What went wrong?

>>31203210
Lack of training and experienced tankers late into the war.

>inb4 they broke down every 10 km

>>31203210
Regardless of how good it was, it's 1 gun for the price of 3 StuGs (3 guns).
If you're losing you play economical instead of going to overkill units.

>>31203312
Stug is an infantry assault gun. 3 Stugs can't fill the role of even 1 decent medium tank.

>>31203553
stugs had the highest # of tank kills overall for the germans in ww2.

>>31203210

It can't effectively defend itself against airpower, artillery, or infantry.

>>31203553
>3 Stugs can't fill the role of even 1 decent medium tank.

Good thing they werent going up against medium tanks then.

>Le Sherman meme

>>31203690
But what the germans needed were assault guns, not medium tanks. And they needed heavy tanks even less.

>>31203210
Needs a partial traverse turret.

Because that would sexually amuse me.

Allied Air power

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>>31203210

>>31203210

That's a panther right?

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>>31203210
Not enough Otto Cariuses to man all of them. Don't put 13 year olds in command of your superheavy tank destroyers.

It's just fucking pointless

At no point ever did the tiger II need a bigger gun. What it did need was less weight.

Soo the point of a retardedly big gun, and making the tank even heavier just didn't serve a purpose

>>31204693
nah that's a famas

>>31203210
it was fucking awesome only if they had thousands of it and not half a dozen and havve it at the beginning of the war not the end we would all speak german now.

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>>31204894

>>31203690
to be fair that's probably because they were one of Germany's most produced AFVs

>>31204906
really dude the mechanical problems that plagued the series were only a real problem when the germans had to fall back, while they advanced their lines they could easily recover and repair (or refuel) the jt-s. they were tough monsters when operational.

also in a few years the germans would have fixed the under-powered engine and other mechanical issues i'm sure. it was rushed production and material shortage at the end of war that most likely caused all of them btw.

also this was a problem: >>31204667

>>31203312
>1 gun for the price of 3 StuGs (3 guns)
yeah stug could kill a late war tank from what 500-700 meters? around that.
this guy could do it from 4-5000 meters.

9 stug could never kill 25 allied tanks face to face but 3 jt did easily.

so the number of guns means jack shit.

>>31205089
>Muh range

You would not hit a moving tank at 5000 meters. That shit is hard to achive even with todays tech. And very few tank engagements happened at ranges over 1000 meters.

Sure the JT was a beast at long range tank sniping but that rarly happens in a battle.

>>31205089
>number of guns means jack shit
>the sheer number of Shermans and T-34s didn't help win the war.

Tactical superiority means little. Logistics are everything.

>>31205089
...i dont think it works like that. StuGs are great because they can be where they have to be. They don't guzzle fuel like mad (I think the king tiger could go about 260 meters per liter of gas). They are also smaller an easier to conceal. And no it doesn't have the crazy 10 inch front armor or the fuckhueg 128mm gun, but the StuGs PaK 40 was enough for Shermans up to about 800m.

And if you fed the gun newer APCR ammunition it could even hurt IS tanks at shorter ranges

The StuG was good, because it was just good enough

>>31205212

> I think the king tiger could go about 260 meters per liter of gas

1 liter every 200 meters on road

for reference

M4 is 1 liter per 500 meters on road
T-34/85 is 1 liter per 550 meters on road

>>31203210
What went wrong?

It would have been great if armored warfare was focused on 2 corners of the AFV triangle (firepower and protection) but once people realized the third corner, mobility, was extremely important, it became obsolete. Simply put, you need a tank that can move.

Otherwise your tank becomes a pillbox that can move a little. Which is ironic, because the Germans pioneered the idea of highly mobile armored warfare, something their heavy tank designs really contradicted.

>>31204970

I love the Nazi's and have been called a Wehraboo many a time.

But you're fucking dillusional, m9

>>31205212
In a way the StuG is like the U-Boot: Germany didn't appreciate it at the time, but if they concentrated on them and not their more complex and expensive siblings, they would have been better off?

>>31203553
The Jagdtiger is a medium tank now?

>>31205089
Range in a direct fire weapon only matters if you have a line of sight to a target that distant. We're not fighting in some salt flats.

>>31206193
well, they certainly didn't need wither king tigers or jagdtigers...

also, subs got shafted pretty badly by american and british destroyers and air power later in the war, while StuGs remained useful until the last day

materials and crew

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>>31203210
It's not the Jagdpanther.

>>31206358
>also, subs got shafted pretty badly by american and british destroyers and air power later in the war

Alan Turing got a good kick in as well.

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Thats not a towed at gun.

>>31206193
>concentrating on u-boats

Well I wouldn't go that far m8, u-boats weren't very effective after 1942.

