Walter_Sobchak

Kinda reminds me of the Brazilian Alacran  

That's pretty much my understanding of the situation.  Teledyne was working with Renk by the late 1970's to get a Renk transmission into their "Super M60".  So I'm not sure if Teledyne pitched the Renk transmission to the Israelis, or if the Israelis picked the Renk transmission independently.  

That's pretty much my understanding of the situation.  Teledyne was working with Renk by the late 1970's to get a Renk transmission into their "Super M60".  So I'm not sure if Teledyne pitched the Renk transmission to the Israelis, or if the Israelis picked the Renk transmission independently.  

Thanks. If you speak to Mr. DiNardo again, please tell him he owes me twelve bucks. PayPal is acceptable. ;)

A couple summers ago I had a chance to get inside an M113 and I have to say, I am not sure it was intended for human crewmen.  

Just got through Guderian: Panzer Pioneer or Myth Maker? by Russell A. Hart. I was looking forward to reading it; the introduction says the book "seeks the real Heinz Guderian, not the man of legend." I was expecting a short but interesting insight into how Guderian inflated his accomplishments, much like Bond and Mearsheimer had done with Liddell Hart (and which Gat later attempted to redress). No less than Richard DiNardo proffered a decently glowing review of the book that concluded with, "This monograph is certainly not the definitive biography of Guderian, and I do not think the author had that goal in mind. As a corrective to one of the more mendacious memoirs of the Second World War, Hart's work clearly hits the mark." Looking good!
 
As it turns out, the book is a hot mess. It consists of surprisingly repetitious (and it's only 118pp), scantily-researched, poorly-evidenced, and thesaurus-driven prose that does little to convince the reader of the author's arguments unless the reader is fine with simply taking his word on things. (Of course, with the way things go on social media, this may not be an issue...). The third sentence in the introduction is, "Unfortunately, too many of Guderian's biographers have accepted Guderian's view of his accomplishments without sufficient critical scrutiny." In the endnote for this sentence Hart mentions seven such hagiographies, including two editions of Macksey's book on Guderian, Panzer General and Creator of the Blitzkreig. From this strong start, I thought with glee, clearly Hart will offer some hard-hitting, original research using novel sources!
 
Oh. Hart's main sources are the biographies he accused of insufficient critical scrutiny in the third sentence of his book.

 
Hart consistently makes assertions and accusations with no supporting examples, and often with even no citation. Some of this stuff I even believed going in, but if I had disagreed I would not be convinced by Hart simply saying so. E.g., people now realize Lutz had a large hand in forming the German armored forces. Hart agrees, stating. "It was Lutz more than Guderian who transformed the Mobile Troops Command into a strong, coherent branch in the late 1930s. Quietly, with much less fuss and rancor than Guderian was raising, Lutz negotiated, cajoled, listened, and compromised to push forward his command more effectively than Guderian ever could have done." What negotiations and compromises actually occurred are, like many things in the book, left to the reader's imagination.
 
Hart later says that "Guderian despised the Catholic, Slavic Poles who now [in 1939] occupied parts of his native, beloved Prussia." This is not provided with any citation or evidence. It's not that I wouldn't believe such a statement, but I would expect some evidence to accompany its presentation. Hart later says that during the French invasion, "In his private correspondence, Guderian expressed compassion for the plight of the French populace. This demonstrated that he held the 'civilized' French in much higher regard than he did the Slavic Poles." So I guess that's the evidence? Again, not that I wouldn't believe it, but that connection seems a bit of a stretch.
 
Likewise, Hart says that during the Polish invasion Guderian "earned the enmity of many a senior officer whose command prerogatives Guderian carelessly and thoughtlessly trampled over. For example, Guderian soon found himself at odds with the 3d Panzer Division commander--Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg--another future rising star of the armored force." What prerogatives were trampled, what odds occurred, and how those odds were resolved are not mentioned.
 
