If the Germans had been equipped with Panther tanks rather than Panzer IV tanks during Operation Barbarossa...

If the Germans had been equipped with Panther tanks rather than Panzer IV tanks during Operation Barbarossa, would it greatly have reduced their losses of personnel and tanks in the battles of Bialystok-Minsk and battle of Smolensk, which is what slowed down the operation and ultimately caused its failure?

No, weather and supply lines would've still been fucked.

Given the panther's tendency to break down, they likely would've slowed down even more.

The invasion would've stalled while they were still in Poland due to their tanks breaking down.

>this meme

All these flaws were fixed after Operation Citadel and the tank still had a ridiculously high k:d ratio against Soviet tanks in Kursk.

Nice meme, the panther's mechanical issues were fixed later on and were not nearly as bad as tanks like the ferdinand.
Would have helped but the side armor was shit so it wouldn't have made enough of a difference.

>during Operation Barbarossa
>during Operation Barbarossa

Germans should have just spammer panzer iii

The tank wasn't even invented during barbarossa you fucking mong.

Germans should have just spammed teutonic knights.

they were equiped with Pz IIIs and IIs mainly
not that the IV would have made any different, since upto variant G its armament wasnt great and protection mediocre

indeed the panther would have given them different results but in 1941, after huge victories their armored doctrine prefered speed over armor for protection
it was after those losses they started to aim for better protection for their valuable crews

They'd still be an army heavily reliant on horse-drawn supply lines moving across open country.

also worth nothing the panthers could never entirely replace the Pz IVs, to put it short, the reich could never produce enough of it

If the Americans had been equipped with M1A2 Abrams tanks rather than M4 Sherman tanks during Market Garden, would it greatly have reduced their losses of personnel and tanks in the battles?

Besides the issues with the German army not being able to move fast enough was not caused by slow tanks, it was caused by the fact that most of their supplies and infantry were transported by horseback.

spam tanks that wouldn't be able to kill any t-34, kv-1 at any range except for side/rear shots
can be penetrated by small caliber AT guns at long range.

YEA THAT WOULD A GONE GREAT.

It's a real mystery why the German took so long to slope the armour on their tanks, the French did it and the Somua could kick the shit out of a Panzer III, as they learnt and they literally trained with the Soviets in the rearmament years when they were using BT-5/7s

If the Soviets had been equipped with IS-2 and T-34/85 tanks rather than KV-1 and T-34/76 tanks during Operation Barbarossa, would it greatly have reduced their losses of personnel and tanks in the battles of 1941? (No.)

>Hey, let's replace our tanks with one that has virtually no soft target capability when our doctrine is that the purpose of a tank is to penetrate behind the tactical element of the enemy line and exploit breakthroughs
>This will help us win battles in cities, where we try to avoid sending in tanks in the first place.
OP, were you dropped as a baby?

Outdated by 1939 senpai

correct

If the French had been equipped with Imperator Titans instead of Char B1 during the Invasion, would it give the French victory?

No, because the French didn't understand air support

It would have actually 1 IS-2 Could easily destroy 100 panzer 3's, it would be like the KV-1 on roids.

KV-1 and T-34 were already good enough, the problem was insufficient training and the lack of a cohesive group tactic. If anything, T-34/85 could have had an impact, not because of the gun, but because it had a dedicated loader, so a tank commander could actually command the tank, and a fucking radio, something T-34/76 lacked in 1941 for some reason.

The IS-2 would have been An absolute monster in 1941, even 88s had trouble penetrating. Battle of resenai pass is a good example of how unstoppable even KV-1's were. Lack of training only matters so much when you are driving a monster of a tank against panzer fucking 3's

The Germans didn't have 88s in the anti-tank role at the time, and all the AT they had (something like 57mm AT guns) was ineffective against KV-1. Meanwhile, IS-2 wouldn't have survived being out-maneuvered and getting a direct close-range hit in the ass or being cut off from the supplies.

>The Germans didn't have 88s in the anti-tank role at the time
They used them for anti-tank shit since the Char encounters, granted they weren't designed for it and the shells tended to tumble

>Operation Barbarossa

Their main tanks in Operation Barbarossa were light Panzer Is, IIs, early model IIIs, 35ts, and 38ts. The Panther didn't even exist then.

IS-2 has better armor than KV-2 across the board, and far more mobile too.

