"Armored Champion" - a book review

[edrotondaro]

Hi everyone:


I present to you, a book review, “Armored Champion – The Top Tanks of World War II” by Steven Zaloga, Stackpole Books, 2015. I’ve been a big fan of Mr. Zaloga’s books since the 1980s and have watched as his style and attention to detail have been honed over the years. If anything, he has continued to refine his understanding of armored vehicles and mechanized warfare with an emphasis on Eastern Europe and Russia in particular. He was one of the first Western historians to be granted access to de-classified Soviet military archives when Communism collapsed in the late 1980s and he has visited the Russian tank museum at Kubinka on numerous occasions. In short he talks the talk and walks the walk.

Mr. Zaloga has been known for a very straight forward style of writing, but here he somewhat lightens his approach with the occasional reference to popular culture such as the video game World of Tanks as well as stating that this books is meant to be a jumping off point for further debates.

This is a chart heavy and photo heavy book with lots of original illustrations and rarely seen images. Zaloga has gone to great detail to give individual tank data on armor thicknesses, main gun performance, numbers produced and more importantly numbers available for service (never the same thing for most combatants). He also breaks the discussion down into 8 time periods: The Roaring Thirties, the Blitzkrieg Era, Barbarossa 1941, Russian Slugfest 1942, Other Theaters (mainly the Pacific, North Africa and Italy), Kursk Summer 1943, Normandy Summer 1944 and War’s End 1945. He also has three assessments of a tank’s effectiveness: Tanker’s Choice, Commander’s Choice and Battlefield Dynamics which is the most difficult of the three to quantify.

The introductory chapter “What Makes a Great Tank?” is almost worth the price of the book on its own. In it Zaloga distills down knowledge from dozens of previous books for Osprey Publications and covers the holy trinity of tank design: protection, firepower and mobility. He shows just how much sloped or curved armor increases the relative value of a vehicle’s protection by including the base armor value of a particular part of the tank, plus the effective value if sloped or curved. This was something that he had begun doing in some of his Osprey Publication titles and has carried over here. This is one of the reasons why the T-34 was such a surprise, its 45mm frontal armor wasn’t that thick, but when sloped at 60 degrees it became the equivalent of 90mm of protection. Now think about a Panther tank with 80mm armor sloped at 55 degrees which is equivalent to 139mm of armor. That’s better protection than a Tiger I tanks 100mm with little or no slope. Even a British 6 pounder 57mm gun firing APDS could smash thru 123mm of armor at 500 meters sloped at 30 degrees. No wonder the first Tiger tank knocked out in North Africa fell victim to this gun (albeit to a cracked tread that made it a mobility kill).

The effectiveness of HEAT rounds is discussed including why such rounds were more effective in shoulder launched rockets or even low velocity howitzers as opposed to high velocity tank and anti-tank guns. The differences in armor quality during the late war period are covered which show why German tanks actually were more vulnerable in late 1944 thru 1945 due to lesser quality steel.


One of the charts shows that the bulk of tank kills still came from guns, either anti-tank or tank mounted. And surprise, the largest percentage of hits/kills was not on the turret mantlet or glacis plate (tank front for those not in the know). The bulk were turret or tank side hits. This makes sense since the armor was not as thick there and does explain how lesser gunned tanks killed their more heavily armored brethren.


Zaloga shows how the Allies were much more concerned with getting tanks into production rather than producing state or the art tanks. While the Panther and Tiger tank may have been the Tanker’s Choice, the Commander might have preferred the T-34, the Sherman or even the StuG III assault gun. Germany often times halted tank production to get the latest and greatest model of tank into service when the PzKpfw IV with the long barreled 75mm gun was more reliable and easier to build. Certain factors that popular historians miss out on are brought forth in this book. The Sherman tank had a short barreled 75mm gun because of prewar conceptions that a gun barrel projecting beyond the front of the tank would make it vulnerable to accidents (Zaloga p.231). Also US tank guns were meant to have a barrel life equal to that of field artillery pieces of about 3,000 rounds. No tank in history stayed in service long enough to fire half that many rounds.

