"United States Build T34's Instead of Shermans"" Topic

As an Economics major in college, my neighbor's daughter was assigned a research paper on the wartime economy of United States in WWII. As a retired academic with an interest in WWII she asked me to review her paper. Most of it dealt with production quotas, labor management, production and transportation of raw materials, government economic policies, managed wartime economy, etc. (they don't call it "the dismal science" for nothing). She has absolutely no interest in or particular knowledge of military history but in the course of comparing Sherman tank production in the United States to T34 tank production in the USSR she came across numerous references to how superior the T34 was to the Sherman in combat. Intrigued, she asked me to explain what was meant by combat superiority. I explained as best I could ending by telling her that it was generally agreed by military historians that the T34 was indeed superior to the Sherman in all significant battlefield respects and was generally agreed to be the best combat tank in WWII.

"Then why didn't we build them instead of the Sherman?", she asked.

"What?"

"If they were so superior, why didn't we build them instead of the Sherman? In researching this paper there is no question in my mind that American wartime industry was entirely capable of tooling itself up to build T34's eventually in the same numbers as the Sherman's. Why didn't we do that?"

"Because we were already building Sherman's."

"So what? If the T34 was so manifestly superior to the Sherman why continue to build the Sherman? We retooled from the Grant to the Sherman. Why not the Sherman to the T34?"

"Well, we were working on the successor to the Sherman."

"Why bother? The T34 was already a proven battle tank entirely adapted to wartime mass production."

"Well [I said weakly], it was foreign."

Disgusted, she replied: "I hope they printed that on the telegrams they sent to the thousands of American tankmen that probably would not have died if they were in T34's."

I hope somebody has a better explanation.

A SNAFU or FUBAR perhaps?

Hmmm…so HOW much superior was the T-34 to the Sherman (rhetorical question)? I think a lot of ink is spilled lauding the virtues of the T-34, but like the longbow, how much of this is historical mythology? Discuss…

Damon.

Sloping tank armour, and the Soviets were the first to perfect it (given the era).

Shermans fit in Liberty Ships.

T34

So good it bears repeating 3 times. Hell of a stutter with that cut 'n' paste job

Saber6

To antcipate her reply,

So what. Modify the current Liberty Ships and build the new ones to ship T34's. This is the WWII American wartime industry; the most awesome indutrial production engine the world has ever seen. Such modifications; small potatoes.

Well, there is no doubt that the T-34 was better than what the Germans had at its debut. The Panther was directly inspired by the T-34.

The fact that the Soviets cranked 'em out by the thousands under often very inhospitable conditions would seem to indicate that they were relatively easy to build – therefore, there should have been no problem for American industry to tool up for their production.

One reason why the T-34 was not adopted by the US is that it didn't normally include a radio, which was an important element for the US Army.

Still, it's a very interesting question. Instead of shipping them our tanks, why could not simply have been building their tanks for them? Would certainly have simplified their logistics a bit, and could have resulted in a better Sherman.

There's already historical precedence for incorporating foreign technology into American designs in WWII: The Apache did not become the Mustang of legend until a British Merlin engine was installed.

In honesty, I suspect a great deal of the answer lies in good ol' American snobbery and distrust of all things Communist.

I once looked at some T-34s with a bunch of WW2 2nd div tankers. They proclaimed the T-34's Peices of sh…uh very badly made and probably not holding up very long in use.

There's lots of reasons, from doctrine, to tooling issues, to shipping distances and needing them to work when they got there, plus some major issues from WW1 where foreign weapons were tried to be adoped to us techniques resulting in great failures.

Besides, Shermans fight infantry, M-10s fight other tanks.

While the T-34 was a somewhat better tank in some categories, I would not describe it as being "manifestly superior." I also believe that few outside of Russia knew much, if anything about the T-34 until Germany encountered them during Barbarossa. By that time the first Shermans were probably coming off the assembly line.

