Consignment Package: Fill & Download for Free

Let’s go in order from the nations you mentioned.United States:The Pershing was certainly not the “best tank used by US forces against other tanks,” in fact the Pershing saw very little action, got knocked out in a few of those instances, and was a nightmare of a vehicle for the Army Ground Forces armored board who vehemently opposed fielding the tank for the entirety of the war.As for the Firefly, it was certainly a tank with a strong track record, but the constraints of the absolutely gigantic 17-pdr within the confines of a Sherman was terrible. Also not used by US forces, it was exclusively a British vehicle and only used by other members of the Commonwealth in limited numbers, no one else. The US flat out rejected the Firefly, having previously already rejected the early models of the Sherman 76mm (which was still a smaller gun than the 17-pdr) which sported the as-of-yet redesigned 3-inch naval gun in a tank mounting. Its performance could also be partly attributed to the fact that, while it was proven to be very cramped and difficult to fight in, it was also the only up-gunned Allied tank for some time before Shermans with US 76mm/3″ guns appeared on the Western Front.The best tank the US had to face other tanks would probably have been almost any of the 76mm gun Shermans. A few armour and turret changes are fine, but you don’t need a metric ass-ton of armour to be capable of engaging enemy tanks to good effect (Jumbo variants, not good on the machinery), and it’s comprehensively well-understood why it was far more influential factor in an engagement for a tank to acquire the opposing vehicle as a target and get off the first shot than to sport excessively large guns and armour.United Kingdom:Centurion. But that’s kind of cheating… alternative? Besides lend-lease Shermans, a lot of the British tanks of the Second World War were designed from the already obsolete approach of an “infantry support tank,” generally failing to combine the best features of armoured forces in a well-rounded package.This was, however, not true of the Cromwell and eventually improved on in the Comet.Germany:Tons of people will go on to no end about how good the Tiger was, or Tiger B, or the Panther, or god forbid the Jagdtiger, or some other mechanically unreliably, logistical nightmare of a tank that was difficult to transport, very difficult to recover, and impossible to get back into action in short order. Just plain wrong, when you have sub 70% reliability rates or worse in the field that’s a sure fire way to lose a war as you’re constantly having to keep a component of the armoured forces you field in a maintenance shop where they make sure to take their time enjoying the R&R before getting back into the fight.The StuG III and IV were easily superior from a holistic view as not only were they very mechanically reliable vehicles, frequently recovered when taken out or bogged down, and put back into service, but also more than adequate when it came to the relentless war of attrition that the Eastern Front boiled down to. Some late-war iterations of the Panzer IV could also be strong candidates, though their excessively long 75mm gun was actually a mixed bag of merits and detriments.France:This is hard to say really, as France was not only operating a hodge-podge collection of all kinds of different tanks when fighting as the Free French Forces later in the war, but the early war French army saw such limited exposure to the long armoured brawling that the other powers would endure and learn from that most of the French tanks were effectively relics by as early as 1942.That said, the Somua S35 and the Char B1 were probably the best France had to offer at the outset of hostilities in 1940. Ironically the French had beaten the Germans to the idea of outrageously large super-tanks, in their Char B2s. But these were of little military value and more focal points for propaganda than of any fighting worth when the Germans came knocking.Poland:Besides the Polish troops fighting under the Soviet army, which would sport the T-34, and Polish troops fighting in the West, serving in different Allied units, Poland had a small car park of hopelessly outmatched tankettes in their backyard when the Germans decided to invade in 1939. Point of note: German armour in 1939 was composed largely of Panzer I and II, with Panzer III in comparatively limited numbers and Panzer IV even more so. Poland simply didn’t have a tank corps to compete with. Any tankette or light tank to be found opposing Soviet and German forces in 1939 were obsolete and often little more than tin cans with machine guns. At least the Panzer II was a toaster with an autocannon.EDIT: It has come to my attention (Thanks to Piotr down in the comments) that there was in fact a rather good Polish tank in the 7TP, and while it did not see significant production it was greatly superior to the machine-gun and autocannon armed Panzer I and Panzer II which constituted the majority of early war German armour.The Soviet T-26 which it would meet face to face was effectively its predecessor, being licensed and manufactured from Vicker’s 6-ton tank by the Soviets, and adapted by the