"Tank Busting – Blowing Up the Myth of the Mighty" Topic

…M4 Sherman

"THE SHERMAN TANK — who hasn't cheered it in Hollywood epics like A Bridge Too Far, Band of Brothers, or The Pacific? Just when all hope seemed lost, a column of Shermans arrives in the nick of time to save embattled American soldiers. Great cinematic moments like these are spot on, aren't they? The Sherman was the tank that won the war, right?

Well, not exactly.

According to British historian Sir Max Hastings, "no single Allied failure had more important consequences on the European battlefield than the lack of tanks with adequate punch and protection." The Sherman, he added, was one of the Allies' "greatest failures."…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Seems like Sir Max is rather late to the show.

Seems like Sir Max is rather late to the show.

You could say the same about this whole thread:

TMP link

Someone had a book to sell, it seems. The Sherman wasn't great and individually inferior to German designs most certainly. It was however reliable and available in good quantities which those superior German designs were not.

One might ask Sir Max what British designs were superior to the Sherman in reliability, availability, speed and firepower at the time? ,

It was a matter of timing. In early 1943 the Sherman was superior to any tank the Germans had except the Tiger I.

If you still believe that gun size and the size of the front plate are the final arbiters of the value of a tank and that tanks merely traded blows until one of them burned, then yes the Sherman was a horrible design.

But in that case you believe a completely artificial fabrication.

We've been through this several times lately.

Sherman's a great tank – they were a bit slow to uparmour and upgun it but then it was a really good balance of all the right qualities and I don't just mean amour and firepower, but comms, ergonomics, mobility, reliability, etc., etc.

Someone posted a link over at Tank Archives.
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Apparently says of 38 M4A2 knocked out 28 of them burned.

If you were a tanker you'd rather be in a Tiger.

The thing is German armored vehicle production (according to Wikipedia) was 49,777 total and there were 49,234 Shermans produced from 42-44 it becomes clear that the numbers game was unwinnable for Germany.

"We've been through this several times lately." may be the understatement of the year

We have previously beat this already dead horse too many times. We're now into dismembering it hoof by hoof. Cheers!

In certain circles you get people who know just enough about firearms to get some bad ideas.

Take the guys who have discovered the .500 magnum revolver and think it's the ultimate handgun because it's the most powerful handgun in the world and they are going to carry it with a red dot and a laser to get pinpoint accuracy and any bad guy who sees that red don on their chest is gonna bricks. Maybe they heard of companies like Underwood or Buffalo Bore who are known for making really hot loads with scary names like xtreme penetrator.

They imagine themselves carrying the most badass gun in history and take on bad guys with shots so powerful all their relatives and friends are going to feel the massive impact and they will have impressive words laser etched onto the gun, like "This gun doesn't just kill you, it kills your soul !"

Until the day they are on an actual range and the first reaction you get out of them is that it looks a lot bigger than they thought and a lot heavier, four pounds hardly sounds like much does it ? Until you hold one and it kinda wants to hurt you just by putting a ton of weight on your ring finger and that long barrel is very muzzle heavy, but hey that's all to stop that massive recoil right ?

Then it's time to shoot the contraption and there is some nervous laughter, a joke and then after a lot of trigger creep and flinching it goes off and for a second the world switches off and there is this thunder that sounds louder than it should, despite wearing ear protection. The shot went wild and the hand stings and hurts.

You might coax them into emptying the cylinder and they might try a reload, but that's when most people get off the train because it's too much for them.

Maybe they looked scornfully at the guy with the little Ruger LCP or a boring Glock, but given the chance to carry a .500 all day suddenly becomes a huge burden. Four pounds on your hips with spare ammo and all the must have Mall Ninja Tacticool doodads starts to be a problem, the 8inch barrel means you need to wear a coat in warm weather and you stand to every law enforcement officer and people who spot potentially armed people for a living.