A fourth example: "Largely as a result of Guderian's insistence, these [Hummel and Wespe] were produced only in limited numbers, sufficient at best to equip a single battalion in each panzer artillery regiment during 1943-5. The lack of self-propelled guns reflected Guderian's opposition to diverting resources and production capacity to artillery weapons and his firm prewar belief that only tanks could fight other tanks effectively." This cites pp.216-22 in Panzer Leader. Unfortunately, my edition is apparently paginated differently, because there is nothing in those pages in my copy that talks about Guderian's opposition to SP arty. I did find where Guderian laid out the notes he took to his 9 March 1943 conference with Hitler et al after becoming Inspector-General of Armored Troops, which included "9.The artillery of the panzer and motorized divisions will from now on be receiving the adequate number of self-propelled gun-carriages which has been requested for the past 10 years...Tanks of latest design must be supplied for artillery observers."
 
A final example of evidenceless assertions for this post, but by no means final in the book: "[Guderian's] response to that trend [of the SS and Nazi party gaining influence and threatening taking over the army in 1944] was to more strongly identify himself and the armored troops with the national socialist worldview and agenda." No citation, no elaboration on how Guderian identified the armored troops with the Nazi worldview and agend, or even what that means, really.
 
Hart can't seem to decide how well Guderian performs as far as politics and influencing others. He variously describes him as having "political naiveté" (p.90), being "a consummate political operator" (p.92) who "continuously politicked" (p.93) those in Hitler's sphere, who executed a "calculated political neutrality" (p.102) after the assassination attempt on Hitler, yet who was again "a political neophyte" (p.115) who was "politically naive" (p.117). This list starts at p.90 only because that's when I bothered to start keeping track. It exists throughout the book.
 
I generally like historical scholarship and biographies to take a decently even-handed approach, but Hart makes no attempt to hide his bias with word choice, time and again throwing out strings of adjectives full of negative connotation: "More than anything else, it was his repeated, insolent defiance of higher authority, his insatiable and threatening demands for more of everything, his inability to understand the needs of other commands or act as a team player, combined with his inability to finesse his superiors, that cost Guderian his appointment." Jeez, say how you really feel.
 
So, in sum, I was disappointed. I went into this book believing that Guderian made more of himself than he should have re: the formation of German armored forces, but Hart did little to convince me had I not already thought so. The book is not all bad (I hadn't heard of the bribes Hitler gave to senior officers, but this research is not original to Hart, who cites others' work), but it's shallow and I feel it's not very good scholarship, especially from a history professor and PhD-holder who specializes "in the history of the Second World War in the European Theater." At least it was only like $12.
 

A couple summers ago I had a chance to get inside an M113 and I have to say, I am not sure it was intended for human crewmen.  

A couple summers ago I had a chance to get inside an M113 and I have to say, I am not sure it was intended for human crewmen.  

Robot tank!
 

 
Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

The best use of some old Sherman tanks for a small army would be to keep them in a separate unit with WWII accurate markings for the purpose of renting them out to Hollywood for WWII films. 

I've heard similar things from other sources, basically my understanding is the Cummins, (thanks for the page corrections, I fix them ASAP) doesn't make power at a low enough RPM so at low speed, the engine is struggling the extra load from the steering brakes stalls it out.  Maybe Meplat knows more, I could have it wrong too. 

Not to be fussy or anything, but there are some errors in this text.  It should read "AVCR-1790 diesel engine, not "AVCT-1790."  AVCR stands for Aircooled, variable compression piston.  Also, where it says "AVCT-1790", it should say "AVDS-1790".  AVDS stands for Air-cooled Vee configuration Diesel Supercharged.  Also, while I know about the Teledyne Continental "Super M60" program, I have never heard of the "General Dynamics High Performance M60 MBT project."  General Dynamics had zero interest in upgrading the M60 and really disliked the fact that Teledyne Continental had created the Super-60 because it was considered unwelcome competition to General Dynamics Abrams tank in the time period addressed in the book.
 
Anyhow, the AVCR-1790 took the variable compression ratio technology developed for the ill fated AVCR-1360 engine of the MBT-70 and General Motors rejected XM-1 prototype and applied it to the older AVDS-1790 engine of the M60 series.  The introduction of VCR to the 1790 got the engine up to 1200 HP, although from what I understand, the prototype suffered a pretty serious failure during testing in South Korea.  Teledyne abandoned the AVCR-1790, replacing it with the AVDS-1790-9, which achieved 1200HP by introducing aftercoolers to the turbochargers with conventional pistons.  Incidentally, Teledyne Continental promotional materials for the Super M60 list either engine, depending on what date they were published.  The AVDS-1790-9 would go on to see service in the Israeli Merkava III and the Namer APC.

