Posted on 01/30/2017 10:02:14 AM PST by C19fan
The M551 Sheridan light tank is largely remembered as a curiosity, an innovative weapon system that proved an overcomplicated failure in action. However, several hundred Sheridans provided useful service in three wars, and left behind a small but noticeable gap in the force structure since being withdrawn in the 1990s that the Army has struggled to fill. That’s because the Sheridan was easily transported by air and could even be dropped by parachute.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalinterest.org ...
“They were sent to Vietnam where the NVA made mince meat of them with RPGs and mines.”
Growing up, a close friend’s father was an armor officer, West Point grad, MS Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech. Was involved in tank procurement later in his career.
His opinion of the air-droppability of the M551: You can air drop it - once.
Also, assuming the missile worked, there was a fuzzy potential gap at the max range of the HESH round, and the min range of the missile. This fell right in the 500m engagement range of Soviet tank doctrine.
See my previous. We’re on the same page.
I was in M60A2 tanks, same gun/missile system. Lots of weight for recoil, stabilized gun and power cupola independently stabilized from main gun and turret. The anti personnel round had “slugs” not flechettes. No range fuse on the round so basically a shotgun shell with a 60 degree arc and a 300m range.
My dad was a tanker way back when and had nothing good to say about Sheridans.
He was a 48 or a 60 TC.
Bite your tongue, and knock out 50
“All the way”
With my best regards,
An X-11B2P
I think the reason for that because the hull was made of aluminum?
You’re right. Read Captain(ret.) Belton Cooper’s “Death Traps’’. The Sherman was a joke.
That’s a good book. I have it in paperback and on Kindle.
He wrote the Shermans had radial aircraft engines that operated at lower RPMs than they should, since Shermans couldn’t fly, and the fist-sized spark plugs were always fouling.
Mobility? Thin tracks. Firepower? Low velocity 75mm cannon. Armor. Not so good against the Panther and Tiger.
The Germans were surprised that we didn’t even bother to camouflage them, but we pwned the sky.
The M26 Pershing was a different animal—good sloped armor, mobility and a powerful, self-leveling cannon.
He has photos of a Tiger(?) that was lying in wait on a feeder street, cooking off after a Pershing at speed loosed a shot on the fly and shows a couple of the crewman scampering off.
Treadhead ping.
“My dad was a tanker way back when and had nothing good to say about Sheridans.”
The only guys who liked Sheridans were the Infantry. When you came up to to a well dug in machine gun nest, some guys were likely to die - but then you drive one of those Sheridans right up to firing port of the machine gun position and blast the living crap out of them. Airborne Infantry guys loved them.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NBlNmVJKUP8/VGZPy6k-p4I/AAAAAAAAi18/SgSKe6U7JoI/s1600/art%2BM4.jpg
Yeah, that’s the encounter.
Patton saw the tank as infantry escort. Of course they wound up slugging it out with superior tanks, better optics too.
The Germans called Shermans `Ronsons’ and made them burn, as the author points out, so they couldn’t be refurbished.
Sherman crews were about as brave as they came.
Belton Cooper’s work has been disproven by later scholars.
See immediate prior post - more recent scholarship has shown that the Sherman was nowhere near as bad as it was made out to be. One case in point was the Sherman Jumbo assault variant, which had frontal armor that simply could not be penetrated by the majority of German anti-tank guns in common service at any point during the war. They were extremely popular for leading convoys and such during the war and were one of the few Western tanks that had the frontal hull armor to simply wade into the fire of a Panther.
Tell that to the German armor crews stalemated by the T-34s and slaughtered by the ‘beast killer’ tanks of the mid to late war Soviet Army.
The amusing thing is that some are considering resurrecting the concept of the M18 Hellcat as an air-droppable big-gun airborne support vehicle, something that’s probably not before time.
Like who? Capt. Cooper was there when they were welding ‘plows’ on the fronts of Shermans so they could get through hedgerows. Tankers also added track, sandbags and anything else they could find to their hulls and glacis plates.
Cooper presents a lot of opinions as historical fact. Others have actually looked at the stats and come to rather different conclusions. Here’s some of those who did so - among others, Steve Zaloga has done a very good job of debunking Cooper.
Start of the Operation Think Tank 2012 panel discussion - warning, it’s four hours long and in many, many parts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oLY4FOrnjc
Further information and statistics here: https://tankandafvnews.com/2015/01/29/debunking-deathtraps-part-1/
And if you didn’t see this in the comments of the above link:
“If you get a chance, check out the interview I did with Steven Zaloga. He has some interesting comments regarding “Death Traps.” He points out that: “[the book] is ghost written, it’s not only Belton Cooper, it’s the ghost writer talking as well. It’s very hard to distinguish Belton Coopers stuff from the ghost writers. I’ve talked to Belton Cooper a number of times, and the problem is that by the time that Belton Cooper got to write the book, he was quite a bit older, his memories were just not all that good so a lot of the stuff that is in the book didn’t even come out of his mouth.”
Over at the WoT Forum, their chief North American researcher Nick Moran “The Chieftain” expressed similar concerns about the book in a forum thread. In that thread, The Chieftain posts a comment from Zaloga in which he states that the name of the ghost writer is Mike Benninghof. I am not very familiar with Benninghof’s work, but according to wikipedia he has a PhD in History and is a well known military simulation game designer.
Probably the harshest indictment of the book I have seen is Robert Forczyk’s Amazon review of the book. Forczyk is a former armor officer and historian who has written some very good good books on armored warfare on the Eastern Front.”
The above quote has many, many links in the original source. Go check it out. Bottom line: Cooper’s entertaining, but he (or his ghostwriter) get a *lot* demonstrably wrong.
I would also commend R.P. Hunnicutt’s series of books on American tanks, especially his book Sherman: A History of the American Medium Tank. Hunnicutt was *also* in the European Theatre in WW2, but has a rather different view of the Sherman than Cooper did - and his views are backed up by facts and stats unlike Cooper’s.
No, the Sherman wasn’t perfect and there were problems, but it wasn’t the death trap Cooper (or his ghostwriter) made it out to be.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
