Otto Carius, Panzer Ace

[glennsche]

Gents,

so check this out:

i'm reading a book on ww2 in the Baltics (estonia, latvia, lithuania). There's a chapter or two where they mention Otto Carius, one of the most decorated Panzermen of the war with 150 allied tanks knocked out.

this is him:


in the book, the author mentions he survived the war an opened an Apotheke (pharmacy) back in his native Saarbruecken, called, appropriately enough, "Tiger Apotheke".

And, guess what? At 92 years of age, he still works there.

this is him.

http://www.tiger-apotheke.de/wir-%C3%BCber-uns/

you can get a signed copy of his book from the webpage too.

[Emdawg]

No hablo aleman...


EDIT: I found the translator!

[Bobby Ricigliano]

Could it be that some German soldiers in WW2 were not Jew hating nazi extremists, but rather just regular Joes who got sent to war, did their duty, and went back home to quiet lives with their families?

Amazing!

[NOTABIKER]

he was not playing fair with the tanks the Germans had. a Sherman or even a T-34 had no chance against a tiger or panther. uncle sam sent a lot of brave Americans to cretin death in a Sherman .

[diverwcw]

I heard the saying that the Germans had about American tanks, "The Tiger tank will kill 10 American Sherman tanks, but the Americans always had the 11th."

[Von_Richthofen]

Awesome Panzer Ace! Read his book Tigers in the Mud... Covers the good, bad, and ugly aspects of the Tigers... As mentioned the Tiger Eins und Swei were superior to most allied armor yet quantity not quality ruled the battlefields

[Grendl]

he was not playing fair with the tanks the Germans had. a Sherman or even a T-34 had no chance against a tiger or panther. uncle sam sent a lot of brave Americans to cretin death in a Sherman .

Even when they factored in the cost of human life, Shermans were cheaper to ship than Pershings, so we shipped Shermans.

[Blitzburgh]

Wow! Absolutely awesome!

I HAVE to get his autographed book! What history!!!

THANKS!!!!!

[Emdawg]

Hehe Purple Heart Boxes.

What killed the Tigers was their cost to produce and their bad engines. They are in a league of their own in gas guzzeling.


What often saved our Shermans was our air power.

[Enfield47]

Very true, allied air superiority made all the difference. It was pretty improbable to escape being hunted from both the ground and in the air.

Pretty cool to see how the regular army guys were compared to the fanatical Nazi's.

[Crunch130]

Yeah, my German teacher in high school flew transports for them. Ju-52's and Me-323's. His brother was a doctor in the Army. Yet the Gestapo took away his father one night, never to be seen again. He hated the Nazis.

Crunch

[Springfield45]

Yeah, my German teacher in high school flew transports for them. Ju-52's and Me-323's. His brother was a doctor in the Army. Yet the Gestapo took away his father one night, never to be seen again. He hated the Nazis.

Crunch

We have gun camera footage from my grandfathers P-51 strafing Me 323s during the war. They were huge planes.

Shermans were easy to mass produce, that is why we had so many of them in the war. I saw the remains of a Sherman tank that was used for gunnery practice. The lower hull was only about one inch thick. That is not a lot of armer at all.

I think Russian T-34 tanks were designed after they got a up close look at German Mark IV panzers and Tiger tanks. They made the next step and made their T-34 tanks with sloped armer and able to be mass produced. T-34s were good tanks better or equal to any at the time, so much so the germans would use them anytime they could get hold of one that was not destroyed. Germany's answer to the T-34 was the Panther tanks.

[Emdawg]

We have gun camera footage from my grandfathers P-51 strafing Me 323s during the war. They were huge planes.

Shermans were easy to mass produce, that is why we had so many of them in the war. I saw the remains of a Sherman tank that was used for gunnery practice. The lower hull was only about one inch thick. That is not a lot of armer at all.

I think Russian T-34 tanks were designed after they got a up close look at German Mark IV panzers and Tiger tanks. They made the next step and made their T-34 tanks with sloped armer and able to be mass produced. T-34s were good tanks better or equal to any at the time, so much so the germans would use them anytime they could get hold of one that was not destroyed. Germany's answer to the T-34 was the Panther tanks.

The Soviets were ahead of the times in terms of most weapons technology in the early war. Problem was that the Great Purge wiped out most of the experienced officer's corps and Stalin slowed down production of the new weaponry.

The T-34 was introduced in 1940. It was designed to be comparable to the Panzer IV and the Sherman. Problem was that it had a 76mm gun and that thing did squat against the Panther.

Panthers were devastating with their 75mm (7.5cm) cannon, which was designed for high velocity fire. When they were introduced in 1943, they could outmatch any tank on the field at the time. The Panther's sloped armor was taken from the T-34.


To compete with the Panther and the Tiger, the Soviets introduced the IS heavy tanks, mainly the IS-2. Trouble was that they were introduced too late in the war to particpate in any of the famous tank battles.


The Soviets used overwhelming numbers, mutch like the US, to overwhelm German armor.

[Von_Richthofen]

Lots of excellent points made... The Tiger design was begun in the late thirties so it missed the surprise of the T-34's sloped armor... The Panther surpassed it and fortunately the Germans couldn't produce enough of them as they kept the Tigers in production till the end. My grandfather drove Shermans and envied the M36 TD's 90mm and the Brits Firefly with the 17 pounder. Clear weather was his best friend and the German's nightmare.

German vets I've met would curse the Nazi elite during Jabo and fighter bomber attacks... There's a wonderful series called Greatest Tank Battles... must see!!

[smle-man]

Fortunately for us the Germans were horrible about tank recovery and repairing them close to the front lines. Any tank badly damaged was returned to Germany to be overhauled and reissued. By the time the tank made it to Germany it had been stripped to its hull and turret by desperate units who could not obtain adequate repair parts and drive train components to keep their AFVs working in the field. This meant that just about every tank returned had to be almost rebuilt from the ground up.
The Germans were perfectionists and tinkerers; they never did understand standardization and true wartime mass production.

Logistics did in the Germans in the end.