Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 9 - German Armor Fails of WWII Ft. Tom

Episode Date: August 14, 2018

Episode 9 brings us our first guest! Tom is an Officer in the United States Army Armor Corps, history graduate, and anonymous shitposter on twitter. On this episode Joe and Tom talk about the stupid history of German WW2 armor development and how it went from revolutionary to comically insane in a short amount of time. We also discuss the myths and legends surrounding German tanks and battlefield prowess that has managed to follow the soldiers of the 3rd Reich for nearly 100 years after their fall. We end the episode talking about the stupid things we manange to get ourselves into on #natsec twitter and how we have both managed to have a run in with General Abrams. Follow the podcast on twitter @lions_by Follow Joe on Twitter @jkass99 Follow Tom on twitter @tomlovestanks

Musik Hello and welcome to another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe. There's no Nick today. Today I have with me Tom, who is a commissioned officer in the United States Army Armor Corps and random anonymous twitter handle yeah it's a random random twitter guy twitter personality um and i know i actually today's wednesday i think right um yeah i originally posted yesterday that we already did this and we did we actually spent what an hour and 10 minutes doing this and it turned in complete trash because i have no idea what i'm doing uh minor technical minor technical issues

you got two tankers working on something we're gonna bust it yeah and i couldn't even hit with a hammer um which is the usual solution for us yeah how's your uh how's your lead going so far that's been fantastic i mean just the small joy of not being at work. Just a little background on me. So as Joe said, I'm an active duty armor officer currently stationed at Fort Benning. A little over six years in the Army now. So I was a military history major in college. So I remain a giant dweeb when it comes to history, especially tank history. So that's what I'm here to talk about today is a little piece of tank history. And the piece of tank history that pretty much everybody seems to hold on to with like a death grasp for reasons that I'm not entirely sure of.

So we're talking about the hilariously stupid German tanks of World War II. stupid German tanks of World War II. Yeah, so for some reason, like the German armor core, the Panzer Corps in World War II is kind of like held up as a shiny example of like the greatest things that armor could ever do. The center of the Blitzkrieg and like German tanks are the best tanks and the Germans had the best equipment in World War II. And in reality, they were pretty outclassed by a lot of other equipment. And as we're going to talk

about today is just the initial designs for the tanks the germans had went from like reasonable to batshit insane over the course of the war i i found it really nice that um lesser known defense contractors like acme and wiley coyote got their you know crack at it there at the end it really wasn't felt like wiley coyote had like a position in like the armor like the armaments ministry in nazi germany and just was able to pass along just crazier and crazier ideas i got signed off on because hitler is a moron is there like i know in my units and it's probably changed since i've been out because i've been out too long um there was like an S shop that they just stuffed everybody in that really sucked at their jobs. And like, because obviously you can't fire people.

And I guess the German military's version of firing people is just shooting them. Yeah. That's wasteful. So they're like, yeah, let's just stuff them in the armaments ministry with Albert Shabir and make them come up with fucking coyote rockets and shit. There had to be like there had to be like a couple of guys that are just so unconfident that they stuck them up in this ministry. And they just for some reason they would come up with ideas. I mean, come to think of it, that guy was kind of a hero.

Whoever came up with these terrible ideas for Hitler to sign off on. And you'll see over the course of this podcast, like how insane these ideas got. So I guess we can start with the normal ones and fly off the rails. I'll do a brief overview of German tank development. So as you know, World War I was the advent of the tank. And it was these slow, big metal boxes that would slowly drive towards the enemy and then drive over a trench. And the whole idea was direct infantry support. enemy and then drive over a trench and the whole idea was direct infantry support um and so kind of interwar development of tanks across the world carried along the similar paths like a lot of the

tanks that were made were small ones they'd be considered tankettes by uh later definitions just because how light they were and they're lightly armored they had typically machine guns or maybe like a really small cannon in them to provide that direct infantry support. So a lot of the experience in how tanks were being used after World War I came from the Russo-Japanese War and then the Spanish Civil War after that. So the early tanks the Germans developed were the Panzer I and Panzer II. So like the full nomenclature of it was a Panzerkampfwagen, which is armored fighting vehicle. I'm going to assume that is one giant compound word.

Oh, yeah. It's all flammed up together. It's one year of German in college. It gives me the ability to sound like I kind of know how to speak German. I really don't. I learned absolutely nothing. But I can do an okay Gestapo accent. It comes in handy these days.

Yeah, it's hilarious when I question soldiers. They find it gold. I just like it hilarious yeah it's hilarious my question soldiers they find it gold i don't like it but that's whatever yeah so like the panzer one uh was tiny it weighed 5.4 tons uh with only 13 feet long uh five feet high and had uh two machine guns in the turret so it's kind of like the very early tanks that had machine guns in the female design for that direct infantry support role. So the Panzer I was incredibly light, and it was designed, basically they started designing it in 32, started production in 34, and the idea was the tanks were to be used for training.

So following World War I and with the Treaty of Versailles, there was a lot of limits on what the Germans could actually do. They were actually prohibited from designing, producing tanks. But with the rise of power, the Nazis and the World Order kind of allowing the Germans to get away with a few things, they started developing these tanks. So they were never really meant to be used in combat. And the same goes for the Panzer II.

The Panzer II was a little bit larger. It was 8.9 tons, 6 feet tall. It actually had a three-man crew and had a small cannon, like it was a 2-centimeter cannon mounted in the turret. And these were meant for direct infantry support. They were very small. They weren't meant for combat necessarily, but they're actually used during the spanish civil war which is where the germans learned a lot from basically giving these tanks to the fascists to kill communists and you

know civilians and other people during the spanish civil war the spanish war was pretty handy i mean we go to and we go to ntc and uh jTC. They just invaded Spain. Exactly. Hand off your equipment to other guys and just take some notes on how effective it is at shooting peasants. We do that with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates now. Yeah. I mean, about the same amount of shooting peasants. I don't know.

I'm not an expert on those things. Mostly cluster bombing of peasants. It's a little yes well cluster munitions yeah yeah so um continued development led to the panzer three and the panzer four like panzer four was kind of the the war course of the german army um pretty uh typical medium tank that saw a lot of use for a majority of the war the panzer four was 25 tons, had a crew of five. So you had the commander, gunner, loader, driver, and then a radio operator slash battle machine gunner. And the Panzer IIIs and the Panzer IVs were the common tanks

that you saw in the early days of the war. So those were the tanks that actually rolled over Poland and rolled over France. And how did they measure up in comparison to what they were facing at the time? So typical, I mean, we joke about the Poles having mounted cavalry that would charge the tanks, which didn't really happen. I know you were telling me about it before we recorded this. You were talking about something to do with the...

Yeah, it was... So the Poles at the time were, I mean, they were completely outmatched, so you've got to give them credit for even wanting to fight. But they were using early 19th century, late 18th century dragoon tactics where, sure, it looks like they're charging tanks and horseback, but they're using the horses as transport to get to the battlefield. It's effectively what we did during the vast majority of the Indian Wars. It's not as ridiculous. Native American wars, we have to be respectful of the people we slaughter.

Yeah, my bad. It's not as... The dead people truly do care about the feelings. They're really upset about the terms we use. Yeah, the slaughtering, not so much, but the syntax. Exactly.

So it was bad because they're riding on horseback to fight tanks dismounted with weapons that would not destroy the tanks. Yeah. The Poles were hopelessly overmatched. I mean, they fought valiantly in 1939 when the war really kicked

off in September of 1939. I mean, they fought valiantly in 1939 when the war really kicked off in September of 1939. I mean, give Poland credit. I mean, when you have two of the world's major powers decide to split your country in half, you're going to have a bad time. But in terms of like with the French and the British at the time, everybody's tank development kind of focused on that direct infantry support. You didn't see a lot of tank on tank battle really up to that point it never really happened in the first world war

mostly because every tank like went five miles per hour and would break down immediately so you didn't have a lot of maneuvering force on force with tanks yeah so a lot of the tank development was focused on um direct infantry support for these operations so there wasn't a lot of heavy armor. There wasn't a lot of very big guns built in onto these tanks. They had very small guns initially, and it was because the idea wasn't to punch through enemy armor. The idea was to blow up pillboxes and bunkers and, like, dug in enemy positions, things of that nature.