I have a feeling what he's asking is a hypothetical where they did

It's a hypothetical situation

The 88mm's role as an anti-tank weapon has been exaggerated to hell and back. Consider the period of June 1941 to September 1942; during the first six months of this time, the Soviet T-34/76 may as well have been a King Tiger to most German tanks, and for the rest of that time the Germans still had no tank gun capable of penetrating it frontally in large numbers at the front. So basically perfect circumstances to fall back on the 88mm. But the 88mm destroyed hardly any tanks. Per Zaloga's "Red Army Handbook", page 179, table 6.1: long 50mm guns were responsible for 54.3% of T-34 losses in this period, while 88mm guns were responsible for 3.4%. Even 37mm guns were responsible for more losses at 10.1%.

Void Shields are an effective replacement for air support.

Oh they;re overhyped as fuck because of the African campaign where they could shoot a shell at its full range and even if it tumbled they could smash whatever the fuck it hit, I'm not denying that, I'm just saying they'd been using them as makeshift AT guns since 1940

Doesn't matter if your crews don't know how to use the advantages they have and don't know how to cooperate with each other.

you were literally arguing about how the KV was invincible when during barbarossa there were literally 3 ways of taking one out.

1 air
2 Artillery
3 88 direct fire, which if you look at the battle of rasenei you will see is how they dealt with KV-1S, and funnily enough this would not have worked against an IS-2

they'd run out of fuel and break down before they even reached Smolensk
Panthers and Tigers were made specifically for defensive operations or limited offensives, not for large scale offensives like Barbarossa.
Just look at Kursk at how easily destroyed and vulnerable they were

You aren't wrong but PzIII vs Panther isn't even a choice. They could take it easy on the way as well and could probably fix the problems like they did irl within a couple of months.

oh boy it's another
>if Germany did X would they have won
thread

The answer is no, and it will always be no. Germany lost the war in 1933 when Hitler rose to power.

No, they lost in 1939 when he decided to go to war over the Polish corridor, but hey, need to pay off those MEFO bills

>less than 7 million germans were killed by the russians
>more than 20 million russians died by the germans
>By 1941 December the Wehrmacht were 25 miles from moscow.
>Most aerial victories by a pilot was german Erich Hartmann with 352 wins.
>The most aerial victories by a soviet pilot was only 66.

>Germans were nowhere near close to victory.

>kikefag detected

>WW2 was a Team Deathmatch

>Muh kill death ratio
Funnily enough war isn't COD you fucking retard

>muh K:D
>muh aces
Kill claims by all sides for fighters were massively overclaimed in WW2, especially on the Eastern Front where all of the Experten claimed the bulk of their kills. Just about every major action had both sides often claiming in excess of double the amount of enemy aircraft than were ever committed to the theater. Probably the best example that shuts down the claims of their top three aces - Hartmann, Rall, and Barkhorn - is the Crimea in 1943/44. Barkhorn's unit was stationed there at the outbreak of the campaign, and over a one month span in the last quarter of 1943, Barkhorn is credited with some 50 kills. Once the campaign ramped up, the rate of claims skyrocketed. III./JG 52 was shifted to the theater, with both Rall and Hartmann taking part in the fighting alongside Barkhorn's II./JG 52 and a Gruppe from SG 2. Rall was only there for about a week before being called back to the Reich, but Hartmann stayed along until the end. During the last month that the Luftwaffe had aircraft in the Crimea, III./JG 52 claimed over 1,000 enemy aircraft. Over the course of the 5-month campaign, combined claims from the two Gruppen of JG 52 and the one Gruppe of SG 2 amount to somewhere between 4-5,000 enemy aircraft. The most conservative estimates I've seen still claimed well over 500 aircraft.

Meanwhile, Soviet loss records report 179 aircraft lost across two Air Armies who had a total of ~500 aircraft between them.

>>less than 7 million germans were killed by the Russians
Overall 5 million German soldiers died in the war, but only 3 or 4 million of those died on the eastern front, so the k/d was pretty great for the Germans

They spent most of the operation using Panzer I and II tanks

That was the scenario OP posited though. If the Germans had brand new Panzer Vs instead of IVs during Barbarossa they likely would have performed even worse in the long run as their early mechanical reliability problems would have crippled the offensive while high cost and complexity would have made losses much more significant.

Germany was literally bombed to hell in the middle of Panther production by co bomber campaigns from Harris and LeMay, that was the stroke that caused Germany to buckle and ultimately retreat from Russia, the entire eastern front is just a meme and the real war was won in the sky by endless thousands of aircraft bombing German factories and railways day and night for more than a year straight with massive American bombing missions starting in 1943 until there was practically no infrastructure left in virtually months. The same happened in Japan and there's way more pictures of it too. People way over estimate the Soviet German front meme. WWII was decided entirely in the air.

I wasn't arguing about anything, that was my second post in the thread after the one about the composition of the German tank force in Barbarossa.

> during barbarossa there were literally 3 ways of taking one out.

