Kursk

Just guessing, but they might have had faith in "wonder weapons" that were in the works?

By the time Operation Citadel was drawn up, the OKW already accepted that there was no chance of actually defeating the USSR, and the Operation's goal was to inflict a defeat so severe on the Soviets that it would bring Stalin to the negotiating table to sign a peace on the Eastern Front so that Germany could focus on the west.

Kursk was the only place to do this because the Soviets massed 1/4 of their entire army in the Kursk salient, and an encirclement there would leave them all trapped and the Red Army kneecapped. The biggest problem was that the Soviets knew it was exactly where they would attack, and turned the region into the strongest defensive network of the war, where even the finest of the Wehrmacht couldn't even advance 20 miles into it.

After the German failure to encircle the Soviet positions, there would be no possibility of peace with the Soviets, it was either surrender unconditionally or go down fighting until there was nothing left, which the latter was chosen.

>Those tanks
How impractical were they?

Hard to say, but German industry had no chance of keeping up with allied industry.

When FDR showed Stalin the numbers of tanks, trucks, etc. that were coming out of Detroit, Stalin said "Ok, now show me the real numbers." He assumed they were wildly inflated propaganda. They were the real numbers.

not that guy but was kursk the tip or the neck of the salient? were they trying to encircle or actually attack the tip?

Not him, but Kursk was at the tip. They were trying to encircle. Pic related.

emersonkent.com/images/kursk_1943.jpg

oh okjay that makes sense. I imagined a deeper but thinner bulge into the german line

the answer is hideously impractical for the landkreuzer tanks, they're basically huge targets for artillery, aircraft, and getting mission killed once their tracks get shot off, plus they're completely incapable of being manufactured in any serious numbers, being transported around Germany (since it can't use roads, can't use bridges, can't be shipped on railroads), and while the armor is technically capable of standing up to most weapons, it won't stand up forever against the sheer amount of fire that'll get thrown at it.

The Maus/E-100 type superheavy tanks are somewhat more practical, but most of the same problems apply. They're utterly incapable of really fighting a mobile war and will ultimately be isolated and destroyed.

in a war where artillery strikes and aviation were a huge deal, something like slowly moving giant target would not last long. and even if it didn't got destroyed right away it would not change much

This is something a comic book / anime retard would come up with, weird to see it was a concept entertained by actual military people.

those are Hitler ideas actually
>if you make cannon 100 times bigger it will deal 100 times more damage to our enemies
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerer_Gustav
prime example

surrendering to soviets, okay,
or need to stall time to finish gassing the jews

It's completely ridiculous to compare an anti-fortress siege gun to one of these

>I've read a lot of references for Soviet attempts to negotiate peace up until 1943

That never happened, "read references" can you like ... just link 1-2?

He said he didn't have any sources you spastic

>those are Hitler ideas actually

Why don't you read the first sentence of the article before you make stuff up?

>It was developed in the late 1930s by Krupp in Darłowo (then Rügenwalde) as siege artillery for the explicit purpose of destroying the main forts of the French Maginot Line,

Then he might be able to link his references so we can look into it?
I never said source did I?

ps:Calm down angry virgin.

>2700 tonnes of resources wasted because of Hitlers ego and crazy ideas
>48 shots total

>Nothing further happened until March 1936 when, during a visit to Essen, Adolf Hitler inquired as to the giant guns' feasibility

Did he design order or influence the design of the gun?

No ... and now shut your moronic mouth.

>80cm
Holy shit.
Also, I used to pass this thing every morning on the bus ride to school when I lived in Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland

Another good pic

>muh dead austrian painter was genius don't you dare shittalk him

No he was a moron, but that doesn't mean you guys can make up ridiculous stuff.

The gun was built in 1930 Hitler cam to power in 1933 how did he actually influence the design?

Le time traveling Hitler incomming.

Stop strawmaning faggot

>time travelling hitler
youtu.be/WT9mD5hDkqs

>It was developed in the late 1930s
jfyi Hitler would personally inspect nearly every developing project and say his incredibly important opinion about it like it happened with me262 or tiger 1 for example

The only reason kursk didn't serve a killing blow to the soviets was sabotage within the german army, lend-lease and the allies knewing the whole plan and starting date from the get-go through cracked codes/enigma and so on. The rote zitadelle basically sent everything to the soviet high command directly. Still, the soviet casualties were exorbitantly high and would have been almost certainly catastrophic if it had not been for the above factors.

