You have to be careful which Shermans (and T34s) youa re talking about!
The Easy 8’s with the 76mm high velocity gun (British made I think) was much more effect against the Panther and to some extent the Tiger. Still needed multiple Shermans (Not as many!), and the high profile, thin armor was still an issue. How problem wasn’t solved until the Pershing.
The standard Sherman was disgraceful not only did it have the thin armor & high profile. Its low velocity 75mm gun was nothing more then a somewhat modernized WWI French 75. It was kept in production way too long due. People blame poorly thought Army anti-tank doctrine and even Patton for that decision. A lot of young men died because of that.
Slightly different topic: I read somewhere that the 90mm gun was available early in the war. Like the 88mm it originally was an antiaircraft gun. However unlike the 88mm US Army “doctrine keepers” successfully resisted early efforts to try it out as any antitank gun. Probably proper shells was also an issue. However eventually it was crossed over.
Again slightly different: Don’t know if the story is exactly true but its interesting. I do know early in the war we had no way of mounting a gun large then a 37mm in a turret hence the weird Grant tank configuration.
Thanks
I heard the problem with the 90mm was handling the recoil in a vehicle. Large caliber AA guns were usually only used for home defense and the US didn’t need much of that.
Large caliber AT guns are usually deployed defensively and we weren’t doing that. We needed it to be on a vehicle. The Germans wisely deployed 88’s on trucks at the beginning of the war
The 76mm gun that replaced the initial 75mm on the Sherman tank was a modified 3 inch antiaircraft gun (possibly the one that was on US Navy ships) that was adapted for use as the towed 3 inch antitank gun and adapted to fit the Sherman’s turret. The 76 mm gun-armed Sherman, in the form of the M4A1(76)W was introduced during Operation Cobra. See these two Wikipedia articles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_Sherman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/76_mm_gun_M1
I as astounded to see that the M3 Grant/Lee was used until the end of the war. It was used in the Pacific and Burma theaters as the Japs evidently had poor antitank guns, let alone pathetic armor.