Which tank of WW2 was the best overall and why was it the Sherman?

> the best overall
So price/performance ratio? T-35-85 then.

Which is why I know that I'm not only being a full-fledged idiot by bringing this within the thread, and trying to have some people be more knowledgeable about it. Probably the best tank in 1939.

But yes, the Germans drew a lot of inspiration from the B1 when France surrendered, and particularly from its chassis and its caterpillars.

The Pershing was great, too bad it didn't get used. But Jumbo Sherman was all you needed on a battlefield.

T-34>Sherman>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>German Garbage

youtube.com/watch?v=bNjp_4jY8pY&t=28m53s
28m53s

The Char was great at what it did, but its tactical role was one that didn't come up all that often, and it had operational mobility problems besides due to a defect in the fuel tanks.

If I'm in a Pz 2 or 3 I'm going to be wetting myself if I bump into one, but that's not really what tanks are great for, and I wouldn't necessarily be any worse off than if I just ran into an anti-tank gun hidden somewhere.

It was good at the wrong sort of job, is what I'm getting at.

but the french had another great tank for doing that role
The B1 was for fucking up panzers, and great at it
The french army had other tanks for other roles

>useless hull gun AIMED WITH THE HULL
yeah nah m8

I usually can't stand cheap slav crap but I can't help but love the T34-85. It's such a great tank, cheap as hell, has a big gun, is durable and you can spam it out the factory lines like nothing else

Other than that, I'd go with Sherman easy eight or Panther. It's such a shame that most of the panthers turned out to be crap and broke down easily because Germany couldn't afford to make them with proper resources at the end of the war. It's not really a design fault, like most of the Sherman fanboys here claim

excuse me i like having welding that doesn't have gaps massive enough to shove my fingers through

> it was legitimately the best at its role, at its time
> The Char was great at what it did

Obsolete WWI design
16 years in development
Underpowered engine
17 mph max road speed
47mm gun only penetrates 25mm of armor
Hull mounted 75mm gun has no traverse
Driver forced to act as gunner
Using a fragile and finicky pneumatically controlled trans
All-steel tracks are noisy, ride poorly and rip up roads
Unprotected side mounted radiator
Commander’s coupla doesn’t even open
ONE MAN TURRET

The only thing the Char B1 had going for it was it’s armor but even if the French had gotten their shit together in time, it wouldn’t have been of much use.

It wasn't the best due to its cost and various problems, but

>Obsolete WW1 design
It was probably the most powerful heavy tank in the world in 1940, hardly obsolete
>16 years in development
No relevance to actual combat performance
>Underpowered engine
It had 9.7 horsepower per ton, the same as the SOMUA S35, and which was one of the highest among most French tanks, and only 2 less than the Panzer III/IV
>17 MPH max road speed
Its a heavy tank, of course it isn't the fastest
>47mm gun only penetrates 25mm of armor
That's wrong, the 47mm SA 35 had 35mm / 30 degrees at 400 meters as one demonstration. You might be thinking of the SA 34 which did have penetration levels around that level.
>Hull mounted 75mm gun has no traverse
Which is why the French gave it transmission which was extremely precise.
>Driver forced to act as gunner
French tanks did tend to have too few crew, that part I can't disagree with.
>Using a fragile and finicky pneumatically controlled trans
This wasn't as much of a problem in how the French planned to use the tanks since they would be used for brief offensives to break a line and then pause, bite and hold. Plenty of time to do repair on it.
All-steel tracks are noisy, ride poorly and rip up roads.
I haven't heard of this before, where is the source?
>Unprotected side mounted radiator
The radiator and cooling system was protected by two shutters of 23/28mm / 45 degrees of which two would have to be penetrate by a shell, it wasn't a weakness and its something of a mystery why the ones at Stonne? were lost.
>Commander's cupola doesn't even open.
The French opted for increased protection
>One man turret
A legitimate problem

There were failings but given how the French intended to use them they wouldn't have been as bad as it turned out, the mobile warfare of 1940 was about the worst possible environment for the B1s. It wasn't just the armor for strength.

Many of the problems that did exist would have been fixed with the B1 ter too.

But the M4 cost the same per unit and was better.

This

> It was probably the most powerful heavy tank in the world in 1940, hardly obsolete
The original specifications were drawn up after WWI and by the time it actually went into production in 1936, technology has long surpassed it.

> No relevance to actual combat performance
See above. The French had 16 years (from the 1st prototypes) to fuck around with it and still produce an shitty obsolete tank.

