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Zinegata

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Posts posted by Zinegata

  1. The Field Marshall is an example, more than any other allied leader, of a soldier who went into WW2 spooked.  The experience of Great Britain in the Great War is not enviable, and this caused a considerable amount of alternate history writing in the 1920s and 30s, but Montgomery knew that the British had fought dumb at 3rd Ypres, and although the official British history often refers to this battle as a great offensive victory Montgomery saw that the British strategy of throwing men into an enemy line that would not fail could ruin the war effort.  He was one of the people who called Haig "Butcher Haig" behind his back, and after the war when the British command declared Haig to be a war hero Montgomery never could swallow that.  he also knew that his two comrades, Wavell who had served on GHQ in the Great War, and Auchinleck had been handed raw deals by Churchill for failure to exhibit what some might call "cautious aggression," which meant for Churchill throwing every last crumb you have into whatever pet project Churchill had and never saying you were defeated by a superior enemy,

     

    So Montgomery, who had every possibility of being just as good as Wavell, was a lap dog when he landed at Normandy, ready to snarl or curl up as his master commanded, and very concerned lest his master say a harsh word.  American Generals had a significant advantage in having Eisenhower in the chain of command, which assured they could tend things without as much interference, unless they ran foul of Harry Hopkins.  

     

    The massive losses of tanks by the British had more to do with keeping Churchill in statistics than any failure of tactics.  Churchill had been taught in WW2 that an advance cost x men per meter taken.  He wanted to see those meters taken, and if you lost x*5 men he expected to see x5 meters taken.  He was also told a tank was worth 100 men, so it was cheaper to keep Churchill handy to get a bunch of tanks blow up, especially since they lacked enough fuel in the first place, than it was to simply use tanks and infantry in their most effected manner.  The failure at Market Garden becomes more understandable once the logic Churchill operated on is understood.

     

    The US and Great Britain each lost around 10,000 tanks and SPAT in Europe, total of around 20,000 vehicles.  The Germans lost around 4000 actual tanks, but also lost 75,000 other armored vehicles which included STUG, SPAT 1/2 track, and 1/2 Track weapon carriers.  They also lost 90,000 AT guns.  Be careful when someone tells you the allies lost 5 to 1 tanks, in reality the Germans lost 4 armored vehicles for every armored vehicle lost by the allies and it took 12 or more AT guns in the field to generate a tank kill.

     

    Wait, so all those grand tank charges was so that Monty could maintain some kind of imaginary "ground taken versus men lost" statistic?

     

    Also I am glad I am not the only one who noticed how Squad Leader has a Wehraboo bias.

  2. http://navy-matters.blogspot.ca/2015/05/combat-mcm.html

     

    A rather long, but interesting essay on Naval Mine Clearing in varying environments.

     

    Interesting evaluation of USN capeabilities.  I'd like to hear peoples thoughts on this, and possible concepts for moving forward.

     

    I'm not sold on this article because it proposes a requirement of mine-clearing while under fire. I don't think you should really do this to begin with - eliminate the enemy naval and air assets first or reduce them significantly before you begin MCM operations sounds much more sensible. Indeed, the last time I can recall that a fleet tried to clear minefields while under fire was Dardanelles, and that resulted in three pre-dreadnoughts being sunk due to an undetected minefield. Even in all of the wargames I've played the only scenario that required the USN to mine-clear while under fire was a pretty ridiculous EU + Russia vs US scenario wherein a CVBG was evacuating from the Med through Gibraltar; and the EU/Russia had to resort to limited strikes against the MCM helicopters because their air power was so decimated by the CVBG..

     

    Moreover, I think people are a bit too hard on the LCS for MCMing. You want mine-clearing to be done by a relatively small ship with few crew, so that you minimize inevitable losses; and the primary mine-clearing asset in any case is in fact the ship's helicopter.

     

    If you want faster mine-clearing as proposed in the "Contested" scenario you'll actually need a small fleet of helicopters, which means dedicating an LHD (which is what the article proposed, albeit the ship carries only four helicopters which I think is really inadequate for fast clearing) or significant deck space on a full carrier.

