[Milsurplus] Tank vs. Tank

[Hue Miller]

First, any claim that Russians "didn't want" radios in tanks is preposterous 
on the face of it;
nothing to argue there. But - there are references to lack of coordination 
among tanks due
to lack of radio. These references must have been based on observation, not 
imagination.

>The U.S. Army Signal Corps took a considerable, but calculated, risk in
committing to FM and crystal control.  All indications are that this
payed off big time.

Germany - and Italy - did not have access to plentiful quartz supplies,
so crystal control was rarely designed. And yes, the US FM mobile
radios were superior, in terms of distance range, noise rejection,
and channelization.

>Some anecdotal stuff that needs to be confirmed:
             - A lot of units only had transmitters in the command tank,
everybody else just followed orders.

NO! Where does such nonsense originate?

>It's clear to me that superior radios often made the difference when
faced with an enemy in mechanically superior tanks.  You just dispatched
a couple of M-4's around the side where the armopr was thin.

Where you could. Otherwise, where a strong panzer controlled limited access,
you maybe sacrificed tank after tank against it, and finally  sent infantry
with antitank rockets to infiltrate within range....

>There was a lot of stuff like that in the US. You simply cannot order and
produce "just enough" stuff to fight a war. You have to go balls to the
wall, until the war is over, win or lose.

I think it's just a little amusing to think of factory production lines 
producing,
say, vacuum tubes for aircraft radars, up to the final days, when the vacuum
tubes had no place to go - for all practical purposes, no Luftwaffe left.

> Something else that puzzles me is how inadequate many, maybe most,
> German manuals were. Many USA manuals for civilian type hobbyist shortwave
> radios, like some humble Hallicrafters, were vastly superior, in my
> opinion,
> with
> photos and voltage and resistance tables the old-school German manuals
> lack.

>Err...  we won the war. Our cities and factories were not bombed. The
Germans didn't come through like Sherman.

Faulty argument. German manuals were like this from the unbombed 1930s
rearmament war-preparation years. In fact the FuG10 manual I praised, dates
I would take an educated guess at, 1943, when the Reich embarked on its
"Total War" focus.
Up until the final days of the war, German presses cranked out a large
variety of printed matter, including periodicals for all kinds of military
occupations and war fronts. I didn't criticize a lack of manuals: I 
criticized
their content.
-Hue Miller