Posted on 04/07/2018 9:25:29 AM PDT by Simon Green
Yes. It was under powered for the weight of the tank. How do General. Where you been keeping yourself?
At the Aberdeen proving grounds they tested the armor on captured German tanks. THEY WERE IMPRESSED to say the least. So you are not correct. The armor was great, the gun sight optics were great, the main gun was great but overall they were not manufactured in great enough numbers and hard to maintain. Also German tanks were slightly under powered and not diesels.
Because the Sherman was cheap and easy to produce.
You do realize the British troops called the Sherman tank the Ronson Lighter “Lights the first time every time”?
Every Tanker’s dream.....
You come around the corner at a good clip and just ahead of you is the enemy chow line and they have their backs to you and can’t hear you because a helicopter is starting.
“It was just like chopping corn.”
Not after wet stowage.
N. Thats what the Germans called them.
What were the viable alternatives?
Up armor them and make the main gun a 76mm. You think the Army could have figured that out after Kasserine Pass.
Are you implying they didn't?
Panthers and Tigers were expensive and difficult to produce. Which concept worked out better?
“The Germans were wiped out at Kursk.”
Simply not true.
Many books have been written on Kursk. German armor destroyed Soviet armor at a 5 to 1 ratio. Soviet personnel suffered massive losses compared to German personnel. The Soviets, because of the breaking of the Enigma Code, knew the attack was coming and spent months preparing defenses. Despite this knowledge, preparation, and superior numbers of tanks, artillery, and personnel the Soviets were nearly overrun.
The fact is that in launching this attack the Germans had to win quickly and overwhelmingly. They did neither. Numerically they outperformed the Soviets. In doing so they spent almost all they had.
The Germans were always doomed to lose the resource and production battle. THAT was the reason they lost the war. They were always formidable on the battlefield. To deny this is to deny reality and history.
The M26 Pershing was an underpowered dog that was withdrawn from Korea. It's transmission was prone to breakdowns.
It wasn't until it's engine and transmission were upgraded and it became the M46 Patton that it became a winner.
Still, most of the tanks deployed in the Korean War were Shermans.
Some of them had been abandoned in place after WWII and after swapping the fluids and replacing the battery fired right up.
On a personal note, the Museum of the American GI in Bryan/College Station had an event where they were running their AFV's a couple weekends ago.
They were selling rides in both their Shermans for both days.
Their STuG broke down the 1st day.
I just want an explanation as to how Kelly’s sniper in the bell tower got a Mosin Nagant...
No. They didn’t. Americans tanks units had few 76mm Sherman’s among them and they didn’t come into use until the end of ‘44.
“not manufactured in great enough numbers and hard to maintain. Also German tanks were slightly under powered and not diesels.”
Right. The equipment was inadequate to the task.
German tanks just looked cooler so in terms of post war impact they made more appealing plastic models for us kids to build. How effective they were on the battlefield was irrelevant to us.
IIRC, the 76mm gun had the same problem as the British 17 pounder used on the Firefly Sherman, that being lack of an effective HE round. The Brit's who were ahead of the Americans in upgunning the Sherman didn't develop an effective HE round for the Firefly until ~Dec 1944. Even then, they never pushed for complete replacement of the 75mm gun in their Shermans.
The Americans had similar problem with the 76mm gun in that it lacked an HE round as effective as the 75mm. Since the majority of targets presented to American tanks were "soft", I don't recall any American commanders pressing for complete replacement of 75mm guns with 76mm guns.
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