Would Germany have done better with Panzer IV primary force

[Domobran7]

On 4/14/2023 at 6:46 AM, Sardaukar said:

This might give some ideas about comparable costs:

https://panzerworld.com/product-prices

 

OK, finally managed to take a better look, and I noticed some things.

Pz Kpfw III Ausf. N	96 163	Without weapons, optics, or radio
Pz Kpfw IV Ausf. G	103 462 115 962	Without weapons With 7,5 cm Kw K 40 (L/43)
Pz Kpfw Panther	117 100	Without weapons, optics, or radio
Tiger I	250 800 399 800 645 000	Without weapons, optics, or radio Combat ready Export price for Japan

So for Panzer IV, weapons cost some 12 500 RM. For Tiger I, weapons + optics + radio cost 149 000 RM. So if Panther cost 117 100 RM without weapons, optics and radio, fully combat-reay Panther would have likely cost at least 200 000 RM. So we have price of combat-ready tank of ~400 000 RM for Tiger I, ~200 000 RM for Panther and ~116 000 RM for Panzer IV.

This goes well with the data I found in Husar which state that for one Tiger I, it was possible to construct two Panthers or four Panzer IVs. So:

On 4/11/2023 at 8:33 PM, Ssnake said:

As far as I remember it, Panther in particular had a much, much streamlined production compared to Pz IV, and the various Tiger variants were also in part a result of reducing the time and cost of production. As noted elsewhere, if building 12 Tigers cost as much as 18 Pz IVs but the combat value of a dozen Tigers was that of 20..24 PzIVs, and a fuel consumption equal to or less than said 18 PzIVs, building Tigers was the right decision even if it barely slowed down the inevitable.

 

It would be, cost-wise at least, more akin to building 12 Tigers versus 24 Panthers versus 48 Panzer IVs. Also, IIRC Panther A had some serious teething issues, meaning that they were far less valuable than later models until brought up to spec.

So would it have been better to have gone with Panzer IV + Tiger combination instead of Panther + Tiger? At least at first, I think it would have. Not sure about later when (and if) Panther's various issues got resolved.

[Junior FO]

 ...

 

Edited September 23, 2024 by Junior FO

[Ssnake]

Again,

Production investment (the sticker price) is one limiting factor.

Operating costs, especially consumables such as gasoline, were another.

Production capacity was another limiting factor (while it was probably perfectly feasible, "in principle", to have a tank factory produce a another type, it still would require factory downtime during which neither type would be produced). One question is, were there bottleneck resources for certain key components (I don't know, but a thorough answer would have to investigate this).

Then there's the question of how many qualified crews could be trained to combat readiness.

Finally, all that would need to be balanced against the combat value of each tank.

 

Even if a tank may be cheaper to produce it doesn't mean that you get proportionally more combat value from a unified production line.

[RichTO90]

43 minutes ago, Ssnake said:

Production capacity was another limiting factor (while it was probably perfectly feasible, "in principle", to have a tank factory produce a another type, it still would require factory downtime during which neither type would be produced). One question is, were there bottleneck resources for certain key components (I don't know, but a thorough answer would have to investigate this).

One major limiting factor was the limited number of transmission and engine production plants.

Until 1938, Zahnradfabrik had a single plant at Friedrichshafen producing transmissions. Expansion was planned in 1936 for a plant that went into operation at Schwäbisch Gmünd to produce gearing for the Luftwaffe and then later limited slip differentials for Wehrmacht trucks at a third plant there at the Ziegelberg in 1938 but neither of those produced tank transmissions. In May 1943, a plant specifically for the production of tank transmissions began building near Passau at the Waldwerke, which began operations in November 1943. That was it.

For engines, Maybach's Friedrichshafen plant was also it until 1942, when finally eight other manufacturers were brought in as licensees to build Maybach engines but the larger tank engines for the Panzer III and larger, the HL 120, 210, and 230, were only built at Friedrichshafen, MBB-Nordhausen, Nordbau-Berlin, MAN-Nurnburg, and Auto Union-Chemnitz.