     

    Which again goes back to my original point - wouldn't it be better to instead have more fighter and strike craft on your LHD/carrier and eliminate the other threats entirely before getting to work on mine-clearance? Indeed, by having less space for fighter and strike craft you're leaving yourself open to having the enemy target your MCM LHD specifically and wipe out all your MCM assets in one go.

  3. Many of the surviving katanas also tend to be the "lucky" ones where the ore was better and the sword itself was better-maintained, which is why the lasted so long and were so treasured to begin with. There's an inherent bias towards the good swords surviving, whereas most of the swords were broken in combat or rusted down.

     

    Take this also with a grain of salt because Cracked was the first place I saw this pointed out - but the Katana is also apparently harder to master and train on because of the compromises in design due to the crummy Japanese ores. Dunno if this is really true.

  4. vuetd1W.gif

    7ix1ghe.gif

     

    I don't think this should reflect badly on Japanese sword smith seeing as they neither had the resource nor the need to improve the quality of their swords. Despite the claims of some Weaboos there are definitely European swords created with analogous methods however they were later dropped in favor of other methods as the needs of troops dictated. Also at the end of the day it really doesn't matter as nethier the European Longsword nor the Katana were the primary weapon of their respective users. 

     

    There's also the ore source issue.

     

    Before the industrial age it wasn't really possible to create specific mixes of metals to create stronger types of steel, as material sciences hadn't progressed that far yet. More often than not, it was the other pre-existing metals in the ore itself which determined what sort of steel alloy came out of a medieval era forge.

     

    So a longsword from Toledo and a longsword from France may have been made with the exact same technique but one would be better than the other.  In the case of the Katana, my understanding is that part of the reason they went into such extremely time-consuming production methods was because Japanese iron ore was really crummy in the first place.

  5. Seriously, if feminism is what was depicted in the new Mad Max movie, then sign me up.  Male characters and female characters teamed up to beat the bad guys and make their world a better place.  And lots of awesome car crashes happened.  What's not to like?  

     

    Yep, though I'm convinced that this wasn't the original plan and it was only partway through shooting the movie that Tom Hardy and George Miller both just agreed that Charlize was a much better lead. At which point they stopped all pretense and decided she should be the "hero"; which is also why the next Mad Max movie's subtitle is already Furiosa.

     

    It was still a Mad Max movie through and through because of the atmosphere of the movie, even if Max's most awesome moment happened off-screen :P.

  6. Zin, you're upholding a pretty low standard of posting here. Stop misrepresenting people's arguments and condescending to them. It's a habit that will take time to break, so get on it.

     

    Before accusing me of "misrepresenting people's arguments and condescending to them" consider that you yourself admit that you never actually bothered to read the entirety of my post.

     

    Anyway I'm dropping this thread. And maybe this entire forum given that it's pretty clear to me that "low standard" is synonymous with "disagreeing with Sturgeon and his favorites" because some people are too immature and who, in the face of someone seriously discussing a topic, hides behind "don't be serious" every time an argument doesn't go their way.

  7. No. See. The correct response should be "OHMY FUCKING GOD YOU SCRUB, DONT YOU KNOW ANAKIN WAS NINE YEARS OLD IN PHANTOM MENACE YOU POSER HICK CLOWNSHOW!!!!1!!!1"

    And yes, the first time we have a blue-on-blue with a drone killing friendly American soldiers or - as I clearly stated in my first post - if American soldiers die because of a decision to only use drones as CAS you will see a media and political shitstorm of the likes that hasn't been seen since The Little Bighorn. If you can't grasp that simple fact of American political life then you really know anything about American politics at all.

    I mean holy hell, look what a shit storm erupted over the M4 "failing" in Afghanistan. You think a DC is simply going to shrug its collective shoulders? Get with the program man.

     

    Downward, I know enough about American politics that a "shitstorm" will only happen if one party can hurt the other without shooting itself in the foot. And a friendly-fire drone incident isn't going to be one of those issues because the Republicans want to portray themselves as the party of Defending Murica and they aren't about to question a program that was more successful at blowing up AQ leaders in other countries than anything Bush ever did.

     

    Meanwhile, Obama already got away with blowing up two American citizens - one a terrorist and another a hostage - using drones. Do you see any "shit storm" over drones over the death of a hostage? Maybe you should consider that the party that traditionally would be complaining over this - the Democrats - are also too busy using the drone program to play up their Defend Murica credentials hence they're also letting it pass?