Not the best quality picture, but proof that Santa traded his sled for a M46 Patton.
 

Not the best quality picture, but proof that Santa traded his sled for a M46 Patton.
 

Not the best quality picture, but proof that Santa traded his sled for a M46 Patton.
 

Not the best quality picture, but proof that Santa traded his sled for a M46 Patton.
 

Everyone knows that the canine is the true friend of the tanker.
 

Ah, I guess I misheard that. Anyhow, as far as I know, the Schienfurt raids did not do much to actually cause a ball bearing shortage in German industry.  I'll have to double check, but I have never heard that Tiger tanks were excessively loud due to failing bushings.  I could be wrong, I haven't spent much time reading about Tiger tanks lately.  Now, lack of rubber certainly lead to louder tanks, that was an issue the Germans had to deal with.
 
To be honest, I don't have a strong enough opinion regarding the Stg44 to have much of an opinion either way.  I enjoy Ian's forgotten weapons videos and assume his opinions have merit, as I do Sturgeon's.  

Defying Trump, US Senate votes to end US support for Yemen war
 
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/12/defying-trump-senate-approves-yemen-resolution-181213201629972.html

Is that the Bob Semple Tiger?

Something for @Toxn
 
 

...
https://cloud.mail.ru/public/87mv/NGc3PoEpo/ "The TARDEC Story: Sixty-five Years of Innovation 1946-2010", downloaded via some means from GoogleBooks, and ... welll, it lacks some 50 pages (out of 3 hundreed) which they do not show
https://cloud.mail.ru/public/KL5T/U8pbM6iL7 "The Bradley and how it Got that Way: Technology, Institutions, and the Problem of Mechanized Infantry in the United States Army", which GoogleBooks also has, - it also lacks about 50 pages (out of 2 hundreed)
 
Also, Archive.org has a some sort of online library, which allowes to borrow some of their scanned books - so one user could see that book, and enyone else willing to do the same at the same time should wait in line, as if it was not a bunch of .img/.png files but a real physical copy of the book. Anyway, among some things thay show that way,  there is a scan of Burton's Pentagon Wars https://cloud.mail.ru/public/A1qi/Yem6Npsi8
 
https://cloud.mail.ru/public/ES1e/pSRmx6NzH several dozens of articles and small notes (predominantly in english) on Bradley and tracked APCs and IFVs in general, and how they should be employed, which appeared in 50s-80s in those  magazines which I was able to find on the internet - mostly in Army, Armor, Infanry, Military Review, Soldiers, - and also some articles from newspapers like New York Times on scandals around Bradley development and acquizition
 
...
more books there https://cloud.mail.ru/public/Jjk9/mHuYG7piH

...
Now there are I guess about 40 volumes of Infantry available in full view on the same link,
and I've asked them about Army magazine and got 69 volumes so far https://books.google.ru/books?uid=115590142161999487031&as_coll=1006 - also they've denied my requests for 13 volumes (which are available on Hathitrust anyway).

Apparently they've also scanned some Soviet and Russian magazines - like this one https://books.google.ru/books?uid=115590142161999487031&as_coll=1010 (Soviet Miitary Review, english language edition of soviet propaganda magazine about Soviet Army) - also it seems to me that in this case copyright status is confusing and noone knows for sure whether it's in Public Domain or not, which is why my requests on that were mostly denied.
 
those and other "bookshelves" (folders) are available there https://books.google.ru/books?uid=115590142161999487031

Somewhat surprisingly, I think this is one of the best of the Tank Museum Top five videos and one of the best videos that Richard "The Challenger" Cutland has done.   Probably because he is speaking about his personal experiences with these vehicles in the video.
 
 

Somewhat surprisingly, I think this is one of the best of the Tank Museum Top five videos and one of the best videos that Richard "The Challenger" Cutland has done.   Probably because he is speaking about his personal experiences with these vehicles in the video.