Even at that, it is unlikely the T-34 could have been accurately evaluated by American engineers. Stalin sure wasn't going to give some to us. By the time it was, the US would have already been tooled-up to produce Shermans in the massive numbers that they were. It would have been crazy to reverse direction and adopt a new design. Curious your neighbor's daughter, an Economics major didn't consider this.

Finally, when the Sherman first appeared at El Alamein, it was clearly the best tank on the battlefield. The Pzr IV had a better gun, but it was more lightly armored, and Rommmel had too few to make an impact anyway.

My guess is that the T-34 wasn't recognized as being the really effective tank it was until late in the war, or even after.

One word: "Emcha".

Allen

Connard Sage

As the wonderful British actor Nicol Willliamson said in the 1968 British film, The Bofors Gun,

I'M SORRY! I'M SORRY! 1'M SORRY!

Never mind. Have a smiley

I suspect the T-34 would have had to be extensively redesigned to be compatible with American manufacturing.

The Sherman, while perhaps not tops in combat technology, was tops in the world as far as manufacturing technology (including being easily repairable).

"Finally, when the Sherman first appeared at El Alamein, it was clearly the best tank on the battlefield."

Well, that's worth a good laugh…

The reason the U.S. didn't re-tool to the T-34 is because of nationalism -- it would have been admitting the Soviets could design and build a better tank than we could.

I believe it was a matter of ideology. The US would never have produced the T34 because that would have given the USSR one big horn to toot. Look, the workers and people of the Soviet Union is not only overcoming the Fascists in combat but also the powers of Capitalism have adopted superior Soviet technology. Besides, would the Soviets have even shared their blueprints with the US? Doubtful, though they did reverse engineer some of out B-29's I believe so they weren't above using a bit o' capitalist ingenuity and calling it their own.

The T34 was superior in many respects, thick, sloped armor, high velocity gun, good drive train but the "learn on the job" form of Soviet training and lack of communication gear severely limited it and made it a far less effective vehicle. The lack of communication equipment didn't fit into US armored doctrine either. How much space would a decent (Sherman quality) radio have taken up? There's no room in the turret of the early T34's for one unless a sacrifice in munitions were to be made.

We learned our lessons and eventually built our tank hunters while upgrading the Sherman's main gun to deal with the late war Panzers. Ideal? Probably not but we didn't have to deal with the Soviet's gloating. It's not always a matter of economics, sometimes it comes down to pride (for good or ill), plus I'm sure there's not a little in the way of envy on the parts of soldiers going on here – we all know the enemy has got the better weapons systems – right?

Not Invented Here.

Not sure where folks are getting the T-34 was clearly superior from. The Soviets didnt think it superior to the M4. They tended to rate the M4A2/75 they got in lendlease as the equivalent to their T-34/76 and the M4A2/76 as equivalent to their T-34/85. In fact several units, including Guards units, transferred from the T-34 to the M4. What WAS supressed, for so long, was the fact that wartime reports from Russian tankers gave high marks to the M4.

For a good account I suggest "Commanding the Red Army's Sherman Tanks: The World War II Memoirs of Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitriy Loza" translated and edited by James F. Gebhardt, University of Nebraska press 1996.

When did the US Army design review board conclude that, based on current operations, the Sherman was 'all the tank the US Army needs'. Was it '43 or '44? An opportunity might have existed to start producing T-34, but I don't think the need was recognized until late enough in the war that changing over would have been a help. I'm mean…you've got M-26 creeping into action right at the end of the war…was the T-34 superior to the M-26?

Please advise the econ major to revisit the 'opportunity cost' of shutting down tank production to re-tool the assembly lines, retraining the workers to build the new tanks, retrain all the tank crews to use the new tanks.

Oh, and of course, the opportunity cost of letting the Axis have more time to produce their tanks and fight whilst the US stops to re-arm their tank fleet.

Wasn't the suspension of the T34 based on the old American Christie design? Rejected at home, Christie sold it to the Russians?
Did the T34 use those ballbearings we were shipping into Murmansk?

