The “Robson”!
I had forgotten about that one.
Very apt name.
Oddly enough the shortcomings of the Sherman’s were also some of its, not strengths, but selling points.
Under armored meant it was light and nimble.
They could use practically any bridge they came upon and they could traverse practically any terrain.
The panthers were larger, heavier and couldn’t use half the bridges then in use in Europe.
The heavier Tigers were particularly cumbersome and useless.
The larger and heavier still Royal Tiger was practically useless in western Europe because of the light bridges at the many river crossings.
The Sherman was an engineering disappointment from the get go.
The short barreled,low velocity gun meant that it’s shells usually bounced off the thick hides of the German Panthers.
Even the up gunned models couldn’t take on a Panther one on one.
Even the narrow treads on the Sherman had to be upgraded to a wider tread to meet the reality of war in Europe.
A neighbor of mine was in an infantry unit in Europe.
He used to get mad whenever a war movie would show a Sherman destroying a Panther.
He would say that the only way that could happen was for the Sherman to sneak up behind the Panther and” shoot it in the ass.”
I’m sure your Dad came across some gruesome sights working on the Sherman’s.
The worst duty would have been the men who had to clear the disabled tanks of the human remains before they were towed to the shop.
Not a duty I would want.
A tip of the hat to your Dad and his buddies who kept the Sherman’s rolling.
Thanks for the kind words about my Dad; he was very proud of his service and would talk about it occasionally, but focused only on the lighter moments.
Those big Diamond-T tank retrievers had 12 huge tool boxes; as the 3rd Armored rolled through France and Belgium, grateful villagers would run out and press bottles of their best wine, cognac and champagne through the window of the retriever. As Dad said, “we couldn’t turn them down.” So, the tools were pitched into the floor of the cab and the boxes became a place to store donated liquor.
But he saw a lot that he wouldn’t speak about, or mentioned only in cryptic terms. Dad once mentioned that one of the first items on the repair checklist for a damaged Sherman was to repaint the crew compartment. That puzzled me until I thought about the damage an 88mm AP round could do inside that small space. While the casualties had been removed by the time Dad and his men arrived, the effects of the battle could still be seen. So, any Sherman with damage in the crew compartment automatically received a fresh coat of white paint on the inside.
After my father’s dead, I also learned that he earned the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, despite the fact he was a mechanic. He was initially trained as a ground-pounder, as part of the first-ever peacetime draft in 1940-41, then he became a mechanic. But getting the CIB also requires service in combat; all Dad would say is “we got into a few scrapes.”
The Sherman was a product of pre-war parsimony in the U.S. military. As I recall, the Army’s tank development budget in 1940 was $80,000, so it’s little wonder the M-4 used a lot of “off-the-shelf” technology including the low-velocity 75mm gun (the artillery branch liked it because there was lots of ammo available and the tank could be used to support ground troops). The decision to power the tank with a radial aircraft engine was the product of similar thinking (though some models had diesel powerplants). The engine was easy to remove and service, but it also had serious flaws. One was its tendency to backfire when cranking up the tank in the mornign. The backfire was often loud enough to attract Germany artillery fire, so tankers knew they had to crank and roll before the enemy barrage arrived.
In fairness, the Sherman was a very good tank early in the war, more than capable of defeating most German armored vehicles. But with the arrival of the Panther and the Tiger, the Sherman was seriously deficient, under-armored and out-gunned, and a lot of Allied tank crews paid for it with their lives.