World War 2 General Discussion Thread

[The Romulan Republic]

So what are some good WW2 movies out there? I'm hoping to watch Downfall soon if I can find a good English sub.

a bridge to far
the longest day
fury
battle of Britain
das boot

I'd like to add The King's Speech and Judgement at Nuremberg, though neither deals much with the front line. The King's Speech shows things from the perspective of the British Royal family and their associates before and during the war, while Judgement at Nuremberg is about trials of Nazi officials after the war (and also deals with the start of the Cold War a bit).

[Baltenstein]

The key to a good yet realistic battle sequence is:

How would it look like to the viewer if we saw it from the enemy perspective?

If the answer is something along the lines of "Hilarious/Cartoonish", then it's not a good scene.
Imagine the final battle in "Fury" without the pump-up music and from the German troops' perspective. Still think it was good?

Yeah?

Well, if you think the POV characters losing dozens upon dozens of men by running circles around an open and immobilized target is a good scene, be my guest.
I also liked the scene from Monty Python and the Holy grail where the knights are butchered by a fluffy bunny, but that was supposed to be a comedy.

[Socialist Tera]

I have a question, what do you think would of happened if Hitler told his troops to attack the British at Dunkirk and to try to prevent British retreat?

[The Romulan Republic]

I have a question, what do you think would of happened if Hitler told his troops to attack the British at Dunkirk and to try to prevent British retreat?

I thought that the Nazis were attacking at Dunkirk.

If you mean a stronger/more effective attack- well, higher British casualties and lowered British moral would result, I imagine, but I doubt it would significantly effect the outcome of the war. But I don't know for certain.

[Socialist Tera]

I have a question, what do you think would of happened if Hitler told his troops to attack the British at Dunkirk and to try to prevent British retreat?

I thought that the Nazis were attacking at Dunkirk.

If you mean a stronger/more effective attack- well, higher British casualties and lowered British moral would result, I imagine, but I doubt it would significantly effect the outcome of the war. But I don't know for certain.

Hitler allowed the retreat of the British. The advance was halted to resupply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkirk_evacuation

[United Kingdom of Poland]

with what supplies now that UK is over run and more then likely the Meds been sealed of from them.

America would eventually join in as long as Japan and Germany still went to war with it, and the rest of the British Empire wouldn't necessarily surrender just because the UK fell.

The only reason Spain didn't join the Axis in real life was because it was afraid of bomber command running amuck over their airspace. What's stopping them without that threat. its not that the colonies would stop fighting but what we're looking at is a reverse of the Africa front with British forces being supplied and outnumbered. Assuming Sea Lion happens at the planned date, the US won't be jumping in for a full year, and that's assuming hitler still makes the mistake of declaring war on the US first. Other wise the US would have simply wailed on Japan without putting any serious effort into Europe.

[The Empire of Pretantia]

Yeah?

Well, if you think the POV characters losing dozens upon dozens of men by running circles around an open and immobilized target is a good scene, be my guest.
I also liked the scene from Monty Python and the Holy grail where the knights are butchered by a fluffy bunny, but that was supposed to be a comedy.

Eh, it's all about taste.

[SECP]

Hey this is great,I have a Q to ask!

Me and a friend are in a argument over which of the two would win a fight.
Messerschmitt Me 262 vs Mitsubishi A6M Zero

In your opinion which would win a dogfight?

[United Kingdom of Poland]

a bridge to far
the longest day
fury
battle of Britain
das boot

I'd like to add The King's Speech and Judgement at Nuremberg, though neither deals much with the front line. The King's Speech shows things from the perspective of the British Royal family and their associates before and during the war, while Judgement at Nuremberg is about trials of Nazi officials after the war (and also deals with the start of the Cold War a bit).

both of those
oh and Bridge on the River Kwai, even if it is a bit of a slog length and pacing wise.

[Second Modern Rome]

STG-44=life

[United Kingdom of Poland]

Hey this is great,I have a Q to ask!

Me and a friend are in a argument over which of the two would win a fight.
Messerschmitt Me 262 vs Mitsubishi A6M Zero

In your opinion which would win a dogfight?

if the zero jumps the Me on take off or landing the zero, any other time its going to be the 262 every day of the week.

[Togeria]

Hey guys. What we talking about?

[Grenartia]

The key to a good yet realistic battle sequence is:

How would it look like to the viewer if we saw it from the enemy perspective?

