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TANKS!!

#21
Fuzzbass said:
My favorite is this Hunting Tiger, because I've climbed on it (Aberdeen Proving Ground ordnance museum in Aberdeen MD):

US_APG_01.jpg


The cool thing about this tank is that you can see where some large caliber rounds just bounced right off the armor... a half-dozen locations. The easiest one to see in the photo is the mantle of the main gun.
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The paragon of brute force. An awesome design! Just not practicle in tiny European villages where you could get the gun stuck on a house. Not good for cross-country travel in moist fields either.
 
#24
Folmeister said:
For fiction, check out Harold Coyle's Team Yankee. I read this as I was also reading Clancy's classic Red Storm Rising. Both great books!
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Red Storm Rising was an excellent read. I couldn't put it down.

That was about 12 years ago and I remember almost everything in that book like I read it yesterday.
 
#28
srxplayer said:
No. Actually had never heard of him. I will check into his work.

Thanks
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That may be a little difficult, unfortunately. They are really wonderful works, based upon the exploits of a German SS penal unit during World War II. There are some incredible characters. The Hassell books were printed by the English publisher Corgi and are very difficult to find in the U.S. Check E-Bay for collections. I have copies of almost all of them since I have a friend in Scotland that picks them up for me.
 
#29
I used to really into this stuff when some toy/model companies made wonderfully detailed miniatures of this stuff.

The Panzer VI Tiger was my fave.
The King Tiger looked impressive but what a mess!........they were very unreliable, weren't very maneuverable, were too big/heavy for many bridge crossings, and gulped gas so fast, many of them had to be abandoned.

Panzer VI Tiger -

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#30
There was a funny little thing called (I think) PanzerJager or Tank Hunter. It didn't have a turret, just looked like an squat APC with a big gun sticking out the front.

My dad was an exec officer with the 3rd Armored (SpearHead) Division in Germany in the 60's, I got to climb around on some track mounted 105mms, that was kinda cool.
 
#32
Folmeister said:
The paragon of brute force. An awesome design! Just not practicle in tiny European villages where you could get the gun stuck on a house. Not good for cross-country travel in moist fields either.
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Back in 1988 I was in the 3rd Armored Cavarly Regiment out of Ft. Bliss TX and we went to Germany for the REFORGER excercises in the area around Wurzburg. What it came down to was getting brand new vehicles (remember the Soviet Union was still a very real threat back then) and tearing up the German countryside playing war games. I was the driver for the XO for our troop, and was in the first vehicle behind the first M1A1 tank platoon. On those narrow streets I saw huge chunks of sidewalk thrown off to the side as the tracks would catch a portion and just shove them under and over. I also saw the barrel of an M1 gone through the side of a house that was built in like 1511 or something.

FWIW, the only vehicles that we had get stuck were jeeps and a 113, and we went through some pretty mucky stuff. Don't ask how my 577 didn't get stuck. :smug:
 
#33
srxplayer said:
My dad served in WWII and was with the 101st Airborne division. He was talking to me about the German tanks and how it would scare the crap out of them when they would hear German tanks. He said they were superior to anything the allies had for most of the war.

Anyway he told me of a time when they were in a street battle with some German units(I think this was in France) and they were getting tank support from a British armor unit that was equiped with American Sherman tanks. They had got word that there were German tanks moving into the area. I believe he said the German tanks were Tigers and the gun was huge compared to the Shermans.

The German tanks did arrive and they most of his unit was hiding to try to avoid the German tanks as were the Shermans.

He saw a Sherman hit a German tank with a direct hit at about 150 yards. It hit the Turret on the left side and bounced right off "DOINK". When the crew of the German tank relized what hit them the turret of the Tiger spun left towards the Sherman. The crew in the Sherman had already started to bail out of the tank and run. They were were in between two buildings and would have to pull into the street towards the German tank to escape so they just bailed out of the bottom and the top of the tank and ran like hell.

My dad figured they spent their only chance against that Tiger and they had better get out of there before the German tank blew them all to hell. My dad said he thought they all got out before the German tank destroyed the Sherman.

He also said the only way to stop the German tanks was to hit the tracks with a Bazooka in an attempt to knock the tracks off and hopefully inflict enough damage to disable it or you could destroy them with a Bazooka if you hit the top of a turret from above.

He did say the best thing to do was to just try to avoid them or run like hell.
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It's like war story time.

I was in 3/505 in the 82nd Airborne Division in 1990. We were among the first 2,500 or so troops sent to Saudi Arabia at the beginning of Desert Shield/Storm. I got there 14 years ago yesterday. It was a really scary thing, because we were in effect light infantry, and the chances of an invading force leading with armor was the major probability. We spent the first few months working on the AAD, the Anti Armor Defense. In every single scenario we got our rear ends handed to us. From being in 3rd Cav I know that DATs refer to infantry as "crunchies."

FWIW T-72s scared the hell out of me.
 
#36
Ed Fuqua said:
There was a funny little thing called (I think) PanzerJager or Tank Hunter. It didn't have a turret, just looked like an squat APC with a big gun sticking out the front.

My dad was an exec officer with the 3rd Armored (SpearHead) Division in Germany in the 60's, I got to climb around on some track mounted 105mms, that was kinda cool.
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The Germans put field guns on a wide variety of platforms. Some were sort of funny looking like the early Bison guns and others were developed into mean tank killers like the Nashorn and the Hummel. Probably the best tank hunter the Germans developed was the Hetzer, designed off the Czech 38t frame. By far, the coolest and sleekest was the Jagpanther.
 
#37
Well, if it's war stories we're telling...

It's a tad OT, my Grandad was at Monte Cassino and was telling me about what happened when bombers flew over. He said that when the Germans flew over, the Allied troops ducked, when the British bombers flew over, the Germans ducked and when the Americans flew over everyone ducked.

:D
 

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