re: #21 ckkatz

Just watched to the first video. I found it very good. Thanks for posting it!

The second video will need to wait until later in the week, unfortunately.

The speaker actually liked the Cooper book and recommended it. However, the speaker also pointed out that the Cooper book is a memoir not a peer reviewed article. I agree with that observation.

He did point out why Cooper was wrong on Patton. (Cooper claimed that Patton was able to prevent the US Army from designing an improved tank that would fix the Sherman’s faults.) The Army did not work that way. There were very specific organizations in the Army that handled these core tasks. And Patton was not in these organizations.

And he also showed where the meme of needing 5 Shermans against any German tank came from. The smallest unit tank unit you could send was a platoon. Which just happened to have had 5 tanks. It was an organizational thing, not a qualitative thing.

All in all, quite an interesting talk. Thanks for posting it!

Nicolas Moran (aka “The Chieftain”) has some pretty interesting armor-related stuff on YouTube. Plenty of tours of various vehicles and some historical stuff as well about organizational things like the development (or lack of) of French armor doctrine between the two World Wars.