If the answer is something along the lines of "Hilarious/Cartoonish", then it's not a good scene.
Imagine the final battle in "Fury" without the pump-up music and from the German troops' perspective. Still think it was good?

Yeah?

Yeah, I'm gonna go with this. I wouldn't really describe it as "Hilarious/Cartoonish". "

[Grenartia]

I have a question, what do you think would of happened if Hitler told his troops to attack the British at Dunkirk and to try to prevent British retreat?

I thought that the Nazis were attacking at Dunkirk.

If you mean a stronger/more effective attack- well, higher British casualties and lowered British moral would result, I imagine, but I doubt it would significantly effect the outcome of the war. But I don't know for certain.

I think a better question would've been:

"What if the French leadership hadn't fucking chickened out and used their defensive advantages and superior tanks, instead of surrendering?"

[The balkens]

Yeah?

Yeah, I'm gonna go with this. I wouldn't really describe it as "Hilarious/Cartoonish". "

More like "the Waffen SS would not be that stupid" thing.

1 Get some Panzerjagers behind it
2 Blast the crap out of it
3 Profit momentarily
4 Get killed the next day by the numerically superior American force in the next few hours

[Grenartia]

Hey this is great,I have a Q to ask!

Me and a friend are in a argument over which of the two would win a fight.
Messerschmitt Me 262 vs Mitsubishi A6M Zero

In your opinion which would win a dogfight?

if the zero jumps the Me on take off or landing the zero, any other time its going to be the 262 every day of the week.

Maybe if it didn't get into a turning fight. Its hard to imagine the 262 out-turning the Zeke.

[SECP]

I thought that the Nazis were attacking at Dunkirk.

If you mean a stronger/more effective attack- well, higher British casualties and lowered British moral would result, I imagine, but I doubt it would significantly effect the outcome of the war. But I don't know for certain.

I think a better question would've been:

"What if the French leadership hadn't fucking chickened out and used their defensive advantages and superior tanks, instead of surrendering?"

What?! The germans completely outmaneuvered the French Maginot line and the French had superior tanks? HA! The French only had I believe one tank regiment ready by the time the Germans invaded....Face it the French are cowards, but that saved them from being totally slaughtered in the long run.

[The balkens]

if the zero jumps the Me on take off or landing the zero, any other time its going to be the 262 every day of the week.

Maybe if it didn't get into a turning fight. Its hard to imagine the 262 out-turning the Zeke.

Early jets, as far as i know, were energy fighters.

They aint supposed to turn fight, but rather use momentum (or energy) to dive in and out of a fight.

[SECP]

if the zero jumps the Me on take off or landing the zero, any other time its going to be the 262 every day of the week.

Maybe if it didn't get into a turning fight. Its hard to imagine the 262 out-turning the Zeke.

Yeah...Thats what the argument boiled down to.

[Grenartia]

I think a better question would've been:

"What if the French leadership hadn't fucking chickened out and used their defensive advantages and superior tanks, instead of surrendering?"

What?! The germans completely outmaneuvered the French Maginot line and the French had superior tanks? HA! The French only had I believe one tank regiment ready by the time the Germans invaded....Face it the French are cowards, but that saved them from being totally slaughtered in the long run.

Except that when I was learning about the Maginot Line they said that German tanks literally rolled over it when they decided to attack because the French were preparing for a repeat of World War 1 trench warfare

Then what you learned was objectively wrong. I hate to rely on the wiki, but here's a good quote that more or less disproves that:

"By early June the German forces had cut off the line from the rest of France and the French government was making overtures for an armistice, which was signed on 22 June in Compiègne. As the line was surrounded, the German Army attacked a few ouvrages from the rear, but were unsuccessful in capturing any significant fortifications. The main fortifications of the line were still mostly intact, a number of commanders were prepared to hold out, and the Italian advance had been successfully contained."

And keep in mind, these fortifications were intact and ready to hold out while being totally surrounded and cut off from any outside support, not that there was any to be had at this point.

instead of the new mechanized tactics devised by the Germans.

Now there's a weird historical anomaly: the French, as far as anyone can tell, had more tanks than the Germans when the war started, and they were (on the whole) of better quality. According to what I'll generally term the "French are Stoopid" theory, the Germans were amazingly more advanced than the French were in every respect. This is simply not true - nor is it really true in almost any other facet of what would pass for modern warfare in WW2. Did the Germans have better artillery than the French? Nope. Did they have better planes? Not really. Did they have better tanks? Absolutely not. The numbners of these weapons were more or less equal between both sides as well.