> It had 9.7 horsepower per ton, the same as the SOMUA S35, and which was one of the highest among most French tanks, and only 2 less than the Panzer III/IV
They had more than enough room for a far more powerful V12 engine.

> Its a heavy tank, of course it isn't the fastest
Indeed, it was28 tonnes but could barely get out of it’s own way, while an early war U.S. M3 Lee was 27 tonnes and could run circles around it.

> That's wrong, the 47mm SA 35 had 35mm / 30 degrees at 400 meters as one demonstration. You might be thinking of the SA 34 which did have penetration levels around that level.
Granted. Nonetheless, the odds of the commander spotting an enemy tank, stopping his tank, traversing the turret around, loading the gun and actually hitting the enemy tank were pretty slim.

> Which is why the French gave it transmission which was extremely precise.
You mean unnecessarily complicated and extremely unreliable, right?

> This wasn't as much of a problem in how the French planned to use the tanks since they would be used for brief offensives to break a line and then pause, bite and hold. Plenty of time to do repair on it.
This absolutely was a huge problem and should have been abandoned in the testing phase.

> I haven't heard of this before, where is the source?
All the various all-steel track designs by different powers all sucked, which is why nobody uses them anymore but the Char B1s track was particularly heavy.

> The radiator and cooling system was protected by two shutters of 23/28mm / 45 degrees of which two would have to be penetrate by a shell, it wasn't a weakness and its something of a mystery why the ones at Stonne? were lost.
Of course it was a critical weakness and a retarded design element.

> The French opted for increased protection
It provided less protection then the commander being inside the turret looking out thru periscopes and prevented the commander from seeing WTF was going on around him.

> There were failings but given how the French intended to use them they wouldn't have been as bad as it turned out, the mobile warfare of 1940 was about the worst possible environment for the B1s. It wasn't just the armor for strength.
And that’s why it sucked; the French had almost 20 years to develop it and still produced a shit design.

> Many of the problems that did exist would have been fixed with the B1 ter too.
No it wouldn’t, as the fundamental design was still the same and still woefully obsolete.

>Sherman Firefly
Uncomfortable slow moving crewmen.

t. lindy beige

>t. lindy beige

Am I supposed to know what they means?

Its the go-to tank for randomly catching on fire!

>only the Sherman had internal ammo explosion problems.

This is your brain on Belton Cooper.

t. meme pro

lurk more

The Bob Semple tank of course.

Didn't it take several Shermans to take out one Panzer?

so he's saying that everything was reported as a tiger, despite not being a tiger?

so that means, that shitty shermans were BTFO by fucking panzers? fucking lol

Yes, this whole thread is a meme intended to bait Wehrboos and Slavboos both of which had the superior tanks during the war.

That isn't how the -aboo suffix works.

If Battle of the Bulge hadn't happened and all those German tanks that ran out of fuel instead remained in reserve and waited to counter-attack a push, would they have BTFO the American tanks?

As I understand it, IRL most of the tanks ran out of fuel.

The only tank more maitanance prone than the Panther is the T-34, so its neither of those

Probably not, given their earlier performances.

Don't forget, even if the BoB never happens, Germany's fuel situation is still desperate, and if they're being held for a counterattack, there's all the issues of things like the support infrastructure (or the tanks themselves) being destroyed from the air, or running into anti-tank guns or TD detachments, or any of the other things besides tanks you can use to kill oncoming tanks.

Most people forget, but the biggest cause of Sherman destruction wasn't German tanks, it was towed anti-tank guns and anti-tank mines.

That would be the Panther.

The panther usually wouldn't randomly catch fire, it was more prone to random transmission breakage and it sitting there in the mud uselessly.

>BTFO by fucking panzers?
A tiger was a panzer vi, i assume you mean panzers i-iv when you say "panzers". To this I would say there was nothing at all remarkable about any of those 4 designs and german technical advantage is a myth.

They had a superior officer corps and technical fighting doctrine in the early war. That's it.

>The only tank more maitanance prone than the Panther is the T-34
When you look at soviet statisticians records that show that the average tank lasted days before being knocked out it makes sense to build a shoddy engine. Furthermore it worked so who are we to argue that the design was inadequate?

>The panther usually wouldn't randomly catch fire
Spontaneously exploding was actually one of the reasons the entire line had to be recalled.

>Slavaboo

Sounds weird, Slavboo sounds natural.

