The National WWII Museum
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2018–2023
1:12:19 · 536K views · Jan 19, 2014
A panel at The National WWII Museum on the Battle of Kursk, moderated by Keith Huxen with historians Robert Citino and John Parshal. The discussion covers the armored engagement and the German, Soviet and US approaches to tank production.
HN recommends it for its comparison of tank factory efficiency and the Soviet approach of building cheap tanks with short lifespans.
7 comments from Hacker News
I've been to the tank museum in Munster (not to be confused with Münster if you ever decide to go!). Looking up close, comparing the American and German WWII tanks to the Russian ones is absolutely night and day. The alignment of the panels and the welding on a Tiger tank looks (to an untrained eye) pretty much as good as you could make a mass produced vehicle back then. A T34 by contrast has haphazard misalignments connected by welding that looks like mine did when I was learning in high school. So you can see with your own eyes that they essentially put the bare minimum of quality in to them. This is a very interesting talk on the manufacturing efficiency of the US, Russia and Germany in WW2, which drills down into the details of how the factories were organized and the difference in man hours spent on each (which I'll spoil the bottom line of here: US 10k, SU 35-50k, DE 300k). We've all heard stories about how Russian tanks in certain cases were driven out of factories partially completed straight in to combat, but up until I watched it I hadn't heard of Tiger tanks being rejected by the Wehrmacht because they didn't latest gear stick design. I highly recommend it: this video
In the video I have linked below, in third lecture Jonathan Parshall compares industrial doctrines of tank manufacturing by Nazi Germamy, Soviet Union and USA during WW2. Very enlightening. Three different systems, three different manufacturing philosophies. - Germany - pre-industrial artisan manufacture (250 modifications during 2-year production run of 1347 units, 300 thousand man-hours per tank vs American 10 thousand man-hours) - USA - Detroit style horizontal mass production (US scaled down tanks production in 1944 due to overproduction in 1943) - Soviet Union - cost-optimized, vertical mass production (the average tank lasted only 14 hours in battle anyway) this video Tank Production: A Comparative Study of output in Germany, the US, and the USSR Jonathan Parshall.
I found this conference talk about WWII being at its heart a "battle of the factories" enlightening on this point: this video
> At the end of the battle they mention that by the end of the war the US was completing multiple carriers per month, and they were just orders of magnitude ahead of every other country when it came to manufacturing power and steel production. I saw a very interesting video a few years ago [1] - by the end of WW2, tank production figures were: Russia built 106,000 tanks America built 102,000 tanks Germany built 47,000 tanks Britain built 36,000 tanks Needless to say, once you know one side had 5x as many tanks, the outcome becomes something of a foregone conclusion.... [1] this video
One of the interesting things I've heard the Soviets did [1] was operational research: The lifespan of a tank on the Eastern front was less than 6 months, and once in combat was less than 14 hours. Less than 1000 miles driven. Knowing they didn't need a tank that lasted more than 1000 miles let them lower the number of parts and man-hours for each tank, allowing them to get them off the production line that much faster. You can imagine what an advantage it was that the Allies produced four times as many tanks as the Axis powers. [1] this video