[Little Ray]

It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.

There was nothing wrong with the T-34. The PKW V Panther was an attempt by the Germans to copy it. Unfortunately, some sort of committee got hold of it and turned it into a mechanical nightmare.

Likewise, the Sherman was a great tank; it was our doctrine that was flawed. The US Army (including Patton) thought that Tank Destroyers and anti-tank guns were supposed to fight tanks and that tanks were supposed to kill infantry and create breakthroughs. So the Sherman was armed with a low-velocity 75mm that good for throwing HE. Patton wanted a second MG mounted coaxially with the main gun, but didn’t want it converted into an anti-tank weapon.

The Brits, with the Sherman Firefly, proved that the Sherman was perfectly capably being converted into a tank-killing machine, but the nice people in charge of US Ordnance didn’t follow up with our own version. It was not until the very end of the war that the US got good tank-killing tanks, like the Pershing.

The Sherman went on to see service into the 1960s, when they were still serving with the Israelis as 105mm armed “Super Shermans.”

[C. Edmund Wright]

It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.

I cannot imagine a more out of place and irrelevant comment on this thread than this. WTF do you mean? Who's blaming any tools? Who's the poor craftsman? Seriously, what....?

[C. Edmund Wright]

There was nothing wrong with the T-34

Nothing wrong, but it was not the technical craft the Tigers were for example. The key to the T-34 is that they made them so close to the action, that many rolled out of the factor floor and onto the battlefield literally. Germany could not match that kind of logistical advantage.

[RayChuang88]

Actually, the original T-34 was technologically WAY superior to any German tank during the first year of Operation Barbarossa. Once the T-34's took on the German tanks, the Panzer divisions suffered heavy losses because the T-34 could better withstand the relatively small caliber cannon of the German tanks at the time.

And when the Russians switched to the even better T-34/85, German tank losses really soared, even with the better German models coming by late 1942. It didn't help the Germans that the arrival of the Il-2 Sturmovik anti-tank attack plane in large numbers also resulted in heavy German losses.

[PIF]

Israel sold or scrapped all of their M4 variants and their early Merkavas last year.