Quality or quantity? With WW2 tanks, there was a surprising winner

As much as the Second World War was determined by soldiers exchanging gunfire on the ground, it was also a war of logistics.

Tanks were a weapon that demonstrated that fact clearly. Their battlefield effectiveness was in no doubt as weapons of destruction – but the same effectiveness depended on how many could be built, how quickly they could be replaced, and whether an entire industrial system could sustain their use over years of attritional warfare.

As historian Mark Urban explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, this exposes a central tension at the heart of 20th century conflict.

“You have a constant trade-off between quality and quantity,” he says. “And of course in the Second World War, you see that very clearly.”

The industrialisation of warfare

By 1939, major powers unmistakably understood that victory would be decided, in part, by the output of industrial capacity.

Tanks embodied this shift in thinking. They were vital but complex machines requiring steel, engines, optics, fuel, spare parts, trained crews and dedicated transport networks. That presented a challenge, and in their solutions to this problem of resource, Germany, the United States and the Soviet Union each diverged in their approach.

The American solution was rooted in mass production. The United States entered the war with unmatched industrial depth and applied its civilian manufacturing logic to military hardware.

“The Sherman is an iconic tank design of the Second World War,” Urban explains. “And the Americans made 49,000 of them.”

• Read more | When and why did the US get involved in WW2?

And, output reached extraordinary levels. “They were making more than 2,000 in a month,” Urban says. This stunning speed was achieved through standardisation and simplified designs, and a relentless emphasis on speed.

Technically, the Sherman wasn’t exceptional. “If you look at the Sherman and you compare it to the German Tiger, in many ways it’s very inferior,” says Urban. “The gun is less powerful. The armour is less thick.”

Crucially, however, the Sherman was replaceable. Crews were equipped with spare parts and knew how to fit them. When the machines were destroyed beyond repair, commanders could expect new reinforcements. It was a tank that was designed to be one cog in a vast logistical system.

German engineering and the gamble on superiority

Germany made a very different calculation. Its leadership placed faith in technological superiority as a substitute for a numerical advantage.

“If one asks what the most impressive technological achievement of the German tank-design industry was during the war, many people would say the Tiger,” says Urban. “But they only made about 1,300 of those in the entire war. Compare that to the 2,000 Shermans a month coming off the production line.”

There may have been fewer of them, but the Tiger I was undoubtedly formidable. It was clad with heavy armour and equipped with a devastating 88mm gun, that outmatched the Allied alternatives.

“Hitler himself said it at a conference in 1942: that their superior technology could outweigh the numbers of their enemies. And that’s the philosophy behind the Tiger and some of the other vehicles the Germans made towards the end of the war.”

This belief shaped the later phases of production. German tank designs became increasingly complex, slower to build, harder to maintain and increasingly vulnerable to shortages of parts and trained crews.

“One-to-one against a Sherman, they would most times win,” Urban acknowledges. “But of course there were many more of the Shermans.”

Listen: World War Two's Greatest Battles

Did Allied victory in the Second World War really hinge on the battle of the Atlantic?

In our five-part series, WW2's Greatest Battles, we're charting five of the pivotal moments that shaped the course of the conflict, with author and military historian James Holland. 

Listen to all episodes now

The Soviet approach: mass, speed and expendability

“As for the Russians, they made more than 50,000 of their T-34,” Urban says.

The T-34 is often praised as a balanced design, combining mobility, protection and firepower. But its underlying logic was starkly pragmatic.

The T-34 was intended to be a short-lived weapon. “It was only really designed to last a couple of weeks once it was in the field because they got knocked out so quickly anyway,” Urban explains.

And that’s supported by the statistics; the scale at which these machines were destroyed was huge.

“Another military historian, Steven Zaloga, has worked out that the T-34 was the most destroyed tank in history: the highest proportion of those produced were destroyed. They made over 57,000, and he reckons around 44,000 of those were destroyed in battle.

“And if you’ve read a bit about Stalin’s Soviet Union, it comes as no surprise to learn that, for the Red Army, the machines – and the poor people inside them – were pretty much expendable. If they had to lose hundreds of them taking a particular position on the Eastern Front, so be it. That was the price, as far as they were concerned.”

This was a brutal calculus that was matched by staggering organisational capacity. And it was put to the test when Germany expanded its eastern front.

The Kharkiv tank factory

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, vast industrial regions in the east were rapidly overrun. Much of Ukraine and Belarus, home to key factories, fell within weeks. One of the most significant losses was the city of Kharkiv in Ukraine, where the T-34 had been developed.

“The Russians realised it was about to be overrun,” Urban explains. “They put all the machinery onto trains, all the staff, and they took them to the Ural Mountains. Three months after they’d moved out of Kharkiv, they were producing new tanks in the Urals.”

This was only possible because of the Soviet system of total mobilisation.

“Through industrial planning, through central control, through Gosplan [the Soviet Union's central agency responsible for economic planning], they could mobilise amazing resources and they can mobilise individuals.”

But relocating factories created a new problem.

“The new factories were in the middle of nowhere,” Urban says. “There weren’t enough people.”

• Read more | The 1943 battle of Kursk: was it the biggest tank battle in history?

The Soviet solution, once again, relied on a numerical advantage.

“All the guys who were being trained as tank crews, and there were women as well, got sent to the factory,” he explains. “The idea was that first they helped to build them,” Urban says. “And then after a month or whatever of working at the factory, they took their tank away onto the battlefield.”

In some cases, crews fought in machines that they had personally assembled.

“The driver’s understanding of the engine, or the gunner’s understanding of the gun, was pretty good because they’ve actually helped build them themselves,” Urban notes.

“No other country had a system like that,” he adds. “The Germans, the Brits, the Americans – no one else did this.”

Germany believed excellence could compensate for volume. The United States believed logistics and standardisation would win out. The Soviet Union believed in overwhelming output, whatever the human cost.

“In the end, it’s that old truism: quantity has a quality all of its own.”

Mark Urban was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.