Do you think the... Because the Germans had the dry run in the the spanish civil war and to kind of perfect their blitzkrieg tactics which you know what we talked about is uh combined arms is all it is yeah blitzkrieg was just a propaganda term um and it looked really good in front of the cameras but in reality like 90 of the german army at the time was horse-drawn yeah which was not uncommon that was completely absolutely i mean um but you know the uh the french actually had a comparable if not better tank uh called the char b1 i'm sure i mean it's char or something like that but char b1 because i'm american yeah sure uh the problem was is the french were still not uh they

they didn't really understand the concept of combined arms even though they had literally used it during world war one uh yeah it's kind of like the uh the british navy forgetting that lemons and limes cure scurvy and a hundred years after coming up with it in the first place um but uh you know the tank was on one-on-one was better they had less of them sure but they also used large tank formations and didn't have them dispersed with infantry so they though the the tank pocket which was actually under the command of uh de gaulle at the time, Charles de Gaulle, had virtually no orders, no air support, and no coordination. So they got surrounded and fucking wrecked. Yeah, that's the problem.

It wasn't necessarily the equipment advantage the Germans had. It's just the fact that they had worked on developing offensive tactics when the French, basically after the First World War, kind of focused on the defense. You could see that with the creation of the Maginot line um which was a complete disaster because they didn't finish producing it actually belgium didn't finish producing their portion of it but still like the germans went around it and we talked about blitzkrieg being this like amazing and like groundbreaking earth changing like development and tactics and like you said it's just combined arms warfare like we've been doing combined arms warfare for like thousands of years like the first time a

caveman with a spear teemed open another caveman throwing a rock like that was combined arms warfare yeah and it's it says something that you know people kind of fell for propaganda hook, lay, and sinker that Goebbels was spouting off at the time and the movie rules were spouting off at the time. And I don't know if that's equal parts stupidity or the fact that countries like England needed people to be afraid of them so they would help after the Battle of France. It's definitely a combination.

It's kind of hard to explain. We lost the battle because we suck. It's definitely a combination. It's kind of hard to explain. Like, we lost the battle because we suck. You know, it's hard to swallow that pill. So it's easier to just say, man, we got beat because the Germans are just so good at war. I mean, what they were doing was just, you know, it's all about envelopment warfare. It's what they've been doing for centuries, really. You see in the Franco-Prussian War, the Austro-Prussian War, you know, the Kaiser-Schlock concept of maneuvering to envelop a force and then destroy it.

They just, they had tanks and they had Stuka-type bombers and they had infantry, you know, mechanized wheeled infantry moving along with the tanks to be able to quickly exploit breakthroughs in the enemy lines. And realistically, it wasn't because they had better equipment. It's just because they were honestly better trained and better prepared for the war i mean when you think about it the allies weren't interested in starting another war because they had just survived the worst war in human history the first world war like that was the war to end all wars and we say it now ironically but the fact of the matter was at the time everyone thought this is the worst thing that could ever happen and we can never do this again because millions and millions of lives, like an entire generation of Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans just disappeared. Yeah.

And they did it themselves. I mean, absolutely. I mean, not just World War One based on stupid inbred Habsburgs and interwining alliances and everything, but those Habsburgs. winding alliances and everything but those habsburgs they uh they uh i mean they everybody knows now but you know they set the the table for world war ii because they're vindictive assholes at the end of world war one yeah none of them had anything to fight for but germany sure did yep yeah so basically this phase of the war you have the french have been knocked out for all intents and purposes except for charles de gaulle causing chaos up in Britain and the French resistance, you know, doing their thing in France, which is actually pretty significant to ruining the Germans days on a consistent basis. And so Germany's kind of involved in North Africa now because they had to go bail out Mussolini because Mussolini wanted to rebuild the Roman Empire because he was like

the closest thing we've ever had to a living Bond villain in history Mussolini is probably one of my favorite historical uh figures and not because I like him in any way uh because I don't think he'll ever exist again and it's like he was he had a building with his face on it oh yeah if you haven't seen this building you had to look it up i can't remember the name of it i think it was like the party headquarters in rome but it's literally muslini's face like tiled in 3d all across the facade of the building and it's horrifying it looks terrifying i guess maybe italian artisans at the time kind of sucked or you know they didn't exactly they couldn't exactly do a 3d draft of

the thing but it it looks like something that you would see in a video game like it looks like the like evil bosses temple like it looks like a dystopian nightmare when you're approaching it is in rome yeah well you you actually bring down the uh the was it the italian people's republic or the second italian? I don't remember. You actually have to shoot. God, I had so many names. Yeah, you actually have to shoot Mussolini's head's eyes a certain amount of time to bring it down.

That's the only way to make it past that level. Yeah, exactly. And then coins will come out of his mouth. Oh, God, it's horrifying. It's absolutely insane. You have to believe there's never going to be that kind of a megalomaniac world leader ever again, right? You know, I feel like we are civil enough is the word that's become popular that this will never happen again.

It will never happen again because we are civil in our political discourse. But so the Germans decide to do, you know, top five mistake strategically in world history and they decide to invade the Soviet Union because if everything's going well for for you in the war you got to find a way to screw it up when you're hitler yeah so he decided to open the the hitler book to page napoleon and like you know this didn't work for him um but i feel like i can pull it off i mean yeah i mean the only people who can like conquer russia besides russians themselves are the mong. So clearly, clearly the Nazis had a great opportunity. So they opened up and they open up this another front of the war with a significantly large force, like a massive, massive country. And things are going pretty swimmingly at first because it's easy to run over peasants

when the Soviets are completely unprepared. And Stalin has completely eviscerated his officer corps because he was going on one of his little paranoid tirades as as one does the soviet red army at the time was like the equivalent of if you took um like a reception battalion which is like for our for our non-military listeners there might be a couple a reception battalion is like when you enlist and you get sent to basic training but there's not enough seats for you quite yet. You just have to go live in this fucking boring building for weeks or months at a time until you find a basic training class for you. But you're in uniform, you follow military regulations, etc., etc.

The Red Army at the time was pretty much an army-wide reception battalion because all of their leadership had been massacred and they had no weapons yeah they were completely wholly unprepared for it i mean just completely and utterly yeah just some randos in uniform yep so things went pretty swimmingly at first for the germans for the largest the largest invasion in human history the led to the largest uh armored battles in history later on the war just because the the sheer number of forces that were being thrown to the east. And early on in the war, in the eastern front, the Germans started to figure out that the Panzer IV and Panzer III couldn't really stand up to the Soviet T-34. And they did some studies.

They sent some folks east to just watch, basically, how the Soviets were murking their tanks. And what they saw was the T-34 had a couple distinct advantages. So it had a larger gun in the turret. The Germans still had relatively smaller guns than the Panzer IIIs and the Panzer IVs. It had sloped armor, which when you think about it, sloped armor rather than flat-facing armor has a tendency to better deflect incoming rounds. So instead of taking the full force, the round gets deflected in a different direction from the initial shot,

as well as increasing the amount of basically penetration a round has to go through, phrasing, to destroy the tank. So these are—and then it had like a wider track base it was more stable so there are a lot of distinct advantages that the t-34 had and another advantage of the fact that the t-34 so it weighed um weighed 26 tons it could be produced rapidly uh it could move a lot faster than the german tanks so the problem the germans started running into is that their tanks were completely outclassed and that this is where is where the Germans definitely showed their Achilles heel of wanting to over-engineer everything,

and the Russians show why they're so good in that they can slap a couple pieces of scrap aluminum together in a cannon, and you've got a T-34. Yeah, exactly. The T-34 was easy to produce. It was easy to operate and everything. And then the Germans took a look at this, and they got some lessons from it and then they just sprinted in the wrong direction because you know instead of thinking hey let's kind of upgrade the medium

tank we have now and make it maybe more stable more simple i decided you know what we need bigger so they started producing bigger tanks and that led to the development of the Panther and the Tiger I. So the Panther and the Tiger I are formidable tanks. Don't get me wrong. They are kind of the quintessential example of the horrifying German heavy tank during the war. They're like Sherman crews are horrified to see. The Panther weighed 44 tons, and it had a 7.5-centimeter main gun, several machine guns as well.

