Former 19k....ping the treadheads!
Having a decent and reliable tank in great numbers beats having a great but unrealible tank in small numbers...
My dear departed father who servied in Burma often stated that America’s manafacturing might and logisitics won WW2.
Oddball: “To a New Yorker like you, a hero is some type of weird sandwich, not some nut who takes on three Tigers”.
b/c of Hitler & Tojo (short-mindedness) were in charge, it's that simple.
that and the overwhelming might of American mgf. and logistics
and grit..much of which (in key areas, unfortunately), is gone now. We were lucky.
American tanks in World War II were generally inferior to their German counterparts.
In a sense. But not exactly. In 42 when it was fielded, the Sherman was the better of everything the Germans had fielded. By the time the Nazis built some behemoth monsters, Shermans were rolling off the lines in incomprehensible numbers.
We didn’t duplicate the Germans superweapon fantasy and stop production in hopes of some grand scheme.
They Nazis were morons to build the Tiger around 1400 built, and King Tiger with around 500 built. Meanwhile their panther was a far better tank then either Tiger and they built 6000 of them. Better to have another 4000 panthers than the handful of monsters that were mechanical nightmares.
But either way, the P-47s ate them all alive.
But the Sherman was speedy, dependable, easy to repair in the field, and a mass production success. The Germans couldn’t keep up.
One book I read talked about how the radial aircraft engine wasn’t well adapted to a ground vehicle, and idling (which tanks did a lot of especially in cold weather) caused the spark plugs to foul frequently. Changing/cleaning plugs was a prime job of service crews.
I love all the X tank was better than Y tank talk. The argument is made as though the tanks fought individually, in a vacuum. The Sherman was the best tank of the war, becasue the US (and its allies, including Russia) used it across the entire globe, and it beat not only the Nazis, but Imperial Japan to boot. It was so good, the Germans used them whenever they could lay hands on them. Period, end of story.
Quantity has a certain quality in battle.
Ok, so I stole the quote...
5.56mm
Reminds me of a story one from my childhood friends fathers, a WWII vet who was part of the push through Italy (I don’t remember the details of which part, I was a kid when he told it).
A German officer, who spoke good English, had been captured, and one of the GIs guarding him (I don’t recall whether it was my friend’s father or someone else in his unit) asked him, “So, if you’re the ‘master race’, how come we’re guarding you, instead of the other way ‘round?”
The German replied, “I was in command of an anti-tank battery, and was ordered to destroy every tank that came up a certain road. We destroyed every tank that came up the road. We ran out of ammunition, you Americans did not run out of tanks.”
The Sherman was even more reliable than the T-34. The Red Army used their Lend-Lease Shermans to equip their mechanized corps (divisions), instead of T-34’s, because their mech units were used in deep-penetration missions where maintenance and recovery/repair services were scarce. This maximized the utility of the Sherman’s superior reliability.
And to think Christy basically invented the T-34 the Russians used to such great affect and we passed on it for the Ronson Lighter.
I look at all the areas in which US weapons excelled over those of Germany and the only 2 areas where the US was clearly inferior was artillery with the German 88mm cannon and the main battle tank. Yes, we had greater numbers of tanks but we had much greater losses of tanks too.
I am still furious at George Patton for saying that we didn’t need a heavier tank because tanks are not supposed to engage tanks. Well, maybe they weren’t supposed to General, but they sure did! And when they did, the US took heavy losses in their relatively lighter Shermans.
Beyond that, I am given to believe that a lot of German tanks were taken out by artillery shells dropping in from above on their thin top armor, or from aerial bombing. To the extent that there is no defense for a tank from an artillery barrage, I guess our general strategy of having more tanks worked out, even if more vulnerable.
Still and all, if we had something like the T-34 with a high velocity 75mm gun, our tanker losses would have been lessened, probably significantly. Letting the Russians have the tank based on Christy’s design was just criminal.
There was politics in the military even back then. That has never changed.
Transferred to Infantry, he suffered from his football knees as well as a commanding officer who insisted his company perform duckwalks to stay in shape on the ship headed for North Africa.
Two swollen knees that prevented his even walking led to his admittance to sick bay for the landing.
Every man in his division was either killed or captured at Kasserine Pass.