Some frequently made points:
Is this rhetoric accurate, or revisionist?
Some of it's accurate; but missing the point. Some of it's outright false, or based on a highly-misleading view of history.
To unpack a few of the claims:
1. The Tiger was seemingly infinitely superior to Allied tanks
This comes down to how you define "superior," what qualities you emphasize, and your point of comparison. Let's compare the 88mm-armed Tiger II with its two greatest rivals: the 76mm-armed M4A3(76) Sherman and the 85mm-armed T-34/85.
In the the realms of firepower and protection, it has them all beat. Max armor on the Tiger II is 185 mm versus 89mm (M4A3) and 80mm (T-34/85), not accounting for the similar armor sloping. The Tiger II is also more powerfully-armed. The 8.8 cm KwK 43 L/71 could frontally-penetrate both its rivals at long ranges, while neither could hope to return the favor.
When it comes to mobility, the M4A3 is the fastest at, 48 kph on-road, while the T-34/85 does 38 kph and the Tiger II does about 42 kph on-road. Off-road, the Sherman lags, since it actually has higher ground pressure than the Soviet or German designs (duck-bill track extensions on VVSS Shermans and the wider tracks on the HVSS Shermans did mitigate this a little).
On paper, the Tiger II certainly seems like a superior tank. On a flat, featureless plain, it could shoot Shermans and T-34s all day. In video games, the source of a lot of people's "knowledge" about tanks, the tank with the thickest armor and the biggest gun wins. No one in War Thunder wants their Sherman to get matched against a Tiger II.
So is usually where a lot of internet discussions end - in a Top Trumps argument over "who has the bigger gun." Of course, it's not like these discussions are really new. Even during WWII, phrases like “the American tank is not nearly as good as the German tank" or “next to the German and Russian tanks, the American tanks are the best in the world" were flying around.
In 1946, Lieutenant Colonel Albin F. Irzyk, the former commander of the 8th Tank Battalion wrote a letter that hit on the very points people are still making today:
If they used simply the gun, the weight of the tank, and the width of the track and thereby the floatation of the tank as criterion, as I am sure they did, then I heartily concur with them that the German Tiger tank is unquestionably superior to the American Sherman tank.
The German 88 is more powerful than any American tank gun used during the course of most of the war.
The German tank is much heavier and therefore its armor is much thicker than that of any American tank.
The tracks of the former are much wider, with perhaps a less vulnerable suspension system than that of the latter.
But WWII wasn't fought in a frictionless vacuum. A big gun and thick armor might win a few battles, but can they win a war? Irzyk continues:
Could 53 Tiger tanks, for instance, move from the vicinity of Fenetrange, France, in the Saar, to an area near Bastogne, Belgium, a distance of 151 miles, in less than twenty-four hours to answer a fire call, as did tanks of the Fourth Armored Division? [Note: This advance was spearheaded by then-LTCOL Crieghton Abrams, Jr. a future Army Chief of Staff and namesake of the famous main battle tank. Patton, with characteristic modesty, called Abrams his only "peer" for the title of "best tank commander in the Army."]
Could a German Tiger tank be used for weeks of training in England, land in France and fight across the widest part of that country to the German frontier, race back to Belgium, retrace its steps again to the German border, and fight its way well into that country before being replaced?
Could a German tank roll for several hours at a speed of twenty-five miles per hour in exploiting a breakthrough?
This is where we get to another part of "superiority." The things that really matter on an operational level (fuel economy, reliability, ease and frequency of maintenance) and a strategic level (man hours to produce, ease of production, use of resource) don't grab the attention of History Channel viewers or get simulated in popular games. But for an army in combat, this is really the meat of the matter.
How many tanks will I have available for the next operation? How many broken tanks do I have? How long will it take to fix them? How many spare parts will I need? When will I get replacements for those tanks I lost yesterday?
In these respects, the Tigers (and the other big cats) were decidedly inferior to many contemporary Allied tanks.
They consumed enormous amounts of industrial resources, money (Germany could make three Tiger Is for the price of ten Stugs) and man hours (it took nearly twice as long to build a Tiger I as a Panzer IV).
They broke down constantly and often had to be abandoned by their crews. The final drives on the early Panthers couldn't handle the tank's massive weight. Some could only go 150km before breaking down. In fact, about half the Panthers abandoned in Normandy had broken final drives.
