The World War 2 Obscure Trivia Thread

You aren’t referencing Werewolf, are you?

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I’ll give you a hint; they fought each other.

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Spain and Portugal? Both sent troops to fight on the Eastern front and neither were particularly pally with each other.

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The Georgian Uprising of Texel. The 163rd Marine-Schützenregiment fought the the 882nd Infantry Battalion “Königin Tamara”, but only after the later (which was recruited from Soviet POWs), had mutinied, and killed all it’s German officers and NCOs. Also, members of the Dutch Underground, as well as numerous Dutch civilians got caught up in the fighting.

The mayhem was only stopped by the arrival of some Canadian troops on the 20th of May 1945.

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Dammit! I was just writing a post about that!

Alright then, what’s this?

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If it looks like a T-44… Smells like a T-44… Then it must be… T-44…

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I would have also accepted T-34/85 turret stuck on a T-54 hull, because it’s pretty much the same thing.

There’s a really interesting progression in Soviet tank design that arguably goes from the BT-2 right up to the T-62.

It started with the BT-2, which is basically a copy of Christie’s tank design.

This was improved through to the BT-7, which was still a common design in 1941.

A feature shared by all of these tanks was the ability to pull the tracks off and run on just the rubber road wheels. This was faster and saved a fair bit of fuel but placed limits on the weight of the tank and the width of the track that could be run. The B-20 design did away with this feature and was able to run much wider tracks.

More armor and a bigger gun gives us the first T-34.

The Soviets were aware of a number of shortcomings in this design and the T-43 was supposed to address a number of these.

Among other features it had a three man turret, more armor and, because of continued weight growth, ditched the Christie suspension for a torsion bar design instead. Due to the needs of war production, this design never entered production although an improved and upgunned version of its turret was fitted to the T-34 to make the T-34/85.

The same turret on a much reworked hull gave the T-44, which although several thousand were produced before the end of the war, did not see service.

A bigger gun was added to give rise to theT-54, the first versions of which had a turret similar to that on the T-44.

An upgrade to the NBC protection gave the T-55…

…which was further developed into the T-62.

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Absolute beast of a tank the T-54 was that the M60 Patton was specifically designed to counter the T-54!

A bit of trivia outside the scope of WW2 but hey, everybody loves tanks.

Except the Panzer corps of the Wehrmacht during Battle of Kursk, maybe.

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The gigantic tank battle at Kursk is a bit of a myth actually. In most cases, it was tanks vs dug in infantry and antitank guns, not tanks vs tanks.

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Here’s another tank one then.

What WW2 tank had 3 engines and a machine gun mount verging on the obscene?

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Very delicately put :laughing:

Well yes, the largest tank battle in history is NOT the battle of Kursk. Historians have debated the fact for a while and recent findings have suggested that the Battle of Brody near Kiev during Operation Barbarossa was, in fact, the largest tank battle in history

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…and yet there’s barely been a word written about it in the history books. Something that’s intrigued me of late is how much stuff was forgotten about on the Eastern front. There’s a lot that’s come to light in recent years as archives start to become available, but there are still some really big gaps.

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Stronk Russian tonk. I’ll get my coat.

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Had to look twice. At first was wondering why that tank had Mickey Mouse ears on. It’s been a long work week apparently.

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I’d say it’s the M4 since it had a lot of engine variance but the machine gun thing puts me off because another tank, the Bob Semple tank, was notorious for its SEVEN machine gun ports and NONE of the anti tank gun ports. I’d have to say I don’t know the proper answer to this one.

The russian tenk reminded me of this joke

image

And yes, that is the T34-85 variant in front of the Brandenburg gate

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Well there was the M4A4 which had the Chrysler Multibank engine, which was kind of 5 engines mounted around a common crankshaft.

The machine gun mount was pretty respectable though, so not that one.

At the risk of sounding like a military history pedant, that’s an IS-2 in the picture, not a T-34.

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As a bit of an aside though, that picture kind of shows what an awesome tank the Sherman was for WW2 mass production.

You could have a cast hull…

…or a welded hull.

You could put a bigger gun in and upgrade the suspension…

…or even stick a howitzer in there for fire support for the Marines.

You could wack a load of extra armor on the front to assault fortifications.

It could take a radial engine, a V8, a diesel or a multibank engine. You could even make it swim.

It served in the Pacific, the Desert, the jungle, the Eastern front and Europe and if you were to show this picture to a mechanic who ever had to change the final drives on a Panther, you could reduce him to tears.

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I stand corrected, it is an IS-2, not a T-34, thank you very much. Mistook the driver’s port there

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Here’s the machine gun mount in question.

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LoL

The AC1 Sentinel. What a tank. What a feeling getting sprayed (pun intended) by a penis-shaped machine gun port.

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