Reply To: Poland 1939 – Preparing for 80th Anniversary of World War II

[jamesevans140Participant 2055xp 0]

Thanks for the reply @oriskany.

There will most likely a sound codex out there that you can install onto either Windows or the app you use to do your sound recording. If you ask the guys the do the recording here at OTT they may be able to help out on that.

I called it your idea concerning the cavalry as it was your postelation on this threat and using that word is a bit too grown up for me. So the word idea was used along with my crayons.

I don’t normally don’t go too much into the rivets vs welding thing.  Certainly not the big band production of David  Fletcher concerning the rivets on the Italian M11 plus series.  There was an instance in the Western Desert where one was hit at just the right angle by an artillery shell and all the armour plates fell off but was not the every day expected inferred by him.  Yes rivets popped and sometimes in bad places. What was more important was the quality of the materials and workmanship with many designs being given out to the cheapest bidder.  In this respect welding is not that much better and in the wrong hands far worse. The issue here is tempering, heat the metal up you make it harder.  Heat it up again and out is soft again it becomes soft again. At this point of the war the welds on the German tanks were made by craftsmen but a little later it is forced labour doing the welding.  By far the worst for over cooking their welds were the Russians. On the T-34 there is a weld seam that runs right across the front of the of the upper front hull near the leading edge that was often so badly over cooked you had mild steel for a couple cm either side of the weld seam.  A 2cm AT round could target and penetrate this area out to about 300m. On the History Visualized YouTube site found a record in the German archive one month in the mid war period were more T-34s had been knocked out by more 2cm guns than 88cm guns. So the rivets vs weld is not as straight forward as at first look.  It really comes down to quality of material and workmanship at that given time on that given tank.

The 7TP was the licenced build of the Vickers 6 ton tank,  the same one the T-26 was based on.  It was not designed for the British army but purely as an export design for profit.  As such the British missed out on having the best light tank design of the 1920/30 period with the exception of the twin turret MG version that was made to compete as an export to the tankette market.  The Russians took this design to another level when they upgraded from a 37mm gun to a 45mm gun making it a precursor to the tank destroyer of late war.  Like most designs of 1920s/30s it was not reliable and the Russian built version had difficulties with the clutch and transition. Up until the Vickers 6 ton tank France had the lion share of the export market with its FT17/18 design. Vickers was offering a much better product.  Goes to show how things have not changed that much as we tend to think of building tanks for export as a modern thing,  it only got chapter over time.  Finland purchased its Ft17/18s at US$4 million each while Australia bought her M1s at US$5.5 million each.

Yes I could see what you were doing with the Pz-3s next to the objective hex. The most dangerous things do not always come from a gun barrel.  @yavasa and have mentioned on a number of posts here just how devastating the German communications net was to the Polish Army.

Effectiveness and effected area is the sum of unit sizes