Knocked Out Panzers: 4th Armd Bde Assessment

[Don Juan]

What kind of reports are you looking for?

Basically, the same kind of reports the AFV Branch were generating - the modifications required to improve vehicle reliability, the methods used to increase track mileage (e.g. transporters, restricting training), how overhauls were speeded up and prioritised, requests for skilled personnel, schemes for the prioritisation and more efficient supply of spares, assessments of Allied equipment etc., etc. I would think that the Axis put just as much staff work into this as the British.

Just as an example, I've long suspected that Italian tanks weren't particularly unreliable, but were being subjected to excessive mileage in the same way that British and German tanks were. I could be wrong, of course, but I'd like to see how the Italians themselves were evaluating the performance of their own tanks.

[ClintHardware]

Now, you claim to be interested in knowing the true extent of battle damage to German pantsers and yet you still haven't even started to engage in an analysis or discussion of the numbers and topic areas in which that information is to be found. Quite bizarre!

From the 72 pantsers which do not fall within the 83 detailed by PzRegt.5 werkstatt report, how many can you account for: where and what status? Or is this a case where you've done that analysis, and the numbers you end up with are not big enough for your narrative? Hence the determination to inflate the number by arguing some of the 83 should be added....

You are imploding again but finally you give a reference in this topic - how queer.

Of the 72 panzers on the 5th May, one sixth were within sight of the 1st and 107th RHA' gun positions. Would you like to add more details from your findings? I doubt you can. However, my statement is not necessarily correct because some of those repaired may be amongst the one sixth because of the very loose wording of the translation given to us by Jentz even if he quoted exactly from the translation he discovered somewhere we do not yet know.

Now do keep giving references.

[MarkN]

Oh dear!!!

Of the 72 panzers on the 5th May, ...

No, it's 72 pantsers on or about 11 April not 5 May.....

... one sixth were within sight of the 1st and 107th RHA' gun positions.

Irrelevant.

Would you like to add more details from your findings? I doubt you can.

What findings?

However, my statement is not necessarily correct because some of those repaired may be amongst the one sixth because of the very loose wording of the translation given to us by Jentz even if he quoted exactly from the translation he discovered somewhere we do not yet know.

In the context of the Werkstatt report under discussion and the number of battle damaged tanks up to reaching Tobruk, your statement is utterly irrelevant. So it matters not whether it is correct or accurate or not.

From your many, many years of research, where do you place the 72 pantsers of PzRegt.5 on or about 11 April? It is from that research that you will find the number of pantsers taken out of action by combat damage on the way to Tobruck - which is, in effect, the damage done principally by 2nd Armoured Division.

[Michael Kenny]

This should be a very l..........o.........n...........g & interesting read:

http://www.armourpublishing.co.uk/volum ... ction.html


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AGmdxXUFlo

[ClintHardware]

No, it's 72 pantsers on or about 11 April not 5 May.....

No. The date of the report is the 5th May. It refers to all the panzers by type and quantity of which 83 were repaired in respect of mechanical problems especially noted as pertaining to the desert conditions during the rapid advance towards Tobruk but it does not state when they were repaired prior to the report being issued or where the workshop was as those repairs were being made. It gives us 700 km and Tobruk for sure but not when and where repairs were made during those 700 km or how many completed at any given point. It does not tell us how many were returned to unit.

The quote Jentz left us with does not cover battle damage but we do not know if any of the mechanical damage may have also included battle damage that lent itself to mechanical failure. If the Jentz quote clearly stated no battle damage had been inflicted on those mechanical parts then battle damage would definitely be ruled out.

Because we do not have any hard detailed return information it is possible for some of the 83 and the other 72 to be included in any of the actions on the way to Tobruk and also at Tobruk prior to the report being issued - unless they were not present because they had already been written off or not operational for whatever reasons during the various hours of combat that had taken place up to the point the report was written.

[nmao]

I really don't understand the doubt, the report is clear on what it says:
"The average journey of 700 kilometers in the desert had a very adverse effect on the Panzers. Up to the time that the regiment moved into position before Tobruk, the following Panzers had been delivered to the two workshop companies because of severe motor and suspension damage..."

It refers to the effects of the journey on the panzers, NOT combat damage.
It includes panzers delivered to workshop up to the time that the regiment moved into position before Tobruk (aprox. 11th April), so EXCLUDES the assaults on Tobruk.

The date when the report is issued is irrelevant.

regards.

