What are the best and worst tanks of WWII in each of these categories?

oh geez, here we go

Camel vs Tank

>Japanese
You mean Italian
Japs had some good designs for the task that they were made for (infantry support). You're not going to have any big tank vs tank battles in South East Asian jungle.
Italian tanks on the other hand were useless in all roles and were being made fun of by both the Axis and Allied soldiers.

>Italian tanks on the other hand were useless in all roles and were being made fun of by both the Axis and Allied soldiers.

Daily reminder Rommel was never supposed to leave Europe and the Afrika Korps was never even supposed to fucking exist but they had to intervene because Italy can't do ONE FUCKING THING RIGHT

>Japs had some good designs

I met an Afrika Korps member back in the 80's.
He told me that Italian units would ask to borrow German tanks for their individual operations (patrols, etc.)

Some tanks were totally useless like a super heavy T-35 or Char 2C

Some were shitty like Most tanks were atleast decent or useful is a more proper term. The allied medium tanks T-34/Sherman/Cromwell were all excellent as well as the German Panther and Panzer IV.

>you will never make a stunning jungle flanking maneuver and surround arrogant british imperialists

just kill me now

Your post is pretty good, although technically, a Stug isn't a tank, it's a self propelled gun.

camel
>cute
>can eat it in an emergency
>can cut it open and crawl inside it for warmth in an emergency
>icebreaker with ladies
>runs on water

tank
>made of useless inedible metal
>runs on volatile gasoline
>ladies are turned off by an autist in a tank
>has no face and is thus repellent
>will cook you alive if penetrated by gunfire

how can tanks even compete?

The best is a throwup between the T-34, M4 Sherman and the Panzer 4. All three get top marks for reliability and maintenance, assuming a decent logistics chain.

Worst tanks are a tossup between Italian tanks and British Cruiser Tanks pre-Cromwell. Reminder that the Brits picked the fucking M3 LEE over their own Crusader and Covenater because the latter two kept breaking down. And the Lee was a shitty design. Japanese designs are a close second.

The most underrated tank was the Panzer III, especially the L/M variants.

Also keep in mind that allied tanks appeared more reliable because they had huge logistics supporting them, while the German logistics deteriorated into complete and utter shit by the end of the war. Not that tanks like the Panther didn't have problems, although in the Panther's case it was partially a result of no teething period and being rushed into combat.

Forgot muh pic. This was a Lee commander's experience in an M3 Lee.

>The best is a throwup between the T-34, M4 Sherman and the Panzer 4.
The Panzer IV was already getting obsolete by Barbarossa due to its shitty suspension design.
>And the Lee was a shitty design.
The Lee was by far the best tank in North Africa until Shermans arrived.

Point is, the Lee was the least shit in a pool full of pure shit.

Churchills, Matildas and Valentines were too slow and packed wimpy guns. Covaneters and Crusaders kept breaking down and were too hot. The Lee had a very tall silhouette, and a very awkward design. It was also the only tank that packed a 75mm gun and it didn't fall into pieces.

Yes, the Lee did well in the deserts of North Africa, but it was still a bad design overall.

>Cost-To-Effectiveness Ratio

M4 Sherman

>Reliability and Maintainability

M4 Sherman

>Technical Specs

M4 Sherman

>M4 Sherman

Yesssss. Believe what we taught you in school.

The Lee was superior than both Pz.III and Pz.IV too in terms of firepower and armor. Its mobility was actually quite decent and it was highly reliable. The only tank that was superior in North Africa was the Sherman.

School would have made you believe that the M4 Sherman was dogshit

Fact: If Hitler had a tank as good as the M4 Sherman, he would have won the war.

Fact: Hitler was a retard who meddled in the Nazi war economy which was a piece of disorganized shit to begin with and thus incapable of producing something as half decent and idiot proof as the Sherman or T34

T34 had both simplicity, good gun, good armour and was reliable

Was basically the turning point in armoured warfare on the Eastern Front

>thus incapable of producing something as half decent and idiot proof as the Sherman

This is absolutely true.

Actually it was very unreliable and a total piece of shit mechanically.

It had horrible crew ergonomics and spotty armor.

>Actually it was very unreliable and a total piece of shit mechanically.
Only the Mod.41 really. Most of the drivetrain problems were solved in Mod.42.
>It had horrible crew ergonomics
Which was why slav tankers had a height limit of ~5'8"
>spotty armor
Designed to specifications actually; only needed to be immune to 37mm and resistant to 50mm as those were the primary German guns of the day.

Soviets soldiers did mention that M4 was COMFY and the first T-34s weren't perfect.

But that's it.

Don't forget the shit radio, optics, crew efficiency, and situational awareness.

>Cost to effectiveness
Sherman/T-34

>Reliability
T-34

>Technical Specs
Panther

>T-34
>Reliable

Does being reliable for being totally unreliable not count?

