Not really I didn't book mark the channel but Germany wasted time on too many designs and variants.Tigers where like 52 freakin' tons,Ran out of gas a lot,tranny and drive shaft problems because of excessive weight.Could have kept spitting out stugs,and the 4s were more than enough to square of with what the allies had. Sherman could of been upgunned yet lost none of it's reliability or little speed
Not even close.
This site has a chart that shows global productive capacity in about 1937.
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[size=+1]Country[/size][/th]
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[size=+1]% of Total Warmaking Potential[/size][/th]
United States41.7%Germany14.4%USSR14.0%UK10.2%France4.2%Japan3.5%Italy2.5%Seven Powers (total)(90.5%)It was actually worse for Germany and Japan because the US still had a lot of depression-era slack in 1937 while Germany and Japan were already operating on more of a war production basis.
Even just using the figures above though, the combination of the UK and the USSR could out-produce Germany by roughly 5:3 and once the US got involved that ratio was more like 5:1.
The T34's were clearly superior to the Mark IV while the Shermans and British tanks were roughly equals with the Mark IV. Look, you can't win a war with comparable equipment when your enemies can make 4-5 times as much equipment.
The only plausible path to victory when you are being out-manufactured by 4:1 is to build substantially better equipment.
I get where you are coming from because I've made a similar argument myself. Someone will extol the virtues of the German late-war tanks and denigrade Shermans and I'll point out that Shermans are a lot better than anything the Whermacht had when you provide the Shermans with something like a 5:1 numerical superiority.
That makes it seem like the Germans should have built more Mark IV's to keep closer to numerical parity but that wasn't a viable option for at least three reasons:
- As laid out above, they utterly lacked manufacturing parity so even if they had maximized their numerical production they would still have been outnumbered by at least 4:1.
- Their biggest limitation (until they started running out of people late in the war) was a lack of fuel. As of 1940 the US produced around 2/3 of the world's petroleum. The USSR and Venezuela were next at around 10% each. Next came Iran, Indonesia, and Mexico at around 2-3% of global production each. Next was Romania which was the Third Reich's major supplier with about 2% of global production. Note that all of the large producers were either at war with Germany or inaccessible to Germany due to unchallenged Anglo-American control of the Atlantic. Thus, even if the Germans could have built enough Mark IV's to maintain numerical parity with their enemies T34's and Shermans, most of those Mark IV's would have been parked for want of fuel.
- Initially due to the fuel crisis and later also due to a simple lack of people, the Germans lacked trained tank crews. Thus, even if they had managed to build enough Mark IV's to maintain numerical parity and if some heretofore unknown diety had gifted them sufficient fuel to actually operate them, they'd have been operated by untrained kids from the Hitler Youth going up against well trained and experienced Soviet, British, and American tankers.
No, building more Mark IV's would absolutely not have been a viable strategy for the Germans.
A similar argument is made regarding aircraft. The Germans built some phenomenal planes during WWII especially their ME262 jet. I've heard people argue that they'd have been better off expending their resources building more Bf109's and FW190's instead. This argument suffers from the same flaws as you argument that they should have built more Mark IV tanks. At the end of the war the Germans had plenty of planes and tanks, what they lacked were pilots, tank crews, and fuel.