-Nuno Oliveira

[Don Juan]

I really don't understand the doubt, the report is clear on what it says:
"The average journey of 700 kilometers in the desert had a very adverse effect on the Panzers. Up to the time that the regiment moved into position before Tobruk, the following Panzers had been delivered to the two workshop companies because of severe motor and suspension damage..."

It refers to the effects of the journey on the panzers, NOT combat damage.
It includes panzers delivered to workshop up to the time that the regiment moved into position before Tobruk (aprox. 11th April), so EXCLUDES the assaults on Tobruk.

The date when the report is issued is irrelevant.

This is correct - the report covers losses to mechanical defects only.

What is not generally appreciated is just how disturbing the 5 Panzer Regt Workshop report really is. It's as bad as the reports that the British 7th Armoured Divisional Workshop issued after Operation Crusader. This report must have generated searching questions and a significant paper trail, as it basically demonstrated that the German tanks, especially the Panzer III, were every bit as restricted in their mileage as the British cruisers.

What this in turn means is that neither the British nor Germans had any realistic chance of delivering a "knock out" blow to their opponents, as they didn't have either the equipment or the support infrastructure to enable it. So the battles over the first two years of the desert war were for much lower stakes than is generally realised.

I was also amused to note from the report that the Germans managed to burn out a number of their tanks while loading them at the docks in Naples. This is exactly the kind of thing the British tended to do, and is why I consider all three of the major armies in the desert to have been pretty amateurish, at least at the operational level. None of them, at least at this time, seemed to have a clue as to how to conduct the kind of long distance operations that would have been necessary to secure victory. That the Germans had an edge at the tactical level was, in the big scheme of things, irrelevant.

[ClintHardware]

I really don't understand the doubt, the report is clear on what it says:
"The average journey of 700 kilometers in the desert had a very adverse effect on the Panzers. Up to the time that the regiment moved into position before Tobruk, the following Panzers had been delivered to the two workshop companies because of severe motor and suspension damage..."

It refers to the effects of the journey on the panzers, NOT combat damage.
It includes panzers delivered to workshop up to the time that the regiment moved into position before Tobruk (aprox. 11th April), so EXCLUDES the assaults on Tobruk.

The date when the report is issued is irrelevant.

regards.

-Nuno Oliveira

nmao The issue of delivered to the werkstatt is only half of the history concerning the panzers the werkstatt received. What about delivered/collected from and when?

Yes it does not deal with combat damage but it does not rule it out definitely either.

I am not concerned with attempting to attribute any combat damage from this report because it clearly contains no mention of it.

[MarkN]

Oh dear!!!! Still peddling your garbage...

Yes it does not deal with combat damage but it does not rule it out definitely either.

The werkstatt report was not written with the expectation that amateur historians 75 years later such as yourself would try to spin a narrative based upon what they didn't include.... :roll:

Whilst it is true that the report does not include a clause or sentence along the lines of,

'...and just to clarify for all the amateur historians in the future which wish to rewrite history, the total of 83 pantsers immobilised by the desert does not include any pantsers that had previously suffered battle damage inflicted by elements of 2nd Armoured Division.'

It is, of course, the exclusion of those words (or similar) which you claim justify your narrative that it does include battle damaged examples.

However, you will also notice that the report does not include this clause/sentence,

'...and just to clarify for all the amateur historians in the future which wish to rewrite history, the total of 83 pantsers immobilised by the desert does not include any pantsers that had previously suffered battle damage inflicted by alien death rays from the BattleStar F'rage from Planet Ukip.'

You may wish to include that possibility in your narrative too...

[Urmel]

Just as an example, I've long suspected that Italian tanks weren't particularly unreliable, but were being subjected to excessive mileage in the same way that British and German tanks were. I could be wrong, of course, but I'd like to see how the Italians themselves were evaluating the performance of their own tanks.

OT here but the Italian tanks had fundamental reliability issues linked to being under-powered, suspension issues, and soecific desert problems with the (you guessed it) cooling and air filter systems, the latter of which were only fixed with the M41. The suspension may have been fixed with the M40. The power issue was never fixed.

It doesn't seem to have been a mileage issue.

[Don Juan]

OT here but the Italian tanks had fundamental reliability issues linked to being under-powered, suspension issues, and soecific desert problems with the (you guessed it) cooling and air filter systems, the latter of which were only fixed with the M41. The suspension may have been fixed with the M40. The power issue was never fixed.

