KV?

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davebender said:
Allied propaganda aside, WWII German did not have many tanks to shoot at.
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Really?

BT-2: 650
BT-5: 1,884
BT-7: 5,556
IS-2: 3,854
IS-3: 350
IS-4: 250
ISU-122/152: 4,075
KV-1: 3,015
KV-1S: 1,232
KV-2: 334
KV-8: 137
KV-13: 3
KV-85: 130
SU-76: 12,045
SU-76i: 201
SU-85: 2,050
SU-100: 1,675
SU-122: 1,148
SU-152: 704
T-26: 1,717
T-28: 12
T-34: 34,780
T-34/85: 22,559
T-40: 709
T-44: 200
T-50: 63
T-60: 5,920
T-70: 8,231
ZiS-30: 101

And so you figure the Germans had difficulty in finding roughly 113,585 Soviet tanks?
 
davebender said:
That's to be expected. Allied propaganda aside, WWII German did not have many tanks to shoot at.
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When Germany invaded the USSR, the Soviets had ~28,000 AFVs. In Dec this was down to just under 5000 but rose every year from then on when in jan 1945 the Soviets had 16-17,000 AFVs.
 
The KV-1 tank on display at Bovington tank museum has always been one of my favourites as I have always thought the KV-1 was a design that needed to exist before anything better could be achieved. While not being right in many ways the KV-1 was a step forward that needed to be taken to find the answer to the question of what a modern tank should be like. From what I can remember reading of the Bovington KV-1's history it was brought to Britain to be evaluated and it is a shame the British did not learn a lot more from it like they should have done.
 
Shortround6 said:
It was sent to England in 1943.
Design work started on the Centurion in 1943, it started on the Comet even earlier.

What should the British have learned from the KV in 1943?
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I was only talking from memory and for some reason I assumed the British received this KV-1 before the end of 1943, I probably made this assumption as November 1943 was really to late to learn a lot from it, which probably explains why the Russians agreed to send the thing over.
You have to remember that lack of a decent tank in World War Two is a major source of regret and annoyance to us British. Just look at what the Russians and Germans were building by the time the Cromwell came out, yes the Cromwell had it's good points but it was not in the same league as the Panther or T34. The best tank the British had up until the Comet was the Sherman, and the Sherman was neither British nor a match for the German tanks, and this put the British tanks in a poor fourth place behind the Russian, German and American tanks. The Centurion was a world beater but not until after the early marks had been replaced.
 
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I believe a T-34 and KV were sent to the US for examination at the end of 1942. I guess the Brits got theirs late.
 
Development was fast during WW II and what was state of the art in 1940 was well behind in 1943.
There is a lot more to tanks than just the guns and armor thickness/slope.
There Sherman was as good as any tank in the world when it first came out but then the running gear ( engine, transmission, suspension/tracks) date back to the T5/M2 series of 1938 so most of the bugs were already worked out. The M3 was supposed to be a stop gap while they figured out the 75mm gun turret.
The Sherman's gun got trumped by the long 75 in the MK IV but the MK IVs armor wasn't good enough to give it much immunity to the Sherman's gun at most practical ranges.
The British had a decent start but then floundered for a while. The A13 C Cruiser MK IV was as good as anything in it's time but for some reason the program got derailed with the Covenanter then it was a mad scramble to keep up. Running dual programs (cruiser and Infantry) didn't help.

The KV wasn't really 'progressive', it was BIG but it was crude, It may have been what the Russians could produce but it's 'systems' (transmission, steering, vision, communications, etc) were no better and in some cases worse than others.
 
As a side note, the first Tiger tank captured by the Western Allies was captured in April 1943 after being damaged by a Churchill tank in North Africa. So thinking back on it I don't think there was anything much to be learnt from a KV-1 that couldn't be learnt from the Tiger.
This very same Tiger tank is now on display at Bovington Tank Museum and is the only one in the world that is in running order, videos are on youtube if anyone is interested. It may well be the case that the collections KV-1 is also in running order as a surprisingly large number of the tanks at Bovington are.
 
Anglo-Americans were in position to learn something from KV maybe 18-20 months before the Tiger was captured. Applying any lesson from the Tiger would be too late for the ww2 to matter.
 
tomo pauk said:
Anglo-Americans were in position to learn something from KV maybe 18-20 months before the Tiger was captured. Applying any lesson from the Tiger would be too late for the ww2 to matter.
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The Tiger was already a little old fashioned in not having sloping armour and it would take longer than a year to put a design based on the Tiger into production but there were still lessons to be learnt from this powerful machine, which is why it's capture was considered to be of such great importance in 1943.
 
IMHO Cromwell wasn't a bad tank and the original idea was even better. It was originally thought that it could be armed with Vickers 75mm HV gun, which had adequate armour piercing capacity and some 3 - 4 guns were made but then it was found that the new gun didn't after all fit into Cromwell's turret, so they had to rely on 6pdr rebored to 75mm and using the US 75mm ammo.
 
They had to rely on the US ammo for HE requirements. The 6pdr was better at punching holes in armor.
The Cromwell also used a transmission and steering gear related to the one used in the Churchill tank which gave a different turning radius for each gear in the gear box. It also allowed pivot turns.
 
The beauty of Vickers 75mm HV L/50 would have been that it would have used US 75mm shells with more powerful catridge. So it would have the HE power of US 75mm gun but armour penetration that of US 76mm, i.e. a bit better than 6pdr. But as said the gun didn't fit and as the normandy experience showed, tje penetration power of US 76mm wasn't so special against Panthers and Tigers, so there was need for 17pdr tank gun or at least the developement of 75mm HV namely 77mm gun later used in Comet.

Juha
 
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That's right the Cromwell was not a bad tank as such, it had a decent gun and was fast but the armour was light and not angled. The Cromwell was a match for the PZIV but no match for the Panther or Tiger and was vulnerable to anti-tank weapons, to put it politely the Cromwell was not what it's crews were hoping for. I remember watching a video of the post war Berlin victory parade and have read that the Western Allies were most unnerved when they saw their own tanks next to the Russian monsters, the KV-1 taught the Russians a lot and was a step that needed to be taken to show them the road ahead.
 
I like the Cromwell, but it could and should have been better.
If the Russians had been a bit more forthcoming with their T34 development - maybe Cromwell could have had sloped armour?
The Russians had began experimenting with sloped armour just before the onset of WW2.
However, it is probably the case the the Russians were not sure who was likely to be its probable enemy in the future - so maybe kept its cards close to its chest?

I liked the KV - it had its limitations - in speed and mobility, but was a step that enables later Russian tanks to improve.
 
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