>shit radio
Only the Germans had a radio in every tank in 1941/42.
>optics
>licensed Zeiss optics is bad

>crew efficiency
only Germans and American tanks had 3 member turret crews

>situational awareness
The commander/gunner has a rotating periscope and his gun sight. If anything, he had more situational awareness than other gunners at the time as Panthers didn't even have a secondary periscope for target acquisition for the gunner. Only German tanks had cupoula vision blocks in 1941 and T-34 Mod.42 did have commander's cupoula with vision blocks

Chi-Ha confirmed for best tank.

The Tiger II would have been amazing if it was faster and was more fuel efficient.

iremember.ru/en/memoirs/tankers/dmitriy-loza/

HERE'S YOUR CITATION FOR COMFY M4S.

>ItwasallHitlersfault.jpg
Herr General, bitte

sherminator

VERYU CORRECTU. WESTERN PIGGU TANKU ARR INFERRIOR IN EVEWY WAY.
t. WoT forums

>Implying American schools(and every fucking WW2 documentary on tv) think the Sherman was anything but a rolling coffin
My 10th grade history teacher thought that AN MG 42 could penetrate the Sherman's armor. People don't know shit about the Sherman so they assume it blew up when a slight breeze blew when in reality it could go toe to toe with Germany's best tanks and win.

Cost To Effectiveness Ration - isn't that what also covers Reliability adn Specs?

How do you measure cost in planned and/or wartime economies?

Personally, I really like the Tiger 2 with the Henschel turret, however I acknowledge that mechanically it was a piece of shit

>you will never liquidate bolshevik scum in this beast on the eastern front

Did German tanks really need to be coated with that anti-magnetic paint like the Tiger II in that image? Were magnetic mines really that much of a threat?

they used slave labor and had inferior access to quality materials

>you will never drop an armour piercing bomb on top of this barely moving target in your Il-10

>go toe to toe with Germany's best tanks and win

When a Sherman or Shermans came across a Tiger, they would retreat and radio for TDs to assist. That's not really toe to toe.

No. The Germans thought magnetic mines would become the next big thing and pre-emptively developed Zimmerit to counter them, but the Allies ended up never using them much. Zimmerit wasn't entirely useless, but it was unnecessary most of the time.

That is an excellent source. Thank you comrade.

[citation needed] and a preemptive rebuttal :

On December 21st, 1944 at 5 pm, 6 Tigers of 506th Heavy Panzer Battalion attacked the 7th Armored Division near St. Vith in the Ardennes. The Tigers started with Star Shells and followed up with armor piercing, destroying all of the defending American vehicles, including tanks. [1]

Also during the Battle of St. Vith, an M8 Greyhound of Troop B, 87th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron destroyed a Tiger I tank. [2]

Staff Sargent Lesniak encountered a Tiger in Nouville during the Battle of the Bulge. He quickly fired 3 75mm rounds that apparently did nothing, but the Tiger crew retreated, backing over a jeep and became disabled. The tankers destroyed the Tiger with thermite. [3]

On December 19th 1944, Donald Nichols engaged a Tiger at 600 yards with his 105mm Sherman, resulting in a confirmed kill. He was later engaged by a second Tiger, and retreated. He knew it was a Tiger from the distinctive sound that the 88 mm shells made [4]

Not all wins, but American tankers didn't run and look for help from TDs when they saw Tigers.

[1] Saddles and Sabers: Timeline of St. Vith

[2] The Battle at St. Vith, Belgium, 17-23 December 1944. US Army Armor School. Pg. 31

[3] Bastogne: The Story of the First Eight Days. Col. S. L. A. Marshall. Pg. 88

[4] The Tigers of Bastogne. Michael Collins. (which incidentally was not about Tiger tanks during the battle, but the 10th Armored Division, nicknamed "The Tigers.")

>How did you feel going up against the Tiger Tank

>- It was an extremely heavy vehicle. The Sherman could never defeat a Tiger with a frontal shot. We had to force the Tiger to expose its flank. If we were defending and the Germans were attacking, we had a special tactic. Two Shermans were designated for each Tiger. The first Sherman fired at the track and broke it. For a brief space of time the heavy vehicle still moved forward on one track, which caused it to turn. At this moment the second Sherman shot it in the side, trying to hit the fuel cell. This is how we did it. One German tank was defeated by two of ours, therefore the victory was credited to both crews. There is a story about this entitled "Hunting With Borzois" in my book.

So in conclusion, the Tiger was regarded as a very serious threat, but it certainly wasn't invincible and the Shermans certainly didn't go running just because 1 tiger was spotted.

Was the T-34 a meme tank?

No, but retarded Soviet armored doctrine, especially early in the war, robbed it of much of its potential usefulness.