I won’t tell you which tanks won the titles in each time period, but the results may surprise you. If you are a fan of tank warfare in WWII and want the latest insights, this book is required reading. I give it an A+.

[oldpop2000]

Jan 18, 2017 13:53:39 GMT -6 edrotondaro said:

Hi everyone:


I present to you, a book review, “Armored Champion – The Top Tanks of World War II” by Steven Zaloga, Stackpole Books, 2015. I’ve been a big fan of Mr. Zaloga’s books since the 1980s and have watched as his style and attention to detail have been honed over the years. If anything, he has continued to refine his understanding of armored vehicles and mechanized warfare with an emphasis on Eastern Europe and Russia in particular. He was one of the first Western historians to be granted access to de-classified Soviet military archives when Communism collapsed in the late 1980s and he has visited the Russian tank museum at Kubinka on numerous occasions. In short he talks the talk and walks the walk.

Mr. Zaloga has been known for a very straight forward style of writing, but here he somewhat lightens his approach with the occasional reference to popular culture such as the video game World of Tanks as well as stating that this books is meant to be a jumping off point for further debates.

This is a chart heavy and photo heavy book with lots of original illustrations and rarely seen images. Zaloga has gone to great detail to give individual tank data on armor thicknesses, main gun performance, numbers produced and more importantly numbers available for service (never the same thing for most combatants). He also breaks the discussion down into 8 time periods: The Roaring Thirties, the Blitzkrieg Era, Barbarossa 1941, Russian Slugfest 1942, Other Theaters (mainly the Pacific, North Africa and Italy), Kursk Summer 1943, Normandy Summer 1944 and War’s End 1945. He also has three assessments of a tank’s effectiveness: Tanker’s Choice, Commander’s Choice and Battlefield Dynamics which is the most difficult of the three to quantify.

The introductory chapter “What Makes a Great Tank?” is almost worth the price of the book on its own. In it Zaloga distills down knowledge from dozens of previous books for Osprey Publications and covers the holy trinity of tank design: protection, firepower and mobility. He shows just how much sloped or curved armor increases the relative value of a vehicle’s protection by including the base armor value of a particular part of the tank, plus the effective value if sloped or curved. This was something that he had begun doing in some of his Osprey Publication titles and has carried over here. This is one of the reasons why the T-34 was such a surprise, its 45mm frontal armor wasn’t that thick, but when sloped at 60 degrees it became the equivalent of 90mm of protection. Now think about a Panther tank with 80mm armor sloped at 55 degrees which is equivalent to 139mm of armor. That’s better protection than a Tiger I tanks 100mm with little or no slope. Even a British 6 pounder 57mm gun firing APDS could smash thru 123mm of armor at 500 meters sloped at 30 degrees. No wonder the first Tiger tank knocked out in North Africa fell victim to this gun (albeit to a cracked tread that made it a mobility kill).

The effectiveness of HEAT rounds is discussed including why such rounds were more effective in shoulder launched rockets or even low velocity howitzers as opposed to high velocity tank and anti-tank guns. The differences in armor quality during the late war period are covered which show why German tanks actually were more vulnerable in late 1944 thru 1945 due to lesser quality steel.


One of the charts shows that the bulk of tank kills still came from guns, either anti-tank or tank mounted. And surprise, the largest percentage of hits/kills was not on the turret mantlet or glacis plate (tank front for those not in the know). The bulk were turret or tank side hits. This makes sense since the armor was not as thick there and does explain how lesser gunned tanks killed their more heavily armored brethren.


Zaloga shows how the Allies were much more concerned with getting tanks into production rather than producing state or the art tanks. While the Panther and Tiger tank may have been the Tanker’s Choice, the Commander might have preferred the T-34, the Sherman or even the StuG III assault gun. Germany often times halted tank production to get the latest and greatest model of tank into service when the PzKpfw IV with the long barreled 75mm gun was more reliable and easier to build. Certain factors that popular historians miss out on are brought forth in this book. The Sherman tank had a short barreled 75mm gun because of prewar conceptions that a gun barrel projecting beyond the front of the tank would make it vulnerable to accidents (Zaloga p.231). Also US tank guns were meant to have a barrel life equal to that of field artillery pieces of about 3,000 rounds. No tank in history stayed in service long enough to fire half that many rounds.

