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I saw VDH on tv a few months back.

He had an absolutely brilliant observation about WWII.

He talked about the impact of the British and American heavy bombers against the Nazis.

He said that the heavy bombing of Germany caused the Nazis to pull their 88mm guns off the Russian front to fire at the bombers.

This allowed the Russian tanks to be much more successful and eventually overrun the Nazis.

What a brilliant observation!

I believe he said that this kept 10,000 88s off the Russian front.

Love VDH. I will definitely check that book out. Also, it was my understanding that the German 88 was indeed constructed to serve equally well as artillery, anti-tank, and anti-aircraft weaponry. From all accounts, it had a lot of advantages in supply chain and training.

Another interesting observation from an EXCELLENT book “Freedom’s Forge” describes how allied armor was inferior in many aspects of performance and firepower to German armor, but there were two areas where teh allies had a significant advantage: Quantity and reliability.

As the saying goes, quantity has a quality all of its own, but the angle on reliability was not one I had ever considered.

The “reliablity” wasn’t what you might call “operational reliability” or MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) though that might well have been worse too, but I don’t recall the author mentioning that.

He was talking about what happened when a tank did break down, and how the tank was brought back online and put back into battle.

Apparently, our tanks were constructed using Henry Ford’s mass production techniques that had been developed, refined and sharpened in the 1920’s up to the point we were embroiled in WWII, and those mass production techniques depended less on individual quality of component in some cases, and were more focused on uniform tolerances...for replacement and interchangability purposes.

For example, if a Sherman tank had a cracked manifold, they could go over to any other Sherman tank (say a severely damaged or disabled one) cannibalize a manifold off it, and install it on the tank other tank. It fit without too much fuss if the models were using the same part.

Apparently, that was not the case with German armor, which was constructed via mass production techniques, but had a focus on craftsmanship and making things a custom fit. So if a Tiger tank had a cracked manifold, they could take it off another severely damaged or disabled Tiger tank, but...the manifold would generally not fit quite right. They had to grind, enlarge or drill new holes, etc. to make the thing fit from a functional perspective. So once a tank needed maintenance, it took longer to repair it and required more expertise and manual intervention to make that happen.