  8. Wow. You responded seriously to my joke post about six-year old Anakin. Geesh man, lighten up.

    And as someone who is intimately familiar with American politics and media, trying to gauge the cost of a pilot's life based on the dollars spent to train him is... let's just say it is a very unique way to view how things are prioritized in this country.

     

    It's hard to believe you're "joking" when you're grumbling about how we put dollar values on a pilot's life while ignoring that the whole point of the drone program for Western miliataries is to take the mortal danger away from the said pilots; and that the only folks who will still continue using CAS aircraft are those who train their pilots dirt-cheap like in South Africa or the Philippines because we accept some of them might not come home.

  9. This thread has gone far afield since last I responded. But I think some of you are really underestimating the political cost of dead pilots and dead ground pounders.

    In the aftermath of Desert Storm, the shitstorm in the media and DC with the various friendly fire incidents - including the infamous "this Bud's for you" one - lasted for years.

    Now multiply that ten times over and add the hot button issue of drones to the equation to a 24 hour news cycle with social media and the Internet and you have the risk of an event that could make Abu Gahrab look like an isolated, one-off bit of horseplay involving a bunch of POGs with poor platoon leadership.

     

    Again, you do realize that as much as a third of drone strikes *already* cause civilian casualties and nobody even questions this, yes? There is very much an understanding that drones are still controlled by people and it these people who are ultimately responsible for any collateral damage mistakes.

     

     

     

    So. The answer is lots of aircraft flown by six-year olds?

     

    No, as Toxn and I already explained the only niche for manned CAS aircraft is the low-cost military aircraft, because those are cheap enough to be had in large numbers - cheaper than drones in fact even with pilot training - for militaries that don't have the cash to afford drones.

     

    You do realize that the US Air Force went through a phase like this, yes, when they formed SEAD units that had the crappiest jets available? The idea being that it's better to risk some older planes like F4s for Wild Weasel duty instead of the more expensive F-15 Strike Eagle.

     

    ====

     

     

     

    E.) None of this means we should just throw our combined arms out the window in favor of promises of mature unmanned technology that does not actually exist yet. FFS, we don't even have optical navigation down yet!

     

    "Meh. The day when we go all-drone with CAS isn't too far off anyway."

     

    "Really, it's glaring how people keep going we shouldn't all-drone for a risky job like CAS, when Space Exploration went all-drone years ago, suffers plenty of glitches and lost missions, and yet the reaction to lost space probes is "Oh well, good thing we didn't send a guy up there or he'd be dead now!" while taking the risk to the human operator away from CAS is treated as dangerous sci-fi fantasy despite drones conducting the majority of actual air strikes (as well as most of the recon flights) since Obama became president."

     

    Finally, what does optical navigation have to do with present-day drones? Most human pilots don't even navigate optically anymore for most of the journey - that's what GPS is for and why autopilots are common for airlines. And even if we assume some optical navigation is necessary there's a reason the things still have a human operator back in the base; and nobody in this thread is advocating fully automated drones that fly without human guidance and choose targets for themselves without any human input. 

     

    If you get to the point of fully automated drones, then you can retire the fighter jocks because at that point you really don't need a pilot for the dogfighting portion anymore (and dogfihts will keep happening because BVR thing just isn't going to be allowed unless in an apocalyptic war because of ROE issues). Before then CAS is actually going to be the first to end up all-drone'd because having a full picture of the battlefield is much more important to ensuring the ordnance gets dropped on the right target instead of the advantage of having no lag due to tele-operation.

  10. Battlefield intelligence doesn't work the way in practice that it does in theory, mate.

     

    These are the same tired old argument from the corners of the military that still can't accept their obsolescence that actually don't hold any water.

     

    Battlefield intelligence doesn't primarily come from air-based assets in CAS in the first place, and you'd notice this if you read my argument. You have planes flying at high speed looking at itty-bitty little figures on the ground - and this assumes that the pilot can get a good view from the cockpit and the pilot isn't terribly distracted by being shot at. Does this sound like ideal conditions for intel-gathering?