What do you mean? I'm interested.

If you look at German tanks as pieces of engineering, for most of the war, ironically, especially when they were on the offensive, German tanks were vastly inferior to those of their adversaries.

What they had, however, was an extremely good set of systems for command and control, which allowed them to use their armor better. Sure, their tanks might not have had as good guns or armor, but if you can identify where their line is wavering, and get a battalion or two of tanks there, with commanders who have enough initiative and grasp of what's going on in the rest of the battle to exploit opportunities without having to be handheld all the time, that can mean a hell of a lot more than raw power.

The Soviet army's human element was pretty bad until late 1943. People weren't taking initiative, because that was a great way to get gulaged or shot. You didn't have good coordination between your tanks and your more mobile infantry elements, necessary in case your armored breakthrough ran into some anti-tank guns; hell, the soviets barely had any motorized infantry at all. And you can just forget about the notion of concentrating mechanized forces near a break and trying to exploit it: Even if that was part of the Soviet battle planning (and it usually wasn't, Deep battle doctrines might have been abandoned with Tucashevsky's purging on paper, but they were still influential, which mean stretching the Germans out and multi-axial pushes were often the orders of the day), it meant that tanks were usually spread out and trying to accomplish dozens of objectives instead of just a few, and the force would be dispersed too much.

None of that has anything to do with the engineering or design of the T-34. But it would affect performance, but you'd get similar issues if you waved a magic wand and replaced them all with PZIVs or Shermans or something.

T-34 - effective, fast, has good armament
T-34- can be assembled from two-three destroyed tanks
T-34

It seems like, going through history texts, every single good decision made on the Eastern front is prefaced with "At the insistence of Heinz Guderian"

What a bro

Why the fuck does no one remember him while the meme master Rommel gets all the attention?
Is it the hat?

Especially since Guderian was even more anti-Nazi than Rommel (arguably)

Guderian openly bickered with Hitler so much there's an entire section about it on his Wikipedia

>cost-to-effectiveness ratio

Best: sherman or t-34
Worst: probably panther or king tiger

>reliability

Best: Probably the Sherman. American tanks in particular were intentionally designed with reliability in mind, and they were able to mass produce replacement parts, and had plenty of well trained crews that could service them all. Other armored american fighting vehicles like a wolverine or hellcat might have been more reliable, but my money's on anything american.

Worst: Panther. 9 out of ten of them never made it to combat because they broke down.

>technical specs

You mean like armor thickness, penetration, range, etc.? If you had to go into combat one on one versus another tank, and it was in perfect mechanical order, and you had nothing else to consider but it's optimal design?

IS-3. Entered in at the very end of the war and only saw a tiny amount of combat against Japan when USSR declared war on them. So there will be people who say it doesn't really count as a WWII tank.

So barring that, I'd say a king tiger or an IS-2.

Bullshit.

The Germans lacked Fuel and Manpower more than anything else. Though retarded more generally, putting all their eggs in one basket with muh wunderwaffe was really the best they could do.

They couldn't afford to put their 0.2 liters of gas and 3.5 surviving actually-trained tankers in anything short of a maximum-cock-compensation wagon in 1944.

The comment was intended as a joke. A humorous parody of the constant: Hitler would have won if X.

But you are right. 100% right. Nothing that you said was incorrect. Every single syllable was a factual statement.

IS-2 was dogeshit

Completely wrong. You imply that Germans had more tanks than they had fuel or tankers for, and that's why they tried to build expensive tanks that they could still find drivers for. That is pretty much the complete opposite of history. Germans fought with severe shortage of equipment compared to their adversaries. German panzer divisions often had single digit numbers of tanks.

>Cost-To-Effectiveness ratio
Bob Semple. Just whack some corrugated iron on a tractor

>reliability
Bob Semple. NZ DIY shines through

>Technical specs
IMPENETRABLE CORRUGATED IRON. SIX GUNS NIGGA, COUNT EM

The Sherman was far and away the most reliable and easy to repair tank of the war.
The T-34 was easy enough to repair, but was in no way reliable. Shifting gears involved hitting it with a hammer after all, and most tanks drove off the factory with a spare transmission as it was expected to crap out within a week.

Which wasn't the biggest problem since front line tanks weren't expected to survive a week but anyways, in terms of cost to effectiveness I'd probably give it to the T-34. They were dirt cheap and didn't have to be shipped over an entire ocean to get to the fight.

