RE: [OT] Sea Leopard

Ryan M Gill wrote:

>Properly employed, you don't have to have armor on the other side for
>your tanks to be useful. Tanks in the purest sense are excellent for
>exploiting breaches in the line and making good on gains. They are
>the modern cavalry in every sense. So just because the Chinese didn't
>have anything heavier than run down WWI era armored cars doesn't mean
>that tanks weren't useful.

Ok, first of all, if you can show me in quotations where I ever said
"Tanks 
were not useful to the japanese,"  I'll quit ever making any comment on
the 
list, because my Other Voices have been talking out of turn.  In
response to 
the comment about the quality of the Chi-ha, I merely pointed out that
in 
most of the Pacific war, especially against the US, the japanese were 
fighting on terrain that did not favor tanks.  In regions where tanks
WERE 
more at an advantage, the Japanese were fighting opponents with
equipment 
inferior even to their own (Except as was pointed out at the end vs. the

USSR, by which time it was too bloody late to matter).	This does NOT
mean I 
thought tanks useless to the Japanese, it merely meant that the
large-scale 
tank battles witnessed in Eurpoe and the Soviet front did not occur, and

there was little need for the Japanese to rapidly evolve their tank
designs 
the way the allies and Germans had to.

>The US and the British brought tanks with them on a number of the
>island hopping fights where they were quite useful for dealing with
>bunkers and other fortifications. This is where tanks are also useful.

Yes, useful.  In large formations like those found in Europe and Africa?

>Tanks are and always will be excellent infantry support platforms
>when used correctly. Sometimes I wonder if the British practice of
>two types of tanks wasn't such an incorrect method given the uses
>that some tanks were put into when dealing with entrenched opponents.
>Flame Thrower tanks were the best example of useful against
>fortifications. But really anything with a good HE round was better
>than a guy with a Bazooka or a squad rushing the MG with grenades.
>

>It wasn't just a little generalization, it was a massive sweeping
>blanket statement that really doesn't hold water better than a sieve.

Let's see.  My blanket statement was that MOST terrain in the pacific
wasn't 
suited for LARGE-SCALE tank combat.  Other than exceptions like Korea
and 
Manchuria, most of the pacific WAS pretty jungle-clad, no?  Or maybe I'm

hallucinating all those trees in places like the Phillipines....

3B^2

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