Source: http://worldoftanks.ru/ru/news/1/symbols_of_victory/

Hello everyone,
this is a WG RU article translation. This article came out like an hour ago on official WG RU portal. It is…. well, you be the judge.

Vehicles, emblems and inscriptions happen to be an integral part of of all Wargaming projects. With their help, we create the atmosphere of those events and years for our players.Some of those elements of the game process (inscriptions “Stalinec”, “For Stalin!”, “For our Soviet Motherland!”, “Iosif Stalin” and others) are politicized, and their use often causes unease and mixed feelings of a lot of players. The company understands that certain individual members of community might have their feelings hurt, but at the same time does not want to twist the history and to further remove content from the game, that is not banned on the international level.

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Author: Vollketten

Another quite interesting article from Vollketten, enjoy :)

I was browsing through some of the excellent archive of the British Medical Journal for another project I am working on and as a result came across some articles relating to tanks I thought I would share here as matter of general interest.

Regarding WW1 tanks

There was discussion (post war) about the use of tanks to carry or move wounded from the front and as dressing stations protected from enemy fire and shells. Notably one suggestion was that certain types of larger tanks could be “adapted for medical purposes with a dressing table in the centre of the hold behind the engine with electric light provided, stretchers and hammocks arranged in tiers capable of holding half a dozen lying cases or twenty sitting.”

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Source: Daigensui posts (US forums)

Hello everyone,

a lot of people ask themselves, is the Lorraine 40t depression really historical? Ingame -6 depression seems a bit low. After all, let’s look at the turret picture:

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This article is to debunk the myth of the Duel at Dessau, an engagement where the Super Pershing knocked out the Tiger II.

So the story, told by gunner Cpl. J. Erwin, goes that the single T26E4 “Super Pershing” to see combat in the 3rd Armored Division was advancing into the city of Dessau on April 21, 1945. The T26E4 was the American “response” to the German Heavies, especially the Tiger II. By fate, the Super Pershing finds itself in a one-on-one shootout with a Tiger II in the streets of Dessau. The Tiger II fires first and misses then the T26E4 fires an HE shell and that just bounced off. “Something” hits the T26E4(making the reader assume that it was the Tiger II). The T26E4 then fires an AP shell that goes through the Tiger II’s underside and ammo racks it, making the turret fly off in the process.

Now the closest recorded Tiger II units(SS 502) were ~70 miles from Dessau fighting the Soviets around Berlin. The Germans had fairly good documentation on the locations of their units throughout the war, so it would be extremely strange for them to lose track of a working Tiger II for no good reason and having it be 70+ miles from where it is suppose to be. Also it just seems more unlikely knowing that this engagement pits the rarest American tank to see combat with the rarest German panzer in a one vs one battle.

American reports after Dessau also never mention any German tanks in Dessau and defiantly don’t mention anything about a Tiger II being knocked out by the “Super Pershing”. No other source mentions this engagement either. Irwin’s own account, in the book Another River, Another Town, also never states that the vehicle was specifically a Tiger II, rather just “Tiger”. A Tiger is a more plausible candidate, however it is also plausible that the vehicle could have been a Panther or even a humble Pz IV(which were commonly misidentified as Tigers).

So in conclusion this story is a fictionalization and glorification of the T26E4′s action in Dessau. The vehicle destroyed on the 21st of April was more than likely a Pz IV misidentified as a Tiger. Later this snowballed into a Tiger II somehow in a retelling of the story by Irwin(outside of his book) and then picked up by the 3AD website because it is a neat little fairytale. I guess Super Pershing vs. King Tiger is more interesting than T26E4 vs Pz IV.

“I must say, that the increase in dead and wounded was greatly inconvenient for German officials, filtering information from the front, and attempting to present it in the best possible light. As one of them admitted to me later, they worked on the principle of “Let us lose the war in reality, but we must win it on paper.”” - Hendrick C. Verton, In the Fire of the Eastern Front, The Experiences of a Dutch Waffen-SS Volunteer, 1941-1945

In the wake of the apparently controversial M4 vs Panther myth article, I was asked to write a similar article for the Eastern Front. However, since there is no “authority” on the subject that claims any kind of ludicrous ratio like Belton Cooper did for the Western, I’m going to have to do my own legwork.

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After having talked about the Sturmpanzer E-75, we will now take a further look to the E-Series using data from “Waffend und Geheimwaffen des deutschen Heeres 1933-1945″ by Fritz Hahn.

The translation has been done mostly by Google Translator with later adjustment by hand so please bear with me any mistakes.

While the author did not participate in tank development, he worked on the V2 project and claims to have had access to the original papers of tank designs during WW2.
Some stuff has likely to be taken with a grain of salt and I will try to compare passages with Spielberger where possible.

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