Now here's the question: was Germany possessed of some kind of unique, irresistible body of armored theory that allowed then to steamroll everything in their path: Once again, the evidence does not show this, especially given how cautious the Germans actually were with their military budgeting, devoting huge sums of cash and resources to the exact same kinds of fortifications the French were building, first to cover the Polish frontier, then on the Siegfried line (more or less a copy of the Maginot Line). Blitzkrieg hardly existed as a coherent body of theory by 1940, and there's a solid argument to be made that it never actually did coalesce into any sort of meaningful theory during wartime. It was far more the preserve of propaganda men than it was any sort of coherent practice.

Their tank defenses weren't as up-to-date as they needed to be to stop the Panzer columns that closed in on it.

This is demonstrably untrue for one simple reason: not a single Panzer was ever used on a direct assault on a Maginot position. I can guarantee you that. Every single one was in with Army Group A or (more likely) B - the Germans had no tanks to spare to throw at isolated fortresses. Tanks are worse than useless in attacks like that, as Patton's abject and prolonged failure to take Metz in 1944 proved.
And if a panzer had miraculously appeared, it would have been blown up at range from all the embedded AT guns, which the French were not short of. The French had the best AT weaponry in the world at the time - the long-barrel 47mm could kill any German tank in operation at any angle with relative ease.

The German's literally picked it apart until France surrendered.

There is literally no part of the historical narrative that I've ever encountered that upholds this. Ever. I can find you all sorts of sources about how the Maginot Line was basically surrounded, cut off, and yet still intact when the surrender came down, but not a single one that says what you're saying. And on top of that, what you're claiming makes no sense given the geographical realities of the landscape: most of the Maginot Line area was in the Vosges Mountains, which, as the name implies, is pretty damn hilly.
You want to know what are mostly to totally useless in hills and mountains?
Tanks.
You want to know what aren't useless?
Fortifications.
Take a look at Monte Cassino for an example.

You must understand that there is a tremendous amount of myth-making and politicized revisionism about this exact issue. This sort of historical corruption springs from three sources, one expected, two probably not.
The first is from the Germans themselves. The thing the Nazis were best at, by far, was promoting themselves and their technology as war-winning and unbeatable. Through their propaganda machine, they created a narrative that held that they were the unchallengeable masters of modern warfare, born savants with tanks and planes, which was proven when they overran France because they knew how to use tanks and the French didn't. This just isn't true - at Gembloux Gap, for instance, three German armored divisions crashed into a roughly equivalent force of French tanks, with the French winning the day. Nobody knows about Gembloux, though, because it happened on literally the same day as Sedan.

The second is interesting: De Gaulle's boosters, after the war, liked to propagate this Maginot myth. Why? Because it made the Third Republic seem incredibly incompetent and stupid - and De Gaulle, the tank commander, France's own personal Jesus, look even more heroic and visionary in comparison to his predecessors in the 1930s. Simple enough. The Vichys also liked to espouse this myth, citing it as proof that the Third Republic was stupid and that fighting the Germans was impossible.

The other source is far more insidious, but likely the most significant of all: a considerable group of British historians, past and present, are themselves perhaps the prime espousers of this unsupported view of history. Why?
Because it absolves their country of wrongdoing or grievous incompetence: the Germans were all geniuses, the French were stoopid, now let's all focus on how plucky and awesome we were at Dunkirk and gloss over how the BEF ran like chickens with their heads cut off and screamed for rescue and salvation before they even fired a single shot in anger, mmkay?
The German aim from the start had always been to cut the British away from the French and destroy them both in detail. They never even had to do this - because when the British retreated, the British just gave the Germans exactly what they wanted without a fight.

Between these three sources - the Nazis, the De Gaulle French, and the blame-the-French British - the French side of the war has been horrifically misrepresented.