So this thing had the sloped armor that you saw on the T-34, a little bit wider base, a little more stable, but heavier. The Tiger I, which is a personal favorite of mine just because of the propaganda value put all around it they made the tiger look like the fucking king of the world in fury oh yeah it was absolutely terrifying it's amazing to see one of those things in person realize just how freakishly huge they were yeah i got the c1 um i don't know what the tank museum was called but it was at fort knox i assume they moved it with the rest of the armor school when they committed awful, awful sacrilege. Moved it down to Fort Benning.

Yeah. Ruined the armor core forever. Yeah. The tank is massive, even by modern standards. I spent my entire time in M1A1. I was an old toggle switch tanker. time in m1a1 as an old toggle switch tanker and uh the thing's that thing is comically large um to an insane extent but like the tiger one when you realize that this is being invented by a group of people who you know so many different technological like points have not been

crossed yet in human history but they attempted to make this fucking armored colossus oh yeah like the tiger weighs so 54 tons compared to you know the abrams now with uh the a2 cep is 72 tons roughly a little bit more but still significant significantly close for something that was being produced like what is this like 30 this is a little under 30 years since the first tanks actually were conceived you have a 54 ton 54 ton tank

that's a size of two Bradleys exactly it's huge it's 9 feet tall it's 20 feet long I mean this thing has a huge 8.8 centimeter gun it had a ridiculous amount of armor like 120 millimeters of armor on this front like this thing was definitely made up for the weaknesses of the panther um the panther i i will say it could have been realistically the best tank of the war

um if the germans had their shit together um but the the major huge if of the war yeah like if if if you know they could get all the gas they ever needed and they could fix the mechanical issues that the panthers had but you know the major downside is it had virtually no side armor but uh you know the tiger did not have that weakness it had all the mechanical weaknesses yeah but i mean after seeing it and seeing what it can do i can absolutely understand why uh you know the in theory they made it look like like a transfer like optimus prime dropped on the battlefield and tom cruise peed a little in his or tom cruise brad pitt yeah peed a little in his pants yeah i could see i mean when you think about

this thing i mean the amount of armor was on it the size of the gun especially when they upgraded to have an 88 in this thing yeah i mean, it was absolutely horrifying on the battlefield. It had a ridiculous amount of armor compared to everybody else. But the problem that the Germans were running into with the Panther and the Tiger, and then later on with the Tiger too, was the sheer weight of this thing made it so that it was hard for it to maneuver on open terrain. Like if there's a little bit of marsh or bog, which, as we know, the Soviet Union doesn't have any, none whatsoever, it would get

bogged down. And it would free, like it would get stuck in the mud, it would get stuck in, you know, any place that didn't have great stable ground. And then just the sheer mechanics of it was ridiculous. Because for some reason, I mean, anybody who has owned a BMW or Mercedes knows, for some reason, German engineering means efficient but impossible to understand right so these things were over engineered and it took like a you had to have like a master's in mechanical engineering to fix the damn engine and this is yeah and normal tank crews I mean you've worked with tankers and I've been a tanker and yep we're not exactly mechanical engineers man like if we can't fix the buy-in

yeah if you can't like fix it with a sledgehammer and some electrical tape you call the mechanics and you just pray like there's only so much that a tanker can do and i understand the german tankers are mythological creatures and don't get me wrong the ss panzer corps had great uniforms i mean yeah they could really stomp on stomp on some prisoners of war while looking fucking dapper shit but they look good i mean they completely ruined it like you can't wear all black anymore since you know the nazis ruined it that's one of the things i have with the navy is in the in the summertime they look like the good humor man but in the winter they look like the waffen ss and you know it speaks volumes of like how unreliable these tanks are when there's so many of them that were captured because the

crew tried their best to keep them running and uh they eventually just had to bail out on them because it became useless and so broken down there was no replacement parts there was no you know if the tank needed an actual overhaul outside of like track or road wheel like changing i'm assuming they had to ditch it yeah absolutely i mean like these crews would do everything they could to try to fix these things but without having you know mechanics with you at the time without having that like mechanical engineering degree and like having read read the TM to the point of memory, a lot of times they would have to abandon the tank because around this time is when the Western Front opens up.

The Allies land in Normandy. You have Brits and Americans and Canadians in France. You have the Soviet Union pushing back and effectively turning the tide against the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. So you have these heavy tanks that have more armor, heavier armament, than what the British, the Americans, and the Soviets have on the battlefield for the most part. But the Americans, the Allies have numbers, and they're able to maneuver around and basically overwhelm these tanks. It doesn't matter how much armor you have. One, there's always less armor on the back of the tank than there is on the front just the

nature of the design you always want to have your front slope towards expected enemy so all it takes is you can murk a couple of shermans but if enough of them get around you and hit your backside you're done for like a you know that's what fury illustrated actually pretty effectively was yeah how the shermmans are able to – essentially, you just had to try to overwhelm it. Imagine a classroom of toddlers crawling all over an adult and finally bringing him down. That's kind of how tactics were against something like a tiger. I fear that's how I'll one day go.

Don't we all. Just swarmed by children. Like the numbers game, the swarm of angry, ill-tempered toddlers, no teeth. The numbers game is interesting because the Tiger I, which is king shit of the battlefield, I will say of all the German tanks, either that or the Panther,

is the craziest design they actually made work for the most part. But there's only 1,300 of them. Without looking it up, because I don't even know where to do this and I didn't do the research, I'm willing to bet the factories in Michigan put out more Shermans a month than that. Oh, I'm sure.

You got to think about as the war goes on, you know, the bombing campaigns by the Americans, by the British are slowly wearing down the German ability to produce anything

because, you know, the factories are being destroyed, supply points are being destroyed, the mines where all the raw minerals come from, everything's getting destroyed slowly but surely and you're losing ground.

So it's harder to produce these tanks, and for some reason, the Germans decided, instead of, hey, we're going to cut down on design and go back to something that we know works, we're going to keep designing bigger and bigger shit. So the thing about the Germans over the course of the Second World War is for some reason they had this fetish where bigger is better, and it really didn't matter if it made sense. and i think a large part of this is the fact that i don't know like the the description of german military development over the course of the second

world war is just tiny dick syndrome yeah it goes for everything they had to build the biggest battleship they had i mean they didn't exactly succeed in the biggest aircraft carrier because their kriegsman was horseshit. They had to build the biggest bomber, and that failed. They had to build the biggest tank, and that was a miserable failure. And, oh, by the way, I looked it up. It was 1,000 Shermans a month. So in a month and a half, the Tiger 1 was outnumbered.

And that is just Michigan. That's just Michigan. Yeah. That's fantastic. That's the last time in human history that my state was worth a shit. There you go. Small victory. Yeah, but the Germans started developing bigger and bigger things. So they came up with the Jagdtiger, the hunting tiger, which is a tank destroyer because it didn't have a pivoting turret.

And this thing has the distinction of being the heaviest armored fighting vehicle used operationally during World War II. It had a 128-millimeter main gun. It weighed 71 tons, so almost as much as the Abrams today. And it was like 9 feet tall, 11 feet long. This thing was 34 feet long, including the gun. This thing was massive, absolutely massive. It's just like it was effective because it could completely demolish anything on the battlefield but it was so huge that it would get stuck it would break down because

the mechanics are complicated and ultimately weird how that keeps happening there's kind of a trend going on here you know like they keep building these bigger and bigger things so it was used operationally it was kind of effective in the sense that if you have a big giant rolling cannon it's going to murk a lot of stuff but eventually it's going to get enveloped so you had that being produced and then we start going into more and more batshit and saying this is my personal favorite here this is the storm tiger the assault tiger so before we get the storm tiger uh a thing about the jeg tiger the Jegdtiger, they actually equipped two full anti-tank battalions with these things. They were so unreliable

that only 20% were lost in combat and all the other ones were simply abandoned. That's superior German engineering. For some reason, the Germans have this weird mythos that goes along with the mythos of Blitzkrieg is superior German engineering. And it's like, yeah, I mean, it works well.

