The guy was very lucky to be in a new Pershing tank. Much more firepower and better armor, it could take on a Panzer. The Shermans were death-traps.
“...it could take on a Panzer.”
Panzer is the word the Germans use for “tank”. What you’re probably looking for is the “Panther” tank (or the panzer called and designated as Panzerkampfwagen V Panther). Not criticizing you, just a common mistake.
“The Shermans were death-traps.”
The U.S. supplied the Brits with thousands of Shermans.
The Germans called them “Tommy cookers”.
Actually, the Sherman gets a lot of bad press (probably some of it from that Hollywood tripe movie), but it was actually ideally suited for fighting in Europe. Being narrow due to having been designed for the auto assembly lines, and fast due to gasoline engines and fairly light armor, it could zip down lanes between hedgerows and take pretty much any road available, including those narrow village streets with medieval layouts. The German tank crews had to rely on the rather smaller number of heavier modern roads to move, and of course wound up heavily outnumbered (the US built somewhere north of 30,000 Shermans), outrun, outflanked. I'm not entirely without a dog in this fight, as one of my mother's dearest first cousins was the only survivor of his Sherman crew.