>Why give up when they won't reach the borders of Germany itself for more than a year?
Because hundreds of thousands of white aryans died for those borders that were taken by the Soviets.

The great irony about modern Nazi support is how badly it destroyed white men and nationalism.

I guess that's why we look so kindly on nazi germany.

The completely retarded levels of industrial output the US could manage during the war never fails to give me a freedom chuckle.

Sabotage?

> bring Stalin to the negotiating table
Stalin offered Hitler a peace deal. At leat three times throughout the war. Twice through neutral Sweden, once through Bulgaria. The last offer was made right after the 1943 battle of Kharkov when Germans were already preparing Citadel.
archive.org/stream/MastnystalinAndProspectsOfSeparatePeaceInWorld/Mastny--StalinAndProspectsOfSeparatePeaceInWorldWarIi_djvu.txt

Wehraboos are amazing. If meth-addicted bavarian corporal was interested in peace he wouldn't have attacked the Soviet Union in the first place.

>Aviation or artillery destroying a tank.

yep most Tanks got rekd by arty planes and mines tank v tank made about 20% of the losses afaik

Yeah, imagine artillery destroying a tank! Bonkers!

This is the caliber of Veeky Forums?

youtube.com/watch?v=Nd7jvwKk6-4

I remember reading in Why the Allies Won that the state of California produced more ships in one year than Japan did for like, the entire war.
It's fucking madness.

He's right about aircraft (and to some extent about tanks, although artillery is more effective - I presume in this case the reference is to indirect fire artillery, since direct fire anti-tank artillery was an extremely large source for tank casualties). The whole "aircraft destroyed the German tanks" idea is a meme. The number of casualties which tanks took was always much lower than was claimed : fighter bombers claimed that they killed hundreds of tanks while they actually only killed a few.

ftr.wot-news.com/2014/04/04/ground-attack-aircraft-myth-of-the-tank-busters/

You can see that there, the exaggeration was huge. 4-11% weren't unusual numbers for the real destruction as a percentage of the original claim.

Aircraft were extremely useful for hitting soft targets, but against tanks they were not very effective. Of course, the divisions were still shredded because tanks are ultimately just part of a machine, and if they lose all of their transport, logistics, infantry, artillery, etc. assets they're useless, but the idea that the tanks themselves were wiped out by aircraft is a myth.

You can also read about general Allied tank casualties from aircraft on the following:

ftr.wot-news.com/2013/12/26/on-allied-tank-casualties-in-the-eto/

The claim can be advanced that Allied units of course had air superiority which explains why they suffered such low losses to aircraft for their tanks, but the French in 1940 who didn't have air superiority only lost an extremely small percentage of their tanks to aircraft, despite the Luftwaffe's important role in the campaign being universally noted. It was roughly equal to losses to mines, and the overwhelming majority came from losses to gunfire.

I guess all those first hand memoirs of german soldiers who ran from enemy aircraft and were destroyed was just made up then.

Against some of the Wehrmacht's heavier tanks, the rockets needed to hit the thin-walled engine compartment or the tracks to have any chance of destroying or disabling the tank. Analysis of destroyed tanks after the Normandy battle showed a "hit-rate" for the air-fired rockets of only 4%.

they weren't that effective but they could still destroy tanks

If you read the articles I posted you would probably note that these psychological aspects are well commented upon there. It isn't that aircraft were ineffective : it is that the idea of them hard killing German tanks is wrong. The Germans were still plenty terrified about getting shot at by aircraft, and the soft vehicles, artillery, communications, transport, etc. needed to actually make a division combat-effective were still vulnerable, but the tanks themselves were extremely hard to hard-kill for aircraft, and actual results reflected that in just how few were destroyed.

Furthermore if you read the articles you would note that essentially whenever the zones attacked by fighter-bombers could be analyzed, what was revealed was that the number of tanks destroyed was hugely lower than the number claimed by fighter bombers. So hard evidence is available that the fighter bombers were not very effective in hard killing tanks.