I won’t tell you which tanks won the titles in each time period, but the results may surprise you. If you are a fan of tank warfare in WWII and want the latest insights, this book is required reading. I give it an A+.

I've put that on my Amazon Kindle wish list, thanks mate.

[edrotondaro]

You'll enjoy it my friend. Love that drawing. Is it true to life?

[oldpop2000]

Jan 18, 2017 15:05:10 GMT -6 edrotondaro said:

You'll enjoy it my friend. Love that drawing. Is it true to life?

Yes, that's the Grampaw Pettibone emblem used since 1943 in Naval Aviation News. He was the "Sage of Safety". I always enjoyed the pieces in Naval Aviation News periodical that we had at work, hilarious and very effective in their assessments of accidents etc.

[felixg91]

Yeah Zaloga is solid...he is probably the best for Russian stuff period. That this is a good book surprises me not at all. I am sort of not into Tanks at the moment....but it'll be back on the plate before long, of that I can be sure my interest cycle is circular, Naval warfare, aerial warfare, ground warfare, ancient warfare, rinse-repeat. Every year. I have a bunch of his older titles so this wouldn't be out of place in my library either.

Thanks adding to my reading queue.
Be well.
Felix

[oldpop2000]

Jan 19, 2017 12:45:56 GMT -6 felixg91 said:

Yeah Zaloga is solid...he is probably the best for Russian stuff period. That this is a good book surprises me not at all. I am sort of not into Tanks at the moment....but it'll be back on the plate before long, of that I can be sure my interest cycle is circular, Naval warfare, aerial warfare, ground warfare, ancient warfare, rinse-repeat. Every year. I have a bunch of his older titles so this wouldn't be out of place in my library either.

Thanks adding to my reading queue.
Be well.
Felix

OK, I did it. I bought the Kindle edition so let's talk armored vehicles. Big ones, little ones, fast ones, slow ones; and French tanks.

[edrotondaro]

Hi Denis:

In keeping with tanks and other WWII tech, I often get a kick out of the supposed superiority of all things German. Closer examinations shows they many problems with some of the most mundane things and often fell prey to bigger is better rather than what is practical and useful. Considering how short they were on some of the most basic "sinews of war", it is amazing that they accomplished as much as they did.

I recently finished two other Zaloga books in Osprey's Combat series. The Combat series is similar to the Duel series except instead of comparing planes or tanks, it compares troop types. In this case, the two titles compare mechanized infantry against panzer grenadiers or plain leg infantry against each other. It comes out that while Germany may have created mechanized infantry, they lacked anywhere near enough half tracks to mount all their mechanized forces and many were classified as motorized infantry carried in trucks. And they were the lucky ones. Most of the German Army was heavily dependent on horses to transport everything from supplies to artillery. So much for the vaunted Wehrmacht and mobile operations. Now admittedly by the time the US Army met them in Northwestern Europe, Germany had been bled white, but Zaloga uses battalion sized battles were the force structure was usually equal in manpower, but not in support weapons like airpower or artillery. Despite the experience of the green 106th Infantry Division at St. Vith during the Ardennes offensive, most US formations were the equal or better than their opponents even the lesser experienced ones. It does shoot up S.L.A. Marshall's assumptions about US ground forces in WWII and worth the read.

[oldpop2000]

Feb 27, 2017 20:34:00 GMT -6 edrotondaro said:

Hi Denis:

In keeping with tanks and other WWII tech, I often get a kick out of the supposed superiority of all things German. Closer examinations shows they many problems with some of the most mundane things and often fell prey to bigger is better rather than what is practical and useful. Considering how short they were on some of the most basic "sinews of war", it is amazing that they accomplished as much as they did.

