What I’m (also) doing when I’m not blogging

Well, let’s just put it this way: Wikipedia is great!

I am somewhat interested in (modern) military history, and look where I ended up recently. From one of the articles:

“A major problem with the Tiger was its very high production cost. During the Second World War over 40,000 American Sherman and 58,000 Soviet T-34s were produced, compared to 1,355 Tiger I and some 500 Tiger II tanks. The German designs were expensive in terms of time, raw materials and Reichsmarks, the Tiger I costing over twice as much as a contemporary Panzer IV and four times as a Stug III assault gun.“

If we are to believe the numbers provided in the wikipedia articles, the Germans did produce more than 9000 Panzer IV tanks and roughly the same amount of Sturmgeschütz III – and almost half of the T-34’s were not produced until 44-45, so the production ratios were perhaps not as skewed as it might sound from the quote above, at least not until the end of the war.