It doesn't seem to have been a mileage issue.

Yes, this could well be true, but I'd like to find out more. The mileage issue for most tanks in the desert, or dusty conditions generally, was usually down to the air cleaning i.e. the engine wore out first.

What's odd about the Panzer III is that its engine life seems to have been about 1800km (approx 1100 miles) which puts it in the same category as the A13/A15 despite the fact that its air cleaning arrangement was done the "proper" way i.e. the air was taken from the fighting compartment, rather than from outside the tank. Even with the Ausf. J, which had oil bath cleaners, the engine life seems to have only been about 1600 miles. This compares with 2500-3500 miles for the Valentine and M3 Stuart.

If the M13/40 could achieve about 1200 miles per engine, then that would have been about average. Also I believe the Italians loaded up their tanks with sandbags etc., so this could have had an effect on suspension reliability.

Basically, I think the Axis must have been agonising over the technical issues of their tanks as much as the British, and this must also have affected their tactical behaviour. Until we find some of this info, if it even exists, I suspect our appreciation of what the Axis were really doing will be quite shallow.

[Urmel]

I think you're deep into speculation territory here. Another issue affecting engine wear would be the fact that the tank was underpowered, meaning that the engine spent more of its life being pushed hard.

Where does the 1,200 miles come from?

[Don Juan]

1200 miles for the A13 and A15 was the standard overhaul mileage. I think they could both achieve 1500, and the 1200 specified included a safety margin.

For the Panzer III, I took this from the 5 Pz Regt workshop report:

When the tanks arrived in AFRICA the average odometer reading was 500 kilometres. By 1 May the average reading per vehicle had reached 1,800 kilometres of which 1,100 kilometres had been done on roads and 700 on desert.

1800km = 1118 miles. It was at this distance that 44 out of 65 Panzer III's fell out due to engine damage.

For the M13/40, I've no idea, I was just stating that if they could only achieve 1200 miles on an engine, then they were no worse than the main British and German tanks. For example, what mileage did the M13/40's the British captured have before they used them? That the British found them unreliable means nothing if they had already accumulated significant mileage. On the other hand, if they all had only a couple of hundred miles on the clock, then that does indeed indicate that they were a very unreliable tank. But I should be able to do some digging myself here, tbh.

You are of course correct that being under-powered would affect engine wear, but e.g. the A10 was under-powered but could still achieve respectable mileages when it wasn't being over-driven.

But yes, I'm speculating - it's all I can do without hard evidence.

[Urmel]

I think this deserves a thread of its own.

In any case, without knowing the expected mileage of an M40 all of this is idle speculation. The items I gave you come from Battistelli's book on the Italian tanks.

Reliability is also highly dependent on availability of spare parts. That was an issue the RE seems to have struggled with for its tank arm as well.

[MarkN]

An interesting discussion, but one more suited to theory than operational performance. What I mean is, did pantsers give up in the desert because they were nearing their mileage 'expiry date' or for other reasons?

Consider the example of I.Abt/PzRegt.5 early April 1941.

Early morning on 4 April, a leichte panzerkompanie of I.Abt/PzRegt.5 with probably a zug of Pz.IV attached raced up the Via Balbia from Agedabia/Zuetina to Benghazi in support of AA.3. The same evening (about 18.00) they engaged with 2/13 Australian Infantry on the escarpment and became bogged down by a minefield. Australian reports suggest up 13 pantsers - although they may have misidentified armoured cars and/or PzJag.1included in that number. Whilst it is unlikely that all 26 pantsers described in the KStN set off, even taking 13 as the arrival number, a fair few dropped out. And that was on a (relatively) decent road.

At the same time, the remainder of I.Abt/PzRegt.5 (Stab I.Abt, lkp and 4.kp) set off with Stab 5.leichte Div on the long desert route to Mechili and thereafter. Only 8 pantsers were still standing when it came to the attack on Mechili on the morning of the 8 April. Or, to be more precise, only 8 had remained operational throughout and kept at the front of the column.

In otherwords, from a start number of 73 (using Jentz), no more than 21 (probably less) managed it to the first point of contact with the enemy. Of the 'missing' 52 or so, we can account for 13 lost in the fire back in Naples (10 Pz.III and 3 Pz.IV). The rest were lost to the Libyan landscape and the pressure of Rommel's forward tempo. How many fell foul of reaching the end of their 'normal' mileage 'expiry date'?