     

    Instead, the ones actually guiding the planes are your Forward Observers on the ground, which is why it's silly to claim drones can be jammed when a jammer powerful enough to do this will also break the comms between the ground team and the CAS bombers.

     

    So really there's no need for manned CAS. Battlefield intelligence comes from your FOs on the ground.

     

    Moreover, if you subscribe to the fantasy of primarily air-based recon then drones can do that for you too, and you can have a team of analysts sitting in a comfortable building to actually have time and support to figure out which of the little figures on the ground are the good guys and the bad guys to begin with; rather than asking a pilot to do this solo while being in mortal danger.

     

    Really, have you ever tried identifying targets on the ground based on an aerial recon picture, much less try identifying targets when the plane is flying really fast? Why do you think so many actual drone strikes still end up killing the wrong people even with a room full of analysts?

  11. So, you lose 10% of the payload if you want ejection seats? That doesn't leave much weight for a gun

     

    Actually, our OV-10s don't even have guns - they come standard but as far as I know we haven't done a gun strafing run since maybe the 70s and they've been removed or gutted to save weight for the most part. But again, the main virtue of this class of planes is that they're so cheap to fly and maintain, so your operating costs are really low, your acquisition cost is so low you can afford to replace them when one or two are lost.

     

    Sure, a 500 lb payload is totally irrelevant against the Red Amy, but against a handful of rebels a single bomb is often more than enough to win a major fight outright.

  12. Uh, no it's because an experienced pilot is expensive.

    UAVs make a lot of sense for CAS. What you need is cooperation between UAV assets and manned CAS/FAC assets. Which is pretty much what we have now. Plop all the Hellfires and APKWS onto a drone or drones, and have something manned supported by loads of unmanned assets so they're able to take fewer risks while still getting intel calling the shots.

     

    Again, you really need to reconsider "expensive pilots" when South Africa can get 30 for a million dollars in training. Flying a plane nowadays is not that hard. Heck, modern airliners are primarily flown by auto-pilot in the first place; which is why even the really basic PAL flight training is more than enough to get them civilian airliner jobs.

     

    Also, mixing manned and unmanned planes over the same area? What for? Anything the pilot can do, the drone can do also. You seem to be under the impression that the future lies in having a manned bomber "supported" by unmanned drones, but you don't need a manned bomber in the area at all when you can have the drone control center in the United States.

     

    Or are you saying that the unamanned drones do the SEAD portion to pave the way for the manned planes? Sorry, but that doesn't make sense. The SEAD portion is in fact the bit that is most likely to encounter electronic jamming in the first place which is why SEAD - despite being hugely risky - may need to be one of the roles that goes to the drones last.

  13. Studies seem to indicate that pilots are by far the most expensive asset, and that you don't want to be throwing them away.

    Sure, you could put no-training scrubs in Cessnas and try to get them to do CAS, but your attrition rate, coupled with the low delivered capability would make these "assets" decidedly appendix-like.

    Infantry need a good, well-trained CAS element, not some idiot who doesn't know how to read a battlefield puttering around uselessly in the sky.

     

    That's because as Toxn pointed out Western militaries tend to have pretty ridiculous pilot training costs since they're being asked to fly very expensive aircraft for an extended period of time. For a Third World military pilot training costs are much lower, to the point that the running joke is that the Philippine Air Force is just a flight school for commercial airlines where you actually get paid instead of paying tuition but at the slight risk of death.

     

    Incidentally, this is also exactly why drones make sense for a well-funded military. With drones your well-trained Western pilots are no longer put at risk and can instead spend more time on things like target acquisition and verification to make sure that your expensive Hellfire missile actually kills actual enemy targets and not some innocent civilians in the wrong place and time.

     

    Meanwhile the Philippine Air Force pilots, while skilled, are expendable enough that they can continue to be risked on bombing runs using OV-10 prop planes. Since getting through a tour makes you employable in a high-paying commercial airline job, there is no shortage of new candidates.

     

    Moreover, for CAS to be really effective you need to have on-the-ball forward observers; and they are arguably more important than the pilots. The pilots for the most part are dependent on the FO to tell them who's the good guys and the bad guys.

