Weapons of WWII With Stephen Ambrose: Shermans, Tigers, and Panthers

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with Our American Stories. Stephen Ambrose was one of America’s leading biographers and historians. He passed in two thousand and two, but his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here at Our American Stories, thanks to those who run his estate. Our next story is the story of weapons used in World War Two. Here again is Stephen Ambrose.

00:00:34
Speaker 2: A lot of improvement in the tank by the time the Second World War came along, and then a lot of improvements were made in the tank during the Second World War, so the tank became the queen of the battlefield, the decisive weapon of ground warfare. Everybody had their own tanks, and their own tank design, and their own ideas about tank tactics. The first to come along with a doctrine that was put into practice and proved to be in its initial use at least extraordinarily effective, was the Blitzkreed method that the Germans used. There had been dispute between theorists all through the period after World War One and before World War Two over what the proper role of the tank was. Right, this grossly simplifies the argument, but in general, the old line regular infantry officers, the men who were in their thirties and World War One who would be the general officers in World War Two, tended to regard the tank as an auxiliary to the infantry. Yeah, whose function was to support the infantry any attack or in defense. So that the right way, the first, uh, the, the, to make that decisness, say, the, the, the right use of the tank is to support the infantry. Then, then, dictates the design of your tank. If that’s so, if that’s the role you’re going to use the tank for, you don’t want speed in a tank. You don’t want a tank that’s going to go faster than marching infantry. Which you do want is an awful lot of heavy armor, so that that tank becomes practically a moving fortress that creeps its way along the battlefield at about the pace of an advancing soldier and provides protection for them and provides; he can get in behind it, and provides firepower form in front. You want as much firepower as you can get. You’re not concerned about how many miles to the gallon that tank’s going to get or what its range is. You want a tank that is designed less for operating on a road at high speed. Then you want a tank that is capable of getting across ditches and through muddy fields. And most of all, you organize the tanks by spreading them out. If their role is to protect the industry, you got to spread them out with the infantry, so that there’s a battalion of tanks in every division of infantry, and they’re divided up into their respective companies and fed out among the regiments, the battalions of the infantry, and the tanks operate then directly with the infantry as individual weapons. Again, I know I’m grossly oversimplifying here, but the other way of looking at tanks was the proper role of the tank is an independent one. That the great advantage of the tank brings to you is mobility and speed. And the way to utilize mobility and speed is to build light fast tanks that can operate on roads and get a lot of miles to the gowns so that their range is very great, and put them all together into armored divisions and let the infantry break through the enemy’s prepared defensive position. But once the entry is broken through, then you bring the tanks in as units and they pour behind the enemy lines and encircle the enemy and cut off as front line troops and separate them from their headquarters and from any hope of reinforcement, shoot up headquarters back in the rear, and, in short, have the independent function. The victors of World War One tended to look at the tank in the first way, that is, its proper role was with infantry, because after all, they won the First World War, and they won it with infantry, so they didn’t see much point in changing tactics or doctrine. The people who lost the First World War figured they’d done something wrong and they’d better figure out some new doctrines and some new tactics, and the Germans did. Even though it was British authors Liddell Hart and JFC Fuller most of all, who foresaw the role of the tank as an independent weapon, it was the German serving officers who picked this up. Gadarion, Ronald, and Hitler was a revolutionary in his attitude towards weapons. Hitler had been at the cutting edge of the First World War. He’d been a runner in the trenches on the Western Front. It had an impression; made it a pression line like anybody else that was in that, that was the trench system of the First World War. It was determined to avoid that if at all possible, and he was very keen on new ways of doing things and new ideas, and he was thus receptive to what his tank commanders, his younger tank commanders, were telling him about the possibilities of the tank. And so Blitzkrieg became the doctor of the German army and the tank took an independent role, and the German tanks of nineteen thirty nine forty were characterized by lightness, speed, maneuverability, durability, and range. Germany’s strategic needs changed in the course of the war. By nineteen forty two, Germany was on the defensive, no longer on the offensive, and for defensive warfare those light, fast tanks were inappropriate. Now the Germans needed big, heavy tanks they could both or a infantry position and take on a defensive role. So that Germany’s tanks tended to grow during the war, and then grow some more, and then grow some more, until they doubled and then doubled again in size. And the armament went up from fifty caliber machine guns to seventy five millimeter cannon to eighty eight milimeter cannon, and the armor thickness increased on them, and they got bigger and bigger and bigger, up to sixty eight tons, and then even bigger than that, and consequently they got less and less miles to the gallon, and so their range was reduced drastically, until by the climax of the war, the winner of forty four to forty five, the Germans were turning out their new Tiger tanks, which were twice as big as any tank that the Americans had, and almost four times as big as the tanks Germany was using the Mark one and two at the beginning of the war, carrying an eighty eight milimeter cannon, a formidable weapon. That German Tiger tank, terribly clumsy and awfully slow, with very little range to it. The Sherman tank, the basic American tank of the Second World War, was a relatively light, relatively lightly armored, not really very well armed. It carried a seventy five millimeter cannon. But it was fast, it was maneuverable, it was small. It was half the size of a tiger. The Tiger got a third of the mile to the gallon of gasoline. The Sherman was close to three miles per gallon of gasoline. That’s a three times; that’s nine times better. And the Sherman was small and compact relatively, so that for the same deck space that would get you one hundred t thirty fours across the Europe and into the battle with the Sherman, you could get two hundred into the battle. American tankers complained all through the war and have complained to this day about being inadequately equipped to fight against Panzer regiments and divisions because the Tiger and the Panther that preceded it, and German tanks in general, were tank for tank better than the American tanks. But you didn’t have to fight the Tiger face-to-face, gun-to-gun. You can move so much faster than it could; it had such a slow traverse to it. Also, you had so many more Shermans. The tactics were developed by the tankers in the course of the Second World War that two guys would spot a Tiger, and they’d call it in two more Shermans, and they would circle around and keep it occupied, and guys would get in on the side of it and then fire into the boogie wheels and decommissioned that tank; and it was done over and over again.

00:08:50
Speaker 1: And what storytelling by Steven Ambrose on the weapons of war; and terrific explanation of the differences in these tanks and their very functions, and my goodness, the difference in what the Germans were looking for in the beginning: speed, and as time went on, size. It’s like David and Goliath. In the end, huge opponent, the other guy’s got the slingshot. There are ups and downs. You have to make choices and trade-offs in the weapons of war, and that’s what we learned here. The Germans in the end went for the size. We went for the speed and the mobility and the range. The stories of the weapons of war with Stephen Ambrose here on Our American Stories.