German Tank Development.

Were any German tanks actually equipped with a 10 speed manual transmission, or was that a system that was developed but not put into production?

 

MOTOREN UND GETRIEBE DEUTSCHER PANZER Fred Koch - PDF Kostenfreier Download

see also: OLVAR (Oel-Variorex) pre-selector transmissions

What is often described in English as "ridiculously over-engineered" can be translated in German as "well sufficient".

 

Doncha just looove technical German . . .

 

Generally speaking German tank design was pretty good in getting the latest anti-tank gun design into their tanks pretty quickly. Notable here was getting a variant of the latest pretty high velocity 75mm gun into their tanks at about the same time the anti-tank gun was being issued in Spring 42. An even higher velocity 75mm gun on their new Medium tank first appeared in Summer '43. These two guns gave them superiority over their Allied equivalents, markedly so over the Soviets, until the Allies all began catching up with upgraded tanks in Summer '44.

The only mistep seems to have been the somewhat curious decision to go for a somewhat weaker tank gun, the 5cm L/42, at the same time as the more powerful 5cm L/60 was appearing as an anti-tank gun. Never quite understood that especially as they had the time in Summer 1940 to study heavily armoured (relatively) French tanks and the Matilda.

 

The L/42 was the KwK 38, the L/60 became the Kwk 39.
Fun Fact:
This was largely due to the Nazi preference for militant social Darwinism: "The stronger one prevails", which led to a considerable juxtaposition and wrangling of competences: the 7.5-cm KwK (Panzertruppe) and the 7.5-cm PaK (Heer) were also developed quasi-independently alongside each other.

I could write pages and pages on the almost obscene misplanning and waste of resources of the Third Reich, but that would easily go far beyond the scope of ANY thread.

 

Sounds more like socialist/bureaucratic waste to me. Social Darwinism would have two companies develop two different designs that can be both KwK and PaK, and then better design selected.

Which I think would be an interesting topic in and by itself - why did Germany have so many different tank and SPG designs? Was it just the result of the arms race with the Soviets, or the result of, well, the previous paragraph?

 

Add to this resource and armament constraints, endless bureaucracy, departmentalism, incompetence, cluelessness, conservatism, wishful thinking, corruption, nepotism, vanity of every kind....I probably forgot something else.

If you deal with armaments and the economy in the Third Reich, you need strong nerves.
Nowadays you can only be thankful for what a mess it was.

 

Daimler scout and armoured cars had pre select gearboxes.
So did some of the London Buses

 

A good number of the SPGs were repurposed captured tanks and also Panzer Is and IIs, no?

 

List not complete. The principle was: If it drives and shoots, we take it

source: Jane´s tanks of World War II

 

Desperation. 1941 made it clear that towed AT guns were essentially just victims, and needed to be replaced urgently with armoured, mobile weapons. In fairness every major army took this approach to a secondary weapon, as this meant scarce production and design capacity for mainline tanks was not compromised.

See e.g. the USSR and the SU-76 with an obsolete gun strapped to an obsolete chassis (or the SU- series in general), the British and the Archer or the Crusader AA, and the US and the original tank destroyer (37mm M3 on a half-track chassis, in 1943).

All the best

Andreas

 

"Towed AT guns are too vulnerable" isn't (IIRC)referenced in British documents from the summer of 1942 about SPs in the British army (which led to the development of the Archer). SPs were supposed to be able to keep up with the advance of an armoured division or brigade. The Archer wasn't introduced until after the anti-tank regiments in 21st Army Group suffered unexpectedly heavy casualties from German mortar fire in Normandy.

(British anti-tank manuals did stress the importance of concealment because they note that anti-tank guns would get fired at by everything once discovered.)

I'm not sure that the US tank destroyer development proceeded for the same reasons either.

 

There are requests from 15. Panzerdivision after CRUSADER to make all guns armoured and self-propelled as an element of the overall redesign of the armoured division.

I have had a look whether similar calls came on the Allied side, but they were just waiting for the 6-pdr to fix things.

My point regarding the other armies was not so much about why they did introduce bastardised equipment, but rather that they did so in a similar way to the Germans. Knocking together in some cases (not the 17-pdr, obvs) obsolete guns with obsolete chassis because it gave a second life to both of them.

Regarding the Archer, it was designed and started production in 1943, so I don't think it had anything to do with the Normandy experience.

All the best

Andreas

 

Ian Kershaw has a very interesting chapter on this topic in his biography of Hitler - "Working towards the Fuhrer". Shows how everything you mention (and more) was institutionalised in the Nazi state from the beginning . . .

 

Love the 150mm Bison on the Panzer I chassis.

The crew got quite a ride when they set one of those off.

 

Yet despite all that a good case could be made that the Germans led in tank development for much of the war.

Of course a good case could also be made that the United States led in tank development for much of the war. Or the Soviets.
No one, I think, would argue that the British did.

It's fair to say that they all had their successes and all had their failures and also one mans 'beautiful tank' is another mans 'piece of junk'.

 

Very aptly noted.
However, I also very often have the impression that when someone talks about the advantages of a tank, he is actually referring to the concept: But these are two different pairs of shoes

 

Brits surely did in WWI though.