     

    In the recent Masamapano fracas for instance the supposedly "elite" ground team was using Google Maps to navigate a swamp, ended up on the wrong side of the river and thus violated a cease fire agreement, and got wiped out to nearly the last man because no one could give the army any coordinates as to where they were and where the Moros were. The OV-10s in this instance didn't even bother dropping bombs, much less take off from the nearby airfield - they didn't have any valid targets and the ROE sensibly forbade willy-nilly dropping of munitions.

     

    On the other hand, with some very good intelligence and some exceptional recon one of our OV-10s actually took out one of the top AQ leaders in the region. That our pilots could drop a bomb in a properly identified hut so surprised the local media that they still think that the OV-10 bombing was a hoax and it was really a US drone that conducted the strike (at best a couple of US drones might have helped guide the OV-10, but the US has been extremely scrupulous about its "no combat" pledge in the PH).

  14. That thing's a fucking deathtrap.

     

    Of course it's a death trap. That's the whole *point*. Note how "Optional Ejection Seats" are listed as one of the features?

     

    • Compact size
    • High wing for crew visibility and better field operation
    • Low purchase and operation costs
    • Simplified logistic support
    • High cruise and dash speeds
    • Payload capacity in excess of 800kg
    • Large operating range
    • Short Take-Off and Landing
    • Self-protection counter measures
    • Optional ejection seats
    • Light attack capability
  15. Funny that the thinking behind the AHRLAC is almost the opposite: CAS should be manned (because the ground is the most complex environment), so the best option is to make a cheap-and-cheerful plane suitable for operation by relatively low-skilled pilots:

    http://www.paramountgroup.biz/en/ahrlac-rad-aircraft.html

     

    Actually, that's exactly the niche manned CAS is going to have as I mentioned above:

     

     

     

    Manned CAS's niche will in fact be with very low cost militaries that can't really afford to keep up on the electronics and want something very simple to operate and maintain.

     

    In fact, the AHRLAC's selling point is that it's supposed to be cheaper than drones from a dollar value perspective, so if you're the sort of military that can afford to spend lives instead of dollars (and don't mind a lot of misses) it's exactly the sort of plane you'd want over a drone.

     

    (the exception being CAS over a low-threat environment, but then I'd argue it's technically a COIN as opposed to CAS aircraft - and even the USAF is getting AHRLAC-like planes like the Super Tucano for the COIN role).

  16. And the first time kills some American soldiers get killed in a friendly fire incident or the first time a drone isn't able to get the job done because of a technical glitch, electronic interference or getting hacked will be the last time they are solely used as Close Air Support.

     

    And when was the last time the entire drone fleet got grounded by a friendly fire mistake? Oh wait that never happened, and in fact the drones are still flying missions despite constantly hitting civilians by mistake. Maybe it's because they figured the ones at fault are the human operators evaluating and picking the targets, and not the drones?

     

    Meanwhile entire squadrons of manned CAS aircraft get grounded whenever Joint Strike Fighter suffers some kind of glitch again - usually computer-based ones that renders the entire airplane inoperable because modern aircraft are so computer-dependent.

     

    Really, it's glaring how people keep going we shouldn't all-drone for a risky job like CAS, when Space Exploration went all-drone years ago, suffers plenty of glitches and lost missions, and yet the reaction to lost space probes is "Oh well, good thing we didn't send a guy up there or he'd be dead now!" while taking the risk to the human operator away from CAS is treated as dangerous sci-fi fantasy despite drones conducting the majority of actual air strikes (as well as most of the recon flights) since Obama became president.

     

    CAS is going the way of drones and very soon because the very nature of the entire Air Force is so hugely dependent on electronics. Yes, yes, drones may be jammed and the Iranians claim to have done it once but so can the comms of a manned CAS aircraft, which is just as bad because you now have your CAS pilot needing to figure out who the hell among those little figures on the ground are the good guys while going through the stress of being shot at. Jamming / counterjamming is not some magic counter to drones; it's just something that you have to take into account for with manned aircraft just as you do with drones.

     

    Manned CAS simply does not have a future for modern militaries if they were thinking straight instead of trying to preserve their petty little fiefdoms in the military hierarchy. Going drone is simply cheaper in terms of air frame cost (important given that the aircraft is always at risk in CAS) because you can make drones a lot smaller since you don't have to worry about fitting a pilot, and you are assured of preserving your skilled operators since they are never put in any danger. Manned CAS's niche will in fact be with very low cost militaries that can't really afford to keep up on the electronics and want something very simple to operate and maintain.