At the start of the war, France had one of the largest tank forces in the world along with the Soviet, British and German forces. Like the British and the Soviets, the French operated two classes of tank: cavalry tanks and infantry tanks.[35]

The French had planned for a defensive war and built tanks accordingly. Their infantry tanks were heavily armoured. But, also, generally, they were relatively sluggish, and operationally in terms of control of their forces, the French were at a disadvantage and were outmaneuvered by the German forces. When the French were able to mount an attack their tanks could be very effective. On 16 May, during the Battle of France a single Char B1 heavy tank, the Eure, attacked and destroyed thirteen German tanks lying in ambush in Stonne, all of them Panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs, in the course of a few minutes.[36] The tank safely returned despite being hit 140 times (this event is not verifiable in German documents and relies on the statements of the crew). In his book Panzer Leader, Heinz Guderian wrote of a tank battle south of Juniville: "While the tank battle was in progress, I attempted, in vain, to destroy a Char B with a captured 47 mm anti-tank gun; all the shells I fired at it simply bounced harmlessly off its thick armor. Our 37 mm and 20 mm guns were equally ineffective against this adversary. As a result, we inevitably suffered sadly heavy casualties".[37]

The total tank assets in France and its colonies were perhaps less than 5,800 during the time of the German offensive. After the armistice in the unoccupied Free Zone of France a clandestine rebuild took place of 225 GMC Trucks into armoured cars. When all of France was occupied in 1942 the secret hiding places were betrayed to the Germans.[38][39]

So, basically, the Nazis' hype, and its effect on the British and French elite, is the only thing that made the war escalate to the point that it did?

I think you can trace that, more than anything else, to why the Nazis won in France more than any other factor by far. I've gone back to this one factor again and again - the French war was lost not when the Germans reached around, or at Sedan, or anywhere else, but on May 15th - the night that Reynaud called Churchill, declared that the war was over and lost, and Churchill believed him and ordered the BEF to retreat and move to the coast. At that moment, Britain became just as complicit in the loss as France was. They had lost one battle, with the vast majorities of their armies (in Britain's case, their entire army) undeployed and with their air forces not even being used.
But they let themselves get beaten anyways. And all the while, the Germans were thinking right up until the surrender that the French and British were going to fight on. Hell, a theory about why the Germans didn't attack at Dunkirk might've been because they thought the British were preparing for a siege there, not because they were cutting and running. They thought, every step of the way, that the British and French would fight them to a standstill, and that the war would last a long time - Hitler even moved his HQ to Belgium for a while to be closer to the action, right as the war finished.

Jesus, I wasn't expecting a whole essay...

NOBODY EXPECTS A WHOLE ESSAY
Besides, with NOBODY ELSE POSTING, what else should I be doing?

Excuse me for having a hard time believing that something that, from what I gathered, was supposed to keep Germany from invading France actually was really good despite completely failing to prevent such an act.

That's the thing: it was never meant to PREVENT a German invasion. That was, fundamentally, not its mission. As soon as it was built, it was more or less dead ground for the Germans - totally off limits, and both the Germans and French knew it. Building the Maginot Line was basically a guarantee that the frontier would never see combat, ever again.
It was meant to make the Germans invade, if they did, at the most advantageous spot for France to defend. And it did make them do that.
No need to ask to be excused, Mon. It's a commonly held belief, and one that hasn't ever really been challenged significantly before. Mosier's Blitzkrieg Myth was pretty enlightening for me (although I don't agree with all of it) - I highly recommend it.

Obviously, the VHS tapes I watched in my childhood about WW2 need some updating though.

Quite possible. Don't worry - I grew up on the exact same myths as well.
I just read a few interesting books along the line that weren't quite the same as the rest.

Consider yourself Tiggered by Proxy.

[The Empire of Pretantia]

Yeah, I'm gonna go with this. I wouldn't really describe it as "Hilarious/Cartoonish". "

More like "the Waffen SS would not be that stupid" thing.

1 Get some Panzerjagers behind it
2 Blast the crap out of it
3 Profit momentarily
4 Get killed the next day by the numerically superior American force in the next few hours

Why wouldn't they be that stupid?

[The balkens]

More like "the Waffen SS would not be that stupid" thing.

1 Get some Panzerjagers behind it
2 Blast the crap out of it
3 Profit momentarily
4 Get killed the next day by the numerically superior American force in the next few hours

Why wouldn't they be that stupid?

The SS were an equivalent of a special operations force. Assuming that their best battalion level commanders werent killed at the eastern front and had some dumbass replace him, id say i would expect more out of them.

[United Kingdom of Poland]

Yeah, I'm gonna go with this. I wouldn't really describe it as "Hilarious/Cartoonish". "

More like "the Waffen SS would not be that stupid" thing.

1 Get some Panzerjagers behind it
2 Blast the crap out of it
3 Profit momentarily
4 Get killed the next day by the numerically superior American force in the next few hours

except more then likely they wouldn't really be battle hardened Waffen SS at that point. More then likely its what ever men a SS commander could round up. And if you notice 75% of the casualties were during the initial gunfight when they were caught off guard.

