Billy O is showing his age.
The few Sherman tanks not shredded for junk or rusted away are museum pieces.
And the Sherman wasn’t that great during WWII.
The guys who crewed them called them Purple Heart boxes.
The Germans called them Tommy cookers because they tended to explode and burn rather easily.
The only things good about them was they could be turned out in great quantities very easily and they were easy to repair.
But if someone wants to own an operable tank,and they can afford it, let’em go for it.
Same goes for an operable mg,mortar or other means of defending oneself.
Who the devil is Bill O to decide who can own what?
I agree; if you can afford a Sherman, by all means go for it, and park it in the driveway. Guaranteed to reduce neighborhood crime rates.
My late father was a part of the 3rd Armored Division during World War II. He was the NCOIC of a platoon of tank retrievers—they had the job of pulling damaged Shermans and other vehicles off the battlefield, fixing them, and getting them back in action. They were easy to repair and the Army was full of men who had acquired mechanical skills in machine shops, factories and on family farms. There wasn’t much those men couldn’t fix, and M-4s that would ordinarily be written off were repaired and fought another day.
My dad had the utmost admiration for the Sherman crews. Everyone knew the long odds they faced in going up against a Panther or Tiger. In fact, the tank crews took so many casualties that during the Battle of the Bulge, infantry replacements were retrained as tank crews and sent into battle with barely one day of instruction.
For what it’s worth, Bill O’Reilly is an idiot. I guess he became an expert on tanks writing the god-awful “Killing Patton.” My wife gave me “Killing Reagan” as a birthday gift; I hated to tell her it was the biggest waste of ink and paper in publishing history. Not that O’Reilly cares; he’s got a nice little assembly line going and each book in the series adds more millions to his bottom line.
BTW, my favorite nickname for the Sherman is the one the Brits gave it, the Ronson. Named for the British cigarette lighter that lights “first time, every time.”