How long would it have taken to run proper trials to evaluate which one was better, then re-train and re-tool for T34 production? What about the implications of change in ammunition, change in maintenance requirements (tools and skills), change in training…

All this in the middle of a war where the re-training would be difficult at best.

How about the fact that the Soviet Union would not share the technical details with the U.S. on their tank and the U.S. didn't HAVE a T-34 to study at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds to assist with the design/manufacture of tanks in the U.S.

The Sherman, while inferior to the T-34 in most aspects, armor, speed, maneuverability, and armament – was the most easily repaired vehicle of the war. The timeframe for turning a knocked out Sherman back into an operational Sherman was about 24-48 hours if it didn't burn. If it burned, it was scrap. Note that in late 1944 the Germans fired upon Shermans until they DID burn – because the knew the tank would be back tomorrow if it didn't!

Interesting thought though – if the Soviet Union HAD shared technology for manufacture of the T-34, American tank design and manufacture would have taken a huge leap forward – a lesson we didn't get until after the war and we started copying German tanks for armor, armament, suspension systems, and the like.

Not to mention that you would have to re-engineer the turret for the main gun – as you know, the T-34 mounted a 76.2 or 85 mm, the Sherman a 75 (or 17 pdr) – for ammunition supply, keeping things simple is way better

Also have to engineer in a radio in every tank

I think Ermintrude has it right – in the middle of a war, probably not the best time for sober second thought on a total revision of your tank design strategy

For that matter, why didn't the Luftwaffe use Zeroes in 1940? Two hour loiter time (versus the 20 minutes or so an Me-109 had), more nimble? Probably a better fighter than the Me-109 in a number of ways

Again, why did the German use their 88 mm AA guns for anti-tank but that Brits never seem to figure that out?

Ah, the vagrancies of technology in war

"Interesting thought though – if the Soviet Union HAD shared technology for manufacture of the T-34, American tank design and manufacture would have taken a huge leap forward – a lesson we didn't get until after the war and we started copying German tanks for armor, armament, suspension systems, and the like."

Which brings us back to the key point, that Stalin wouldn't have just handed the U.S. Army the plans…

The T34 was a lousy tank compared to the Sherman. Western tankers would not even want to sit in one never mind fight in it. Read the Aberdeen Proving ground's test on the T34.
The T34 had technical superiority until the long barrelled PzIII and PzIVs appeared. But crews could not be trained quickly enough and few generals were competent at armoured warfare to achieve tactical parity with the Germans until 1943-44. The T34 was strategically successful, like the Sherman was. It could be built fast enough and was of an adequate quality. It was able to appear on battlefields where the Germans had few or no tanks to oppose them. The Russians called them 'matchboxes' , not a derogatory term as with the 'Ronson' nick-name for Shermans, but because the T34 was manufactured fast and was as plentiful as a matchbox.(after 1942 that is).
The Sherman was a very good tank but the Russians could not hope to manufacture it. The US would have to step back 10 years in technology to make the T34. The T34 was adequate to its task and could be successfully modified as necessary. But so was the M4. The other key factor is design and production. Complex items like tanks cannot be produced overnight. It takes years. The t34 broke th emould of tank design and beat the German design hands-down vis. the Panther…but it was not a pinnacle of achievement.The British experience with this is salutory. British industry finally turned out a winning design just as the war ended….T34s come in for a lot of praise by jealous Germans before 1943 and by people who did not fight in them. As with most of these comparisons it's apples and pears….

"Besides, Shermans fight infantry, M-10s fight other tanks."

This works as long as the Germans cooperate. Problem is, your typical German tank commander was usually not disposed to wait. Ignoring American tank warfare policy, they rudely engaged Shermans instead of waiting for the Wolverine's to show up.

Also,

Ideological differences?

I hope to god no Sherman crewman burned to death in his undergunned, underarmored, tank bacause some war production authorities in the Pentagon didn't want to give him a better tank sooner because it was a Russian design and therefore not "politically correct".

p.s. the US got a T34 for testing at Aberdeen in 1942 to compare with US models.

