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Therer are a number of sources youcould have a look at, a reasonable (and small cost) is John Forzcyks Panther vs T-34 1943. He quotes that the panther cost RM129K (exclusive of turret and communications), and extrapolates that this would equate to 51000 USD. On average a panther required 55000 man hours to build.
By comparison, during its peak production year of 1944, a T-34 cost R135K or roughly 13000USD. I do not know if that cost includes everything. It required a little over 3000 man hours to build a T-34.
However these comparisons need to be treated with a ghreat deal of caution.
The concept of 'cheap' or 'expensive' has no meaning in a command economy. The reason being that the pricing mechanism is controlled by the government. If Moscow (or Berlin) wanted a weapon to cost x amount of roubles (or RM) it would cost x amount. Command decisions were made at the top and did not take into consideration free market concepts like return on investment, opportunity cost etc etc
This makes it problematic to directly compare weapon systems by looking at the official prices. In general trying to compare the costs of weapon systems built in different countries under a command economy is very hard and prone to errors. Even using other indicators such as man-hours and input of raw materials can be misleading. Just the same, it is clear that a panther tank was far more expensive, whichever way you want to cut it, than a t-34. thats reflected in therespective production runs.
Just to give an example the 'cheap' T-34 had an aluminum engine. The Germans with more industrial assets than the SU and significantly higher aluminum production reached the conclusion that they could not provide their own tanks with an aluminum engine. It was simply too costly for them. This shows the different capabilities and priorities that countries have.
A better way is to compare prices of products in the same economy. This shows that the T-34 was much cheaper than the KV-1 and IS-2 tanks.
Also production costs and man-hours went down during the war. In 1941 8.000 man hours were needed to produce one T-34, this was reduced to 3.700 in 1943. Price in rubles went from 430.000 in 1940 to 136.000 in 1944.
Yes, that's it. It's impossible for one man to assemble a Panther in 85 hours.Maybe something is lost in translation: 2000 working hours != 20000 man hours?
Its not a myth, its just a completely different set of data. it gets down to which source is correct. Its entirely possible that both sources are correct but are referring to different time periods of the respective production runs. . I have no real idea. Obviously you have a lot of faith in your source.
At the end of the day, all we can say is that for a two year production run, the Germans managed to produce about 6500 Panthers, whilst in that same period, about 40000 T-34s were produced. There might be any number of reasons to explain that, but superior Soviet industrial indexes is not one of them. The Soviet economy was, in theory, significantly smaller than the German, using the accepted and available Industrial indexes of the day (generally steel production and other similar crude indicators). Most scholars agree that the overall Soviet economy was markedly smaller than the Germans, yet they managed to outproduce them in just about every category.
Also, these figures align to Steinbecks, but Steinbeck points out they are based on a memo emanating from MAN dated August 1944, at a time that Panther production had pretty much overcome a lot of production bottlenecks and was churning out Panthers very efficiently. You will get vastly different numbers at other times of the war, particularly at times when there were some sort of botlenecks in the supply chain (for example during the first half of 1944, after the Augsburg raids) . Thats the salient point of my post if you read it.....prices and times and materials are essentially not comparable between each country or even at different times of the production run, or for different types. Things change, systems are different, other issues, all of which make this virtually impossible to quantify and virtually impossible to compare.
Your implication was, that you get 8 T34-85 for 1 Panther.
To me this totaly overestimated, my persomal opinion is 2 T34-85 for one Panther from working hours, material and production time.
Also germany producing at that time PIV and TigerI and TigerII tanks and was massiv under bomber attack.
Also from my understanding of UDSSR economy WWII from Glantz and other Authors, there are very serious shortcomings in favour of tank production.
The UDSSR had serious shortcomings in production of tractors and general agricultural machines plus truck production, both could only be compensated through landlease. Without landlease the UDSSR would not be able to foot their troops and civil people at 1942/43/44.
Also without the landlease trucks, the Red Army would be much more immobile.
.To me here are distinctions in the production in general and the output of tanks