>>31204667
Did fighter bombers/strike fighters actually do meaningful damage against armour? Of course they can damage the supply chain and supporting units but even getting a mobility kill on a heavy tank doesn't seem that easy. Rockets and bombs were inaccurate as hell and a very close hit is required when dealing with heavy armour, which is the reason why post war everyone went for cluster munitions or precision munitions vs armour

>>31203210
Not enough of'em.

>>31206744
yeah, thing is, they had a fuckload of them. the skies were filled with bad weather

>>31206744
They did. Germans called them Jabos. After Normandy they gave the panzers a hard time.

>>31206744
Falasie Gap is a prime example of the damage strike fighters can do on armor.
>Typhoons everywhere

>>31206744
The point is not killing anything. It's wrecking the enemy's freedom of movement. You see this in Afghanistan right now for example. For the whole war the Taliban have held secure areas in the country. At any point Americans could go in and secure them--the Taliban would not win. But they were rooted enough that the whole process would be really obnoxious; precisely calculated so that it was exactly obnoxious enough to not be seriously considered.

The same with our interdiction campaign--at any point the Germans could say fuck it and just drive willy-nilly. There was no way to stop all of them. But people would die in the process, it wasn't worth it, it was more efficient to drive at night. We would then do something to force them to drive in the day, like almost surrounding them, and the ground troops could sit back and watch the Germans pay the blood toll. The Falaise Gap was already mentioned.

>>31206193
You do realized that U-boats had the highest casualty rate ever, right?

>>31206744
No. Ground BDAs revealed airpower claims to be almost completely fictitious.

However, they can certainly disrupt soft vehicles and supply lines

>>31203312
>>31203553
In addition to being far easier to produce, Stugs and PzIV were far more reliable; so even if production numbers were equal, a Stug would be far more likely to actually get to the battle.

>>31206744
you're fucked once your supply chain get wreck. you can't fight with no fuel, parts, ammo, and most importantly, food.

70 tons with less than 700hp

>>31203210
Volkssturm.

>>31206744
>Did fighter bombers/strike fighters actually do meaningful damage against armour?

Destroying supply lines and limiting fuel/spare parts/ammunition is very meaningful.

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>>31207030
>>31207876
>>31208124
>Jabos

That shit hanging from the frame of the truck is what's left of a German soldier after a Jabo attack.

>>31203210
Too large and heavy, had terrain issues and difficulty with bridges/low mobility.
Some didn't have adequate protection for the crew which left the tank vulnerable to infantry getting up close.
Poor reliability, prone to mechanical malfunctions which led to a high maintenance cost.
Fixed gun, gotta move the entire tank to traverse the gun horizontally.
Oversized gun, the 88 could handle the vast majority of things it was shooting at and a tank could carry more ammo for an 88 than a 128 giving it the ability to kill more targets before needing to be resupplied.
Costly to produce, never produced in substantial enough numbers.

The design sacrifices its mobility, fuel efficiency, and advantage of sheer numbers for heavy armor and an overkill gun. For a country strapped for resources and massively outnumbered that kind of design is not a worthwhile tradeoff.

>>31203553
Stugs stopped being assault guns the moment they got the long 75mm gun.
To support the Infantry they built StuH

>>31207876
Falaise was mostly artillery though. The whole point of the Polish unit holding the hill was to call in artillery fire on moving columns.
Not saying aircraft didn't do a lot of damage too, but the majority of movement along the road was soft skinned vehicles, horses and walking men, not armor. Most of the armor was simply abandoned back at the actual fighting.

>>31206744
>meaningful damage against armor
Directly or indirectly?
Directly, absolutely no sources put ground attack aircraft as a meaningful threat. What the attacking side often called a "decisive and powerful strike by dozens of aircraft destroying dozens if not hundreds of tanks" was reported by the other side as "light bombing, no to few losses, mostly repairable."
It was just too hard to directly hit vehicles while traveling hundreds of miles per hour with dumb munitions. But machine guns could perforate a truck and the people driving them pretty well, and the morale impact of being in a tank and knowing that if he misses you as he most likely will, you'll be perfectly fine, but if he hits you burn to death in your own tank.
That's a pretty big "if" and a lot of tankers would just bail if they saw attack planes coming, go hop in a ditch and then climb back into their tanks afterwards.

You see a lot of German armor hiding in woods and towns during the day to limit these air attacks. Even if they never claimed, well, claims that were afterwards credited as kills I mean, they claimed a massive amount of unsubstantiated tank kills in all air forces throughout the war, but yes even if ground attack planes never destroyed that many tanks, they still had a chance to. Any losses, especially for the dire straights the Germans were in, would have been disastrous, and there was almost no way for them to respond to these attacks on their own. Who cares if you only have a 1% chance to accomplish something if he has a 0% chance to stop you from trying? Just try a thousand times, you'll succeed eventually.