September 19th, 1944. Fog so thick across the Lorraine plateau that a man cannot
see the far side of a field. Four American tank destroyers sitting in a hedgerow
near Lezey hear engines. Not see. Hear.

What comes out of the fog a few dozen yards in front of them are Panthers of the
113th Panzer Brigade, and over the next few minutes the American gunners destroy
them one after another by shooting them in the side.

On paper this is impossible. The Panther's gun kills a Sherman at two thousand
yards. Its frontal armour is immune to the American 75mm at any range a crew would
willingly fight at. In every comparison table ever printed, the Panther wins.

Over ten days around Arracourt, the 4th Armored Division and the 704th Tank
Destroyer Battalion destroyed somewhere between two hundred and two hundred and
eighty German armoured vehicles and lost between twenty-five and forty of their
own.

Here is why, and it is not luck.

Every armour comparison you have ever read describes a duel — two tanks, facing
each other, known range, both aware, both aimed. A duel is not what happens on a
battlefield. What happens is a meeting, where one side detects, traverses and
fires while the other is still working out what is happening. Post-war operational
research went through thousands of individual tank engagements and found the same
thing every time: the side that fires first wins the overwhelming majority, and
the loser frequently never fires back at all. A tank that never fires back has not
lost a duel. It has been ambushed, and its frontal armour was never part of the
equation.

Which is why the fog mattered so much. Gun superiority is a function of range — it
only exists in the band where you can kill him and he cannot kill you. Collapse the
range to a hundred yards and both guns kill. The fog deleted the one German
advantage and left every American advantage untouched: radios in every tank, turret
traverse independent of engine speed, all-round vision, integrated artillery and
air, and crews who had been fighting together since July against crews who had been
together since August.

Also in this one: why the Panther's turret could take close to a minute to traverse
at idle, where the "Ronson" myth actually came from, and why the story that the
Germans were better and were simply outnumbered was largely written by German
generals in the 1950s.

All footage and imagery is used for historical documentary and educational
purposes.

#WW2 #Sherman #Panther