A Russian member of the testing commission's report concluded.

"Pt 10. despite the advantages of the use of diesel, the good contours of the tanks, thick armour and good and reliable armaments, the successful track design etc. Russian tanks are significantly inferior to American in their simplicity of driving, manoeuverability, strength of firepower, speed, reliability of mechanical construction and the ease of keeping them running"
Khlopov, Major general, Red Army Intelligence.

This was on Russian Battlefield but i cant find it there now.

No need for a bad conscience Mosby 65 !

The reasons are simple.

We were already tooled up for mass production of the Sherman. We didn't "re-tool from the Grant to the Sherman", the Grant was a stopgap until the Sherman could be produced. The Grant and Sherman also had a lot of parts commonality; not something that could be said about the T-34 and anything US. I expect that switching to the T-34 would have delayed things by one or two *years*. Anybody think the Soviets would have been happy waiting that long for a second front?

Second reason: I'm pretty sure that the Soviets weren't interested in giving us tanks or plans to build them. They needed all they could make, and were kind of busy with more important things than improving American combat vehicle performance by maybe 25-100%.
-Kle.

I have read Dmitriy Loza. He makes a two great points about the Sherman. It did not blow up and burn, and it had a drivers seat. The T-34 had an I beam welded across the hull for the driver to seat on. He said if you drove a T-34 for any distance, you were almost to tired to engage in a fight. He fought in Matilda's, Valentine's, T-34's and Sherman's. He thought the Sherman was the best of them all. I think the T-34 gets its reputation from one of Stalin's lines, "quantity has a quality all it's own".

Mike

Read "Death Traps" by Belton Y. Cooper. The tragedy is that the USA could have designed a tank in 1940 far superior to the T-34 had the US army had its stuff together. Even as it was, we could have had the M-26 Pershing tank (which was far superior to the Sherman) in combat from D-Day onward had General Patton not chosen to stick with the Sherman. The Sherman tank was a wonder of manufacturing but deficient in almost every important combat factor, armor firepower and mobility. The T-34 was primitive in construction and short on creature comforts but was superior in the areas that counted in combat.

The Soviet T-34 evolved out of a design sold to them by J. Walter Christy an American tank designer in the 30's. His tank had torsion bar suspension and sloped armor. Christy had tried to sell his ideas to the US ordinance department with no success.

In the event, as has been mentioned, we did not have access to a T-34 until after the war and uncle Joe was not about to share anything of value with us. The real question is why didn't the Germans copy the T-34. They captured many of them intact right at the beginning of their war with Russia. They recognized how superior it was to their tanks and immediately started designing a tank to counter it. It would have been easier and I assume faster to just copy it. I think it was national pride that prevented that.

Lots of misinformation here!

Allen

Are we in Wierd War 2 here ?

Ogdenlulimus, yes the T34 suspension, it's best feature, was an upgraded version of the Christie supension used on the BT series. U.S. Army Ornance evaluated and rejected it in favor of a a suspension that had high reliability and was easily maintained. IIRC the Panthers and Tigers were rated as being able to operate for about 14 hours without a breakdown. The U.S. tanks could go many times that long.
I also remember reading a report of a British officer who was sent to the Soviet Union in the late '30s to evaluate BT tanks while the Brits were working on their own (horribly unreliable) Christie suspension cruiser tanks. He recommended that the British Army get a license and build copies of the BT tanks as it was a proven design and far superior to any of the designs the Brits were then contemplating. They said no.
Finally, the M3/M4 series tanks were all about ease of production using existing manufacturing resources. For instance each variant of the Sherman used a different engine. A single radial aircraft engine, a couple types of twin inline gasoline engines, twin diesels and of course the multibank auto engine arrangement all fit in the M4 hull. That's why they didn't have a low silouette and sloping armor. The neighbor's daughter should have found all that in her research.