When you have certain metrics you cannot understand why nobody sees all the obvious advantages of the .500 magnum revolver. To you the guy who carries that .380 ACP compact is just asking to get killed by the ten foot tall rage machine berserker with arms bigger than an entire person who will try to tear your chest open with their bare hands and eat your guts. That tiny little caliber is not going to stop them. You want to go on the streets and come prepared for REAL fighting. John Wick style, but vastly more epic. It's the commuter who is fed up of getting stuck in traffic every day and buys a bike so they can magically weave through every problem and then discover there are many drawbacks to riding a motorcycle every day when you don't have that bug in your brain.

The guy (or gal) carrying that .380 knows they can put it quickly and accurately on target without flinching, double tapping center of mass like a pro, reliably and consistently because they put in a ton of training and have built up muscle memory and can use that gun without a second thought. Most people give up on .500 magnums after a few rounds because those pills hurt and cost a ton of money.

From a certain perspective it would sound like madness for people not to want to carry a .500 magnum, just as most people with experience think that a .500 is one of the worst carry guns, too big, too heavy to wear comfortably all day and it has far too much recoil for a gun that is only going to dump 10% of all its considerable energy in a human target and then dump the rest into the air (if not an innocent bystander) when they exit again.

And that's how we approach things like German tanks, we are convinced they are perfect in every way by virtue of being so powerful and do not realize they have many drawbacks and that stupid Sherman is a very practical tank especially if you have to sit inside one and operate it all day.

It's a compromise of various factors and the people who designed it tried to make something that fitted the parameters they expected a Sherman to operate within.

Say you write a list of virtues a tank might have and you further than armour and guns, to include crew comfort, ergonomics, survivability, maintenance, transport, resistance to flooding, resistance to tropical fungus, radio, vision etc the Sherman ticks a lot of boxes, and more than any other tank.

But who cares that a Sherman was tested to run from anything under arctic to tropical conditions its only the armour and firepower that counts !!!

That's the thinking that leads people to consider only the confrontation with a hostile threat in terms of lots of boom and the threat going down like a really epic real life version of a John Wick scene.

They don't deal with stupid things like maintenance or operating the tank outside of a fight, all they are focused on is that moment the Tiger is in proximity of a Sherman and it blasts it to pieces. Who cares you're probably not even inside that Tiger because your tank was commandeered by a superior and you're helping maintenance or sitting on your butt for three days until your Tiger has been repaired and hope the repair holds this time.

In absolute terms the Sherman was at a disadvantage, but then again Shermans fought other tanks only about 10-15% of the time, the rest of the time they were on the move or supporting the infantry and dealing with enemy infantry, guns, buildings and a variety of other targets. If you think a tank should be super powerful at the expense of nothing else it might lead you to finding yourself with over four pounds of dead weight strapped to your body expecting a fantasy scenario.

Max Hastings is talking absolute nonsense. On what planet is the Sherman, a tank so good that some countries were still using versions of it decades later a military failure.

I may be wrong on this but for the Allies it must've been a great advantage to mothball their assortment of unreliable armoured vehicles all of which needed their own supply chain of unique parts and servicing specialists in favour of a single vehicle which was reliable and did the job.

It is often said that the Second World War was won by superior industrial and logistical capacity and the Sherman was key to this, much like the Jeep and the Liberty Ship.

The M4 was mechanically reliable, fairly easy to maintain, and made in very large numbers. Which if you compare that to the German WWII "Big Cats", you'll generally find the opposite.

Add in the rub of logistics, i.e. ability to get to the battlefield, and in numbers.

Maintaining the "Iron Monsters", e.g. with replacement/repair parts.

As well as getting enough ammo and fuel.

The US M4 is superior on all accounts, IMO.

However, if you are in an M4 in a gun duel with a Panzer V or VIa/b. You may find yourself at a distinct disadvantage. You may need a 3-5 to 1 of M4s vs. a Pz. V or VIa/b to "win" that engagement.

