Hello everyone, I started reading military history when I was 8 years old and never stopped! WW2 is my favorite topic and my library is extensive. As I get older, I hope to switch careers and become a teacher. I also look forward to writing some books and articles, all the while immersed in research of my favorite subject matter. I posted an article about the Sherman tank and the new movie, "Fury," here: https://medium.com/@klausewitzian/strategic-decisions-fury-and-the-sherman-tank-c8b969b508bf Please let me know what you think. Thanks for adding me to this forum. Robert
I'd disagree with a number of your points regarding the Sherman and their German opponents, but there are a ton of discussions here as to their relative merits. You wrote: "The Sherman chassis was also used as the platform for two tank destroyer designs, the M-10 gun motor carriage with a 76mm weapon and the British Achilles mounting a 17lb gun. These vehicles were somewhat more vulnerable to infantry and artillery with their open-topped designs, but their mobility and powerful guns made them useful against German armor." What about the M36 "Jackson", 90mm GMC? It too was based upon an M4 chassis.
G'day and welcome...one cannot hope to visualise ones trajectory through time without learning your past...to learn history is to learn about one self. That's one of my quotes : )
Robert, glad to have you aboard. Like UCMCPrice points out, the armor VS armor debate on this forum is extensive and brings up a lot of interesting points, but the fact that the Shermans were superior in number did to level the field-- so your article holds a lot of water.
Well not just numbers, but mechanical reliability and ease of maintenance and repair. The Germans might have been more effective even with lower production numbers, if they had a higher operational rate. It doesn't do much good to have a tank on paper if it's not available when you need it. Another factor that needs to be considered is what type of operations the tank was most likely to be used for, whether offensive or defensive. The allies understood that they would primarily be engaged in offensive operations, this puts a premium on reliability and mobility. it is also a common rule of thumb in the military, that because the defender has certain inherent advantages, that you need to have a 3 to 1 superiority in numbers, if possible, when planning for offensive operations, so it was important to have superior raw numbers. While certain features made the big cats impressive on the defense, their weaknesses would have presented great liabilities for offensive operations. Another thing that should be noted are the causes of losses. Tank vs tank losses are quite low proportionally, mines, AT guns and SP guns each account for a much greater percentage of tank kills than enemy tanks. Hand held anti-tank weapons have a virtually identical rate of kills to that of tanks vs other tanks. So even if Germany's tanks were as powerful, superior and effective as Belton Cooper wrote that they were, they only inflicted 14.5% of allied (British/American) tank losses.