[Domobran7]

1 hour ago, Ssnake said:

Again,

Production investment (the sticker price) is one limiting factor.

Operating costs, especially consumables such as gasoline, were another.

Production capacity was another limiting factor (while it was probably perfectly feasible, "in principle", to have a tank factory produce a another type, it still would require factory downtime during which neither type would be produced). One question is, were there bottleneck resources for certain key components (I don't know, but a thorough answer would have to investigate this).

Then there's the question of how many qualified crews could be trained to combat readiness.

Finally, all that would need to be balanced against the combat value of each tank.

 

Even if a tank may be cheaper to produce it doesn't mean that you get proportionally more combat value from a unified production line.

I am aware. On the flip side however, even if a tank is superior in combat, that does not mean you will get more value out of it if you cannot get it to combat because it is mechanically unreliable / difficult to transport / cannot cross bridges and so on.

Do we know how bad Tiger's and Panther's reliability issues really were, and how much of that was due to their design as opposed to lack of spare parts due to Allied bombing (and was it bombing or just incorrect prioritization?)? I suspect interleaved wheels did them no favor, especially in Russia...

[Stuart Galbraith]

Its not just the vehicle unreliablity. Its that the Wehrmacht expanded too fast, and it may not have had the chance to fully establish the technical arms that the Western Allies took 20 years to figure out.

I remember a book on the Battle of Britain that showed this problem with the Luftwaffe. It gave them untold problems in technical arms of the Luftwaffe, such as in Radios and intelligence. Because they had expanded far too fast.

There is also the claim that because German farms were less mechanised, they were less familiar with engines, hence there was a smaller pool of people whom had the skillset to be driver mechanics. Which would mean quite a lot of the problems with Tiger and Panther may not have occurred to the same degree in Western Armies.

[Ssnake]

I think the Tigers were actually quite reliable (or at least, no worse than average for the time and their weight class). It's just, they had to drive more and longer distances due to their assigned role of "firefighters", plugging breaches in the front line all the time. The Panthers were also suffering from increasingly worse production condition and material shortages, plus, fighting retreats over hundreds of kilometers tends to force you to leave tanks behind whenever they have a malfunction.

"Hans, ze transmission broke" is a German trope not just because the transmissions were particularly vulnerable (they probably were somewhat more fragile due to the higher vehicle masses), but because they weren't easy to replace and recovery was not possible in the later war years. So there's some sort of "inverse survivor bias" at work in the literature.

[Stuart Galbraith]

I was reading a book on Hans Rubbel, whose Tiger I was modelling and discovered Schiffer books did a tome on him. Anyway, he said that the transmission was vulnerable to shellfire. There is a well known picture of his Tiger being towed away by two halftracks at Kursk, and that apparently was due to shellfire (presumably to the sides) penetrating the transmission. Rubbel claimed in the book the Tiger had a specific vulnerablity to it, the only thing he didnt like about it. It may have been a fault shared by the Panther, certainly the one that was restored recently and sent to Australia showed some damaged to an antitank gun that seems to have jammed the transmission.  One of the problems with having your transmission at the front It seems.

Reading the official British report on the evaluation of Tiger 131, when they fixed the problem that was causing it to overheat (presumably dust ingestion) it seems to have been reliable enough.  And that was one of the early production engines, not the HL230's they fitted it with in restoration. If it was well maintained, and well driven, I dont think there was anything badly wrong with it. One has to question how often that was the case on the Eastern Front or in Normandy.

Edited April 24, 2023 by Stuart Galbraith

[Domobran7]

8 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

One of the problems with having your transmission at the front It seems.

Nick Morain discusses it here, but do we know why specifically Soviets went for the rear drive (T-34, IS-1, IS-2, etc.), Germany and US opted almost exclusively for the frontal drive, and British seem to have had a combination of two? Because from what Nick says, having frontal drive actually simplified maintenance with the engines of the time.

Could it have had with the terrain they expected to fight in?