If you can't effectively provide proper maintain/parts, fuel or ammo to a Pz.V or VIa/b. The M4s will be the de facto "winner". And it seems it was …

In practice wasn't it the case that a Big Cat was living on borrowed time once one was discovered, Allied air superiority being the crucial factor following D-Day.

Patric R,
I have seen the arguments presented many times but never with such a flare in presenting it. A superb analogy I will remember for a long time.

Thank you for taking the time to produce it.

Re Patrick R … Go ahead … make my day!

In practice wasn't it the case that a Big Cat was living on borrowed time once one was discovered, Allied air superiority being the crucial factor following D-Day.

That goes without saying, Allied Air Superiority was a critical factor. Not only KO'ing German AFVs but the trucks and trains that were trying to supply them.

Allied ground attack planes were really bad at ko ing jerry tanks.

The primary factor in tank v tank is and was crew quality.
By q3 1944 the new panther crews were barely trained and mostly just there as targets.
Sherman crews were often higher quality.
That their turrets rotated a bit faster or such like was neither here nor there.

You could build a system just had broad ratings weak medium strong for armour and gun, primarily emphasised crew quality. You could get results similar to reality.

Although an order for 1,500 Tiger IIs was tendered the impact of RAF bombing from October 1943 onwards had a severe impact on Henschel's facilities and production was limited to less than a third of this figure.

Unfortunately, I can't locate the source or documentation. Allied heavy bombing is often generalized as "ineffective" but the US did not have to worry about this.

Wolfhag

Andy Oneill is corrected, claims by the various air forces involved not withstanding aircraft were not the "hawks of the air" when it came to destroying AFVs. What they were good at was isolating the battlefield. This involved destroying resupply convoys. Further, reliance on rail meant well defined routes aircraft could concentrate on. Stop the flow of parts, fuel and ammunition and you do impact enemy armor. The threat of air attack did have a chilling effect on daytime movement though mostly logistic type movement vice enemy attack formations.

A few article worth considering, there are others:
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The primary factor in tank v tank is and was crew quality.

As I have posted many times a weapon system is only as good as it's crew.

The threat of air attack did have a chilling effect on daytime movement

Yes in many cases forcing AFVs and rolling stock to move at night.

But again overall Allied Air Superiority was a critical factor. And yes the majority of KO'd vehicles were soft skins/rolling stock. But CAS on occasions did kill some AFVs. Or at least made them stay in cover and not move. Which could influence the situation on the battlefield. Fear of being blown up CAS is a strong motivator to not make yourself a target.

E.g. Albeit decades later, some Iraqi tank crews abandoned their tanks when A-10s, etc. appeared over the battlefield. Some just were blown up before they could do anything but burn. They even would ignite smoke pots on their rear decks to make it look like they were KO'd and burning.

When wargaming, a Tiger on the table with ammo is better than a Sherman.

So then it is down to rules and scenario design

Same as when playing a cops and robbers game – the Magnum wins every time, unless the rules work…

But we often play Hollywood, not IRL

I have read with some amusement the analogy posted by Patrick R, and the synopsis described by Marc at work. They recall for me my own personal experiences with "magnum-envy".

When I was in middle-school I wound up in an arms race with another kid. This was the time when I started my firearms collection.

The other kid, Allen, had been shooting with his father for years. I had learned to shoot at summer camp far away in the mountains, and only when I was about 13 did we discover that there was a shooting range within a reasonable distance of our home in L.A. Suddenly I was all over my folks to get me some guns. They knew almost nothing of the subject, but were willing to go along.

So I got a Mauser (at the local surplus store). It kicked like a MULE (to a 13 year old). I went shooting with Allen. It kicked him like a mule too. Much harder than his dad's .243.

So Allen lobbied his folks, and wound up with a 7mm Magnum. Wow, talk about kick! Honestly, that gun was torture to shoot (for a 14 year old).

In the mean time I got a 9mm Browning HP pistol. Man that was a fun pistol to shoot. And it even had "high power" in the name!

