holds that the correct non-nuclear strategy for dealing with a massive armoured invasion is a defense in depth which gradually wears down the invading forces. The problem with such a defense is that, if it were applied to the scenario just mentioned, much of West Germany would be overrun before NATO could halt the Warsaw Pact advance. This prospect was understandably unacceptable to the West German government, so NATO relied instead on a concept of “forward defense”, with much of NATO’s forces concentrated close to the border with East Germany. This doctrine, however, had two major problems. First, this kind of piecrust defense wouldn’t have worked: if the Warsaw Pact had concentrated the bulk of its forces at one or two key points of the piecrust and had used all of that concentrated weight to effect a breakthrough, there would have been nothing behind the front line to stop them once they had punched their way through it. Second, from the Soviet perspective, this “forward defense” concept looked nothing like a defensive stance; instead, it looked like a set-up for a NATO invasion of Eastern Europe, so it contributed to raising tensions between the two sides.
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@CWO:
I once believed in the Conventional superiority of NATO, but its conceptual strategies (including multinational forces, aluminum AFVs, no easy tack on kit based reactive armor, quality over quantity, tactical use of armor, using armor at all to stop a massed armor invasion, trying to ship 30-40 divisions across the atlantic during a war…) are all failures.
I’ve also read that NATO’s strategy for dealing with a Warsaw Pact armoured invasion of Western Europe (launched from then-East Germany into then-West Germany) was partially dictated by political considerations which undermined its military effectiveness. Conventional wisdom holds that the correct non-nuclear strategy for dealing with a massive armoured invasion is a defense in depth which gradually wears down the invading forces. The problem with such a defense is that, if it were applied to the scenario just mentioned, much of West Germany would be overrun before NATO could halt the Warsaw Pact advance. This prospect was understandably unacceptable to the West German government, so NATO relied instead on a concept of “forward defense”, with much of NATO’s forces concentrated close to the border with East Germany. This doctrine, however, had two major problems. First, this kind of piecrust defense wouldn’t have worked: if the Warsaw Pact had concentrated the bulk of its forces at one or two key points of the piecrust and had used all of that concentrated weight to effect a breakthrough, there would have been nothing behind the front line to stop them once they had punched their way through it. Second, from the Soviet perspective, this “forward defense” concept looked nothing like a defensive stance; instead, it looked like a set-up for a NATO invasion of Eastern Europe, so it contributed to raising tensions between the two sides.
This is what I love about strategy; and why in my opinion political considerations can trump tactical requirements - and rightly so.
By positioning forces in a “forward” stance - maybe the soviets would then readjust their own forces into a depth defense; and their own depth defense requirements become a speedbump in the event of their invasion of the rest of Europe. MAYBE that was the plan all along? and maybe it worked!
Further, it can be strongly argued that NATO was better served by the pie-crust in the big picture. The invasion didn’t come, and the political ramifications of pissing everyone off in west germany, or making them feeling so alienated by the allies who wouldn’t really be defending them, but rather, using them as a human shield to stop the Russians before France were paramount.
I could see it both ways.
Imagine if NATO did the depth defense, only for the west germans to hear 40+years of soviet propaganda that they were just a puppet; maybe the people there would start to align with the soviets? (unlikely but not impossible!)
Quite the A&A gamble to judge and make!
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Well remember with German Reunification, everyone in NATO and Warsaw Pact (ironically) opposed it except US and Germany. That tells you right there that West Germany going Communist wouldn’t happen unless they fell to the iron boot.
In the early days of NATO, West Germany made up half of NATO totally divisions. That says A LOT about a country that is cut into half and still makes up half the west totally EMS against the Soviets.
Back to Afrika Korp:
I am surprised that history doesn’t really talk about how Germany got to Africa. It seems like suddenly they were there and I never questioned it until now.
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