Yes and no. Shermans always engaged in groups of five. That was the minimal unit. You attack an MG nest, you use 5 tanks. You go after a Hetzer, 5 Shermans it is. You go after a Tiger, 5 tanks.

I believe it was a problem in the fuel system. The interior would fill with vapors that would spontaneously ignite and burn the crew, however I can't say if anyone ever died as a consequence. This isn't to say the panther didn't have other teething problems.

*blocks your path*

Wtf is that?

I'm guessing a Sentinel from the filename. Not the guy who posted it though.

This.
>Do not get involved in a fight with a “Stalin” without overwhelming numerical superiority in the field. I believe that for every “Stalin” we must account for an entire platoon of Tigers. Any attempts by a single “Tiger” to fight a “Stalin” one-on-one can only result in the loss of a priceless war machine.
t. Heinz Guderian

>the russians had the best tanks by the end of the war

Ивaн, please.

*teleports behind you*

> promptly breaks down

*breaks down*

The t34 had a high failure rate, just because the Russians had an economy to support making a trillion t34s doesn't mean the t34 is a good tank.

>When you look at soviet statisticians records that show that the average tank lasted days before being knocked out it makes sense to build a shoddy engine.

The Soviets weren't making shitty engines, transmissions, etc. on purpose, that's the best they could do.

Stalin's purges didn't just affect the military, everybody throughout Soviet society who was deemed a threat (or simply accused by someone for whatever reason) was sent to the gulag or just shot in the head and this meant huge numbers of the most talented and best qualified people all the way up and down the social hierarchy in the U.S.S.R.

And that was after the huge "brain drain" of the Russian Revolution, where thousands (who weren't killed outright by Lenin) fled overseas, taking their skills with them.

Russia is _still_ feeling the effects of Communism to this day.

>The t34 had a high failure rate
Because a tanks life span on the eastern front wasn't long anyways. Why make an engine that will last years when your tank is likely to get knocked out within hours of entering a combat zone?

Literally none of that matters. The soviets got a huge amount of trucks from the US, and a sizeable number of tanks from both them and the British Empire. Reusing the engines or better yet copying them and sticking them in t-34's was perfectly within their capabilities yet they felt no need to.

Because what they had was adequate for a tank with a limited lifespan.

> Because what they had was adequate for a tank with a limited lifespan.

Again; Soviet tanks (and everything else) weren’t shitty because they were _purposely_ designed and/or manufactured to be shitty, that was simply the state of Soviet industry.

Even before the pressures of war, Soviet tanks were terribly unreliable:

“During the Soviet invasion of Poland in Sept. 1937, the Red Army deployed 1,675 T-26 tanks in what was essentially an uncontested road march into eastern Poland. Of these, 302 tanks, or roughly 1/5 of the force, broke down for mechanical reasons; in contrast there were only 15 combat casualties.”

“Armored Champion” - Zaloga - 2015

Best tank-fu. Great gun, nice and t h i c c front plate, and the meme bow MG.

What, an IS3 or a Panther?

>Again
Understand that what you are claiming is entirely uncontested because it has nothing to do with anything I was discussing. I am responding to you, plainly, that even giving you the benefit of the doubt that the soviet union as a nation was patently incapable of designing a better engine (it was capable) it would not matter.

The US and British Empire are giving them thousands of engines anyway. If it was somehow found necessary to give the T-34 a better engine they could have done so however what it had was found to be adequate.

*blocks der Path*

afv losses were more or less even on the western front

>The US and British Empire are giving them thousands of engines anyway.

Neither the U.S. nor the UK provided the Soviets with tank engines, the Soviet V-2 diesel was an unlicensed copy of a Hispano-Suiza engine and built wholly in the U.S.S.R.

>tank engines

Stop looking for an argument user. They provided the soviets with working tanks and thousands of trucks, both vehicles have engines.

And even assuming only the trucks were ever delivered taking 2 or more truck engines and linking them is a perfectly practical way of making a "tank engine".

>the only problem with the panther is that it had enough armor that they would last long enough for transmission problems to occur

>and it would sometimes get filled with petrol vapors and explode itself

>the only problem is the engine would last long enough to build up vapors without breaking down first

That's basically the T-60/70/80's engine

I regards to the panthers' spontaneous combustion I believe the fault lay with the tubing and gas tanks themselves not the engines pump system. Could be wrong though.

...

I watch college and convention lectures on youtube.

