I have heard numbers thrown around such as 1 Tiger loss goes with 20 T-34 losses. I have also heard the same thing, except the T-34 losses going down all the way to 7 or reaching all the way up to 57.

Kill ratio in action 1:12.16

Kill ratio total 1:5.44 (this includes Tigers destroyed out of combat)

For both east and west, but not, it appears, including the Tiger companies that were attached to some SS-PDs in 1943 (and after?).

Not quite what you are after, but still does not sound too unreasonable.

The numbers are broken down by Abteilung, so if you know which one fought where, you will be able to get better figures out of the table.

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Originally posted by Andreas:
On the CALL database I found a Master's Thesis from a US Army Major (C.Wilbeck) about the employment of sPzAbt. He takes figures from Schneider 'Tigers in Combat I & II',

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Yea, but the Tiger's in Combat books I believe are 100% from German records. So...they are reporting German claims of kills (a pretty imprecise methodology).

Would it be right to interpret what you are saying as indicating that tank vs. tank the Tiger was probably a waste of time and resources?

It appears to me that the true value of the tank was its ability to shrug off mid-war Soviet AT rounds from the 7.62 Zis-3 gun, no matter where hit, enabling it to break through concentrated PAK fronts (in the west, the Tiger I armour was not sufficient to withstand even the 6-pdr ATG, as shown in Tunisia, and with the arrival of the 17-pdr it just became a very expensive spam can on the attack).

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Originally posted by Andreas:
Chris, thanks a lot. I was wondering about that, but did not want to get into a discussion of claims vs. reality.

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In my upcoming book, I do compare German claims of tank kills versus actual Soviet losses. The German estimations are not bad. Still, I had not looked at the specific claims for the Tigers that Schneider uses, so do not know what they include or how they compare to division and army level loss reports (which are the ones I've examined). In general, claims of enemy losses should not be used unless you can, as a minimum, cross-check it to the opposing side records so you can see if they are in the ballpark.

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BTW - (Popjel, Member of the War Council of 1st Tank Army at Kursk) has an interesting passage about tank recovery at the battle in the second volume of his war memoirs.

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Actually, I have not looked at that. We did gather a brief report on tank repair from the First Tank Army records. In general, the percent of Soviet tanks that were damaged/destroyed that were repaired were much less than the Germans. Again, I have not looked at the CALL report....but if they base their figures on German Tigers destroyed versus claimed kills, they are going to end up with some really distorted figures.

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Would it be right to interpret what you are saying as indicating that [b]tank vs. tank the Tiger was probably a waste of time and resources?[/b]

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Absolutely not! I'm just wary of these specific exchange figures, without knowing what is in them (and so far I have been too lazy to check).

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It would be interesting to see the claims/stats for AT guns destroyed, as these may give a clearer picture of the operational usefulness of the Tiger tank.

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We have a count of AT guns lost (it is probably low) in the Kursk Data Base. There were an awful lot of guns lost.

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Originally posted by Chris Lawrence:
Absolutely not! I'm just wary of these specific exchange figures, without knowing what is in them (and so far I have been too lazy to check).

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Emphatic statement there I look forward to the book. Will you be comparing effectiveness between sPzAbt and ordinary Panzerabteilungen?

I have held them on my computer waiting to download them, but if I do download them, I need an unzipper to see them. If you have seen them or have them, are they worth getting an unzipper over?

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Originally posted by WWII=interest:
Since we are on the topic of documents, Mr. Lawrence, with your work on Kursk, do you happen to have or have ever seen the KOSAVE files?

I have held them on my computer waiting to download them, but if I do download them, I need an unzipper to see them. If you have seen them or have them, are they worth getting an unzipper over?

I dont know if it is worth it or not.

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You can download free unzip programs over the internet kind of like geting free acrobat reader. I think the one I use is winzip and doing an internet search should find this or others. I believe chris and TDI were the driving force behind the creation of the KDB or the kosave study funded by the US army. I´m sure it will be one of the key areas used in his book.

And my computer terminology is correct. I know what downloading is, but I have not downloaded the KOSAVE files yet.

Another person on another forum graciously sent them to me via email. He warned me I had to have an unzipper. So what I did was save the emails to my filling cabinet, were I can download them whenever I wish.

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Originally posted by Andreas:
Will you be comparing effectiveness between sPzAbt and ordinary Panzerabteilungen?

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How can you? The German divisions were operating with one or two tank battalions (briefly four in the case of the GD PzGrD)...and there were seven tiger companies, each attached to a different armor division.

I may be able to assemble what the Germans claimed for each division for each day....and I know what the Soviet armor losses were (usually for each day). But, how to seperate them out as to how many were by tigers, versus other tanks, versus air, versus AT, versus artillery, versus Marders, versus Sturmgeshutz, versus infantry, versus mechanical breakdown.....

Now, I may in some cases have claims from the Tiger company/battalion (there was only one battalion in the south...but it has been seperated into three companies and each attached to a division), and claims from the tank regiments, and I have some aggregate claim for the day sometimes for the air, and an overall division claim...but unless these claims are consistently reported and assembled...there is really no way to apportion out cause of loss. This is assuming, of course, that the total number of losses claimed from all the individual claimers does not greatly exceed that which the Soviets actually lost.

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Regarding AT units at Kursk, Popjel again makes one of these statements you really come to appreciate when reading Kommissar memoirs Something along the lines of 'While our AT Brigades all died in a day, they had made themselves immortal in the minds of the Soviet people.' Sounds like a pretty big desaster to me, but at least it is nicely dressed up in heroics.

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These are the kind of statements that if you read them backwards, sometimes really tell you something.

The first two defense lines went real quick, as did the attached AT units. Popyel is putting a good face on what appears to be a really bad deployment on the part of the Soviets. Furthermore, it doesn't appear that these formations did anywhere near the damage to the German armor that one would expect.

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Originally posted by Chris Lawrence:
Is it possible to get a copy of Popyel's discussion on Kursk?

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