Actually, if you look at the M26 performance in Korea, you'll note that it was fairly quickly withdrawn in favor of the M4.

Shutting down a production line (a lot of them), getting secondary factories to produce parts, etc., is a major undertaking at the best of times.

The US fought (and won with its allies) WW2 with basically the weapons on the drawing boards in the late 1930s and early 1940s, upgrading as it went. Germany tried to leapfrog into the next generation of weapons and failed (and lost).

Trying to claim that the US should have built T-34 is like trying to claim that the US should have built Tiger Is after we capture some in North Africa.

The M4 had a low velocity gun, true, but it fired a decent HE round, could be used as an artillery piece and was dependable, day in, day out. The US produced about 50,000 of the M4 in WW2 and they are still in use around the world (as is the T34).

Dan

It is worth contrasting the attitudes of two of the major recipients of lend-lease. The Soviets seem to have taken and not 'given' (leave casualties and suffering aside), whereas the British freely handed over much advanced technology (something which could not be taken back afterwards) to the US.

As had already been mentioned, although often reluctant to accept things from others, one important piece of kit that the Americans did adopt, was the Mustang with the Merlin engine. A war winner.

To start, it was not a superior vehicle.

Now from an economic perspective here are some things to think about.

The Soviets produced the T34 in a few plants in a very controlled and managed economy. Even having it produced at multiple plants, it took nearly four years to get production going at any worthwhile rate. The biggest differences between versions tended to be simple casting differences between who provided the turrets, until the major design change to the T34-85.

In the US, the government had private industry involved in the production of the Sherman. They sought out companies to create tank arsenals and convert existing facilities. Each company then looked at the basic design and came up with their own ideas to speed up and improve production. I have to look it up, but offhand there were around ten facilities producing a mix of four or five basic hulls types, and equipping them with some five or six engine types and then some three or four basic armaments. This doesn't include the near unlimited experiments and conversions into support or 'funnies'.

Oh and Sherman production ran over 50,000 basic tank in under three years production, not including tank destroyers and self-propelled guns.

You might want to find the post war cartoon about the US commision investigating wartime production and complaints about the quality of equipment with which GIs received. It had George Patton in the Witness' box stating, "He got there firstest with the mostest!" while he points at a Sherman tank in the court room.

Wasn't the T-34 turret rotation hand cranked as opposed to the Shermans power traverse. Also, the Sherman had superior laying and tracking of it's main gun.

I don't know about misinformation, but there is certainly a surprising number of conflicting opinions regarding T34's given the abundance of literature on the topic.

Regarding the T34 rather primitive – OK, non-existent – driver's seat, I understand that was one of the first things a T34 tank crew attended to as a "field modification". I'm told that, at the very least, the T34 tank driver would use his army overcoat as a pad. Most T34 crews, if they and the tank survived long enough, would scrounge up a tractor-style metal seat from other destroyed or abandoned vehicles and attach that. They were also not above "borrowing" a real tractor seat from farm vehicles on the way to the front and using that.

Um, ah, how did the US manage to win the war with such "terrible and shoddy equipment"? Something must have gone right.

Lots of misinformation here!

Not a very constructive criticism…

Talking about the T-34's gun, according to Zaloga's T-34 in Action, the armor penetration of the 76.2 L/42 APHE at 1000m was only 61mm…enough to kill early Pz IIIs or PzIVs, but less likely against the ones with upgaded 80mm armor. How does this compare to the Sherman?

In terms of protection (same source) a T-34/75 M43 had a glacis of 47mm and a mantlet of 70mm. How does this compare to the Sherman?

How does the later 85mm cannon (penetration of 100mm armor at 1000m w/APDS) compare to the 76.2 M1A1 cannon of the Shermans?

Damon.

Damon.

Give that little lady a job in the tank bureau. The effort to convince most of us to do something that's not our own idea is almost always too much. That's some out of the box thinking. I think I'll write an alternate history with a big bunch of US T-34's.

