"Recovering knocked out tanks - how many? how fast?" Topic

Any information for a rule of thumb (I know, "how ling is a piece of string?") on how many knocked out tanks might be recoverable, and how fast could they be put back in to service?

Thinking about a campaign. Let's say on June 1 you lose 50 tanks. Some will be unrecoverable. A lucky few will have an easily fixed/patched/repaired problem and can be made ready for use again.

Out of those 50, how many would be back in action in a day? A week? Never?

Depends on if you still hold the ground or not.

Depends on state of your spare parts inventory. (Germans in WWII never had enough spare parts.)

Some damage can be repaired locally; other damage needs to go further behind the lines to the depots.

That's all I know.

Tomorrow, I will try to conduct actual research. From memory, maybe half the combat losses will be irrecoverable--fuel caught fire or ammo exploded.

Note that almost all the strategic attrition of thrown tracks and engine failures are recoverable--at long as you're still advancing. Retreating losses are permanent. Read Robert Crisp's The Gods were Neutral, and watch the British lose an entire tan regiment to one mechanical failure after another while retreating in Greece.

If I had to go further without research, I'd say that if you hold the battlefield, you get a quarter of losses back overnight, and another quarter--and a quarter of enemy losses--in a week. The rest are gone. Simple, but possibly in the right ballpark. Anything more subtle might vary army by army, theater by theater--and possibly tank model by tank model.

Note the US was about the only power in WWII not to use captured tanks. Germans were especially thorough and actually maintained inventories of "booty panzer" parts, fixing British tanks captured in North Africa with parts from tanks captured in France. But captures are always a parts and ammo problem. Using them for driver training was very common. Still, in North Africa Rommel had squadrons of Stuarts and Matildas, Italians had individual Cruisers, and Commonwealth troops used captured Italian and French models. Much the same in Russia. I saw a photo of a T-34 hauled out of a Baltic pond within the past two weeks. No one even remarked on the Iron crosses painted on it.

Germans no doubt had parts shortages, but the British were frankly envious of German tank repair capacity in North Africa. As I say, either go very simple, or go very subtle. Main factors are who holds the ground, how much time you have, and what side the tank was originally on.

Approximately 50%, after the battle is over, assuming you win the field, otherwise you get nada.

In the preface of the book "Death Traps" by Belton Cooper he writes that the US 3rd Armored Division lost 648 M4's completely destroyed and 700 damaged, repaired and returned to combat. That works out to 48% destroyed. I can't recall if he gives an average time to return a damaged tank to the front.

Ed

Some could be returned in a day or two. Others took a week. IIRC, a minority took a bit longer than that, up to about a month, or so.

No doubt, given all those damaged and destroyed, probably lots of spare parts available to facilitate repairs.

I think there is some info on this in Forzyk's book on tank warfare on the eastern front. Hmmm. I read it somewhere in the last couple of years and I think that's where.

But, yes, if you control the ground, you can recover some of your tanks. I remember being struck by how many vehicles lost in combat were recovered, and how few casualties happened to tankers when their tanks were knocked out (I seem to remember this is around 20%).

AND I was also struck by how high the attritional losses were outside of combat.

Belton Cooper's book is fascinating.
He was assigned to tank recovery because of his engineering experience.
It shows how efficient the American tank recovery system was, at least in his division.
His love affair with the Pershing highly influenced the Flames of War lists.

Keep in mind that in some periods, some forces had inadequate tank recovery equipment, so they were unable to quickly return knocked-out tanks to service. This could also mean that the site of an initial victory might be taken by the enemy in a counter-attack, and the knocked-out tanks still there became permanent losses.

Operation losses: it appears that nearly all of the T-35 "land battleships" were lost to breakdowns during the great retreat of 1941 (poor reliability and complete disruption of logistics). The T-28s seem to have suffered much the same fate.

My recollection was that crew loss averaged something like a man to a man and a half per knocked-out tank. (That adds up: by the end of Brazen Chariots Crisp is in his 7th "Honey" in the course of Operation Crusader.) It's probably worth pointing out the short-term inefficiencies, too. Now you have a crew which hasn't worked together, in a tank where things are missing or absent. (Cleaning kits? Binoculars? That hammer you always used to beat the T-34 transmission into gear?) And Murphy's Law means the available crew members will include too many gunners and not enough drivers, or the other way around. Only the early war Germans even tried to train people for every position, and they gave up fast.
Which is by way of saying 100 tanks returned to combat the next day are a great thing--but for the next week or so they aren't the same as a fresh trained unit of 100 tanks.

Robert has the numbers about right in his first post. Most tank mechanical breakdowns can be repaired in hours if the parts are available. The Israelis were able to return most of their recovered tanks to service overnight in 67 and 73. Recovery of the damaged tank is the big time killer. Lacking specialized recovery vehicles makes that job even longer and doubles the number of tanks off the front line. As the Germans learned the hard way, it takes a Tiger to tow a Tiger.

BTW, the Israeli casualties equated to roughly the crew of every other tank killed.

I read a recent book on Kursk that examined the tank losses, particularly for the Germans. Their ability to recover and put tanks back into operation usually within 24-48 hours was quite remarkable for that battle. It was quite an eye opener from what was previously thought about that battle.

In the Western Desert the difference between the initial German and British approaches were significant, as were the eventual improvement of the British methods so that, by mid 1942, they were as good as, if not better than the Germans.

