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.
And Zaloga’s book, a direct rebuttal to “Death Traps”: https://www.amazon.com/Armored-Thunderbolt-U-S-Sherman-World/dp/0811704246/ref=pd_cp_14_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=DCATFXG65KVRZGWY2SGZ