Steven Zaloga

"Joe, vous ne pourrez pas approvisionner un Corps d'armée tout entier en utilisant une seule route..."

Exaspéré, le général américain (Collins) rétorqua : "Certes, Monty, (Montgomery) peut-être que les Britanniques ne le peuvent pas, mais les américains y parviendront..."

Sur les trois armées allemandes qui organisèrent l'Opération des Ardennes, la seule à effectuer une percée significative fut la 5e PanzerArmée de Manteuffel au centre.

The revived plan received a new codename, Dragoon, reputedly offered by Churchill who complained that he had been "dragooned" into the operation.

The Normandy fighting ended once and for all the debate about whether tank destroyers could singlehandedly deal with the armor threat. They could not.

The armour of the T-72 was inadequate to protect the tank from 120mm fire, and some Abrams crew claimed that their 120mm projectiles went through sand berms, through the T-72’s frontal armour, through the engine compartment, and out of the rear.

Shortly after the war, the Israelis announced that eight T-72s had been captured, including two abandonned with their engines running. The official denial of this which followed days later is hard to believe.

Like the Zeppelin bomber, however, armored trains had a brief moment of military glory and then rapidly faded from view.

If tactical nuclear weapons were to be used, it would be unrealistic to expect the APC’s dismounted infantry to operate in radioactively contaminated areas.

The gun of the BMP is less than six feet off the ground and will hit its own dismounted infantry if they are unlucky enough to be advancing in front of it. This forced the adoption of tactics where each infantry squad would allow a 50m zone of fire between it and the squads on either side to permit the BMP to fire its weapons. Such a tactic is easier to propose in peacetime training than to carry out in the confusion of a modern battlefield.

To deal with this threat [the Panther] the British had developed a special mounting for the excellent 17pdr. antitank gun that could be crammed even into the small turret of the 75mm gun Sherman. this fined weapon was offered to the [US] Ordnance Dept. in the autumn of 1943, and was ignored. The Sherman with 17pdr. gun, called the Firefly, was issued to British and Commonwealth tank troop initially on the basis of one vehicle per troop, to deal more effectively with the new German tanks. The American tankers would not be so lucky.

Armoured infantry were notorious for pilfering gear, since unlike normal infantry, they could carry additional equipment with them in the half-tracks. the degree to which the standard "Lootin" veerbooten" rules were applied varied from unit to unit, and was generally much stricter in France than in Germany. An account by C Company, 17th Armored Infantry Battalion recalled that "one advantage of dismounted attack was the opportunities for more thorough investigations of towns and the chance to fill in the deficiency of our K-ration diet". Half-tracks often became festooned with portable stoves, brooms, wash basins, pails and other amenities.

At that moment, a German 15 cm howitzer arrived. When its commander shouted that the ennemy tanks were approaching, they opened sustained fire without causing the least damage. One approached the howitzer to within 100 metres. They fired again and the projectile struck with full force. The tank halted as though struck by a bolt of lightning. "We’ve done it" the artillery crew thought, quite relieved. "Yes, we’ve done it", said the gun captain. But their expressions suddenly changed when one yelled out, "It’s moving again!" There was no doubt this was so as as the gleaming tracks soon approached the howitzer, crushed it like a toy into the soil, and contiued on its way as though this was the most natural thing in the world.

The T-80 tank was meant to be the ultimate Soviet main battle tank (MBT), entering the Soviet arsenal around the same time as the new NATO generation American M1 Abrams, British Challenger, and German Leopard 2. It was not a new design, but rather an evolutionary reconsideration of the T-64A tank. In the event, the T-80 proved to be deeply troubled, offering modest advances over the existing T-64A and T-72 tanks, yet being considerably more costly due to the use of a powerful but thirsty gas-turbine engine.

When informed that the next-generation Obiekt 430 tank would still be armed with a 100mm gun even though NATO now had a 105mm gun, he [Chuikov] made it abundantly clear that he wanted the next Soviet tank to have a bigger gun than NATO’s.
[...]
He called the head of the GBTU Main Armor Directorate, Marshal Pavel P. Poluboyarov, into his office in Moscow for a severe dressing down. Poluboyarov admitted that Uralvagon had developed a tank with a 115mm gun, but that there had been problems with the stabilizer. Chuikov screamed at Poluboyarov, “Why are you jerking me around over this stabilizer? I don’t care if it’s mounted on a pig! Just come up with this gun!”