Even though later improvements made the big cats more reliable, they couldn't be road-marched a serious distance. They had to rely on trains to be transported to their operational areas. This badly limited their operational mobility and usefulness. It also took up precious time, since the wide Tiger I had to be partially disassembled to fit on a rail car.
Contrast this with the contemporary Allied designs. They were more reliable, easier to fix, and cheaper to replace - that meant Allied armored divisions, especially American ones had very high availability rates. Many American tank battalions in the ETO equipped with the M4 had 90% availability rates. Meanwhile, Tiger units on the Eastern Front in 1943-1944 had availability rates ranging from 18% to a peak of 89% - one average, less than half the Tigers were ready for action at any one point.
Consider the serviceability of these three designs. Let's say you're changing the gearbox on a...
You can start to see why there are American infantry divisions in late 1944 that have more tanks and TDs than some German armored divisions. When they attacked, Americans often had armored support and the defending Germans didn't. When they defended against German counterattacks, the Americans (who, mind you, hadn't been able to choose where the attack would happen) often had near-parity in armor strength. Meanwhile, the Germans had been hard-pressed to scrape up enough tanks from other areas to make that local attack. Why did this happen?
Yes, part of the Allied numbers comes down to American and Soviet industrial capacity. Part of it comes down to better American industrial management and more efficient manufacturing techniques (see Anthony Parshall's excellent talk on this). But much of it comes down the the fact the Germans and Americans had made very different choices. Germany was undercutting other production to build resource-intensive tanks like the Panther and Tiger II. Meanwhile, the Americans and Soviets went with a production strategy and doctrine that put more emphasis on medium tanks and tank destroyers that could be made in greater numbers.
I'm not saying that if Germany would have won the war if it had just built more Stugs, or copied the T-34 or just made a more sensibly-sized Panzer V. By the time the Tigers were coming off the production line in mid 1942, Germany's odds of winning the war were getting longer and longer. By the time Tiger II production started in January 1944, Germany was in even worse shape. However, if Germany had opted for more sensible AFV production, it could have had larger numbers of reliable tanks, tank, destroyers, and SPGs. Does that win Gemrmay the war? No. Does it prolong the war and cause tens of thousands of additional Allied casualties? Very probably.
https://i.imgur.com/Fz0NHjlr.jpg - Two very different tanks.
Important, if unsexy, tactical factors also get missed in online arguments about "superiority." One of the M4's great strengths, for example, was its great visibility when unbuttoned and buttoned up - operational research from WWII and Korea consistently showed M4 crews had the edge in the "see first, shoot first, hit first" contest that so often determines the outcome of armored warfare. The Panther, by contrast, had some problems with situational awareness. The gunner, for example, only had a magnified sight, which made looking for targets much harder.
Another of the M4's great strengths and unique features was its .50 caliber machine gun. This was enormously useful for shooting up trucks, buildings, and reaching things the .30 cals couldn't hit without wasting main gun ammo. On a day to day basis, tanks didn't do much tank vs. tank fighting, but they did a lot of shooting at infantry, hence why one tanker even called the M2 ,50 cal the M4's "most valuable weapon." But it rarely ever comes up in discussions about armor of the era.
I don't want to seem like I'm rabidly anti-Tiger or anti-Panther. The big cats are impressive tanks from an engineering perspective. They must have been terrifying machines to fight. Having seen Tiger 131 going through it's paces, I'll say it's an incredible machine! The sound of those big track links and the big Maybach made my heart skip a beat - I can only imagine how Ivans, GIs, and Tommies in foxholes felt when they heard it.
The design philosophy behind them makes a amount of certain sense (Tiger I: heavy breakthrough tank; Panther: long-range gunnery and thick armor as a force multiplier), even if the concepts weren't always implemented well.
Bottom line: German Tigers and Panthers were "superior" in some respects. But they were desperately inferior in other areas that really, really mattered.
I'd like to add a question based on bullet point two.
I've often heard people claim the US only joined the war after it was almost certain that the Soviets would defeat the Germans, and joined to prevent a complete communist makeover of post war Europe.
How accurate are these claims? I know that Stalin had been asking the United States to open a second front long before they did, but were the Russians winning by the time the Americans joined the European theatre?