Polish into their 7TP.Like other light tanks none of the armour on the 7TP even reached 20mm, itself being armoured at best with 17mm of armour, and many other light tanks and tankettes of the time being similarly armoured with between 15 and 20mm of armour. By all means this was a perfectly adequate tankette, sporting a 37mm Bofors AT gun. Early war tanks often sported little more than machine-guns, reminiscent of some of the early First World War tank concepts whereby the tank was purely a support platform for infantry and saw no need for anti-tank or larger weapons. In that regard the 7TP, T-26, and other light tanks with dedicated (though small) anti-tank guns were vastly superior to machine-gun armed tanks, or the marginally better autocannon armed ones.More than anything else this was probably indicative of the generally weaker nature of German armoured forces early in the war, a concept which seems difficult to grasp in light of the overall successes enjoyed by the Wehrmacht despite technically inferior early war tank models.Russia:More appropriately the collective Soviet Union or USSR, the answer is fairly straight forward. While the Soviets had a plethora of different tanks fielded across the duration of the war, one of the first tanks fielded against the Germans remained in use (in various iterations) until the very end, becoming and enduring as the backbone of Soviet armour. Without a doubt the T-34, but perhaps more specifically the late-war T-34/85.While vehicles of the KV and IS families did exist, they were all plagued by problems the Soviets either knew about and quickly ceased production of in favour of the T-34 (KV family of tanks, also helped that the man they were named after fell out of political favour) or were unable to due to political circumstances. It just happens that Stalin was a tremendous proponent of the IS family of tanks that bore his name. And with that there was simply no room to oppose the IS tanks. While the initial series of IS tanks entered service with KV turrets sporting 85mm guns, and were perhaps not as cornered as the later iterations were in terms of usefulness in the field, the later IS2 and IS3 were without a doubt far removed from genuine contenders for top-performing tank of the Soviet forces.For starters they were a great deviation from the tried and true formula discovered when the T-34 entered service. To make matters worse, comrade Stalin decided they needed bigger guns firing Stalinium tipped shells to become truly unstoppable as the breakthrough force of the Soviet army. Minus the Stalinium, they did in fact receive bigger guns, but not without drawbacks. The enormous 122mm gun the IS tanks were supposed to be armed with was simply unwieldy, being very long, excessively large calibre compared to its contemporaries, and featuring a 2-part system for ammunition where the propellant was separate from the projectile. In an era where elbow grease was the only answer to the question “How do I reload my tank’s main gun?” having two-part ammunition was a terrible design, compounded by the fact that the shells components were incredibly heavy. To really seal the deal, the 122mm gun was poor in every sense of the word when it came to efficiency. Besides putting out rounds slower than genuine artillery crews could, the gun was not particularly high velocity, thus the armour piercing round fired did not reflect the gun’s calibre. Admittedly the round was large, heavy, and went fast enough as to be effective in combat, but the smaller but much higher velocity 100mm gun was proven to perform as well or better. The only way the IS series stood out with its later variants was that the 122mm gun made the tank a mobile artillery piece. Firing HE out of that was utterly incomparable to any other tank which sported a fairly “normal” calibre of shell. The weight behind it made it perform reasonably well against armour of the time, as it would cause great amounts of spalling both due to impact and detonation.It worked out fine in the end, as IS tanks were always fielded in breakthrough army groups, and alongside T-34s operated in a wide network of combined arms structures to allow for success. But while the West may have collectively shit themselves all around the world when first exposed to the IS3 when the Soviets proudly paraded the things in Berlin, it was far from being objectively the best Soviet tank of the war. The IS series, besides being Stalin’s pet residing in the armour department of Soviet forces, was from a concept of heavy tanks which saw their use as independent breakthrough forces, capable of fighting without infantry support if isolated from friendly forces or speeding off into enemy territory through breakthroughs they would create on the assault. But as any tanker knows, this is a joke at best. The IS family even sported rear-firing machineguns in the turret for some time, like the KV before it. Though these quickly fell into disuse and were removed for lack of any relevant use in combat. As most Soviet armoured assaults played out on the Eastern Front, the only infantry those rear-firing machineguns would have killed were Soviet infantry escorting their tanks.The Soviets did field the