Quote:
Originally Posted by frinik
I can t remember where I read it may be in one of Thomas Jentz " s books but it said that in 1942 and 1943 the Soviets lost more tanks than they produced and the difference was made up by the land lease tanks which allowed them to compsensate for these losses.Only in 1945 did their production get ahead of losses.Naturally not all the losses were combat related quite a number of tanks had accidents dues ot the carelessness and runkenness of the crews and mechanical breakdown resulting in fires or accidents.
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If they lost more tanks than they were producing throughout the war, then the much fewer and generally inferior lend-lease tanks could not have done much difference, much less accounted for the increase in size of the Soviet tank force. You also have to make the distinction between tanks lost which could be repaired and put into service and tanks which are total write-offs; they could very well have knocked out all their tanks, but if they could repair them in a couple of weeks and put them back into service, then it doesn't have much long-term effect.
Quote:
Originally Posted by frinik
The Panther ausf. Dweighed 43 tons thus only 8 tons more or 20% than the JS2 odel 1944 not 50 %.The G weighed 2 tons more The TIger II weighed 68 tons thus twice as heavy as the JS and the TIger I 56 tons.However those tanks carried far more shells and were designed with difference purposes in mind than the JS which was not designed to be a tank-to -tank fighting machine and simply ended up fighting them on variosu occasions more by chance that by design.
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I was referring to comparing the Panther and Tiger to the
T-34, not the IS-2. The Panther Ausf. G's combat weight was about 45 tonnes, the Tiger I weighed 57 tonnes, while the T-34/85 was 32 tonnes. This means the Panther was approximately 40% heavier and the Tiger was 78% heavier than the T-34/85; the difference was even larger compared to earlier models. True, it's not quite 50% and double, but very close. The IS-2, for comparison, weighed 46 tonnes, only very slightly more than the Panther.
EDIT: BTW, this is going a bit way off topic, so perhaps this should be split off into a separate thread?