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Comment by usrnm | Hacker News Reader

That's not a new idea, it's the same thing Germany learned about tanks in WWII.

I heard it argued that Germany didn't have the raw resources and production capacity to go for quantity. Especially later in the war. So quality it was.

Not really, the tanks were both inefficient to operate and inefficient to build (lack of standardization, constantly changing plans, have to redesign every single part..)

That's not true. They could have standardized on a few rugged platforms -- and in fact, some in Nazi Germany advocated for that -- but their industry and engineering were generally self-sabotaging and a mess.

They actually did standardize pretty quickly. Panzer III and Panzer IV were the workhorses in Russia, paired up with the StuG (which used the Pz III chassis). I think that it's arguable that no production strategy could have led to German success. Had they tried to produce T-34 or Sherman type tanks (and the Panther was kind of intended to be that tank), they still would have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of tanks built buy the Allies. The Soviets at their peak year produced over 29K tanks, with the US contributing around 21K. The Germans maxed out at around 8k.

IMHO, the Soviets alone could have eventually defeated Germany, thought at much greater cost (as if over 20m casualties wasn't already incredible).

Agreed that arguably no strategy could have helped them against the Soviet Union, it was a major blunder going to war with them.

But the Nazis self-sabotaged constantly. The Panzer IV and the Stug III (with the outdated Panzer III chassis) were arguably the closest standard for armor, but they were constantly diverting effort to alternative platforms that were too complex to mass produce and maintain. And the same for other weapons.

Except that the "quality" of their tanks was not exactly top notch, worse they used a lot of resources. At that point it was just a desperate gamble: "if we can make an invincible tank, then it won't matter how few we have", we both know it did not pay off, not even close.

I suggest reading Len Deighton's Blitzkrieg (among other WW2 books by him) because it goes into unusual detail on the industrial design and resource allocation decisions that went into tank production leading up to WW2.

I mean not really? People focus on quantity but the German late war tank designs just sucked.

When people say things like the GP, they are talking about German early war tanks, not the late ones.

The problem is that the early WWII arms race was so fast that I don't know how anybody can say with confidence that Germany lost to worse tanks than theirs. By the time the allies got any volume into battle, they also got better designs than their earlier ones.

Not necessarily worse, just different design philosophies. German design philosophies changed throughout the course of the war too.

And people don't really know much about the tanks the Germans were using in France and in Barbarossa. The Pz 2 was used extensively in Barbarossa and it was intended as a training tank! The Pz 3 was woefully underarmed compared to T-34 and god forbid come up against a KV1.

But at the end of the war, the Panther was one of the best tanks on the battlefield. Good crew ergonomics, a gun that was perfect, optics that allowed it to be used well. Comparing that to even a Firefly Sherman? Not a fair fight.

Depends what type of models you look at. There were many German designs that were much less prone to technical breakdowns due to pragmatic and mission focused design choices e.g. many of the Jagdpanzer ("tank destroyer") class like StuG II and Herzer were produced en masse and was very successful. Also, the Jagdpanther was a strong design.

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