4th Wilts
I'm afraid it's not that easy. The divisions had different tasks. Looking at Goodwood the divs participating had differnt routes and marched in at different times. This led to different casualties, even within the division. (11th armd on the 19th July: the 2nd Northants Yeomanry had 37, 3rd RTR had16, 2nd Fife & Forfarshire 8 and 23rd Hussars 4 tank casualties.) For the people who got their tank brewed up, getting ot was just step 1 in survival. Minnies and machinegun fire claimed more men, so the position and what knocked you out played a large part too. To add the people killed in that action does not reflect evenly with how many tanks were knocked out.
The 2nd Northants had 37 tks lost and 40 killed
3rd RTR lost 16 tks and had 31 killed
It doesn't mirror eachother. Another issue on this statistic is that the 3rd RTR was at that point a veteran formation from N.Africa and still had more casualties per tank than the Virgins in 2nd Northants.
Statistics is a tool, but also the worst form of lie. Because the morale of the after action report of the 19th of July is that inexperienced crew will survive, and veterans will die.
As Von Poop points out, the Armour issue is pretty much useless at the later stages in the war, because in the battle between armour and warhead, the warhead will ALWAYS win. And in my previous post I pointed out that tactics and doctrine means that there is several other ways of dying in a tank than beeing knocked out by another tank.
In Normany the scourge of the British armour (I won't comment on the American losses since I haven't studied them so carefully as the Commonwealth forces, but given that they faced off 1/6th of the armour compared to the commonwealth sector, and still had massive casualties it supports my thought) were not Panthers and Tiger tanks blowing them to bits. During Goodwood that claimed so many machines it was the dug in AT guns and the massive strikes from several moaning minnies that took the lions share.
To me the Normandy battle is of high interest because the British were finally getting their doctrine right. The use of battlegroups consisting of an infantry battalion and an armoured regiment payed huge dividents (Bluecoat is a good example) the innoventive Canadians started to use APC's since they realised that the Bren carrier would not allow the infantry to be transported safe along with their Armoured friends. Looking back to the organisation of the 1940 armoured formation with 2 Armoured brigades and a tiny support group and the 1:1 relationship in 1944 signify a dramatic development.
However getting the doctrine right is not the whole story. Goodwood was a shambles because the Armd. divisions fought two seperate battles. The Armd.Brigade and the Inf. Brigade were seperated because Dempsey had 500 idle tanks on the beach. He could afford to loose machines not men. In spite of my studies I cannot say that he would have gained more than he lost if he choose to fight the battle with the formations fighting as the "should do".
To the people that managed/bothered to read the whole post. Thank you all, now go get a nice cup of tea. You've earned it.
