Most Successful Tank Ace in History

The_Chieftain:   You mean that playing WoT hasn't taught you that it's not the amount of  damage you do which results in wins, it's how, when and where you do that damage?   I'll happily stipulate that he's the highest-scoring tank commqander of all time. Go play tier II in a MicroMaus, you'll get more kills, probably, than a very good player in a Tier VIII light. Who's the more successful player? Kill tallies for tankers are an interesting stat, but they rely very heavily on the situation. For example, let's say that all of Knipsels kills were of tanks only. Not SPGs, TDs, half-tracks, or whatever. Doing a quick tally, the Soviets had about 85,000 tanks, the British about 17,000, and the Americans 53,000, some 150,000 if one counts the startpoint in late 1941 plus wartime production. So Knipsel was responsible for the destruction of 0.11% of the possible enemy tanks to kill.  Lavarenko is credited with 58 tank and SPG kills, they don't specify type. If you wanted it to be of the entire German tank production for the war, that would be 0.15%. Granted, there would have been some SPGs (But not too many, the Germans hadn't gotten really big into the SPG department in 1941 yet), but on the other hand, Lavarenko did that ratio in two months while Knipsel's kills were over 4 years. Even more so, if you look at the forces Lavarenko faced, he alone was responsible for the destruction of a full percent of the German tank and SPG  forces which invaded the Soviet Union. Similarly, it is estimated that some British tankers also got some silly amounts of kills, for example, Alfie Nichols may well have killed 40 tanks in North Africa alone (And doing some quick reading, apparently is claimed to have killed three Tigers with three shots from his Sherman), but the British strongly discouraged individual kill counting, and so we can't be sure just what his final total was. But if he did  so (And the Italians only add some 2,500 to the German total of some 43,000 tanks), then on a ratio of kills-to-targets, there is a good argument that Nichols was also more successful than Knipsel.   Then you have the question of local force ratios. Knipsel spent pretty much the entire war on the Soviet Front. So some 85,000 tanks (Plus a few thousand lend-lease). So Knipsel destroyed just shy of 0.2% of the enemy's provided tank force. Compare that to Radley Walters or Lafayette Pool, who scored 18 and 12 tank kills respectively in the ETO, the Germans having, what, 2,500 tanks in total facing the Western Allies? Let's say 3,000. That means that R-W killed 0.6% of the enemy's provided tank force, and Pool 0.4%, three times or twice, respectively, Knipsel's ratio.  And in the cases of Lavarenko, Nichols, R-W and Pool, their side won.   So, all of a sudden, 'success' becomes very much a matter of perspective, as opposed to a simple kill tally which is objective.