But the second it stops working, you're completely hosed because you don't know how to fix it. I mean, there's something to be said about like Soviet style, like this is really simple and you can shove it in the mud for five years and pull it out and go and like shoot people in the face with it you know there's something to be said about that simple engineering that the peasants could build a t-34 in the factory hop in that bad boy and roll out the battle right away yeah and i mean it's not even like one of those things that were shitting on them historically um i don't know if you ever read about the tiger ace autocarius um he has a really good memoir if you don't mind reading some nazi shit called the tigers in the mud um so he commanded three three companies yeah yeah it sounds like something that would be on uh it means something awful uh if you sounds like something kirk schlichter would write that's upcoming um so he came into three full companies of Yeag Tigers.

And actually, he notes that he had a rare combat achievement of commanding 10 functioning ones at once. And complains that the Yeag Tigers were not utilized to their full potential due to bad engineering, bad mechanics, allied air supremacy. bad mechanics uh allied air supremacy and that massive gun that made it combat effective was actually so huge that after driving it so say you like most vehicles you're driving to combat you have to recalibrate the gun and after every five rounds you had to recalibrate it as well can you imagine having to hop out of the tank in the middle of an engagement like five rounds in it's like all right get out there boil yeah um and the the gun was so huge it had to be locked in place otherwise mounting brackets would be broken for accurate firing jeez that's insane so you're say you're um it's a it's a tiger hunter or it's a tank hunter sorry so you're going to be fighting someone who can feasibly reach out and touch you uh exactly so before you went to combat or before you started

slinging around so you had to jump out a member of the crew of which there was two loaders of course i'm assuming the guy um actually lost rock paper scissors would be the one that'd have to do this um i had to jump out of the vehicle and unlock the gun before firing this is so crazy it's absolutely insane i mean like how who thought this design was a good idea and i'll tell you why they thought it was a good idea and it's stupid and only makes sense in world war ii vermont horseshit yeah it was recorded that the 120 millimeter gun was so powerful and went through an entire house and then destroyed an American tank that was sitting behind it. I mean, credit where credit is due.

I mean, it's effective, but it kind of defeats the purpose if it's not practical. Yeah, it's completely retarded. It's great if you have a giant-ass gun, but if it can't move to actually maneuver around enemy armor, what's the point of it being on a tank destroyer i i don't i mean the tank destroyers hypothetically are supposed to move with the armored force or the the combined arms force but this thing like the most of the tanks are

about to get to was so comically misengineered and useless that they might as well just put a couple more stugs out there. Well, I mean, the sad part of the fact is that the Jagdtiger is like the last semi-realistic thing we're going to talk about. Yeah. That's the absolute saddest part. I mean, with all of the issues that we just talked about, that was like the last effective thing of a series of designs that the Germans kept coming up with because as the war went on, they continued to come up with bad shit and ideas so this is the storm tiger the assault tiger uh

it was built on a tiger one chassis and it fired a 380 millimeter rocket propelled round like this thing they had taken a uh i think it was like a gun off a ship that was designed to like fire uh death charges so it was a death charge off a ship that was designed to like fire death charges. So it was a death charge loader and launcher. And they just stuck it in a tank. Well, technically an assault gun because they didn't have a pivoting turret. But this thing. It's like the only time in World War II history the Germans actually showed that, hey, more than what, we don't have to engineer everything to do with this just for this tank.

And they used, of all things, a depth charge launcher that they had laying around. They put this thing on there. It weighed 68 tons. It had a five-man crew. The thing was 20 feet long, 9 feet tall. The amount of armor on it was insane. It had 150 millimeters of armor on the front, 150 millimeters on the front of the hull.

It was a breech-loading 380-millimeter rocket and warfer, which would fire a rocket-propelled projectile that was 4 feet 11 inches long, that weighed up to 829 pounds with a maximum range of 6,000 meters, 20,000 feet, and contained an explosive charge of 276 pounds of high explosive. And this thing, you know, we've talked about a little bit before, and we'll talk about it way more later as we get into the even more insane designs,

is it's nothing but a resource leech. is um it's nothing but a resource the resource leech and um like its whole history was krup manufactured a ton of tiger one hauls um to be made into tiger ones for obvious reasons it's mostly functional and said fun and it's a mostly working tank yeah and instead hitler uh decided to send those halls to elkit uh who made the sturmtiger so these are what 19 sturmtigers got built these could have been 19 tiger ones um which actually would have been useful because uh this fucking monstrosities uh were made for urban warfare yeah and then you know uh got their first taste of urban warfare, slaughtering unarmed Jews in the Warsaw Uprising. Something you need heavy armor for is when you're shooting up a bunch of Jews that have bolt-action rifles. If that, yeah.

If that. And it had two loaders. And these rounds weighed, what, 800 pounds, something obscene like that? Yeah, 829 pounds. And they're rocket-propelled. like, what, 800 pounds, something obscene like that? Yeah, 829 pounds. And the rocket propelled, and they had to go out of their way to prioritize making these comically large rounds. And all the rocket technology at the time

was being made by Jewish slave labor. So even at best, I'm not sure how motivated the death camp workers were to for quality you can assume that the vast majority of these rounds were probably not going to work as intended yeah i mean when you think about the germans like the theme the tank design is kind of a variation on the theme of german war like weapon development in the second world war where they just focus on like insane things like you're in the process of losing weapon development in the Second World War where they just focus on insane things. You're in the process of losing the war against the Allies,

so what do we spend all our resources on? Well, we're going to build missiles to launch at Britain because Hitler just wants to hit the British continuously. He builds the V-1, the V-2, which becomes the foundation of space programs at the United States and the Soviet Union because they're so ahead of their time, and he just wants to launch explosives at the foundation of space program at the United States and the Soviet Union because they're so ahead of their time. And he just wants to launch explosives at the British countryside and like blow up cows. That's what he wants to do with those things.

The Germans developed the first viable jet engine for an aircraft. And instead of using it for like a high speed interceptor to take down the bombers that are destroying your entire war production hitler wants a medium range bomber so he can still bomb the british and this is also dumb that they actually had a lighter tank called the panzer six um the low or i guess it translates to lion and it was canceled in favor of something even bigger yeah they use this thing i mean like you said they used it to slaughter jews which is a great pastime for the nazis i can understand why they're excited about that opportunity

but it was also fielded at remagen uh and there's a case where one of these things fired at a group of shermans and destroyed four of them and all of the crew with one round. What the fuck? So credit, it's effective. I mean, if your enemy is kind enough to sit in close dispersion like they're taught not to do, and you get a lucky shot, you can kill a lot of tanks with it. But overall, this thing was insane. It was meant to be used for urban operations, for assault operations, while it was a storm tiger, the assault tiger.

And that phase of the war, by the time it finally rolled out, Germans weren't doing a lot of assaulting. It was more run away and get run over by the Allies at various points of the map. You know what the Stormtiger looks like? So I'm going to show how nerdy I am. Did you ever used to play... I have honestly no idea how old you are, but I just turned 30.

When I was a kid, probably middle school, high school, there was this game that came out for the Game Boy Advance called advanced wars oh yeah yeah absolutely the sturmtiger literally looks like a tank that was in that game that you had to unlock as like a boss tank and even then I'm like this thing looks fucking ridiculous it's actually made by the Germans so like you have the sturmtiger they They build a few of these things. They're used at various points in the war. Realistically, a massive, massive waste of time. And strangely enough, it's kind of like the last really operational kind of tank they have.

Because you mentioned the Panzer. The Panzer 7, the lion, was canceled before it went into production because they decided to focus on something even heavier the panzer 8 the mouse this is my personal favorite because it's fucking stupid it's a thing of beauty this one i mean they produced they produced two two hulls in one one turret and that was all they were able to produce before the war ended i mean this bad boy and we have to point out it never saw combat um it did undergo trials in late 1944 the the outcome of those trials are not noted so we're gonna assume it broke down i mean this thing was it weighed 188 tons jesus which like if you try to process this, it's more than an Abrams with a Bradley on top of it. It's just massive.