They were most commonly "taken out" by just letting them break down. Also side and rear armor was only 70mm. The 5 cm KwK 39 could penetrate that with a close range shot. Which normally wouldn't be very viable, but crew coordination and visibilty in the KV was utter garbage, so it happened more often than you'd think.

Nice try buddy

Why do wehraboos always pretend that POWs don't exist? Because unlike the Germans the Soviets didn't massacre 70% of their's?

Wehraboos are really, really dumb, even when they're not being intellectually dishonest. That's often why they do things like cite total Soviet casualties against Eastern Front German killed/missing in battle.

this is a weeb free board Boris

>Because unlike the Germans the Soviets didn't massacre 70% of their's?
Excuse you the Germans didn't massacre their Soviet POWs. They just penned them up in fields without food, medical supplies, or even shelter for months on end until magically they all disappeared.

> German aces aren't notorious for inflating their records

> Taking Moscow somehow immediately causes Russia to surrender

> They couldn't secure Stalingrad after nearly 6 months of fighting


> Meanwhile the Western allies are seizing Africa, preparing to invade Italy, and ramping up their bombing efforts


Victory was within their grasp!

> February 2nd, 1943, turning point of the entire European theater at Stalingrad
> 85%+ of all Reich losses including the virtual entirety of the elite SS corps occurred in the east
> m-muh bombs in late 1943 did all the work! the war really ended when USA decided to do something for the first time after sitting on its ass for two years and then it REALLY ended two years after that when it physically arrived at the most geopolitically convenient timing possible!

kill yourself

Not him,
>85%+ of all Reich losses [...] occurred in the east
Is weapons grade bullshit, formed by pretending "Heer killed" is the only sort of loss that exists.
>including the virtual entirety of the elite SS corps
And that's just funny. SS were by and large worse soldiers than the Heer, and of course they were not disproportionately committed to the Eastern Front anymore than any other asset was.

I like talking shit about Ivan but give credit where credits due. The eastern front was a morbid place to be.

Bullshit.

The Panther was unreliable to the end of the war and beyond.

End of story.

If the Americans had been equipped with Imperial I-class Star Destroyers instead of Standard-type battleships during Pearl Harbor, would it greatly have reduced their losses of personnel and ships during the attack?

No because nobody would be able to pilot them.

They would have gotten no further than 50 miles into russia before they all broke down

>elite SS corps
The only SS units that could really be called "elite" were the panzer divisions, and most of them were deployed in the West after 1944.

>What if we had [insert piece of equipment here] during [insert period before piece of equipment was introduced here]?

Oh. How original.

Sloped armor eats up interior space, and depending on the quality of welding techniques at the time, could potentially compromise structural integrity. The SOMUA may have incorporated some sloping, but that was only possible because the tank was made entirely out of very large castings, which were hard as balls to manufacture.

To be fair, the Panzer III was pretty much the backbone of Germany's major victories earlier in the war, and was a good deal more advanced than most other tanks in 1939, with a five-man crew, radio, a powerful engine, and torsion-bar suspension.

...

The most logical reason I've ever heard is that up until they invaded Russia they simply didn't need sloped armor, just using thicker flat plates was getting the job done and was also much easier to produce

>Count only German loses, ignore their allies
>Count civilians causalities on Soviet side
>Count PoWs killed by not giving them food
>At some point the Wehrmacht were 0 fucking miles from Stalingrad. Boy it did end well for them, didn't it?
My God, camp guards were like best soldiers ever, each one had like few hundreds thousand:1 k/d.

No, see Sloped armor has as many disadvantages as it has advantages and back then choosing armor with minimal/no slope was a viable choice. It allows you make the overall vehicle smaller (or allow you to have much more interior space at the same size) and is easier and cheaper to produce. T-34 were so cramped and uncomfortable that it significantly affected their combat performance.
Most tanks were also designed to support infantry operations in the widest sense, not to fight other tanks, or dedicated anti tank weaponry.

You don't need air support when you have multiple titans that are immune to any form of weapon in the era while having the firepower to destroy entire cities

>le kill ratio decides who wins wars
>Even though the Germans couldn't capture Stalingrad despite 6 months of fighting
>Afrika Korps were getting blown out by the Allies in Africa

but the 88mm was a big-fucking gun that was at best good for entrenched positions and lacked any illusion of being "mobile".

I already stated along with several others that sloped armor is much more costly to produce. Post-war tank development shows that even with it's disadvantages sloped armor is far superior to flat armor, the primary reason the Germans were so slow in adopting it is that up until 42/43 they hadn't faced any numerous weapons capable of penetrating 100mm of RHA from anything but closes range hence why the first German tanks to use sloped armor weren't seriously considered until this period