Kursk: The Epic Armored Engagement (2013)

What people said

reitzensteinm · 2019-04 · Strong recommendation

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: [VIDEO]

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chewz · 2020-10 · Recommendation

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) [VIDEO] Tank Production: A Comparative Study of output in Germany, the US, and the USSR Jonathan Parshall.

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avar · 2018-12 · Recommendation

I found this conference talk about WWII being at its heart a "battle of the factories" enlightening on this point: [VIDEO]

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