delete013

Panther's only frontal weakness was the curved lower mantlet. Everything else was fine. A credible weapon beyond 500m? I think not. If you are so close then you ought to mind infantry rather than the tank. You got priorities all wrong. If a tank can't deal with vehicles then a single stug is enough for an attack to fail. Armored vehicles were the first and primary target if Allies hoped to achieve anything. If tanks can't accompany infantry then the latter has to expose themselves and we know for a fact that Allied infantry was as reluctant as ineffective in doing so. Weight of an explosive filling is secondary because you don't evaluate a tank by how well it fares against an MG nest. There are other weapons better suited for the job. The post war development clearly confirms this. Primary task of modern tanks is anti-armour combat, everything else seems rather an after thought. The strong focus on anti-tank capability shouldn't be taken out of the context. It was an obvious choice for Germans on western and eastern front. Maybe against a tank weak country they would have used something more explosive. Another factor is the wavering combined arms components, of which role had to be compensated by tanks and infantry. Nobody says that. It is still way ahead of anything it faced. Any other alternative to a panther is at least as bad or worse. Idea of an all pz4 or stug army in 1944 is plain unrealistic.

Well, I guess I have rather radically different opinion on German tanks than the community here. I am a total amateur, so whatever I write please don't take as holy truths. May I also remind that I don't claim that panther was the pinnacle of tank design. It obviously had issues. Anyways, let's do this.. They used them as other countries without their own tank fleet - until the spare parts were available. I completely agree that they could have been complicated to use, don't get me wrong. They weren't designed because someone wanted to overengineer but you can't avoid the fact that no attempts were made to improve the tank. Every MBT today uses panthers armour philosophy, all or nothing, focus on frontal protection with addition of 60deg frontal arc. You enhance panthers turret side armour and add heavy side skirts to the frontal third of the hull sides and you have western armour arrangement of the 70-80 ies. This was a deliberate move. From 1943 on they had the only army that operated a mainstream medium tank with actually functioning armour, excellent armament and decent mobility. You can call it all mediocre all you will but criticism of a panther is unavoidably conditioned by its era in which everything else was worse! If you dislike Schachtellaufwerk you have to confront the fact that German tanks featured more armour, better relative mobility and better weapon platforms. What was a better alternative? Even a fairly good IS-2 only a tad better armour than tiger 1 whilst dispensing with a load of features. Turning radius, weapon stability, barrel depression, ammo storage, single piece ammo, reload speed are all things that matter in tank combat but maybe not so much for someone that doesn't expect a tank to have time to spend its ammo. I seriously doubt that any professional would consider D-25T a better weapon than either KwK42 or KwK43. D10 was afaik considered quite better but even that one could not match the long 8.8. I understand the big soviet calibres rather a necessity born out of resignation of the ammunition and cannon designers. Good HE shell was probably second requirement. People today spin in circles thinking that cracks in German armour are an indication of a good anti-tank weapon. Most late and immediate post war requirements evolved around Tiger B's 8.8 kwk and its armour. Most modern MBTs likewise focus on good mobility and have primarily anti-armour armament. You will perhaps notice that nobody managed to get the German performance out of their guns. 17pdr is the closest but at a cost of a heavier shell. Everyone else had to choose between custom ammo or bigger calibers. But let's not forget. French immediate post war medium and heavy tank development is all German designs (besides that fetish for scillating turrents). Lorraine 40t, Cannon D'Assault Lorraine, AMX-50. Centurion had panther's hard specifications. Two years younger tank with no advantage over a panther and which cut the edges at mobility and suspension (unless you consider horstman any credible tank suspension). If Germany wasn't collapsing it would compete with panthers with up to 120 mm armour and 8.8cm cannons. But all tanks suddenly look better after war because Germans designed no more, coincidence? Translate the weight difference into reliability, add logistics and you are not far off. As the heretic said, your stats and calculations are wrong. I got to 0.31 W/ccm for a HL230 and 0.26 for V-2 whereas I took 370 instead of 340kW. But more important is that the engine is also shorter. This means shorter hull, less metal for sides and shorter track lengts, which is crucial for any decent turning radiuses. Usually neglected is the fact that turning radiuses of shermans and IS-2 were giant and you can forget about any credible tactical maneuvering. No? Well, what was equal then? Neither T-44, Cent nor IS-3 were battle read by the end of the war and panthers were rolling around for 2 years by then. Anything else is pure conjecture.

You guys are being a tad too critical. I sense an influence of usual internet "wisdom", which more too often is based on contemporary opinions, rather than the realities of the past time. Germans themselves admitted to the weak final drives, the tank was known to be delicate but that 150km average lifespan of final drives obviously lacks context if HJ's panther bataillon managed to drive 140km from Le Neuborg to the Normandy front without losing a single tank (https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://startpage.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1842&context=cmh). Another indication of reasons for short lifespans was that Guderian reported in 1944 on the final drive problems on the Eastern front in the mud season where, not surprisingly, all armored vehicles experiences high attrition. At the meeting of panzer commission on 23rd January 1945 it was established that broken final drives plague Pz4s, Panthers and Tigers almost equally (in numbers: 500 - 370 and roughly 100). (https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=236740) The French are for some reason considered independent evaluators but to my knowledge, despite their complaints they never attempted to remedy final drives, neither did they attempt to improve panthers at all. They just ran down the remaining pieces until new equipment arrived. The British made a few panthers post war for testing but they broke down before finishing the trials which together with the French indicates that they were not using them in the same way as Germans. The question to what extent was the real German problem the lack of spare parts and to what unreliability hasn't really been answered until today. Considering high attrition of armoured vehicles in ww2, intuition points to the former. I think by now we all know that Shermans' readiness rates were not really due to its reliability but rather sheer amount of replacements. Likewise, panthers had indeed a fairly short engine lifespan and it was a calculated risk in exchange for a group of benefits. It was small overclocked engine enabling high performance for small volume. German tanks were for it shorter, spacious, relatively lighter and more agile than contemporaries. But above all, they could carry actually effective armoured protection AND firepower, whereas Allied tanks only could have one. I think this is an underestimated fact. In 1944, German tanks had to compensate for air power and lack of artillery. Let's not ignore that panther was an entire generation above contemporaries and a certain trade off was unavoidable. If panther was mediocre, then what was everything else?

Chieftain, versions with all steel armour up to Mk.9, I think, was considered to be a very well protected tank for its time. But that was said during time of rampant use of shape charge ammunition and the steel plate offers arguably not much protection against it. Considering that Germans were pushing for mass production of HEAT-FS ammunition already during the ww2, what was the logic behind chieftain's armour against such ammunition in the 60-70ies?