James Holland: belief

Transcript context

…It’s pretty fearsome, but there are pragmatic problems. The big problem is the Germans are incapable of mass production on a scale, but Americans could do. Frankly, even the British could do. They’re just not in that league. The reason they’re not in that league is because they’re in the middle of Europe. They don’t have access to the world’s oceans. They don’t have a merchant fleet, they can’t get this stuff. It hasn’t gone terribly well in the Soviet Union. They can’t process it, and they’re being bombed 24 hours a day. And so all their factories are, they’re having to split them all up and that is inherently inefficient because then having to move different parts around and you then having the whole process of having to travel from one place to another to get stuff, you haven’t got much fuel. So the consequence of that is that what you do is you think, “Okay, well ,we can’t mass produce, so let’s make really brilliant tanks.” But they’ve lost sight of what a really brilliant is. Really brilliant to their eyes is big, scary, big gun, lots of armor. But actually what conflict in World War II shows you is that you need more than that. You need ease of maintenance, you need reliability. And the problem with having the bigger the tank, the more complex the maintenance equipment is, you need a bigger hoist, which then means you need a bigger truck, which then uses more fuel. So for example, the Tiger tank is so big that it doesn’t fit on the loading gauge of the European Railway system. So they have to have different tracks to roll onto the wagons that will then transport them from A to B, take them from West Germany to Normandy, then they have to take them off, then they have to take off the tracks, put on combat tracks, then move them into battle and hope that they don’t break down. The problem is when you start the war, it’s not very automotive and you’ve only got 47 people for every motorized vehicle in Germany compared to three in the United States or eight in France, is that you’ve got lots of people who don’t know how to drive. And it also means you haven’t got lots of garages and mechanics and gas stations and so on. And so you are then creating an incredibly complex beast. But you want that complex thing to be as simple as you possibly can be. And that’s the beauty of the Sherman tank. All those guys in America, they’re used to driving stick cars. There’s three people for every automobile, and that includes the old and children, so almost every young man knows how to drive. And when you get into a Sherman tank, it’s got a clutch, it’s got a throttle. The brakes are the steering mechanism. The clutch is where you would expect the clutch to be. It’s got a manual shift. You put your foot on the clutch and you shove it into second gear and off you go or reverse or whatever. And it literally can be easier. ere you would expect the clutch to be. It’s got a manual shift. You put your foot on the clutch and you shove it into second gear and off you go or reverse or whatever. And it literally can be easier. Anyone who can drive a stick car could drive a Sherman tank, seriously. Not everyone can drive a Tiger tank. It’s incredibly complex, really, really is. And that comes with a whole host of problems. And of course, you don’t have the numbers. You don’t have the numbers. You’ve got 1,347 of them, you’ve got 492 King Tigers, which are even bigger and at a time where you are really short of fuel and you are really short of absolutely everything. And those shells are huge and they’re harder to manhandle and weird little things that the Germans do, for all their design genius, the loader is always on the right-hand side. Now, in the 1920s and 19 teens and thirties, children were taught to be right-handed. You weren’t allowed to be left-handed, so you were right-handed. So you want to be on the left-hand side of the gun so you can take the shell from your right and swivel it into the breach from your right side. But the loader in a Jagdpanther or Panther or a Tiger is always on the right-hand side of the breach, which ergonomically makes no sense whatsoever. Why do they do this? I’ve never found an answer to this. So there’s all these little things, and as a soldier coming up against, you are an American GI and you’re coming up against a Tiger tank, you don’t care about the fact that it’s difficult to maintain or the problems involved of trying to get it to the battlefield. All you care about is this monster coming in front of you, it’s squeaking and clanking away, and it’s incredibly scary and it’s about to blow you to bits. That’s all you care about and quite understandably so. But those who are protracting the war at a higher level and historians that come subsequently and look at all this stuff, they do need to worry about all these things. I remember the same Georg Thomas, the architect of the Hunger Plan, I found there’s minutes of this meeting, which I think was either on the 4th of December or the 5th of December 1941, so it’s just before the Red Army counterattacks outside Moscow in the winter of 1941. And it’s a meeting about weaponry, and this is a verbatim quote. He says, “We have to stop making such complete unaesthetic weapons.” In other words, we’ve constantly building over-engineered and aesthetically-pleasing weapons up until this point and they sort of half manage it, but don’t quite. We could probably talk for many hours about each of these topics. We could talk for 10 hours about tanks. I encourage people to listen to your podcast, World War II Pod, We Have Ways of Making You Talk. It’s great.…

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