[SECP]

What?! The germans completely outmaneuvered the French Maginot line and the French had superior tanks? HA! The French only had I believe one tank regiment ready by the time the Germans invaded....Face it the French are cowards, but that saved them from being totally slaughtered in the long run.

Then what you learned was objectively wrong. I hate to rely on the wiki, but here's a good quote that more or less disproves that:

And keep in mind, these fortifications were intact and ready to hold out while being totally surrounded and cut off from any outside support, not that there was any to be had at this point.

Now there's a weird historical anomaly: the French, as far as anyone can tell, had more tanks than the Germans when the war started, and they were (on the whole) of better quality. According to what I'll generally term the "French are Stoopid" theory, the Germans were amazingly more advanced than the French were in every respect. This is simply not true - nor is it really true in almost any other facet of what would pass for modern warfare in WW2. Did the Germans have better artillery than the French? Nope. Did they have better planes? Not really. Did they have better tanks? Absolutely not. The numbners of these weapons were more or less equal between both sides as well.

Now here's the question: was Germany possessed of some kind of unique, irresistible body of armored theory that allowed then to steamroll everything in their path: Once again, the evidence does not show this, especially given how cautious the Germans actually were with their military budgeting, devoting huge sums of cash and resources to the exact same kinds of fortifications the French were building, first to cover the Polish frontier, then on the Siegfried line (more or less a copy of the Maginot Line). Blitzkrieg hardly existed as a coherent body of theory by 1940, and there's a solid argument to be made that it never actually did coalesce into any sort of meaningful theory during wartime. It was far more the preserve of propaganda men than it was any sort of coherent practice.


This is demonstrably untrue for one simple reason: not a single Panzer was ever used on a direct assault on a Maginot position. I can guarantee you that. Every single one was in with Army Group A or (more likely) B - the Germans had no tanks to spare to throw at isolated fortresses. Tanks are worse than useless in attacks like that, as Patton's abject and prolonged failure to take Metz in 1944 proved.
And if a panzer had miraculously appeared, it would have been blown up at range from all the embedded AT guns, which the French were not short of. The French had the best AT weaponry in the world at the time - the long-barrel 47mm could kill any German tank in operation at any angle with relative ease.


There is literally no part of the historical narrative that I've ever encountered that upholds this. Ever. I can find you all sorts of sources about how the Maginot Line was basically surrounded, cut off, and yet still intact when the surrender came down, but not a single one that says what you're saying. And on top of that, what you're claiming makes no sense given the geographical realities of the landscape: most of the Maginot Line area was in the Vosges Mountains, which, as the name implies, is pretty damn hilly.
You want to know what are mostly to totally useless in hills and mountains?
Tanks.
You want to know what aren't useless?
Fortifications.
Take a look at Monte Cassino for an example.

You must understand that there is a tremendous amount of myth-making and politicized revisionism about this exact issue. This sort of historical corruption springs from three sources, one expected, two probably not.
The first is from the Germans themselves. The thing the Nazis were best at, by far, was promoting themselves and their technology as war-winning and unbeatable. Through their propaganda machine, they created a narrative that held that they were the unchallengeable masters of modern warfare, born savants with tanks and planes, which was proven when they overran France because they knew how to use tanks and the French didn't. This just isn't true - at Gembloux Gap, for instance, three German armored divisions crashed into a roughly equivalent force of French tanks, with the French winning the day. Nobody knows about Gembloux, though, because it happened on literally the same day as Sedan.

The second is interesting: De Gaulle's boosters, after the war, liked to propagate this Maginot myth. Why? Because it made the Third Republic seem incredibly incompetent and stupid - and De Gaulle, the tank commander, France's own personal Jesus, look even more heroic and visionary in comparison to his predecessors in the 1930s. Simple enough. The Vichys also liked to espouse this myth, citing it as proof that the Third Republic was stupid and that fighting the Germans was impossible.

The other source is far more insidious, but likely the most significant of all: a considerable group of British historians, past and present, are themselves perhaps the prime espousers of this unsupported view of history. Why?
Because it absolves their country of wrongdoing or grievous incompetence: the Germans were all geniuses, the French were stoopid, now let's all focus on how plucky and awesome we were at Dunkirk and gloss over how the BEF ran like chickens with their heads cut off and screamed for rescue and salvation before they even fired a single shot in anger, mmkay?
The German aim from the start had always been to cut the British away from the French and destroy them both in detail. They never even had to do this - because when the British retreated, the British just gave the Germans exactly what they wanted without a fight.