It was 11 feet tall, 33 feet long. It had 220 millimeters of armor on the front of its turret, which is double what the Tiger has on the front of it. That thing is formidable to begin with. It had a 128 millimeter gun, which is bigger than what's on the abrams today that might be one of the biggest um proposed direct fire tank weapons i know the those the russians use 125s um yeah i mean like some of the other i think the the modern leo uses a 120 no no they use a 120 uh i think the challenger uses a 125, so the British main battle tank uses a 125. But those are like modern tanks that were developed in the late 90s, early 2000s.

Like this thing was getting rolled out in 1944, and it was the brainchild of like Ferdinand Porsche, who, you know, he created a car company, but then also worked with the Nazis for a bit. Yeah, he was the brains behind the Tiger and the Panther as well. You know, he's not the best guy sometimes. So Ferdinand Porsche comes up with this thing and Hitler signs off on it because apparently all you need to do to have Hitler sign off on something was just tell him this is bigger than everything else. Yeah. He's like, fuck, yeah, let's do it. Let's absolutely do it.

So this thing, it weighed 188 tons. So this thing, it weighed 188 tons. It had a top speed of 14 miles per hour was achieved during its trial. 14 miles an hour. 14 miles an hour, which at the time was blazing fast, of course. Not really. Not at all. It would have fit in in World War I.

Yeah. That was a good cruising speed in the first World War where everybody everybody was just putting, like, tractor engines in a tank and just sending it on its merry way. This thing was, like, so massive that it wouldn't be able to cross a majority of bridges, so the plan was for it to just ford rivers or actually submerge. Just drive through the river. We got this. Just drive through the river. Like, it was going to submerge at depths up to 8 meters, so up to 26 feet deep.

You just snorkel. I mean, you have experience driving, right? Yeah, of course. And being a driver of a tank that goes underwater is literally my idea of hell. That's the worst way for me to go because the seals are never good. No, and this is, granted, I was was probably refitted tanks from the late 80s. But still, that's 40 years on these, and the rubber seals never worked. And that is sitting in a motor pool, occasionally going to the field.

These aren't like our deployment tanks. But even then, those seals never worked. It always leaked. And this is a tank being built in the the you know the stress of world war ii and you know you have to look out back at the junkyard to see what you can build next because there's you have no resources um like i really wish i could have been in porsche's meeting with hitler for this like i'm sure like albert speer or maybe one of the other actually accomplished engineers were uh were like uh sir this is a really bad idea.

And Porsche just kept pointing to a picture of how big it was going to be and making explosion noises with his mouth. That's pretty much actually what happened. Like so Heinz Guderian and like one of his memoirs, Panzer later, he talked about the meeting where they basically got the final approval from Hitler to start production of this thing. the meeting where they basically got the final approval from hitler to start production of this thing and uh ferdinand porsche brought in a wooden model of the mouse and told them like all the sizes and specifications and stuff and you know they ignore the fact that like it had this weird uh completely different track and suspension design uh that probably wouldn't have worked besides the fact that this thing was absolutely massive and apparently hitler saw this like wooden mock-up of it and saw that it had 128 millimeter gun and he said that it looked like a toy gun and wanted it to be 150 millimeter gun like he wanted

a bigger gun to be in this thing and he wanted it to be design changed that it would actually weigh up to like 200 tons sure buddy you wanna you want 200 millimeter gun we'll put a coffee maker in there fucking schnitzel bar what else do you want like you want 200 really again we'll put a coffee maker in there fucking schnitzel bar what else do you want like that was the thing it's like you have this model for like the largest tank that would ever exist like it's technically the largest vehicle to be produced because of the simple fact that they built one and a half of these things and when hitler got the mock-up for it he he looked at it and said, I want bigger. So that's like the constant trend of all this stuff. People will

come to him with these ideas and Hitler would bless off on them even though they're just batshit insane. So, you have you have the Maus, the Panzer VIII and then we move up to this is a second personal favorite of mine, the cruiser p1000

rat rata this thing is only exists in you know you know where this exists um i think i developed this when i was in middle school or elementary school when i was too because like most people end up being tankers or armed officers i had a lifelong obsession with tanks I thought they were the coolest thing ever and uh so I had a little notebook that I would doodle in in class instead of paying attention like most people who end up enlisting when they're 17 and one does yeah and I would draw what I thought tanks should be and it looks like they're the dumbest designs ever you know it was like a fucking steamship with a turret and everything else. Yeah, I mean, like you're six, seven years old drawing, like doodling in a notebook. But the Germans came close to making your doodle a reality.

Yes, and that's exactly what this looks like. Like there's this thing is so huge that I found a diagram that has the rat, the mouse and the tiger all lined up um and the mouse if the rat had a trunk the mouse would comfortably fit in it so like the rat was like this is like evil genius levels of insanity uh for a tank design they started developing it in june of 1942 they named it the land cruiser so because it was supposed to be a land cruiser this thing was basically what they had come up with is they were going to get the turret and the main gun from a battleship so it was going to mount two 280 millimeter guns like literally the turret and main gun from a battleship and mounted on this thing. The design, it was supposed to weigh 1,000 tons.

1,000 tons! 36 feet tall, like 115 feet long. It had a crew of 20 proposed, as many as 41. It had not just literally a battleship turret on it, but it also had a few machine guns and then flak guns for anti-aircraft built in onto this thing. It was literally supposed to be, the Germans thought, if we could get a battleship and put it on the ground, what would it look like? And they came up with this bad boy. Yeah, this thing weighs, not that it exists, it exists on paper, but if it existed,

it would have weighed as much as seven adult blue whales. And I think the guy who wins the award for the most, like the calmest description of how these things exist is Heinz Guderian himself. He said, quote, Hitler's fantasies sometimes shift into the gigantic. If you could just understate anything more, like that is, that's the exact example

of like a German officer just slightly understating something. It's just shifting to the gigantic was a 1,000 ton land battleship, which is what this design was. Like in the craziest part is these designs came forward. Hitler actually approved the damn thing. He thought, you know what?

Let's actually commit resources to this. And then it took Albert Speer to be the voice of reason to cancel the project in 1943. And Albert Speer is a legitimate madman. He wanted to create, was it Germania? Yeah. He was going to completely rebuild the city of Berlin into this

thing called germania um and the center which i assume was going to be the new reichstag was going to be so large that it was going to create its own weather and uh yeah he actually went on a test for us because berlin is built on like marshy land um that's why it's it's really hard to build there and he knew that but so he built this giant um like pillar of concrete and just stuck it on the ground and he was going to measure how fast it sank um it is still there today that that is as close as germania got yeah i mean like albert schwer who who was an architect that hitler liked and so hitler made him the minister of armaments for reasons unknown like he's the voice of reason that says you know what maybe not maybe not the best idea this one yeah and he was an architect

that he never made weapons in his life but even he was like this is dumb it was bad shit i mean the thing was supposed to it was supposed to have a ground clearance of six feet so that it would be able to ford rivers easily i mean you just think about something that weighs like a thousand tons and trying to maneuver that thing literally anywhere i mean it was supposed to be propelled by two marine diesel engines that were used in u-boats i like the other um possible option was Daimler Benz marine diesel engines yeah totally reasonable you think maintaining one engine was a pain in the ass in the Abrams

just think of maintaining 8 20 cylinder marine diesel engines so clearly a batch of insane surprisingly this design was not actually the largest land vehicle that they were coming up with they actually wanted to come up with another version that was essentially uh essentially the idea was for it to be a self-propelled siege gun

so the land cruiser p 1500 monster which is one of the best names this this one was literally the rail guns that they used on trains because they're so massive the transport they wanted to slap some treads on them and send them cross-country so it was a 800 millimeter gun driving down the street it's just it was literally just a massive artillery piece that was supposed to just roll down the street it was supposed to weigh 1500 tons it had a 800 millimeter gun it's just like absolutely insane you know what this reminds me of um i'm a fucking huge simpson nerd so this reminds me of the episode where homer's cousin let him design a car oh yeah he designed the homer

it is the biggest piece of shit and this is, Adolf, go ahead and invent your own tank. I mean, I know Ferdinand Porsche designed most of these stupid ass things, but you know he wasn't designing these on his own. He was designing any engineer worth his shit. And I've never driven a Porsche. I'll never be able to afford a Porsche. And from everything I hear, they're good cars. So he obviously knew how to actually engineer things that functioned either he spent the entire war tripping balls on acid or like you know his

