Comment by Top19
9 years ago
Makes sense about the bridges and roads thing. You need to know that for tanks. Even today in Germany you’ll see tiny bridges crossing a stream, a sign right by that says “this bridge rated for 70,000 pounds” (so can hold multiple tanks at once).
Multiple? A Main Battle Tank such as the German Leopard 2 weighs 62,300 kg (137, 347 lb). Even a puny WW2 Sherman medium tank weighed in the neighborhood of 70,000 lb.
An M4 Sherman weighed about 35 tons when including fuel, crew and ammunition. So technically, it could hold two, though it would be a risky endeavor.
35 tons is close to 70000lbs
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Is that literally true? I would have expected Germans to rate their bridges in tons, not pounds/pfund.
I live in Germany and have never seen a sign using pounds, only tons.
Read the German Wikipedia article on the subject which shows German signs in short tons (non-metric unit): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militärische_Lastenklasse
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You'll find lots in areas where the allied troops did their exercises. Around "Feldberg" (Wetterau) you'll find plenty of them.
That would likely be metric tons, or a little more than 2204 pounds. The US uses short tons, or exactly 2000 pounds.
A lot of bridges everywhere are marked with their capacity. I don't think it's necessarily for the purpose of tanks.
I think he relates to the bridge signs of the NATO.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Load_Classification
Interesting, never knew about this.
Those are MLC (Military Load Classification) signs.