I recently finished two other Zaloga books in Osprey's Combat series. The Combat series is similar to the Duel series except instead of comparing planes or tanks, it compares troop types. In this case, the two titles compare mechanized infantry against panzer grenadiers or plain leg infantry against each other. It comes out that while Germany may have created mechanized infantry, they lacked anywhere near enough half tracks to mount all their mechanized forces and many were classified as motorized infantry carried in trucks. And they were the lucky ones. Most of the German Army was heavily dependent on horses to transport everything from supplies to artillery. So much for the vaunted Wehrmacht and mobile operations. Now admittedly by the time the US Army met them in Northwestern Europe, Germany had been bled white, but Zaloga uses battalion sized battles were the force structure was usually equal in manpower, but not in support weapons like airpower or artillery. Despite the experience of the green 106th Infantry Division at St. Vith during the Ardennes offensive, most US formations were the equal or better than their opponents even the lesser experienced ones. It does shoot up S.L.A. Marshall's assumptions about US ground forces in WWII and worth the read.

Hi Ed:

For the German's, it was doctrine and organization that carried them as far as they did.  All the fancy armored halftracks and other vehicles are of no value, without training, doctrine and good officers. We experienced that at Kasserine Pass. As the war progressed, we improved, they deteriorated. I've been reading about WWII armored warfare since my first book about 11 or 12 years old, that would be Foxes of the Desert by Paul Carell. I've read everything and anything. It all points to the same issues. For the German army, their deterioration began at the top and progressively got worse. If you are interested, read a book titled "Panzer Tactics: German Small -Unit Armor Tactics in World War II" by Wolfgang Schneider.

Here is a brief snippet:

...theory and practice do not always coincide. That is exactly how it was with the German philosophy of the employment of armored formations in World War II. Although Germany was well ahead of all other armies in the fundamentals of commitment and in the art of operational command from the mid-thirties, within the Wehrmacht there were abundant violations of those fundamentals when it came to putting them into practice on the operational and tactical levels.



Schneider, Wolfgang. Panzer Tactics: German Small-Unit Armor Tactics in World War II (Kindle Locations 62-65). Stackpole Books. Kindle Edition.

[edrotondaro]

Hi Denis:

Yes, I agree completely. The doctrine and organization of the German army had always been a strong point and certainly carried them far in the first two years of the war. In some ways, having a restricted military by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles meant that the German Army could pick the best and brightest and let them develop the doctrines of mechanized warfare well before the weapon systems were available. It is interesting how many of the top German generals were at odds with each other. Now you have to allow for the normal amount of rivalry and egos that all successful commanders have, but many of the Army level commanders didn't see eye to eye. Guderian and von Manstein disliked each other and it came to a head over the lowly Sturmgeschutz III. Guderian felt they were a distraction from pure tank production and von Manstein saw them as a vital support vehicle for the infantry. And to top it off, Guderian objected to them being placed under the command of the artillery (he may have been right there). So much for leadership at the top.

Ed Rotondaro

[oldpop2000]

Feb 28, 2017 13:38:23 GMT -6 edrotondaro said:

Hi Denis:

Yes, I agree completely. The doctrine and organization of the German army had always been a strong point and certainly carried them far in the first two years of the war. In some ways, having a restricted military by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles meant that the German Army could pick the best and brightest and let them develop the doctrines of mechanized warfare well before the weapon systems were available. It is interesting how many of the top German generals were at odds with each other. Now you have to allow for the normal amount of rivalry and egos that all successful commanders have, but many of the Army level commanders didn't see eye to eye. Guderian and von Manstein disliked each other and it came to a head over the lowly Sturmgeschutz III. Guderian felt they were a distraction from pure tank production and von Manstein saw them as a vital support vehicle for the infantry. And to top it off, Guderian objected to them being placed under the command of the artillery (he may have been right there). So much for leadership at the top.

Ed Rotondaro

Hi Ed:


The problem for the German General Staff was of course, Hitler. He did not trust them, so he played them off against themselves. There are always conflicts of ideas within services, the US is no different. It shouldn't have an adverse affect on combat operations, but with the German's it did.

As to the STUG controversy, many will say that the German's had limited production capability and probably should have scrapped the older tanks to release those production capabilities for newer tanks. That is probably valid but if you aren't the ones in the front lines of Russia, it is easy to criticize. The German army was moving to the defensive and had to have heavy gun infantry support to use their fluid defense doctrine. The assault gun could provide that gun support. They were an older and more reliable chassis, lower silhouette and had a much more powerful gun. They were perfect for infantry support. The replacement Panther and Tiger, while great tanks, had many teething problems and were much more complex to build and support.