  17. We're talking at least a 100m diameter ring here. This would put it in the same size category as the ISS. Only, you know, spinning.

     

    When I say "longer-term space missions requiring larger space ships in the first place" I'm actually already thinking on the scale of O'Neill Cylinders.

     

    At ISS levels of habitation or space ships there is no point to having babies in space in the first place.

  18. Centrifugal gravity is pretty problematic.  Nothing insoluble, but lots of headaches.

     

    1)  Where do your space station's docking ports go?  They clearly can't be at the spinning periphery, and even a rotating port, say, at the center of a hub is still problematic.  Could you have a spinning section and a non-spinning section?  Pressure-tight rotary joints would be a real headache.  I can't think of anything comparable that actually exists.

     

    2)  A spun ship ideally is large, or Coriolis effects will be significant, and disorienting.

     

    3)  A large spun ship will need to be radially balanced, somehow.

     

    By the time you want to have babies in space it's implied that we're looking at much longer-term space missions requiring larger space ships in the first place.

  19. This is a great note Zinegata.

     

    Institutional memory was lost at the end of the Napoleonic era for France because the July Massacre, when more than half the army was demobilized (and it was the better half, with Napoleon trained officers) and later the White Terrors literally gutted the pragmatic wartime military infrastructure.  Then they passed the military laws of 1818 and 1819 which returned the Army to its former size, but no officers from the old Army could be employed - so they ended up with a pretty half-witted military force.  Unlike Germany post WW1 there was not a backdrop of officers who could be called back - the monarchists were incompetent and the Napoleonic corps was tainted.  One only has to look at the list of dead or exiled officers to know what France lost -Ney, Brune, 12 of the 18 Marshalls of the Grande Armee.  If I am not mistaken Antoine-Henri Jomini himself went  to Russia or Sweden or something like that after the return of the Kingdom.

     

    Britain and France both drank the bayonet cool-aid because they found the weapons useful in the empire.

     

    Was the loss of officers to the Bourbon restoration really that severe? While Ney and other Marshals were killed others were spared and even held positions in the restored government - Davout, St Cyr, and Soult being the particular stand outs. There were a couple further revolutions after Napoleon's final defeat though so I'd think those would also account for why the French army ended up having amnesia - by 1870 French politics was such a mess that I think the French army had trouble remembering who exactly they were fighting for by this point.

  20. Just another note: Studies of Napoleonic eras revealed that bayonets only caused about 2% of the casualties, and that bayonet charges were largely mythical in nature.

     

    And when I say mythical I don't meant that entire battalions didn't charge with bayonets drawn - they certainly did. However, the charge was usually conducted when the defender was already wavering and the charge itself was just one massive bit of posturing to put them to flight. If the defender didn't run then the result was the attacker usually taking an entire volley at point-blank range resulting in the attacker getting routed instead.

     

    In fact, Jomini - one of the big Napoleonic references of the period - claimed that he in fact never witnessed a battalion ending up in a melee with another battalion. One side or another always broke first. The bayonet injuries, when they do happen, tend to happen to men who are running and are caught by the pursuit charge; or they occur during smaller charges by skirmishers (usually of only a few dozen men) fighting each other for good positions. That the French had to study the Civil War to find out the dubious utility of bayonets when their own Grand Armee actually hardly relied on it goes to show how institutions can easily end up mythologizing its own past into unsound doctrines for the present.

  21. Improvements in radar MASINT are supposed to mitigate this problem to a large degree.  Radar returns from engine compressor blades in particular are, at least per Raytheon boilerplate, very reliable identifiers for a radar with enough post-processing power.

     

    There are other solutions too, like the high-magnification stabilized camera slaved to the radar on the tomcat.

     

    Key word though is "supposed", and just to be safe RoE will still very likely require final visual identification before taking any shot.

     

    Mistakes do happen when you're relying entirely on radar, such as the recent Malaysian airline shoot down or the case of an AEGIS downing an Iranian jetliner. By contrast it's almost impossible to mistakenly shoot down an innocent airliner at visual range.

