[C19fan]

Gasoline was not helpful but also early models of Shermans had bad ammunition storage resulting in catastrophic explosion when the tank was penetrated.

[donozark]

I saw the movie FURY the other day. Pretty much demonstrates the frailties of the Sherman.

Basically our troops "swarmed" the German tanks and put one up their tailpipe.

[PIF]

The Sherman aks a ‘Ronson’ - they work everytime.

[NonValueAdded]

the photo of the Super Sherman in the article immediately brought to mind the T-1 of Terminator fame.

[webheart]

The best Sherman tank movie was the one where the guy put the transmission in backwards so it had one speed forward and four speeds in reverse. Kelly’s Heroes?

[Kozak]

Sherman M4’s were jokingly referred to by British soldiers as “Ronsons”, a brand of lighter whose slogan was “Lights up the first time, every time!”[iv] Polish soldiers referred to them simply as “The Burning Grave”.

However to quote Comrade Stalin
‘Quantity has a quality all its own.’
There were A LOT of Shermans...

[pleasenotcalifornia]

A good friend of my family was a tank driver in the 4th Armored Division. He had three Sherman tanks shot out under him.

[OKSooner]

Probably an interesting read but... "every theater of operations" is usually meant as Europe, the Pacific, and CBI or China Burma India theaters. (Flying Tigers, right?)

I've always understood North Africa to be considered an ancillary or prologue to the European Theater.

[webheart]

Also, the word is renowned.

[Hebrews 11:6]

We had quite an extensive discussion of this topic, in which you may be interested, several days ago on Homer_J_Simpson's excellent 70-years-ago series on WW2.

The final US Army mortality rate for Sherman crewmen in destructive disablements was just 0.3 fatalities per incident (sadly, I don't have the link handy, but you can research it, too). In other words, most got out, contrary to the Ronson stigma.

[bagman]

I recall that the Israeli Defense Forces were effectively using up-gunned Shermans as late as the Yom Kippur War (1973).

[Mat_Helm]

The M4A3 “Jumbo” Sherman's started using the 76mm higher velocity guns that could penetrate Panther and Tiger Armor at point blank ranges, but not at distance where the panther and tiger could kill a Sherman from 800 yards out. The M4A3 also had the V8 “Easy Eight” ford engines and were fast. The 76mm gun had a longer chamber for the armor piercing high velocity rounds but fired a smaller high explosive round than the 75mm gun for anti personal work. In Fury they are in an M4A3 that began to see action in 1944 and the other Sherman's were A1’s and or A2’s.

[blueunicorn6]

The Sherman was a great tank for what it was designed to do.....suppress enemy machine guns. American military leaders in the 1920s and 1930s saw tanks as being a support weapon for the Infantry. They did not envision huge armored thrusts knifing into the rear of the enemy. The tank would be a mobile machine gun in the defense and a protected machine gun to suppress the enemy machine guns in the offense.
Tankers like to talk about the tank-on-tank battles. Tanks are most useful when they are shooting up the enemy communications vans and driving through their chow halls. That’s when they really break and run.

[Rinnwald]

Contrary to what people may think, all the German tanks ran on gasoline too. Maybach tank engines, including the HL230 engine in the Tiger I and other heavy tanks, were gasoline engines, not diesel.

[lewislynn]

The fact that we put our guys in those things to go against what the Germans had was nothing less than disgraceful.

[PapaBear3625]

I was reading that two advantages of the Shermans were numbers and speed. In a tank battle, the advantage goes to the tank that’s already there, hiding or sitting behind cover, and waiting for the other guy to come into range.

[longfellow]

What’s really sad is the worst tank ever made was named after Patton.

[MasterGunner01]

Belton Cooper was an Ordnance Officer under Patton. His book, “Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II” tells a very sad story. Cooper's job was to give his boss a daily update on how many tanks were totaled, under repair, available for issue, or combat ready on a daily basis. On this day there were 30 Shermans sitting along a road ready for action, but they did not have enough seasoned tankers to make up the five man crews. And so they assigned 2-3 veteran tankers per tank and used raw replacements to fill the crews. Almost all the replacements were lucky if they'd seen a tank before, much less crewed one.

At the end of the day, nearly all of the 30 repaired Shermans had been knocked-out with heavy casualties. Tanks that didn't burn were taken to ordnance shops where they were rebuilt and repainted inside. These refurbished tanks were then reissued to the division's tank battalions. Veteran tankers knew how to recognize these refurbished Shermans. They said they could still smell the death that had occurred inside these tanks.

[Pilsner]

The Sherman matched up very well in terms of arms and armor with the Panzer IIIs, which had a 37mm anti-tank gun, and early Panzer IVs which had a short barreled, 75mm howitzer, and it completely outclassed earlier German tanks, and the captured Czech and French tanks the Germans were using in the Spring of 1941, when the Sherman was selected for production. The Sherman performed very well in 1942, in North Africa, against early and mid-war Panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs, and Italian tanks.

The problem was that the War Department failed for too long to appreciate how significantly the Germans were up gunning and up armoring the Panzer IV, or how badly the Panzer V and Panzer VIs outclassed the Sherman, and it failed to upgrade the Sherman.

[Organic Panic]

I forget what documentary I was watching that was interviewing the tankers of WW2. The nickname for the Shermans were “Ronsons.”

Ronson Lighters’ motto was “Lights every time.” The USA used gasoline and the Germans used Diesel.

[Rebelbase]

Good stuff on this thread.