SU-100, ISU-122, and ISU-152, and while they all had their applications as fire support platforms, and more prominently in the anti-tank role, they provided a niche which paled in comparison to the jack-of-all-trades yet also master of the Eastern Front in the T-34.Japan:If you thought Poland had it bad for tanks, Japan one-ups them, being the only one of the great powers (which Poland was not even one of, and understandably lacked in armoured assets as a result) in the Second World War to field domestically designed and manufactured tanks, yet were found wanting when confronted in virtually all armoured engagements. The only successes the Japanese armoured forces found were against the divided, inconsistently trained and equipped, and overall generally inferior forces of the Communist and Nationalist Chinese armies. That and early on in the war the M3 Stuart was more or less on par with the Type 95 Ha-Go and Type 97 Chi-Ha, the most common Japanese tanks in service. Turns out most engagements still went to the side which managed to fire first (surprise surprise!).Later in the war when the US had far more Shermans deployed in-theatre, Japanese armour quickly went from a coin-toss away from being competitive to utterly obsolete tin cans. When the Soviets fought them, they lost pretty decisively. First at Khalkin-Gol to a motley of BT series fast-tanks and the soon to be obsolete infantry light-tank in the T-26, all rather light tanks. And eventually in the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, at which point the Soviet BTs and T-26s must have seemed like children’s toys as the Soviets had long since replaced all their BT series with T-34s, though some T-26s still made their way into Manchuria alongside their newer cousins.Admittedly the Japanese did build the Type 3 Chi-Nu and Type 4 Chi-To medium tanks, but these were entirely irrelevant to the war and it’s very difficult to gauge how good they were without empirical evidence to be found. The Chi-Nu was quickly produced to deal with American armour encountered in the Pacific, namely the M4 Sherman and the M3 and M5 Stuarts. Sporting a 75mm gun when first produced, it was the largest gun that had been mounted to a tank in service with the IJA, itself being a quick adaptation of the 75mm Type 90 field gun then in service with Japanese forces into the 75mm Type 3 L/38. The Chi-To went bigger and used the 75mm Type 4 AA gun adapted into the 75mm Type 5 L/56.5, considerably longer than the Chi-Nu’s gun.At 50mm, though it was an upgrade in thickness compared to other Japanese armour, the Chi-Nu’s armour plating tended to be very boxy and would have provided less protection than the early Sherman’s 2″ sloped hull of equivalent thickness. Similarly the T-34, while not impressively armoured by any means given the number of heavy tanks in existence at the time, always featured sloped armour which greatly improved resistance to incoming fire. The Chi-To exhibits similar problems with it’s armour, capping out at 75mm. While the Japanese made 144 Chi-Nu tanks, according to historian Zaloga, they were all hoarded in the Japanese home islands, in preparation for the expected invasion by the Allied forces. Of course, when this didn’t happen, the Chi-Nu, along with the Chi-To, of which there were even fewer (only 2 fully completed by war’s end) never had to fire a shot and thus had no combat record to speak of.The Chi-To and Chi-Nu were, at least on paper, comparable to a medium such as the Panzer IV, Sherman, or T-34 and their different iterations, but without any kind of comprehensive look at their performance in combat due to a complete lack thereof, they will forever be consigned to the realm of speculation.Though to be honest, ragging on Japanese armour of the Second World War is a little unfair. Japan was still a largely pre-industrial nation at the outset of the war (do some more research, they had a long, long way to go) and between infrastructure and their immediate needs, tanks simply didn’t rank very highly on their list of priorities. Why else do you think they had a much more competitive navy and airforce? They prioritized different things. They never expected the Japanese homeland to be invaded and saw no reason to prior to hostilities with the US, so all their tank production and design went into vehicles which would be easy to transport by sea and operational in the expected theatres of war, which included a great chunk of land they laid eyes on in South East Asia, which featured even less infrastructure than their native land and a lot of jungles to boot. Seems like a lot to say after I beat the horse to death but, there’s always another side to the story.China:Not even worth looking at really, China’s Nationalist tank forces were as scattered in variation as the Polish were. The Communists had effectively no tank forces bar the odd tank they could capture from their Nationalist friends or the Japanese.Early war China was as much a non-entity when it came to tank forces as Poland was. To really illustrate the problem, the Polish sold obsolete Renault FT light tanks to China in the ‘30s… When you’re getting hand-me-downs from someone who only has maybe one shiny new toy and a bucket full