  22. Zaloga took these graphs and crunched the numbers to get his figures.

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    ALSx0Hd.png

     

    I would use this with conjunction with Zaloga's commentary. 

     

    Forczyk's Commentary on Death Traps

    Death Traps, a poorly written memoir by Belton Y. Cooper promises much, but delivers little. Cooper served as an ordnance lieutenant in the 3rd Armor Division (3AD), acting as a liaison officer between the Combat Commands and the Division Maintenance Battalion. One of the first rules of memoir writing is to focus on events of which the author has direct experience; instead, Cooper is constantly discussing high-level or distant events of which he was not a witness. Consequently, the book is riddled with mistakes and falsehoods. Furthermore, the author puts his main effort into an over-simplified indictment of the American Sherman tank as a "death trap" that delayed eventual victory in the Second World War.
     
    Cooper's indictment of the Sherman tank's inferiority compared to the heavier German Panther and Tiger tanks ignores many important facts. First, the Sherman was designed for mass production and this allowed the Allies to enjoy a 4-1 superiority in numbers. Second, fewer than 50% of the German armor in France in 1944 were Tigers or Panthers. Third, if the German tanks were as deadly as Cooper claims, why did the Germans lose 1,500 tanks in Normandy against about 1,700 Allied tanks? Indeed, Cooper claims that the 3AD lost 648 Shermans in the war, but the division claimed to have destroyed 1,023 German tanks. Clearly, there was no great kill-ratio in the German favor, and the Allies could afford to trade tank-for-tank. Finally, if the Sherman was such a "death trap," why did the US Army use it later in Korea or the Israelis use it in the 1967 War?
     
    There are a great number of mistakes in this book, beginning with Cooper's ridiculous claim that General Patton was responsible for delaying the M-26 heavy tank program. Cooper claims that Patton was at a tank demonstration at Tidworth Downs in January 1944 and that, "Patton...insisted that we should downgrade the M26 heavy tank and concentrate on the M4....This turned out to be one of the most disastrous decisions of World War II, and its effect upon the upcoming battle for Western Europe was catastrophic." Actually, Patton was in Algiers and Italy for most of January 1944, only arriving back in Scotland on 26 January. In fact, it was General McNair of Ground Forces Command, back in the US, who delayed the M-26 program. Cooper sees the M-26 as the panacea for all the US Army's shortcomings and even claims that the American offensive in November 1944, "would have succeeded if we had had the Pershing" and the resulting American breakthrough could have forestalled the Ardennes offensive and "the war could have ended five months earlier." This is just sheer nonsense and ignores the logistical and weather problems that doomed that offensive.
     
    Cooper continually discusses events he did not witness and in fact, only about one-third of the book covers his own experiences. Instead of discussing maintenance operations in detail, Cooper opines about everything from U-Boats, to V-2 rockets, to strategic bombing, to the July 20th Plot. He falsely states that, "the British had secured a model of the German enigma decoding machine and were using it to decode German messages." Cooper writes, "not until July 25, the night before the Saint-Lo breakthrough, was Rommel able to secure the release of the panzer divisions in reserve in the Pas de Clais area." Actually, Rommel was wounded on 17 July and in a hospital on July 25th. In another chapter, Cooper writes that, "the British had bombed the city [Darmstadt] during a night raid in February," and "more than 40,000 died in this inferno." Actually, the RAF bombed Darmstadt on 11 September 1944, killing about 12,000. Dresden was bombed on 13 February 1945, killing about 40,000. Obviously, the author has confused cities and raids.
     
    Even where Cooper is dealing with issues closer to his own experience, he tends to exaggerate or deliver incorrect information. He describes the VII Corps as an "armor corps," but it was not. Cooper's description of a counterattack by the German Panzer Lehr division is totally inaccurate; he states that, "July 11 became one of the most critical in the battle of Normandy. The Germans launched a massive counterattack along the Saint-Lo- Saint Jean de Daye highway..." In fact, one under strength German division attacked three US divisions. The Americans lost only 100 casualties, while the Germans suffered 25% armor losses. The Official history calls this attack "a dismal and costly failure." Cooper wrote that, "Combat Command A...put up a terrific defense in the vicinity of Saint Jean de Daye..." but actually it was CCB, since CCA in reserve. On another occasion, Cooper claims that his unit received the 60,000th Sherman produced, but official records indicate that only 49,234 of all models were built. Cooper claims that the 3rd Armored Division had 17,000 soldiers, but the authorized strength was about 14,500. Can't this guy remember anything correctly?
     
