[AppyPappy]

A tank that appeared too late

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Of course the Sherman and Firefly weren't up to snuff but by god they whipped the livin' shit out of the Germans and Japs and that's what counts. As uncle Joe said, Quanity has a quality all of it's own. Looks like a good book. All the war movies suck now so reading is the only way to go.

[Red6]

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.

[Tallguy]

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.

[spankalib]

bkmk