io9 tackles WW2 fatalities, and how they could have been avoided if Stalin had used actual tactics instead of human waves.

Unfortunately, this post is much more /r/badhistory material than what it's attempting to critique.

Many of those loses can be attributed to the professional state of the Wehrmacht and its superior application of tank warfare. But these staggering loses can also be attributed to Josef Stalin, who purged many of his top generals before the war and who had no qualms about throwing a seemingly endless supply of men into the Nazi meat-grinder.

None of this is incorrect.

Even the armor bit is correct if we take tactics to be the focus, rather than hardware, saying "no but muh T-34" (and ignoring the KV-1 for some reason) is much closer to bad history than this original claim.

"Armored warfare" =/= tank specifications

That would be "armor technology"

And it does so spectacularly. Most of you should be familiar with how wrong this is from the thread[4] the other day, but to reiterate: The M4 Sherman had 76mm sloped frontal armor, and was one the most heavily armored medium tanks of the war, far above the Panzer IV and Tiger and comparable to the T-34 and Panther. For comparison, here is a German tank crew describing an encounter with T-34s, which only had 56mm of frontal armor

The armor and weapon varies from model to model, there is a whole family of Sherman variants, you must mention the specific one in your comparisons.

The Tiger is not a medium tank, it is heavy tank, as is said in the first sentence of wikipedia funnily.

The T-34 armor claim is flat out wrong, perhaps you didn't understand what LOS thickness was when you made that claim?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/T34_armor_sheme.jpg

45mm sloped at 60% provides 90mm of effective protection, and this is for the 1940 variant.

The M4 could engage a Tiger I from over 1,500 meters, while the Tiger would have to close to under 100 meters to penetrate the Sherman's armor

I'd hoped this was from the post you were quoting, unfortunately this is not the case.

I'll let someone who's suffered through the WWII tank debates tackle how misleading or outright wrong this is, but suffice to say the vast majority of sherman variants would stand little chance against a Tiger.

I can't thing of anything to say about his other than no.

Funny, I'm experiencing exactly the same thing to your post.

The M4, Panzer IV, and Panther had 75mm main guns,

Really?

Because you already told us the M4 had a 76mm gun just a minute ago.

You're conflating the M3 and M1, which is understandable if you forget that tank designs change over time without changing names, like you seem to have.

The Tiger had a larger 88mm gun, but it would still only penetrate the M4's superior armor from very short ranges.

This is flat out wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.8_cm_KwK_36

The M4 has 50mm of armor barring the mantlet, sloped at 30* from vertical, coincidentally the same angle the penetration values for the 88 are given at.

Take a look at those numbers, and surprise surprise they're bigger than 50 at more than extremely short ranges.

The Jumbo Sherman and some other variants were far better armored, but to say that the Tiger would truly struggle to penetrate the basic M4 is laughable.

Source: wikipedia because apparently that's legitimate now...

OP, you really need to try harder.

/r/badhistory Thread