    Cooper's description of the death of MGN Rose is virtually plagiarized from the official history and a number of articles in ARMOR magazine in the past decade reveal that Rose was an extreme risk-taker. Reading "Death Traps," the uninitiated may actually believe that the US Army was badly defeated in Europe. Cooper even claims that, as the 3rd Armored Division approached the Elbe River in the last days of the war that, "with our division spread out and opposed by three new divisions, our situation was critical." If anybody's situation was critical in April 1945, it was Germany's. Actually, the 3rd Armored Division had one key weakness not noted by Cooper, namely the shortage of infantry. The division had a poor ratio of 2:1 between tanks and infantry, and this deficiency often required the 3AD to borrow an infantry RCT from other units. While the much-maligned Sherman tank was far from perfect, it did the job it was designed for, a fact that is missed by this author.
     
    Extra Comments

    Check out the fighting at Arracourt in September 1944 where standard M4s from 4th AD destroyed two brigades worth of Panthers for only 14 Shermans, a kill ratio of better than 5-1. Yes, the German tankers at Arracourt were rookies and the US tankers had the advantage - just like Barkmann and Whittman had over Allied tankers in June 1944. That's war. At Arracourt, Shermans routinely destroyed Panthers. For more, check out my upcoming book Panther vs T-34 for more info on Panther's actual abilities. Certainly it would have been great if the Sherman had a better main gun in June 1944, but the "Sherman was a bad tank" school are only looking at one aspect. The Sherman's mechanical reliability was a far more important factor than a gun with better penetration. I keep looking for instances where German tanks "slaughtered" US tanks in 1944-45 (ie kill ratios of 2-1 or 3-1 or better) and can't find any major such instances (2-3 tanks lost 1 1 Tiger or Panther, yes, but not whole companies like on the Eastern Front.

     
     

    Actually, comments such as "It took about 5 Shermans to kill 1 Panther, of which the Panther would kill 3" are not facts, they are unsubstantiated opinions. Any analysis of actual tank losses reveals that US tank losses were not three times German tank losses or even double. Far More US tanks were destroyed by AT guns and Panzerfausts than German tanks and the humble StuG III accounted for far more successes than Panthers. One look at the German tank "aces" reveals that aside from Barkmann(Me -> Barkmann's success is very questionable, Richard Anderson suggests Barkmann knocked out two Stuarts and come trucks at his corner), there were few Panther aces on the Western Front, but a fair number of successful Pz IV and StuG III commanders. US tank crew losses were not catastrophic as you are suggesting, heavy in some units, but far less than infantry units. On the other hand, the Panzerwaffe had far fewer veterans by December 1944 and had to fight a two-front war (three if you count Italy). The idea that the Sherman was only suitable for the Pacific is ipso facto absurd, since it was the Sherman that won the war in the ETO. If we had to wait for the Pershing, the war would either have dragged into 1946 or the Soviets would have been sitting on the Rhine.

     

    I also have some information in this thread about the M4 and its casualty rates. There's some cool statistics there like 29% of frontal hits of Tigers and Panthers were penetrations. 

     

    Geez, am I getting my math right? Based on Zaloga's charts there were 30 Sherman vs Panther engagements, wherein a total of 20 Shermans were destroyed in exchange for 72 (!) Panthers. Total Shermans engaged was around 200 versus 150 Panthers.

     

    Some kill ratio for the Panther.

  23. The major issue that the BVR crowd isn't addressing is that most future air warfare conflicts won't be pitting best against best. Much more likely is some kind of "peacekeeping" OP where you have a first world top-of-the-line jet going up against some rebel/rogue country Mig-21 jet.

     

    And the issue there is that it will be an invariably messy conflict over airspace that still has civilian traffic; at which point the rules of engagement will almost certainly require visual confirmation before any engagement to avoid mistakenly shooting down any civilian jet liners.

     

    Still, if a conventional war does break out, I don't think you can go very wrong with FIRE EVERYTHING.

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