[tumblindice]

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.

[jmacusa]

The Sherman also had a high center of gravity. It was easy to spot in the hedgerows. The Germans learned a valuable lesson from the Russian T-34(originally an American design) that in addition to sloped armor, a wider track width , wider threads and a lower center of gravity made a tank more maneuverable, gave it better traction and a lower silhouette. Yeah, the M-26 was a game changer but it was deployed too near the end of the war to really make a difference. The tank photo's you're speaking of, if I understand you correctly are from a famous encounter on March 6,1945 when a Sherman tank of the 3rd. Armored Division was ambushed near the Cologne Cathedral by a German Panther Mark 5, not a Tiger tank. If you go on You Tube and type in "Tank Duel/Cologne Cathedral 1945'' there's actually video shot by a US Army cameraman capturing the whole encounter. It's gripping to say the least. Far and away, German armor of WW2 was far superior to anything on the battlefield.

[Spktyr]

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.