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The German tanks were put together by highly skilled craftsmen. Often, the parts were hand machined or finished for each tank. This meant that the tanks did not have interchangeable parts, and were difficult/impossible to fix in the field. Being unable to fix equipment in the field was a general problem for the German army, as a very large proportion of their trucks and other equipment was captured from other countries, and they had no spares.

Once the Soviets moved their factories beyond the Ural mountains, the Germans, who lacked heavy bombers, had no way to knock out the factories. They stood no chance against the Soviet T34s and tank destroyers at that point.

If you're interested in digging deeper into this kind of history, take a look at "The Second World Wars" by Victor Davis Hanson.

Fascinating. In Britain it's long been recognised that our frequently innovative design engineering is often let down by poor production engineering. Many exmples can be cited: most F1 cars are UK built, but we no longer have an mass market car producer. Everything built by Jaguar and Land Rover! Spitfires took four times as many man hours to build as ME109s. The Rolls Royce Merlin was the best aero engine available to the Allies early in the war, but was effectively hand built. When Packard started building Merlins for the P51 they had to retro fit the production engineering tolerances to the design [2]. So I'm surprised to learn that tank production engineering was so poor. I wonder which models were most affected? Panzer III or IV? King Tiger?

[1] Stephen Bungay - The Most Dangerous enemy. [2] https://www.tested.com/art/makers/492418-packard-merlin-how-...

I only learned this while studying German, but King Tiger is actually a poor translation.

The German nickname for the tank was Königstiger, which is the German name for a Bengal tiger, but if translated literally it would instead be Royal Tiger.

The decision to allow production of Merlin by Packard was a masterstroke. The UKs engineering talent was amazing, and the American production engineering was also amazing. The collaboration of the 2 superpowers was unbeatable.

Another important example seems to be the cavity magnetron in WWII. Developed in the UK, it provided about a thousand times more power than the klystrons the US was using at the time and let the Allies maintain a lead in radar technology: probably an important component of the Allied victory, though under appreciated by the public at large. UK designed, mass-produced in the US. The “Tizard Mission” that this was a part of sounds pretty fascinating and I’ve always told myself I’d pick up a book on it someday.

> So I'm surprised to learn that tank production engineering was so poor. I wonder which models were most affected? Panzer III or IV? King Tiger?

Probably the Pz III and IV, particularly early in the war.

They stopped manufacturing the Pz III in 1943, and around the same time started to rationalise tank production to keep costs down. So a Pz IV produced in 1944 or 1945 would be of a lower production quality standard than one produced earlier in the war.

From the moment Hitler invaded France, he was never more then two months away from running out of oil. German railroads were gridlocked and mismanaged compared to the Russians. Germany spent more money on the V2 project then the USA did on the Manhattan project. Hitler survived a dozen assassination attempts. And then there is the fact that most of their encrypted coms were compromised. It really is a wonder that Germany stayed in the war for as long as they did.

Because their air forces were more effective, the Brits and the Americans could rely more on their air forces to neutralize their enemy's tanks (an approach they continued during the cold war, where the A-10 and the Apache helicopter were developed primarily to kill Soviet tanks).

On Battle Stations' episode on the Tiger, a former British M4 commander told the camera that encountering a Tiger sucked, but that the air force responded very quickly whenever he reported one. (The air force used rockets against the Tiger.)

German Stukas were also excellent tank killers, and early in the war, it was the only weapon that could hurt the heavier Russian tanks.

Germany lost their early air superiority in the Battle of Britain, though. Having your pilots shot down over enemy territory while shooting their pilots down over their own territory is a battle of attrition you're eventually going to lose.

>The T34's were designed this way on purpose. They purposely skipped on making things perfect so long as they were functional. The guns worked. The engines worked. The transmissions worked. This is what they needed, nothing more. See the CIA document regarding this tank: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp81-0.... The German tanks, on the other hand, were designed and built meticulously...at least in the early days of the war. The downside is they were expensive to build and maintain...and they were not reliable.

This way undersells the T-34 tank. It was a better designed and superior tank to the Sherman and Panzer IV tanks fielded by the US/Germany armies. It may not have been as good as a Tiger, but that's not an apples to apples comparison.

My post was certainly not intended to be read as an indictment of the T-34, though in retrospect it may read like that.

In my opinion, the man hour stats say it all. With the benefit of hindsight, you'd have to be nuts to consciously decide to produce one Tiger instead of 6 T-34s.