of of hand-me-downs, things aren’t looking too good. They had, alongside the long obsolete Renault FT, some Panzer 1s, Vickers 6-ton tanks, in general a lot of machine-gun or auto-cannon armed tankettes which would struggle even against the Japanese medium Chi-Ha. Though the Nationalists also tended to use whatever they could capture from the Japanese (and they had such great tanks to give up didn’t they…) so a focus on “best” out of the bunch isn’t going anywhere until much later on in the war, ’43 at the earliest, when the US began supplying Stuarts and Shermans to the Nationalist forces. While they were themselves certainly very competitive vehicles to field, brief training periods, and restrictive ammunition quantities would be impediments to Chinese tank crews until the Communist take-over and the modernization of the Chinese tank forces in the ’50s where they received and began locally producing T-34/85s.Oh and of course, you didn’t mention them but someone in the comments reminded me…Italy:God bless the Italians, I had a great time in Italy and really enjoyed the food and hospitality, but their contributions in the Second World War get picked apart so savagely it’s become more of a meme than anything else.With that said, it’s not misleading to say Italian tanks were not anything to write home about. It wasn’t necessarily that they were all terrible, far from it. The real problem for the Italian tank corps was lack of procurement to provide sufficient numbers of better tanks as the war dragged on. That and training and ammunition was not adequate to field a tank force of much prowess. Much like the other powers involved in WW2, they entered the war with perfectly adequate light and medium tanks, those in the 10–15 ton range sporting 37mm and 47mm light AT guns and armour appropriate for their weight class. They weren’t particularly good, but they weren’t abysmal for early-war designs. They rapidly saw obsolescence as other powers began to field increasingly heavily armoured mediums and heavy tanks, where the Italians had only the P26/40 as a 26-ton medium.Oddly the Italians dubbed “heavy” due to its comparatively heavier specs relative to other Italian armour, yet the tank itself was barely adequate as a medium. And while this tank sported a 75mm gun and medium tank of 50–60mm on front facings, the Italian armoured forces themselves found the tank unimpressive. The tanks only entered production in 43–44, thus most of them went to the Germans when the Italians switched sides. They were similarly unimpressed, though pressed them into service regardless.Of all the Italian armour encountered, the only vehicle which genuinely performed well and were feared by the Allied forces was the Semovente da 75/18, a self-propelled gun which sported a 75mm divisional light howitzer as its main gun. While intended for a fire-support role as a mobile artillery piece, it wound up performing admirably in the anti-tank role as well as providing supporting fire. Its 75mm gun was what kept it competitive, and later variants sported a longer gun, though they saw little use by the Italians as they only entered service by the time the Allies had already overrun the Italian peninsula and saw little action in Rome. The rest were confiscated by the Germans and used in the Balkans and Italy, as it was technically very similar to the StuG III.The most definitive formula, certainly the one which won the war in a sense, showed why the best tanks of the war were late-war mediums which sported adequate armour (which can always be angled or employed hull-down to increase survivability), good speed, and a reasonably powerful gun so as to not be found wanting when striking enemy AFVs. The evolution of armour being the best reference for this formula of well-roundedness, the modern MBT is just that. And in the Second World War, this amounted to “Good enough,” in all categories; as that was all you needed, and the Soviets ran on that with the T-34, forgoing many opportunities mid-war to re-design the thing to be objectively “better” due to the issue of part interchangeability, existing production line tooling, costs, etc. In the long run they, and the US, cornered the “quality”-centric German armoured philosophy which, ironically, didn’t even field the highest quality armour of the war to warrant the material cost. And while I love playing games set in the Second World War where German tanks are almost invariably the best, mind the line between stat and spec focused gaming as opposed to the bigger picture when it comes to warfare and all it entails. Logistics and concepts wholly focused on working with numbers are far more important factors to influencing the outcome of a war than adding Xmm of armour to your tank or making your gun X size larger for short-sighted gains in a small action.Good place to start in regards to clearing up one’s understanding of American armour:It’s a small wonder how things that are regularly repeated by enough people become commonly accepted as facts, even though if anyone actually bothered to retrace where the information came from, it would be far more dubious then when viewed under the lens of academic research or some such fact-seeking initiative.