Article I wrote on Panthers in Normandy-I./SS Pz Rgt 12

[Panther Arthur]

Hello Ron Klages Panzer Page forum users,

Here is a link to a paper I wrote in the online Canadian Military History Journal regarding I./SS Pz Rgt 12 Hitlerjugend Panthers in Normandy, making use of the accurately reprinted war diary of SS-Pz Rgt 12 in the Szamveber book.

In it I put forth the theory that the sizeable number of Panthers that were out of service during 1944-1945 was in large part due to Allied action, and the Panther as a main battle tank was relatively mechanically reliable by 1944 standards in the last year of the war. While I do disagree with some authors and mention their names in the footnotes, I disagree in a respectful academic manner, presenting an alternate viewpoint. I also go into the topic of tank repair and replacement within the Canadian Army in NWE.

It is free. Please forward or pass on if you feel it is interesting or worthwhile.

Any constructive criticism is welcome, as this article will hopefully be made into a chapter in a larger future book on Panthers in Normandy.

Here is the link:

http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol25/iss2/13/

Cheers,

Arthur Gullachsen

[Yoozername]

I guess I could offer some obvious criticism if you like?

[Panther Arthur]

Hello Yoozername, do please PM me or light me up online.

I have a thick skin, and there have already been several things I should have included pointed out online to me. Also, no article/book/essay is perfect, and the minute something goes out you see things to add/subtract. But this is my take on things and adds to the written subject matter on I./SS Pz Rgt 12 and Panthers in general. Any attention or response to my written work helps out. The online community/knowledge on the subject is huge.

Best to you in CO,

Arthur

[Yoozername]

I am sorry, but that is a flawed paper. I see you also touted it at the modeling website. I think the exchange between you and Mr. Zaloga is a low point for you.

Since my (Steve Zaloga) books seems to be quoted so often in Gullachsen's article, I hope forum members will tolerate a lengthy comment.

The Gullachsen article suffers from several flawed arguments. To begin with, it is based on a cheap and unprofessional straw-man argument that the two Osprey Duel books written by Bob Forczyk and myself have described “the Panther was a largely non-functional weapons system due to its record of chronic mechanical breakdowns.” These two books were written in response to the largely uncritical popular views about the Panther that had existed previously. Gullachsen’s suggestion that we have depicted the Panther as “non-functional” ignores the more complex depictions of the Panther presented in both books.

The article then goes on to create a counter-argument that the evidence from I./SS-Pz.Rgt.12 shows that a large fraction of Panther losses were due to combat damage and not mechanical breakdown. That’s all well and good. But it begs the question whether the author has considered that the source of Panther losses were highly variable from situation to situation: Normandy 1944 was not Kursk 1943 or the Ardennes 1945. Bob Forczyk dealt with the Panther in its infancy during its combat debut at Kursk when its mechanical problems were debilitating and I dealt with the Panther in the Ardennes after the industrial decline of the autumn of 1944 that created a new set of reliability issues. The Ardennes reliability issues (exacerbated by training issues) are dealt with by the technical memorandum in the USSBS studies of the Panzer industry (cited in my book) that Gullachsen does not seem to have bothered to examine. Furthermore, it is very difficult to dis-aggregate the source of combat casualties since many if not most tank losses are the result of both combat damage and mechanical problems.

A major problem with the article is its very thin archival sourcing from German sources. The only German primary source for the article seems to be the battalion war diary (KTB), and I am not even clear from the article if the author actually has a copy from the Czech archives or is simply relying on the translation in the Szamveber book. The author seems largely uninterested or unaware of the Gen.Insp.d.Pz.Tr. reports on German tank and AFV operational rates in 1943-1944 (available for example at NARA in RG 242 T-78) that are one of the few sources to provide a broad picture of the problems that the German army had in keeping their tanks operational in the field.
I would suggest that even a cursory look at this data raises questions about the author’s assertion that “the German repair and recovery system…was a model of poor performance”. Maybe it was, but I would suggest that the core issue was not the shortcomings of the repair and recovery system at the tactical level, but rather the dysfunction of the German armament industry at the strategic level. The overstressed armament system tried to compensate for perennial shortages by establishing a cyclical pattern of pushing large quantities of spares into the army’s front-line repair and recovery system, and new tanks into the Panzer divisions, in the late spring of every year to get units ready for the summer campaign season. The system then starved the repair system of spare parts afterwards in the summer, autumn and fall, leading to a “perfect storm” off-season when the Panzer divisions had large fractions of their tanks non-operational in the late autumn and winter months due to the combination of combat damage from the summer campaigns, reliability issues and severe shortages of spare parts. This is not evident when looking at one battalion over a few months in the peak summer campaign season as was done in the Gullachsen article, but it is evident when a broader study is done.

The other critical issue at the heart of this whole debate that the author fails to directly address is that the Germans in 1943-44 had a crappy and dishonest reporting system for unit Panzer strength. They did not make any attempt to dis-aggregate the status of non-operational tanks based on combat damage vs. non-combat mechanical problems. I do not agree with the quote from Friedl’s book on p.23 that this was simply due to local commanders trying to shield their stash of tanks from the prying eyes of Berlin bureaucrats. The whole categorization system of “Total loss/short-term/repair/long-term repair” is a system-wide problem on all the fronts in 1943-44 and 1944. This reporting system is very different from the more honest and clear one used in 1939-40. I am not sure whether it was done deliberately to hide combat casualties or was simply incompetent. I have never seen an adequate explanation for the system, and the reporting system seems to be taken at face value in many sources such as Zetterling. The problems of the reporting system are evident in looking at German Panzer loss reports for France in the summer of 1944 where Panzer losses in June, July and August are unbelievably low and then suddenly in September, they write off most of the Panzer inventory in one fell swoop.

