Posted on 04/15/2021 7:49:08 AM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
After seeing his friends get cut down from the West Wall to the Bulge in their M4 Sherman tanks, elite gunner Clarence Smoyer is assigned the experimental T26 Pershing, armed with the 90mm gun he needs to keep his buddies alive. But with the new tank comes a deadly new role that culminates in a legendary tank duel at the Cologne cathedral. We now present to you the official trailer for Spearhead, the new book by Adam Makos, the bestselling author of A Higher Call.
(Excerpt) Read more at youtu.be ...
A tank that appeared too late
Read the book last summer before visiting Cologne and retracing the battle over the current terrain. Very powerful and surprisingly emotional (as a former tanker). Definitely will see the movie.
I just finished reading a book about Tankers in WWII. Most books cover the strategies or the tactics or the equipment. This book covered the men....and women. The Russians had females in their tank crews. Not too many, but still it was news to me.
Lots of interesting information. The change in British Officers assigned to Armor units as the war went on. The early Officers were from the horse cavalry and the elite schools.
Just bought the Audible version.
We had it earlier but CHOSE not go into mass production and fielding.
Wiki I think is accurate on this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M26_Pershing
From memory based on a book I read years ago (I could be off), by wars end only 310 M26 Perishing’s were in Europe.
We are infatuated with WWII movies. In part that is cool because it was a just war, we won, there are many heroic stories to talk about, this war was a world changing event (huge impact)...
But on the other hand I think there are also another reasons:
It was the last war we definitively won and as a nation stood united behind.
It’s the last war where we see ourselves definitively as the “good guys,” and everything that followed has been expeditionary, with economic and political interests interwoven in the conflict.
There is no conflict nor repercussions killing “Nahhhzi’s” in movies, but China might not like and impose trade restrictions with a movie like Red Dawn II if we portray them bad and as the enemy (so we rewrote the story to be North Korea instead of China). You have the “Russians” and the “Nahhhzi’s” that you can kill by the thousands, portray them in an overly cliché and negative manner in US movies, and no one will complain, not even the Germans.
***Given todays political and social climate, if you made a movie about the Muslim vs. non-Muslim conflict in Africa, you run into political and social sensitivities may it be religion, race, and females.
There was never a chance that we would have been able to transport significant numbers of heavy tanks to Europe before the end of 1945 — even if the military leaders had pushed the idea (which they didn’t).
The US didn’t really have any significant tank force before 1940. We were building from scratch. And up until the end of 1943 the Sherman was better or equal to everything the Germans had — save for a handful of Tiger I’s that the Germans manage to get into Tunisia and Sicily.
I found a picture over the weekend of the Germans offloading a tank in North Africa using dockside cranes. Part of the design limits on US Tanks was crane capacity and the width of standard railroad rolling stock. There were dozens of other limiting factors.
The 76mm models were doing good business but I read tank destroyers killed most tanks. They were upgunned long before the Shermans and we had the M36(90mm) in Oct 44.
Our 75mm’s were great.
Nazi’s proved that a good direct fire weapon with enough of a distance advantage worked. When all guns are good for a mile or more, armor and tactics will Winn the day.
bkmk
Hollyweird is simply incapable of producing accurate and historical depictions without corrupting the entire result with left wing dogma. They rewrite history and attempt to punish political opponents.
So is this movie just now coming out? Because the video you posted is two years old.
I think in that engagement the M4 might have done just as well as the Pershing. It was a shot into the side of Tiger, which was not nearly as heavily armored as the front. The German tank crew survived, and reported that they hesitated to fire because the Pershing did not look like an Allied tank.
When the M4 flanked a Tiger, it could fire into its vulnerable side. The M4 was agile and very reliable. The Tiger was basically a heavily armored antitank gun, and it was effective in that roll, but it was mechanically unreliable. The Tigers were mostly deployed in defense, firing from defilade and in ambush. In open fields, like in Holland, their long range could be decisive, but so was any antitank gun. In close quarters the M4 might not hold its own, but it was a very formidable threat to any German tank.
The only Pershing that was destroyed in Europe was the victim of a Nashorn firing from defilade at 300 yards.
I did not know that until recently, and I used to have a much lower opinion of the Sherman.
Apparently in early 1950s the Army wanted to shift a Pershing equipped unit from one location to another, within the state of Kentucky. It found out that there were fewer than 1,000 railroad flatcars in the entire country that could take a Pershing. That had not been a problem when the Army was taking small deliveries of new production each month in peacetime, but in WW2 the US would have had to have vast numbers of super heavy duty flatcars manufactured, and transported everywhere in the world that the Army wanted to move tanks by rail, if it had replaced the Sherman with the Pershing.
Tanks went overseas as deck cargo. The deck cranes of Liberty Ships could load and off load Shermans, but not Pershings. So the Army's ability to off load Shermans would have been restricted by the number of heavy lift cranes that had been landed and constructed.
Wow!! That must have been a very moving experience. Thank you for your service. I had two uncles who were U.S. Army, and served overseas in WWII. My brother was U.S. Army Infantry in Vietnam ‘66-67. The closest I got to WWII sites in France was visiting the D-Day Landing Beaches, and St. Laurent Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. Too old now to go back unfortunately. My great-uncle who served with Canada during WWI, and was killed two months before the Armistice, is buried in Terlincthun British Cemetery, in Wimille, France.
I just finished listening to the audio version of James Clavell’s “Whirlwind” about a multinational helicopter company working in Iran back in 1979, and how the revolution threatened to destroy the company and get many of them killed.
I had read the book many years ago. It was an astonishingly long audiobook (73 chapters) and must have easily been close to twenty hours but I came away with the feeling that, if there was EVER a movie for a mini-series, and the casting team would have had a blast selecting characters to play the parts, it is a mini-series that most producers and film companies would be unwilling to make out of fear they would offend someone.
Shame.
No, the trailer is advertisement for the book that came out then......
Exactly!
You cannot tell such a story without stepping on or trying to tap dance around some of the political/social sensitivities of today: race (other than white), religion (other than Christian), feminism/female empowerment (don’t show them as a weaker sex), sexual orientation and a little bit of national origin.
Better just kill more Nahhhzi’s and Russians.
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