NEVER HAD A CHANCE

Follow up to a headline from my last post. This is a picture I took of an M-5 Stuart displayed on the front lawn of the VFW hall where I park every day for work. Someone had commented on another board that they had inquired with folks at the hall as to the history of the vehicle, and were told that it was operational for parades and holidays up until a few years ago when some neighborhood kids were able to pry off the gas cap and poor in some anonymous liquid. This made the engine seize upon the next start up.

Anyways, here below the Stuart I have provided a German Tiger tank for contrast, something that was the last sight on earth for many a Stuart tanker.

I don't know: would crews inside the Tiger know they were being hit from a 37 mm Stuart round? The notion of targeting the thinly armored Stuart with the Tigers 88 mm cannon is analogous to using a shotgun to kill a fly. I imagine a complacent Tiger crew could have had the theoretical luxury of having tea while waiting for a Stuart to exhaust all it munitions, and then simply overrun and crush it without resorting to its main armament.

By the time the allies landed at Normandy after the campaigns in North Africa and Italy, the imbalance in armor was already apparent and the M-5 was prudently relegated to more of a reconnaissance role. Still, the under-armored and under-gunned Sherman was only a marginal improvement. Read here for a horrifying account of what happened when British Shermans came up against a lone, German tank commander who knew his vehicle well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Villers-Bocage

“On 8 August 1944, a single Tiger commanded by SS-Unterscharführer Willi Fey from the 1st Company of sSSPzAbt 102, engaged a British tank column, destroying some 14 out of 15 Shermans”

So then, what’s all this claptrap about how we sent our soldiers into Iraq “ill-equipped” with under-armored Humvees and not enough body armor?

There are pros and cons to every tactical decision concerning armor and mobility. When you add to one, you necessarily take away from the other. If you increase the armor on a vehicle that wasn’t originally designed as an armored vehicle, then you raise the risk of rolling the vehicle –and killing it’s occupants-- during combat maneuvering. By the same principle, when you increase the amount of body armor a GI has to wear, you decrease his agility which is a very critical thing to have when someone is shooting at you in close-quarters.

How many media stories has there been reporting on this aspect of armor vs. mobility concerns in Iraq? And what of the corresponding losses we sustained by up-armoring humvees and soldiers to avoid, in part, further political fallout from charges of negligence?


While we're at it, why don't we remember the intelligence failures over the hedgerows at Normandy, or how many GI’s were thrown into combat during the Battle of the Bulge wearing little better than summer fatigues. Did we have people in the media then calling for the resignation of President Roosevelt or Secretary of War Henry Stimson for incompetence with these and other failures of intelligence or planning? Is it perhaps partisan politics that promotes this double-standard?