I would have to say that Manstein had the better argument, considering his position on the front lines of Russia.

Dennis

[bridav58]

One must also look at 3 things,operations,logistics and intel..In the first one the Germans may have been superior BUT in the last two? In the German army an operational commander may very well not have listened to his quartermaster when the latter states there aren't enough supplies or enough fuel for this operation. In intel? A German intel officer may tell his superior the enemy has 100 tanks the operations officer may very well him rubbish!!!..It seems in the US Army logistical and intel staff were listened to more..Not saying it always was the case but....

[oldpop2000]

One aspect of German operations that I want to elaborate on is logistics.

Jomini defined logistics as "the practical art of moving armies" but a more complete definition would be "the practical art of moving armies and keeping them supplied". In strategy, the art of the possible, it isn't just numerical superiority, doctrine and intel, arms and tactics but supplying the requirements, organizing them, administrating them and moving them. In the modern era of aircraft, that can be a problem without air superiority over the battlefield. As the war progressed, the German's faced the problem of supplying their forces without air superiority, this greatly complicated the issues.

   The German's faced many problems in logistics. They did not have sufficient industrial resources to build motorized vehicles to move supplies from the rail depots to the front. They had not standardized their vehicles to simplify maintenance. They also did not have enough oil to lube and fuel the vehicles.The German's used horse drawn wagons to move their supplies. However, let me point out that the Allies, in France in 1944 had 69,000 tons of motor transports to support forty-seven divisions and they still had a very serious shortage. The German's were not alone.

In the area of organization, the Germans also had a problem. To simplify, logistic support for the army was split between two authorities, one controlled both ends, and one controlled the middle. This created numerous problems throughout the war.

As early as the Polish campaign all these issues rose to the surface for the German army. The destruction of railroads, bridges and roads all caused even more difficulty. They found that keeping the armored spearheads supplied as they made their rapid movement forward was almost an impossible task. Patton found the same issues after he broke through at Avranches in France in 1944. The Russians had the same issues.

For the Germans, the basic issues were easy to define: lack of a properly developed motor industry and an insecure supply of fuel. It is as simple as that.

Dennis

[bridav58]

and then one can look at Allied tactical versus strategic(power projection?) logistics..tactical as IMHO supporting 47 divisions in driving across France and strategic as in supplying nations like the UK & USSR by sea along with projecting power across the Pacific in a series of amphibious assaults and from there supplying them . Then ones has the Allied air transportation assets that were global in nature. It was amazing IMHO

[oldpop2000]

Mar 1, 2017 13:20:48 GMT -6 bridav58 said:

and then one can look at Allied tactical versus strategic(power projection?) logistics..tactical as IMHO supporting 47 divisions in driving across France and strategic as in supplying nations like the UK & USSR by sea along with projecting power across the Pacific in a series of amphibious assaults and from there supplying them . Then ones has the Allied air transportation assets that were global in nature. It was amazing IMHO

Ah yes, the "sinews of War". The US has to be the best at logistics now and in the past. We have to be the only nation who could bring fresh cake from homes to their sons on Guadalcanal. It actually happened.

[bridav58]

Mar 1, 2017 17:22:52 GMT -6 oldpop2000 said:

Mar 1, 2017 13:20:48 GMT -6 bridav58 said:

and then one can look at Allied tactical versus strategic(power projection?) logistics..tactical as IMHO supporting 47 divisions in driving across France and strategic as in supplying nations like the UK & USSR by sea along with projecting power across the Pacific in a series of amphibious assaults and from there supplying them . Then ones has the Allied air transportation assets that were global in nature. It was amazing IMHO

Ah yes, the "sinews of War". The US has to be the best at logistics now and in the past. We have to be the only nation who could bring fresh cake from homes to their sons on Guadalcanal. It actually happened.




and sometimes I bet US forces involved would have rather have more bullets and fuel delivered....lol