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A Panzerjager, of hunting Panzer, without the turret of course, we'd call it a TD or tank destroyer.  Very nasty piece of work.  The US TD had turrets and often were very fast and lightly armored, somewhat akin to a battle cruiser in concept.

I guess I tanked this thread, I'll leave you with this:

Chernobyl's Elephant's Foot Is a Toxic Mass of Corium | HowStuffWorks
Chernobyl's Elephant's Foot Is a Toxic Mass of Corium | HowStuffWorks

It would help some, along with the respirator, if he didn't stay long.

I had never heard of this before.

The evolution of armor is fascinating to me.  The Musee des Blindes in Saumur, France, has lined up German panzers from prewar to near the end of the war.  This is about 1939 to 1944, just five years, and the increase in size and power was astonishing.  

Agreed, comparing at any of the warring nations primary tanks in 1939 to their main tanks in 1945 is astonishing.  

Folks criticize the US Sherman, but it was better than any of these, except the later model IIIs and upgunned IVs that came out about the same time.

I think a lot of the criticism of the Sherman is due to comparing it to late-war German Panthers and Tigers.  As you pointed out it was as good as anything the Germans had when it was initially produced.  

Late in the war the US also produced improved tanks but they only saw limited action because there were so many Shermans already in use and also because by that time the main "tank killer" for the US was no longer a tank or even a tank destroyer but rather a P47.  

A Panzerjager, of hunting Panzer, without the turret of course, we'd call it a TD or tank destroyer.  Very nasty piece of work.  The US TD had turrets and often were very fast and lightly armored, somewhat akin to a battle cruiser in concept.

Tank destroyers are nearly forgotten because, as it turned out, tanks needed to be able to fight other tanks.  That wasn't the initial theory.  The initial theory was that tanks would be for infantry support and destroying tanks was a completely separate function which called for a completely separate machine, the tank destroyer.  

The French had more, and heavier tanks, than the Germans in 1940.  A very credible tank is shown below, it had deficiencies of course.  The Somua S35 had a decent main gun and was fairly fast and decently armored.

This point about the French having more and heavier tanks than the Germans in 1940 is something that few people realize.  When we think of WWII we tend to think of the Germans and their "blitzkreig" so we picture German tanks.  

The difference wasn't so much equipment where the French were not lacking as it was doctrine/tactics where the Germans were first to realize that tanks could be massed and used to punch through the enemy's lines and surround enemy units.  French (and basically all other) tanks were instead parceled out as "infantry support".  Thus French tanks vastly outnumbered German tanks at every point along the front except the few points where the German tanks were massed and, as it turned out, those were the only points that mattered.  


Similarly, the Japanese were the first to really mass carriers.  The world's other major Navies (which basically just means the USN and the RN) mostly treated Carriers as support/spotting for the Battleships rather than seeing them and treating them as the focal point of a fleet operation.  This facilitated Japan's incredible success in the six months starting with Pearl Harbor but it ended at Midway when they ran into a USN that was using similar tactics/doctrine but doing it with equipment that was vastly more survivable.  

The Japanese failed to use the superior range of their naval aircraft to advantage, often as not, I think.  A few times the winds were against them.

Well . . . the tactical success of the "Hawaii Operation" as they called it was due in large part to the phenomenal range of the Zero.  American reconnaissance flights out of Hawaii were fundamentally insufficient because the range of the Zeros allowed the Japanese Carriers to launch at dawn from a position further away than the reconnaissance flights had been planned based on.  

I think the bigger problem for the Japanese was that the long range of their aircraft came with a price and once guys like Jimmy Thatch figured out how to leverage that price against the Japanese they were in big trouble.  

The price of range:
Aircraft design like most engineering is a series of trade offs.  You can increase range by doing things such as decreasing weight and increasing fuel capacity.  The Japanese decreased weight by omitting armor and they increased fuel capacity by omitting self-sealing fuel tanks.  That gave them great range and also very good speed despite the Zero being powered by a much less powerful engine than even contemporary American fighters in 1941.  American pilots eventually learned that Zeros couldn't follow them in a full power dive because the nimble and light-weight Zeros simply were not strong enough to survive at those speeds.  American pilots also learned that while the Zero was very well armed it was almost completely unarmored and lacked self-sealing tanks so if you could line up a shot at it, it didn't take much to destroy it.  

One major mistake by the US was failing to utilize reports from Chennault's flying tigers who had already learned these things about the Zero BEFORE Pearl Harbor.  

I dimly recall that the Flying Tigers rarely if ever combatted Zeros.  That could be wrong.

Obviously the F-6F eliminated most Zero advantages.