So Allen lobbied his folks, and wound up with a Ruger Blackhawk revolver in .45 Long Colt. And when I got a reloading set-up at home (to save money on the high volume of ammo I was shooting off), he got a reloading set-up at his home (to hot-load his .45 Colt). He loaded it past .44 Magnum loads, as the .45 Long Colt cartridge was bigger, and the Ruger Blackhawk was also available in .44 Magnum caliber (so clearly capable of withstanding the pressure). So now he had a .45 Magnum.

Shooting it was felt kind of like slamming a cracked baseball bat on the sidewalk. The shock of firing was painful, there was almost no way to keep the grip firm in your hand, so it would rotate back and you'd wind up with the metal of the gun slamming into the web between thumb-and-forefinger, and un-burnt powder would spray out the sides to pepper anyone unfortunate enough to be standing within 5 feet on either side.

It was a preposterous gun to shoot. And it was quite satisfying to his adolescent male sensibilities.

I had never quite drawn the line connecting the dots before, but my experiences in that same timeframe with wargaming opponents building armies of King Tigers, Jagdpanthers and Jagdtigers does seem to have many parallels…

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

When wargaming, a Tiger on the table with ammo is better than a Sherman.

Yep … but as we know IRL to get that Tiger and/or Sherman to that point in that situation, much more goes into it.

@ Andy O'Neill

You could build a system just had broad ratings weak medium strong for armour and gun, primarily emphasised crew quality. You could get results similar to reality.

You know it's funny you say that. 40-odd years ago there was a series of 5 books called "Tank Battles in Miniature". There was a volume about the Eastern Front and a volume about the Western Front, with exhaustive hair-splitting of tank armour and gun performance.

There was also a volume about the Arab Israeli war. This featured many of the same tanks as those in the two previous titles I mentioned: Stalin, T34, Panzer IV, Sherman, Centurion. But instead of six armour grades for each side of the hull and of the turret, this volume just had light / medium / heavy for the regardless of aspect. For its gun same thing, with just two ranges, effective and long.

And you know what? You did indeed get much the same results this way – with a lot less faff – as what you got if the same vehicles faced off under the much more complicated rules in the earlier books.

I conclude that in 1/300 at least, light / medium / heavy is the way to go. It's not even hard to work out what's what. A KV1 is a Heavy tank with a Medium Gun. A Sherman is a Medium tank with a Medium gun. A Nashorn is a Light tank with a Heavy gun.

And so on.

@ Mark

I've never fired a handgun but at school we had a rifle range where we fired the 0.303" SMLE. We were only ever allowed to fire them prone because of the recoil, and if you didn't hold the thing right into your shoulder when you fired, it would kick you hard enough to leave a nice oval buttplate-shaped bruise that turned purple and green in a couple of days. How on earth people fired these things 30 times a minute I cannot fathom.

I've fired many different small arms. WWI, WWII/Korea and the Vietnam era weapons. Again a weapon is only as good as the trooper behind it.

Re shoulder bruising, the same effect was reported during the horse and musket era after an extended fire fight. One wonders how many men chose to discharge their musket from the hip rather than fire from an already sore shoulder.

B

When wargaming, a Tiger on the table with ammo is better than a Sherman.
Yep … but as we know IRL to get that Tiger and/or Sherman to that point in that situation, much more goes into it.

ha! – that reminds me of a scenario I designed that had 2 Tiger I vs 8 Shermans. The Tigers only had 2 AP shots each for the game, due to supplies being intercepted. The Tiger commander came out aggressively and fired the rounds quickly and brewed up 2 of the Shermans at distance. The Allied players got timid and sought cover while the Tiger commander moved around in a threatening manner. By the time the Allied commander caught on that the Tigers were doing very little, they ran out of turns and the Tigers withdrew at nightfall for a tactical victory.

That sound like a good scenario with a little reality thrown in.