I haven't read the thread but I imagine we are at the point where people are taking photographs of muzzle velocity charts from antiquated history books by now.

Joke's on you, I watch the History Channel

post them

>tfw bf1942 is 15 years old

only to have someone post another book page that has slightly different numbers, no way I am getting into that

inb4 slav(e)aboos arrive to call everyone wehraboos

battle of britain was best map

You do realize your best tank, never fired a shot at the enemy. Was used for propaganda films because the french were to scared to put them at the front. All 7 were destroyed or captured 2 by their own crews. Yea amazing tank man, 37mm pak could go straight through the side with ease at rage. Was a french piece of shit like every bit of equipment they made after 1918

I was there you condescending retard

Char 2C huh?

>taking 2 or more truck engines and linking them is a perfectly practical way of making a "tank engine".

Oh sorry, I wasn't aware that you had no fucking idea what you're talking about.

Carry on.

> Half a dozen anti-tank guns fire shells at him [a T-34], which sound like a drumroll. But he drives staunchly through our line like an impregnable prehistoric monster... It is remarkable that lieutenant Steup's tank made hits on a T-34, once at about 20 meters and four times at 50 meters, with Panzergranate 40 (caliber 5 cm), without any noticeable effect.

>Technology/obsolence
But it wasn't obsolete and it hadn't been long surpassed. In combat capacity on a 1930s battlefield it was probably the most "powerful" (I hate that word but it does work for this situation) vehicle in the world. For the role the French intended to use it it was perfectly capable.

>Engine
Could/might are wonderful words, by the standards of the 1930s and the heavy tanks of the era the B1 was entirely reasonable in its mobility. Also of course it was slower than a medium tank from several years later...

>Gun
Pierre Billotte sure seemed to do all right at Stonne then...

>Transmission
By the standards of the day the most precise in the world, there were disadvantages but you can't simply ignore the advantages.

>Reliability
Again, having to do things like greasing up the track links every day was fine in the concept of bite-and-hold attacks.

>Steel track
You aren't actually showing any sources, just telling me they all sucked. Books, articles, wikipedia links?

>Radiator
So after telling you the actual statistics of the tank's armor and that it was in fact, not a weakness, you simply continue to say it was a critical weakness?

>Cupola
The French had a different view on it, it was the wrong view, but they had a reason for it.

>lol it sucked
It got forced into a role that was completely different than that intended, naturally it underperformed. In its intended role, assault into static enemy lines, it was excellent.

>B1 ter
Let's see of the issues you complained about, you have complained about mobility, reliability, transmission, and the turret. The B1 ter replaced the nader transmission with a simpler system, had a more powerful engine, and a two-man turret. Sure sounds like an improvement to me.

t. lindybeige
of course a tank 20 years old was out of date, why are you not complaining about Mark IVs not being effective in 1940?

And what were the mechanical breakdowns for other nation's tanks? Simply saying 1/5 of the Soviet tanks broke down tells us nothing without knowing what the equivalent rates for other nations were. This isn't even mentioning things like maintenance standards, since a good maintenance organization can probably keep even an unreliable tank reasonably combat effective while a bad one will struggle with a reliable vehicle.

what if you play a lot of Red Orchestra 2?

you forgot about gup

> But it wasn't obsolete and it hadn't been long surpassed.

The entire French armored philosophy and tank program ignored the fact that the very same technology they were developing to overcome a WWI style battlefield, made WWI style battles impossible.

With better command, France could have very well repelled the German invasion and launch an allied counteroffensive with the materiel on hand at the start of the war.

>And what were the mechanical breakdowns for other nation's tanks?

You're not going to get a doctoral thesis on a Tibetan finger-painting board, you're going to have to do your own leg work but British tanks were notorious for their shitty reliability, while American tanks were renown for the ability to just keep going and going.

A lot of that probably has to do with safe American industrial centers, and having to ship M4s, meaning they built the best tank that could fit for shipping, rather than constantly facing material shortages or trying to overload the drivetrain by putting it in a bigger tank.

It's not that the M4 was a great tank par excellence. It's more that the Americans kind of just gave up on making bigger and better and basically didn't even participate in the heavy tanks arms race so they never really pushed the limits of the M4. Even the firefly was a UK modification of the M4, not an American design.

...

>Even the firefly was a UK modification of the M4, not an American design.

Except for the gun and radio, it was wholly American.

>american 1944 tech

The point is the Americans didn't really push the limits of the M4.

Is the closest they really got, and it's kind of pathetic desu.