Technical specs? In regards to what? Raw armor, biggest gun, most crew comfort, best speed, best vision?
There's a lot of factors at play here. On paper the Panther looks good for instance, but in practice it was a complete toss up. You have model 1 Panthers catching on fire on a slope because of faulty engine designs, and model 4 Panthers striping the transmission bare if they try to make a 30 degree turn at any significant speeds. And then there's the King Tiger which is officially a monster and in practice more are lost to breakdowns than enemy fire, and almost all were lost. IS-2 has a good armor layout and strong gun but probably the worst crew comfort of the war, and then there's the whole "three fuel tanks inside the crew compartment right next to all this ammo including the fuel tank on the front hull so if this tank is ever penetrated everyone inside burns to death and then the tank explodes killing anyone within 20 meters" aspect.

>Panther begins it's life as a t-34 knockoff with a 75mm gun
>20 tonnes later the first Panther runs off the production lines and shatters it's suspension because it's so goddamn heavy

Are you aware that allies saw tigers everywhere and most of the time it was poor pz IV.

>I will rebut these very specific accounts with muh misreporting meme!

It was not a meme. Just compare number of tigers destroyed with the ammout of tigers that fought on western front

If someone provides a specific account that is also sourced, and all you can say in rebuttal is that often people made mistakes, you shouldn't be surprised if you end up sounding 1. rather unconvincing and 2. like someone who can't keep his mouth shut when he doesn't know anything.

>best: Sherman, worst: Tiger
>best: Sherman, worst: KV1 and KV2
>best: Panther: worst: some italian or jap shit.

Best 88 with an experienced crew then the sherman with the ford radial becomes the tommy cooker

Rommel was handsome and didn't look like an evil emperor in his pictures.

Heinz Guderian looks like your typical Bond villain in every picture taken off him.

Yes, people are that simple.

my grandfather insisted he saw tigers leaving our town
i searched sources for it and it turned out no division with tigers ever operated here

eye witness worth nothing in these accounts, you just need to look up the area in the german war diary
im not the guy who you are replying to

>tommy cooker

The Sherman was one of the safest tanks of WW2. When they started wet storaging the ammo, it was a lot safer than any other tank it would meet.

Its only "safety issue" was using gasoline instead of diesel. This issue was shared with the germans and the brits who, also used gasoline engines instead of diesel for their tanks. Only the russians used diesel, but the advantage was lost in their poor ammo placement.

not a matter of looks like you imply but similar to your argument - the positive light in which rommel was painted, that is as a somewhat honorable and highly skilled opponent, was already born during the war itself in the british consciousness as the papers and politicians tried to put a somewhat positive spin on the lack of success in the MENA theater
he was basically a celebrity of sorts

>Cost-To-Effectiveness Ratio
Sherman or T34
>Reliability and Maintainability
Sherman or T34
>Technical Specs
Comet or T34-85

And an 88 would go straight through the turret armor well before the 75 came in to range

and an atomic bomb would kaboom the 88 before anyone could see it #rekt

too bad there were not nearly enough 88s to matter then.

Germany relied on PzIII and PzIV. Panthers and Tigers broke down too often to even matter. Meanwhile, the americans could support their infantry with Shermans, meeting mainly german infanty.

Also, a lot of the fighting on the western front was close quarters, in the bocage, and in the cities. The Firefly and Easy eight was perfectly capable of defeating Tigers in such terrain.

On the eastern front it would be more important to have better armored tanks, with larger guns.

>Panthers and Tigers broke down too often to even matter.

This meme needs to stop. Tigers were highly reliable and any issues with them came from Germany's strained logistical system, not the Tiger itself. Or running out of fuel.

The Panther DID have reliability issues but that was because the teething period was done in the field and it was rushed into combat. That's not a flaw in the tank, but a flaw in the use of the tank.

The Tiger was a Maintenance Queen, it was reliable, but only if it underwent constant maintenance. Requiring near constant mechanical work may as well be unreliable.
Panthers were very much a flawed design, its transmission issues were never fixed and its mechanical unreliability in the field was a fact of life. It being rushed out early was the main reason it was unreliable, but just because it only got a half a year of testing doesn't excuse that.

From what I've read, the Tiger wasn't a bigger maintenance queen than any other heavy tank. Heavy tanks by default will have much more stress on them than lighter tanks.

I will say that the Sherman was the shining example of a great, reliable tank. But if Shermans were being used by the Germans in 1944, they would have had massive reliability issues too just due to the nature of Germany's logistics.

>tfw when too embarrassed to tell your grandkids about the retarded-as-shit looking tank they made you drive in the war

Guy also translated everything the Brits had regarding armored doctrine and was a fan of Percy Hobart.

>they would retreat and radio for TDs to assist.

This is not how TDs were used.

>You imply that Germans had more tanks than they had fuel or tankers for

Not him but there are some examples of tanks held in reserve for the defense of strategically important German districts unable to be deployed for lack of fuel.

the fuck, how old are you

how were the panzer tanks?

>Its only "safety issue" was using gasoline instead of diesel.

Stopping crews from lap loading and stowing shells on the floor did more to prevent cook-offs than fuel and even wet stowage.