Between these three sources - the Nazis, the De Gaulle French, and the blame-the-French British - the French side of the war has been horrifically misrepresented.

At the start of the war, France had one of the largest tank forces in the world along with the Soviet, British and German forces. Like the British and the Soviets, the French operated two classes of tank: cavalry tanks and infantry tanks.[35]

The French had planned for a defensive war and built tanks accordingly. Their infantry tanks were heavily armoured. But, also, generally, they were relatively sluggish, and operationally in terms of control of their forces, the French were at a disadvantage and were outmaneuvered by the German forces. When the French were able to mount an attack their tanks could be very effective. On 16 May, during the Battle of France a single Char B1 heavy tank, the Eure, attacked and destroyed thirteen German tanks lying in ambush in Stonne, all of them Panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs, in the course of a few minutes.[36] The tank safely returned despite being hit 140 times (this event is not verifiable in German documents and relies on the statements of the crew). In his book Panzer Leader, Heinz Guderian wrote of a tank battle south of Juniville: "While the tank battle was in progress, I attempted, in vain, to destroy a Char B with a captured 47 mm anti-tank gun; all the shells I fired at it simply bounced harmlessly off its thick armor. Our 37 mm and 20 mm guns were equally ineffective against this adversary. As a result, we inevitably suffered sadly heavy casualties".[37]

The total tank assets in France and its colonies were perhaps less than 5,800 during the time of the German offensive. After the armistice in the unoccupied Free Zone of France a clandestine rebuild took place of 225 GMC Trucks into armoured cars. When all of France was occupied in 1942 the secret hiding places were betrayed to the Germans.[38][39]

I think you can trace that, more than anything else, to why the Nazis won in France more than any other factor by far. I've gone back to this one factor again and again - the French war was lost not when the Germans reached around, or at Sedan, or anywhere else, but on May 15th - the night that Reynaud called Churchill, declared that the war was over and lost, and Churchill believed him and ordered the BEF to retreat and move to the coast. At that moment, Britain became just as complicit in the loss as France was. They had lost one battle, with the vast majorities of their armies (in Britain's case, their entire army) undeployed and with their air forces not even being used.
But they let themselves get beaten anyways. And all the while, the Germans were thinking right up until the surrender that the French and British were going to fight on. Hell, a theory about why the Germans didn't attack at Dunkirk might've been because they thought the British were preparing for a siege there, not because they were cutting and running. They thought, every step of the way, that the British and French would fight them to a standstill, and that the war would last a long time - Hitler even moved his HQ to Belgium for a while to be closer to the action, right as the war finished.


NOBODY EXPECTS A WHOLE ESSAY
Besides, with NOBODY ELSE POSTING, what else should I be doing?


That's the thing: it was never meant to PREVENT a German invasion. That was, fundamentally, not its mission. As soon as it was built, it was more or less dead ground for the Germans - totally off limits, and both the Germans and French knew it. Building the Maginot Line was basically a guarantee that the frontier would never see combat, ever again.
It was meant to make the Germans invade, if they did, at the most advantageous spot for France to defend. And it did make them do that.
No need to ask to be excused, Mon. It's a commonly held belief, and one that hasn't ever really been challenged significantly before. Mosier's Blitzkrieg Myth was pretty enlightening for me (although I don't agree with all of it) - I highly recommend it.


Quite possible. Don't worry - I grew up on the exact same myths as well.
I just read a few interesting books along the line that weren't quite the same as the rest.

Consider yourself Tiggered by Proxy.

Wow..Mind blown. I dont know what to be right now, mad that I didnt know this stuff or happy that I'm now reading it. Ha, I guess the west front actually had something going on.

[The balkens]

More like "the Waffen SS would not be that stupid" thing.

1 Get some Panzerjagers behind it
2 Blast the crap out of it
3 Profit momentarily
4 Get killed the next day by the numerically superior American force in the next few hours

except more then likely they wouldn't really be battle hardened Waffen SS at that point. More then likely its what ever men a SS commander could round up. And if you notice 75% of the casualties were during the initial gunfight when they were caught off guard.

...Ah.

Well shit. Guess the KV-2 incident would not have been as much of a lesson.