The Germans did not consider that a tank had been "lost" in battle if it was repairable in 24 hours. The British had a very bureaucratic system of not only recording damaged vehicles as lost, but also specifying the type of damage that rendered them unserviceable. Even relatively simple damages were sent back to 3rd echelon base depots for repair.

This accounts for some of the discrepancies in losses given by both sides in the same engagement. Whilst there was ample scope for double counting and exaggeration of enemy losses on both sides many German tanks that were, to use an anachronistic modern term, "mission killed" were not recorded as such because they could be easily returned to service. Thus German accounts often give a lop sided account of vehicles "lost" in combat, although, what really matters, the number of runners that you can count on the next day, is accurate.

By the Crusader battles the Brits had become aware of the abilities of the German recovery crews. The first response was to make the work of those crews harder by sending out Royal Engineers using anti-tank mines as demolition charges after the battle to blow up the abandoned tanks to ensure that a knocked out tank stayed knocked out. Brigadier George Clifton in the "Happy Hunted" says that his New Zealand engineers' "final, official score stood at 212 vehicles destroyed and one Military Cross and two Military Medals earned on this job."(pp.138-139)

The second British innovation was to bring tank transporters right up to the front and use them in the recovery process. The transporters were used to bring new or repaired vehicles up to the 2nd echelon anyway but they had been returning empty. In addition they had to be ballasted for the return trip otherwise the empty trailers would shake themselves to pieces bouncing over the uneven desert. By using the incoming transporters to remove damaged tanks they got back to the base depots all the quicker, and the transporter had the perfect ballast, saving them the problem of ballasting the trailer at the front and un-ballasting it at the rear depot.

One final thing to consider for a campaign is the number of tanks held in reserve as replacements and wether or not the "Left out of Battle" cadre of officers and specialists has been used up. If you have enough of these losses could be replaced overnight and so it didn't really matter if a knocked out recovered tank could be repaired in one day or one week, it had been replaced in the unit and the recovered tank went into the replacement pool. In NW Europe the Brits had a higher ratio of reserve tanks than the Americans and in the winter of 1944 transferred stocks back to the Americans.

Ben Kite gives a good account of British REME tank recovery practices in Normandy in "Stout Hearts", (pp. 379-381)
Cheers,
Bertie

It is important in all of this not to lose sight of the fact that tanks take quite a while to re-fuel and re-arm. Tank available numbers covers the re-fueling and re-arming as well as repairs. This take longer than you think as you do not all park round the ammo truck up and load all of the stuff in quick time.

One advantage of the Gerry Can was you could go and fetch fuel for a lot of tanks quickly and safely. Some repairs could be done while the tank re-armed and re-fueled if the kit came to them.

Interesting, informative discussion!

There are good figures around for recovery rates for the Germs in 2 of Zetterling's books..The Normandy book goes into considerable detail for each division, and his Kursk book includes daily divisional strength returns – while not complete, with a bit more spade work on write-offs its possible to extrapolate more detailed (albeit approximate) numbers.
Whats interesting is how often divisional strengths remain fairly static – at a reduced strength- for quite long periods of time as vehicles get knocked out- repaired, and replace write-offs, sometimes a unit will be reduced to a low number only to have double that the next day.

Commonwealth practise was to sort a days tank casualties into 3 classes.
1 fit
2 Repairable in under 24 hours.
3 Repairs taken more than 24 hours/destroyed/not with unit.

Thus if a Unit has 20 fit tanks, 5 with minor damage, 19 needing major repairs and 5 still on the battlefield at last light it will 'write off' (19+ 5) 24.
The decision to scrap or repair a tank was taken by the workshops and not the unit so Allied Unit returns showing 24 tanks stricken is not 24 destroyed tanks. It is possible 9 of the 19 going for major repairs would be putt back in service. This is why Allied losses look (on paper) higher than German losses.

"Operation losses: it appears that nearly all of the T-35 "land battleships" were lost to breakdowns during the great retreat of 1941 (poor reliability and complete disruption of logistics). The T-28s seem to have suffered much the same fate."

Whats nice here is we dont have to speculate. At he beginning of the war a total of 61 T-35 out of a production of 63 were deployed/accounted for. 48 were assigned to the 67th and 68th Tank Regiments, 34th Tank Division, 8th Mechanized Corps. Of those 48 only 4 were lost directly to enemy action (and one of those had broken down prior to being engaged) while the rest were lost to breakdowns and technical failures!

Of the remaining 13 two were assigned to the Moscow Military District and took part in the Battle for Moscow. One of these survived/was recovered and is in the Kubinka museum. 5 were in the plant for "capital repairs". 4 of those were repaired/rebuilt and returned to action in August of 41, their fate unknown. 6 were assigned to the Saratov and Kazan tank schools and doubtful they ever left there.

For the T-28 bit different story.In Jan of 1941 there were 411 T-28's in service. Mechanically they had a much better record than the T-35. Many were abandoned due to lack of fuel, ammunition and spare parts however.

The statistic I recall reading is from Geoffrey Perrett's "There's a War to be Won". For the US Army, approximately 1/3 of all "knocked out" tanks were back in service within three days; with another 1/3 seeing further service eventually.

The US (and anyone else running Shermans) had a huge advantage in getting those beasts back in service: pretty much every part on a Sherman was interchangeable between different factories. No filing to fit like the Germans were doing.

So the track and suspension bogies off that tank that burned might still be usable by a tank that had caught a round in the suspension and was otherwise undamaged.