brain is being eaten alive by worms or something like none of this makes sense to come from him so like that makes me think that more people were like hey man maybe you should uh put a flat cannon on that tank god this is the insanity of having like flat cannons on top of a tank because it rumbles across the countryside i mean whoever it was that worked in like the armaments ministry that came up with these ideas to like have hitler approve and shift resources away from things that make sense like that guy is a hero of world war ii like there had to be like a deep agent from the oss that like made his way in and his whole sole purpose in life was to come up with even more batshit insane ideas to take the hitler and be like hey what if we built this instead of building more u-boats yeah what do you think about that everybody's gathered around a

table talking about war stories he's like well i don't know what i did slides a fucking bar like the whole diagram of the p 1500 monster that he drew in a bar napkin he's like i got them to green light this motherfucker absolutely crazy so like basically that's it's like the quick little walkthrough i mean brief overview the briefest of overviews of like tank development for the Germans World War two and you know like the biggest thing is they kept focusing on building bigger dumber sexier looking things don't get me wrong some of these are sexy designs but they were dumb as hell I mean the tankers wet dreams like I am amazed looking at this stuff but like the amount of resources they're being poured into them instead of mass producing medium tanks that were effective.

Like if they had actually developed the Panther to be more effective, like they probably could have been more successful on the battlefield. So I guess we can be grateful for the fact that they weren't. I mean, yeah. And I think we talked about a little bit in the beginning. I think the I mean, who do you think is guilty? I think the, I mean, who do you think is guilty? Because we're coming up, I don't exactly know how long ago World War II was, without doing the math. It's close to 100 years, 90 years, something like that.

So we are effectively falling for German propaganda almost a century later. These tanks were magnificent um they were the the the picture of of german engineering and they totally would have won the war if x or y didn't happen um you know combine these amazing designs with blitzkrieg and and the the germans were obviously the best army of of world war ii um And we're still falling for that. Yeah. I mean, so I have a theory and this is this is completely pulled out of my ass. I don't have any research to back it up or anything, but I kind of have a theory that like this idea of German military excellence was kind of built up after World War Two ended.

When the like Germany was split between the east and the west. You know, you have this country that's basically you spend the majority of the Cold War years, so like, gosh, 50 years, waiting for the Soviets to come pouring through the Fulda Gap, and you're expecting millions of Soviet soldiers to pour through. So you kind of build up this idea of German military excellence, that they would be able to stand up and effectively fight against the Soviet invasion.

So I think there's a lot of propaganda value to be able to say like, Hey, look how great we did in world war two. Look how awesome we are at fighting. Uh, we could probably still do it again. So do you think this has something to do with the, the myth of the clean Wehrmacht that was pushed,

uh, in creation of the Bundeswehr then? I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think it's just, there's propaganda value to be able to say how great the Germans were. And it's pretty damn annoying because even now, like armor officers in the United States Army, like we still worship at the altar of Guderian and Rommel. And it makes very little sense because they're good, but they weren't that great. like everybody says how great Rommel was.

And when you think about it, Rommel got his ass kicked pretty consistently. Like he got his ass kicked in Africa. And yeah, he didn't. People say Hitler didn't give him the resources he needed, but that's kind of the nature of warfare. Like you're expected to do what you can, what you have available. And he got his ass kicked by Montgomery

and then later on by the Americans. He got his ass kicked in Normandy again. Pretty consistently got his ass kicked up until the point that Hitler made him kill himself. Like, Rommel wasn't that great in the grand scheme of things. He wrote a couple of good books. Have you ever failed so hard your boss

made you kill yourself? He consistently screwed up. I mean, like, sure, being a less shitty Nazi is good, except for the fact he's still a Nazi. He was still a Hitler loyalistist for sure he had to do stuff to kind of survive in that regime and everything and there's kind of a tendency like you said the the clean wehrmacht uh myth to kind of whitewash things and let the bundeswehr have

kind of some legacy that wasn't tied directly into nazism but still like these guys you know like we talked about the beginning of the episode like Blitzkrieg is just combined arms warfare. It's something we've practiced for centuries. It's something that we continue to do today. I mean, we joke about how armor sold its soul by moving the Fort Benning. But, you know, as somebody who works there now who went through the cab's career course, like I can see there's real benefit to us working closely with the infantry. How dare you? Because realistically in battle, in theory, yeah, but realistically in operations, we're going to work with the infantry how dare you because realistically in battle we're in theory yeah but realistically in operations we're gonna work with the infantry

like oh yeah tanks by themselves like especially in urban operations like you take a look at the soviets like that ends horribly oh yeah we did a whole episode on that yeah the first chechen war yeah rosney like you have these tanks that are rolling around by themselves and shockingly the chechens are able to completely destroy them. Infantry and urban operations work well with tanks because it's nice to have a heavily armored direct fire cannon blow stuff up for you. army gets all this credit for being advanced and you know special weapons and great developments and really majority of the force was still riding around in horse-drawn carts and they really weren't as advanced as we were really making them out to be yeah and then you know they get the credit for you know the panther and the tiger one and maybe it's because um a lot of people watch shitty history channel documentaries or they play video games.

And video games are always great. You're not going to play World of Tanks and have your tiger break down on you. That game might suck. So what do you think would have won the crown? Since people were shit-talking us yesterday, what do you think would have won the crown for the best tank of World War II? T-34, hands down. Absolutely. I mean, I want to say the Pershing or the Sherman Firefly or some American tank because, obviously, America produces the greatest things ever.

But realistically, the T-34 was this perfect combination of speed, armor, and rapid production. was this perfect combination of speed, armor, and rapid production. I mean, there's something to be said about something that has a strong gun, that has good armor, can move rapidly and effectively on the battlefield because it had such a wide base that it was stable on the marshy, shitty Soviet terrain, and the fact that you could just punch out like a thousand of these things in a night. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Its design was revolutionary to the point that um i mean as as obvious as it sounds now to a professional armor officer and a professional armor soldier is a

sloped armor no shit but like that was a revolutionary design that someone had to come up with and come and it didn't have you know um a trip up or a hiccup along the way the t-34 rolled off and immediately dominated um yeah the panther was made in direct response to the t-34 which you don't see that happening very often i mean the sherman firefly rolled off uh the assembly line with the i think it was a six pounder something like that yeah um because everybody realized the sherman was shit and the only thing had going for is like like, it's when you, if you go up and punch a beehive, Sherman's come out like,

yeah, there's just tons of them. You could just like swarm all over a German tank. But yeah, I mean like the T-34 is absolutely brilliant design. Like you said, it had a lot of significant advantages on the battlefield. And there's a reason why,

you know, a majority of German casualties were on the Eastern front. And it's not just because of the large number of soldiers involved in it. It's just the fact that the Soviets honestly had some really good designs. Like this kind of viewpoint is like the Germans are like the aliens landing on the caveman planet. That is the Soviet Union. And they have the advanced weaponry and everything. Well, the Soviets had some good weaponry too.

And they had a lot of people. So they had distinct advantages on the battlefield against the germans after the initial successes of the invasion and that you know that's something that people kind of discount the soviets for and i understand why there's no soviet fetishization unless there's some like weird tinkies on the left um about world war ii or you know the the great patriotic war they call it um because immediately after where they became our enemies. And then immediately after World War II, Western Germany was still our buddies.

And everybody just discounts the Soviet Red Army as this horde of peasants with no tactics other than human waves. Yeah, I mean, it's what happens when you watch Enemy at the Gates and that's your concept of what the Soviets did in the Second World War. Like, one man has a rifle, the other man has a clip of ammunition, and you just go forward and try not to get shot in the back. Yeah, and the same thing could have people tend to say about the Japanese, but it's discounting a lot of what they did. And while some of those things really did happen, I mean, the Soviets totally did send unarmed people into combat in very rare circumstances. There totally was human wave attacks.

