You are correct; as they say, amateurs talk tactics; the pros talk logistics and transportation.
My late father served in a maintenance company that was part of the 3rd Armored Division, the famed “Spearhead.” He served as NCOIC of a tank retriever platoon, equipped with 5-ton wreckers that pulled damaged Shermans (and other vehicles) off the battlefield.
When my dad and his men weren’t towing damaged tanks, they pitched in and helped the mechanics repair them. My father told me Shermans were easy to repair and with our advantages in production and logistics, there was never a shortage of spare parts and other components needed to get an M-4 back into action. By comparison, the Germans wrote off any tank that suffered more than moderate damage, while a Sherman with comparable damage was often back on the battlefield in a couple of days—sometimes just a few hours.
Our armored units had another advantage. Scores of men like my father had acquired mechanical skills growing up on a farm, or by working in machine shops or factories. The Army put those abilities to good use. The Germans were mechanically skilled, too, but they never organized their repair teams as efficiently—or supplied them as lavishly—as we did.
A final note: my father once told me that one of the first tasks in fixing a damaged Sherman was painting the inside of the crew compartment. At first, the significance of that task didn’t register. But later, as I learned more about the war and the M-4’s deficiencies, I realized the importance of that interior paint job. German anti-tank weapons, the high-velocity 75mm of the Panther and the dreaded 88mm could easily penetrate the Sherman’s armor and kill or maim the crews inside.
While maintenance teams did not have to remove casualties, evidence of the carnage was often visible when they began working on the tank. The paint was necessary to cover blood stains (and the smells) left from the tank’s last battle. For the record, the 3rd Armored had a cumulative loss rate of 600% among its 232 Shermans during the 11-month campaign from Normandy to Germany. A lot of the M-4s that were knocked out returned to service, thanks to an unparalleled logistics system and men like my father.
The Soviets were also very good at recovery and repair. Some T-34s were knocked out and returned to battle as much as 4 times. Though I doubt the Reds gave much consideration to the sensibilities of the crews about getting a tank that had had its prior crew killed.
I heard from an Iraq War vet that his most horrifying experience was riding in a damaged Bradley in which multiple soldiers had just been horribly mangled by an IED.