If the M4 is the Sherman, what should we call the US manufactured T34? I like the "Uncle Joe" or "The Boss."

"Not a very constructive criticism…"

Sorry; today, it's not my job to educate the posters of the incorrect information posted here, almost all of which could be easily corrected with a simple online search for performance data, armor penetration data, and so on. Some posters are getting it right: they're pretty much the ones I would expect to. and they have a good sense of the bigger picture.

If you want an example, let's start with history. Check the facts about how Christie's (n.b.) prototypes were acquired by the Soviet Union.

But I'll just revert ro my one-word comment before: "Emcha". The Soviets were damn happy to get the Sherman.

Allen

You hear this kind of observation as regards a few weapons systems. Rifle X was better than rifle Y, so obviously all armies should have gone for rifle X. Same thing with tanks, the allies captured Tigers so surely they should just have copied them.

Now I don't pretend to hide the fact that I'm a mechanical idiot. I feel completely out of place in anything like a metal working shop or the like, and as far as I'm concerned all engines are powered by magic mice (the faster the car, the bigger the mouse, obviously).

Yet even I get the impression that tooling up factories around your country to build a specific type of tank is a massive undertaking. You're not simply talking about tools and jigs, but factory layout, training, spares, mechanics, transport (will they fit on wagons and boats and ramps), and that's before you even get to the combat aspects.

The T34 was a very good fighting machine and served the Red Army extremely well, but I think it's unrealistic to suggest it wasn't looking a bit rough itself by 1944. It was just as vulnerable to German anti-tank weapons (faust up to Pak) as the Sherman and Cromwell. Refitting it for Western armies would not be as simple as an episode of Scrapheap Challenge, as mentioned you've got to rip the main gun out for a start, shoehorn in a radio, and oh yes, it's only a two man turret (till the 85-mm in early 1944?), that shouldn't cause any disruption to the crews should it?

Perhaps the reason (stand by for correction) that no nation in the industrial age has copied a weapon system and put it into production with almost zero modification isn't entirely a matter of national pride, but also because it's just unfeasible to do on a mass scale. Concepts have been copied (sloped armour, shaped warhead) but I honestly can't think of a full weapons system.

Gary

Another way of answering the original question of "why didn't the US produce T-34's if they were so superior?" is that we did not know that they were superior at the time. We did not face them in battle until the Korean war. In fact the ordinance board did not realize that German tanks were superior until well into the war. There was a lag between the time that those on the front lines witnessed the problem and this information going up the chain of command into the military bureaucracy and having action taken on it. And then there was no guarantee that the decisions made would be the best for the men fighting or for the war effort. It is only obvious in hindsight.

@ Dan Cry, as I understand it the M-4 was favored for use in Korea because it was lighter and narrower and therefore able to negotiate the narrow roads and bridges found in that country more easily than the Pershing. Rest assured that the M-26 Pershing was a far better tank than the Sherman in every other way.

Anyone prepared to talk about doctrine (what I call "Big D" Doctrine--dependent on the synergistic effects of national will, national capability, strategy, manpower, training, etc.--not tactical military doctrine) and why the Soviets had the T-34 and when, in contrast to why we had the Sherman and when?

Allen

And oh, by the way:

There were no T34 tanks in WWII; the Soviets designed the T-34.

There were no T34 tanks in WWII; the Soviets designed the T-34.

There were no T34 tanks in WWII; the Soviets designed the T-34.

Allen

Now that's raising pedantry to a whole new level…

and why have all this WW2 threads started to seep into General? I don't even game anything after 1900

'these WW2 threads'

"Anyone prepared to talk about doctrine (what I call "Big D" Doctrine--dependent on the synergistic effects of national will, national capability, strategy, manpower, training, etc.--not tactical military doctrine) and why the Soviets had the T-34 and when, in contrast to why we had the Sherman and when?"

I do, I do, I do (saying raising his hand), but that would be cheating. :)