There was definitely bonsai charges. But it's discounting. Like, they didn't win the Battle of Kursk on human wave and tank wave tactics. They didn't take Berlin. They didn't do any of these things by just flooding them in Russian corpses. And, I mean, that could have probably worked too.

But, I mean, the fact of the matter is they were a better military. And a lot of the historical revisionism says, you know, if this didn't happen, the Germans totally would have won. If they would have taken Stalingrad, the Germans totally would have won. And the reality of the situation is the day that Operation Barbarossa kicked off, the Germans had lost have won. If they would have taken Stalingrad, the Germans totally would have won. And the reality of the situation is the day that Operation Barbarossa kicked off, the Germans had lost that war. They were never going to win. This is the historical whataboutism and alternate theories that historians love talking about and people that don't like history just want to light themselves

on fire when they hear it because you just go just go off the deep end but it is interesting to think about like how successful the germans were up to that point in the war and then suddenly opening up this massive front probably before everyone was really ready for it um because hitler had an axe to grind with stalin completely threw germany under the bus in terms of being successful in the war they could have probably negotiated to maintain control of mainland Europe for a significant amount of time. But, I mean, at the end of the day, it's good that it happened, obviously. It's good that the Germans wasted all their resources on these other tank designs

because it all contributed to their ultimate defeat and failure. And that's why you'll never see Nazis ever again, especially not in America or in Charlottesville or as Proud Boys, whatever the hell Proud Boys are. Why would you come up with that as your name for yourself? That's why I can't get my head around. It is based on an Aladdin stage show. So it's this white supremacist group named themselves after a musical based on a movie based on brown iranian people yes that is correct makes perfect it makes perfect sense i mean i think when we come up with our

paramilitary left-wing group we can come up with something appropriately like racially confused i would prefer uh something to do with like tangle on ice possibly the lion king um we could be the people simbas the people symbols yes yeah and i think that has a lot to do with like um maybe it's because i'm older now and i'm seeing it more um but the fetishization of the third reich um is is pretty big um people like Maybe it's because they're white. Maybe it's because a lot of Americans have German blood. But Nick, who isn't here today, he's at work. He talks about it a lot because in his reenactor circles,

which I always jokingly call cosplay, the German, the Wehrmachtacht whether it be wehrmacht or ss uh their groups are always much bigger and they're always much more in depth uh he told me a story about it was a guy who was a tankerman for 20 something years um yeah in the united states army retired and now he pretty much does that full time to the point that he has SS tattoos. He wears SS uniforms pretty much everywhere. SS tattoos? Yeah. And I think he said he had the Bloodsmark on his armpit.

And he also has a full operating Mark IV Panzer. Oh, boy. He owns privately. And, you know, he also did a little bit of civil war reenacting and he said uh it's kind of comes in two camps and it's that the old guys who are generally there for the history and to sit around drink beer and then the young guys who you have to be suspicious of yeah guys are way way too excited that we wearing a swastika armband right and getting away with it and that's where i think it's kind of like

soft accepted and it's bleeding in everywhere um and that's where those people gum up the situation and gum up the discussions like i can only imagine if we had a third person on with us who uh was one of those dudes and he would have pointed out how you know the panther was the the best tank ever and if it wasn't for x or Y or whatever they totally would have won and even though it's completely contrary to all historical evidence yeah I mean the idea that like even even if the Germans had you know not wasted their time with all these other silly designs and focused on developing like Panthers and Tigers they were like truly reliable more effective on the battlefield like

realistically the Germans didn't really have a chance over the course of the war. Like they screwed it up when they invaded the Soviet Union. And there's obviously going to be lots of debates on who won the Second World War. Answer is the United States. But all of their answers are wrong. Always the United States, everyone else is wrong. But realistically, the Soviet Union had a significant role in taking down Nazi Germany. And like you said, with the Cold War, the fact that the

Soviets became our enemies right away, there's not a lot of acknowledgement of that fact, despite the fact that a majority, we were talking about it before this episode, you said like 80% of German casualties were on the Eastern Front. There's something to be said about the fact that the Soviets just killed a lot more Germans

than everybody else. That's the reason why the Soviets rolled into Berlin and took all the territory. Like they contributed significantly to the allied victory. And, and even if the Germans never would have invaded England or invaded England, invaded the Soviet union, there's something to be said. They could have never actually won because the one attempt that they made to

defeat Britain was a fucking hilarious failure in the battle of Britain. And the idea that they had before that i believe was called operation sea lion to yeah for the uh the invasion was even more his like i could have come up with something better in high school it made no it made no sense um yeah but that's and the same could be said for a lot of the shit that happened with the soviet union um like a lot of german apologists or historical revisionists will say well they were always going to go to war and it couldn't be further from the truth because all the way up until barbarossa and i think it was

like two days after barbarossa stalin simply didn't believe it was happening because they had sent a non-aggression agreement absolutely and wanted nothing to do with it like well i guess that's uh that's our podcast that's about it yeah do you want to talk about natsec twitter a little bit you want to talk about general general abrams yeah your your general story is pretty awesome so my general abrams story uh so i tweeted i actually changed so my twitter handle is at TankCaptainNemo, CPTNemo, because I changed it because it had my name in it at first. It was the Gospel of Tom, right? Yeah, it was the Gospel of Tom before that.

Everyone still knows me as Tom, so the whole point of it was lost, but I still changed it, so my first name wasn't blatantly on there. And the reason why is because for some reason I was tweeting, and I jokingly tweeted at him because he was following me, and he commented that he was going to come down and see me so you know general abrams the force comp commander he's coming down at benning we were hosting the the sullivan cup which is the best tank crew competition so a lot of generals are coming down he's coming down for that and he tweeted that he wanted to see me and me a captain hearing that the force comp commander a four-star wanted to come talk to me i was legitimately terrified like i thought this is all over i've had a good run in the army

general abrams come down to snap my neck because i've angered him somehow and so i didn't know that at the time but apparently his aide reached down to benning and was asking like hey are there any armor company commanders named tom give me a list of the armor company commanders. So like my brigade commander, my squadron commander, they all were asked, what the hell is Tom doing on Twitter? And they had no idea. So everybody's losing their mind. They're thinking like, you know, this damn captain has pissed off General Abrams and he's going to come down and now he's going to kill him and everyone else around him because of what this captain did. I see him on the last day of the the last competition like the culminating event of the competition uh my friend is one of his escorts and she texts me and says like he knows just talk to him because i've been

hiding from him for days like i had hid the second he hit the ground um and i go up to talk to him i salute i said hey sir it's nice to meet you in person. We chat for a little bit and it turns out he just really wanted to meet me because he liked my account. He really likes social media because General Abrams, if you don't follow his account or see what he does, he's actually one of the few generals that runs his own social media. Like he'll go on there and he'll tweet about doing some CrossFit or like meeting with people and doing PT and stuff like that. But he's also really involved. And what he was telling me is he was interested in social media, being able to hear what people think, being able to be exposed to the thoughts of junior soldiers, junior officers enlisted.

He said it was like sitting at your defect table and being able to hear what you're saying. And he gave the example of how he was interested in how people responded to the whole Air Force puppet reenlistment thing. Oh, yeah, yeah. And he was fascinated by how upset people were. And I told him my opinion was like, all these field grades, these colonels, these one stars are all staring at me like, what in the hell is this captain doing talking to General Abrams? We're just having this chat about social media.

And I told him, you know, hey, I think people weren't upset that they were punished they were upset about the level of punishment that like people's careers ended because of a video for the airmen's children where they were enlisted with the hand puppets so these people have their careers just completely demolished and then

you can be a racist Nazi in the Marine Corps and be retained, you know, iti in the marine corps and be retained you know it's that kind of thing um we just had this little chat and i told him like hey sir i thought you were coming down to kill me and he said no if i didn't like your account i wouldn't follow you and i was like i can't fault this logic like that makes perfect sense to me yeah i that was my abrams story i know you have an Abrams story too. I was legitimately afraid of this man for the longest time. So I was as one should be. Yeah. I mean, I got out, I was lower enlisted, you know, I had, I didn't have the greatest career, but I mean, I had an unnormal soldier's career from

2005 to 2013. Um, deployed a handful of times, skipped out on my fair share of details. Um, um, deployed a handful of times, skipped out of my fair share of details. Um, uh, completely unremarkable other than the book that I wrote, which please buy it. Cause I enjoy paying my mortgage. Um, uh, so I was a, I guess the, the term is specialist mafia, like Godfather, um, for the civilians who are listening, who for some reason don't follow us on Twitter. I have no idea what we're talking about. Specialist Mafia, we are the last rank before you become a non-commissioned officer. And we end up mentoring a lot of younger soldiers because we are the old people in the room who end up staying the largest amount of time around them. We live in the barracks with them.