This reporting system was so bad that in September 1944, OB West sent out instructions to Panzer units to cut the BS and only report operational tank strength and not the bogus x/y/z numbers (I cover this issue in my recent book Patton vs. the Panzers on the Lorraine tank fighting in Sep 44). BTW, it was not confined to Panzer strength reporting. The German higher commands were so annoyed at the crappy reporting system for combat strength in infantry divisions that they sent out instructions in April 1944 to change the system to a more useful one. This doesn't seem to have occured for Panzer strength reporting except at a local level as in the OB West case I mentioned.

Overall, the author of this article needs to stop taking cheap shots at other authors and do some deeper and more serious research himself (Steve Zaloga)

Response to personal attack of Steve Zaloga on myself
May 22nd, 2017, 9:21 am #26

Hello Missing Lynx Axis Forum users,
I feel I have to respond to Mr. Zaloga’s online message concerning me. This article itself is very clear, and unfortunately raises serious issues with Mr. Zaloga’s understanding of the actual reasons behind German tank losses. I felt I had to write the article because the Osprey series of books are widely popular, and the general public interested in German armour and their operations might actually accept what Mr. Zaloga had written in “Panther vs Sherman:” as accurate. What was most striking to me was the contrast of the results of my research on actual Panther tank losses and some of the conclusions Mr. Zaloga had presented. In response to this, Mr. Zaloga has made an online personal attack on me, saying I am unprofessional and apt to take “cheap shots”. I went about disagreeing with Mr Zaloga in a very professional, high-road fashion, unlike his ungentlemanly online message.
What I sought to illustrate was that Allied combat action was leading to German tank total losses and tanks being out of action due to battle damage, and factors like mechanical reliability, inexperienced/ill-trained crews or a lack of spare parts were very much secondary. A majority of German tanks weren’t breaking down, they were destroyed or too badly damaged to continue in action because they were being shot to pieces!! (Fuel availability was also a huge factor, and I could have made more mention of that in the article.)
The below definition of a straw man argument, which Mr Zaloga says I am guilty of:
A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man".
Mr Zaloga very clearly centers his thesis on the Panther as unreliable and unworkable weapons system that was beyond the poorly-trained German crew’s ability to operate, maintain or employ successfully for a minimum amount of time on the battlefield. It is not more sophisticated than that. That is his main knock on the Panther, his “hit-job” to quote the current U.S. President. His reference to declines in Germany’s industrial capacity or the manufacturing quality of the Panther is window-dressing. The purpose of this main thesis is to boost the reputation of the Sherman, which was a fine tank in its own right and more reliable than the Panther. What I take exception to his damning condemnation of the Panther as a machine.
This appreciation is out of touch with reality, and I knock it down quite easily. The fate of each Hitlerjugend Panther within the battalion I researched, by turret number, is presented. I list the actual conditions in which tanks were lost or removed from service due to battle damage. The intense level of detail supplied by myself using primary documents makes the case, which is irrefutable. The reality was a majority of tanks were out of service due to Allied combat action.
Mr Zaloga’s writing and publication record reflects his bias towards the U.S. Army and its weapons systems. I suspect with little doubt Mr.Zaloga took on this project as an opportunity to further highlight U.S. Army superiority, given what he perceived as the Panther’s overblown reputation as the best all-around tank of the war. Given this, it is shocking how little credit Zaloga’s book gives to the U.S. armoured, artillery, infantry and USAAF personnel that actually destroyed German panzers and won the battles. The three destroyed Panthers of the spearhead of Kampfgruppe Peiper weren’t lost at Stoumont railway station because their transmissions and engines failed en masse due to industrial sabotage and the crews didn’t have the maintenance support necessary to attempt complete overhauls. They drove their way there, 50 + km, with engines roaring and gears shifting. They were knocked out by the combat power of the U.S. Army in battle, while they were fully operational.
On the topic of sources, the actual use of German sources within Mr Zaloga’s work is limited to unwilling interviews with German POWs post war, rather than any German wartime primary documents. While I do center my article on the Panther battalions’ accurately reprinted war diary, and online data from German BA military documents, in German, that I can read, I also use a number of Libraries and Archives Canada Canadian Army primary documents in the way of war diaries written at the time of actual events. These are not template-generic U.S. Army reports written post war in Washington in the 1950s. German primary sources in Zaloga’s bibliography are limited to a translated “Panther-Fibel”-that’s how deep the research goes.
In my analysis, I report accurately in my article what tanks were made inoperable due to battle damage. I doubled checked with Canadian primary documents reporting combat actions to verify numbers of total losses and those that were battle damaged. The simple math gives the number under repair for non-battle damage issues.
On “crappy-tank state reporting”, can you imagine the reaction of a German divisional or corps commander would have towards a panzer regiment commander that was forwarding inaccurate reports/operational numbers? What would be the panzer regiment commander’s motivation? The suggestion is preposterous. Further, Corps and Army commanders only really cared about operational tanks. The one-week two-week repair status was irrelevant to the demands of daily operations, and was not worth mentioning.
I graciously again offer a link to my article if Mr. Zaloga needs an example of detailed operational research from which intelligent conclusions are presented.
http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol25/iss2/13/
Best,
Arthur Gullachsen