View Single Post
  #26  
Old 12-02-2008, 01:25 AM
pmulcahy11b's Avatar
pmulcahy11b pmulcahy11b is offline
The Stat Guy
 
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: San Antonio, TX
Posts: 4,345
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Raellus
I think that at least a few of the Syrian IV's were mobile. I've never read anything about Tigers in Syrian service, though*.

You're dead on about the Tiger's psychological impact, Paul. Aside from some mobility and maintainance issues, it was a very good tank and hard to beat. On our poll, the T-34 ranks very high (and rightly so) but quite a few Tiger aces destroyed scores of T-34s on the battlefield.

*I've should have a book about the '67 Six Day War coming for Christmas so I get back to ya'll on it.

Screwed up -- the war was in 1967. Anyway, the blurb about Tigers was something I read in a Jane's Defence Weekly when I was stationed at Ft. Stewart in the mid-1980s (you board veterans know how my memory for odd facts works) though it was a long time ago and I could be mistaken. The Syrians tried to use them as operational tanks, the few they di got trashed quickly, and they pulled them back to their borders, dug them in, and used them as pillbox/antitank guns -- where they still got trashed.

If any of you have read Joe Haldeman's The Forever War you get a good idea of different tech levels encountering each other in combat. I remember one scene in the book where Mandella's lower-tech troop carrier is attacked by a Tauran ship a couple of hundred years ahead of it in tech -- Mandella's ship lost a good half of the crew and troops, his girlfriend nearly died, the ship was heavily dosed with radiation, the computers were almost totally toasted by EMP, and they had no communications -- after they got hit by something "all in a package the size of a grape."
Reply With Quote