And we are generally always drunk and angry at our lives. Incredibly salty. Yeah. Incredibly salty at all times. Bitter against the world, as you should be as a senior specialist. Yeah. And as such, I like to use that because I completely empathize with lower enlisted. And as somebody who has a lot of friends and a lot of family who are now senior NCOs, I also empathize with them as well.

senior ncos i also empathize with them as well um but um i had a soldier at fort hood send me a video of the bear their barracks room just absolutely coated in black mold um the the video didn't show his face didn't have his name didn't i mean if you've been to fort hood and you've been through the barracks you know what barracks they are um yeah and um he asked me to post it for him uh because he said that he he really wanted to help and he's afraid to go to his ncos and i don't blame him um and you know if you go to your ncos um the non-commissioned officers about this sort of thing they generally tell you to quit being a bitch or clean with bleach and that isn't how you handle black mold black mold's incredibly dangerous to human beings it causes cancer um respiratory issues probably other things i can't remember uh but i was like you know

what not that i'm well known on twitter i have like a thousand followers like fucking i'll post it yeah it blew up us army what the fuck moments got a hold of it um and then it just spiraled out of my control um eventually i got general abrams slid into my dms and asked for details and i said sir thank you for reaching out to me i can't give you the soldier's name i'm afraid of him getting um you know uh punished for it um because i had actually been in the soldier's unit i won't say say what unit it is. General Abrams knows. Not that he listens to my podcast. But I had NCOs that knew that I was in the unit. And they had obviously gotten an email about it or something. And they started blowing up my Facebook messenger, which I rarely, rarely check.

But I decided to check after this thing had spiraled out of control and uh it said like hey give me the soldier's name i just really want to help them and like fuck i'm not falling for that one man no i mean clearly these guys are trying to just nail the guy because for some reason there's this backlash in the army when something hits social media like army wtf moments the answer is not let's fix the problem the answer is let's find who leaked it and then crucify him in front of battalion so it never happens again and exactly this same unit actually demoted me uh so i'd been a corporal a handful of times and they demoted me a couple of times and i had been demoted for something kind of like this um which i won't

go into too much but yeah i was demoted for effectively whistleblowing on social media. But General Abrams said, hey, don't worry about it. If anything ever happens to him, I'll crush whoever does it because he wants to take care of the soldiers. Yeah, I mean, credit to him. I mean, you have a lot of these leaders that say they're involved,

but then you have somebody like General Abrams who he's the commander of Force Com, he's the commander of every combatant force that the United States Army has, all these divisions fall under him. And this man is reaching down because some some guy on Twitter tweeted a video of how jacked up the barracks are at Hood. And everybody knows that especially the posts in the south, you know, in Georgia and in Texas, you have a lot of black mold because of the humidity and these buildings are so old. And it's hard to fight that issue. And like you said, the majority of the time soldiers raise the issue and they're kind of told, hey, suck it up and then, you know, just scrub at it with some bleach while the black mold enters your lungs and kills you later in life.

Right. and kills you later in life. Right. But General Abrams, like this guy, actually took the time to reach down, find out what the problem was, and very quickly mobilize a response because I'm pretty sure a lot of assholes puckered up very quickly at three core and at Fort Hood

to fix that problem right away. And he asked me for more information. I gave him more information. He told me what he found, which thankfully he didn't find anything as bad as what was in the video. So our theory is, my theory is, his theory is that it was an older video that could have absolutely been true. My theory is it could have been an older video or one of his NCOs saw the video first and knew what was going to happen and had him clean it the best of his abilities before yeah it came down and if either one of those is the case it doesn't matter because the situation the situation isn't fixed um because there's still people living in the barracks

but yeah you know he empathizes with that and he knows those are the next barracks to be replaced um yeah i mean i know the problem can be fixed immediately but the fact that you immediately have a spotlight on it is a great thing. That's kind of like the power of social media right now. It's really fascinating that I mean, I'm a captain. I've got six years in and I can interact with generals. Like my first interaction with General Abrams on Twitter was I tweeted asking for advice on writing a change of command speech, because obviously people go into a change of command wants to hear what the incoming commander has to say right uh he actually responded like he responded to the tweet and gave some advice that was actually really helpful so these these uh

leaders are involved you can interact with them there's several general officers that are pretty active on twitter you know beyond general abrams and i was talking to my old squadron commander he just recently pcs'd and he was telling me like he's fascinated by Twitter because it's like a constant one on one sensing session, which is really accurate. Like you could see what people are saying all the time. You have these different accounts. You have you and me. You have some other NatSec accounts that are anonymous, non-anonymous, that people express how they're feeling about the army. And these higher level guys

are paying attention they're actually making some effort to respond to them so it's truly a fascinating uh phenomena and kind of reminds me that i shouldn't spend all of my time on twitter shit posting yeah it's only 90 of the time me too um actually right before we started this uh me and francis from the hell of a way to die podcast if you don't listen to it, you totally should. Oh, yeah. We're shitposting about Ben Shapiro and somehow rallied up one of his small minions to come and yell at us. It goes on top of the Nazis who want to see you and me naked. Yeah.

So I told Nick about the Liftwaffeafa thing and he was beyond himself laughing like he then he fell into a wormhole of following the hashtag because he doesn't really tweet all that much even though i told him to because you know that's how we spread our podcast and everything um yeah uh even and he's 21 so he should know more about this shit than i do but down with the young folks i mean he's this the twitter twitter is where the content is man yeah um i think apparently the content was nazis telling us that they want to see a shirtless so yeah just show physique show physique show physique you're exactly right it's like that meme the bobs and vagine yes it's exactly what it was it means i mean we're probably gonna have some more followers

now because people are gonna realize we did a podcast on german tanks world war ii and we opened up with erica so yeah well see how that turns out we're gonna have some weird people in our twitter mentions after this and i i'd have to thank nick for that one because i because of his cosplaying i uh i know what erica is and he kept showing me memes about it um i posted one it was uh the german soldier using a machine gun for the first time in basic training. In the background, black and white footage of World War II kicks up. Erica starts playing. So I guess we're at about an hour and 20 minutes now.

Any parting words you'd like to say? It's a real pleasure to come on. And like I said, the biggest thing about this is the Germans are vastly overrated for what they did in World War II. Their equipment was vastly overrated. Their tactics are vastly overrated. And it's honestly a good thing because Nazis are crap and they deserve to lose. So it all worked out. It was a real pleasure to be on the podcast.

Really excited to be the first guest on this podcast. Hopefully I can be like a recurring guest. Yeah, absolutely, man. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on the podcast. I'm going to be the first guest on this podcast. Hopefully I can be a recurring guest. We'll find something else to rant about down the road. Just full of tanker stuff to rant about. If anyone's interested, you can follow me on Twitter at TankCaptainNemo. It's CPT for captain, so TankCPTNemo. And then you can go ahead and plug your book again, which I still need to buy. Yeah, so my book is The Hooligans of Kandahar.

It comes out august 19th uh you can pre-order it now on um ebook and the physical one will be available on august 19th because my publisher does not think i'm a big enough draw to pre-order paperbacks and i don't blame them let's be honest we gotta agree on that yeah i mean i'll be lucky if i can put a roof over my head in the next couple of months. No, I'm kidding. Fingers crossed. Guys, think about my dog being homeless.

Don't think about me. Thank you for coming on. I know we've been shitposting together for it feels like months now. I'm calling out any other anonymous netsec Twitter accounts like LieutenantL uh to come on and talk about artillery and public affairs or whoever else that would be the history of public affairs i think she'd be really interested in talking about that yeah um well thanks again and looking forward to doing this again yeah man absolutely have a good one bye