@knp7765:
Yeah, one of the reasons the Allies were able to defeat Germany was by sheer volume. The Sherman tank was a really decent tank, but it really couldn’t compare to the Panthers and Tigers of the Germans. I saw an interview with a guy that drove Sherman tanks in the war and he said that you could send up 4 Shermans against a Panther and while you would take the Panther out, you end up losing 3 of your 4 Shermans. What was sad is that the guys that were training for tank duty here in the States were told by the Army that they were getting the best tanks out there and the Germans had nothing to compare with them. Then they get over to Europe and what a nasty surprise.
I would be interested to find out when he was told that, though. The “best ___anything out there” is usually a moving target. In 1941, given the information that the trainer had at the time, it might have been at least arguably true. Compared to Panzer III’s and early-model Panzer IV’s, the Sherman was fine. Late model Shermans were OK against even late-model Panzer IV’s and in Korea, Shermans did just fine against T-34/85’s. (In fact, late in the Korean war, they even started pulling out M26’s and sending in more Shermans, because the Shermans were doing just fine and the M26’s were having mechanical/ mobility issues in the Korean environment…)
I’ve also read an interview with a Soviet general who was young commander back then of (was it a company? I’m try to remember…) of Shermans for the Red Army, and he actually defended the Sherman quite vociferously and said he and his men preferred them over T-34’s for a variety of reasons. I remember early on in his interview he said that many people would tell him the Sherman was a bad tank, and he would say “Compared to what?!” It’s always a relative thing.
Of course a Sherman would struggle against a Panther, though, because even though the Panther was ostensibly a “medium” tank, it was 10 tons heavier! It’s like pitting a medium-weight boxer against a heavy-weight boxer and then asking what was wrong with the poor medium-weight guy that he got beat up so bad! Even a sloppy engineer can do a lot with 10 more tons of armor, and the Germans’ fault was anything but under-engineering their weapon systems! I think one of the key mistakes that American planners made was that they assumed that the Panther was going to be used, like the Tiger, in limited #'s. Albert Speer, however, managed to streamline Panther production to where they started producing them in numbers, and the Panther was just right in that “sweet spot” where they were enough bigger than the Sherman and T-34 as to be tough for them to kill (without at least a main armament upgrade) and yet they really gave up nothing in terms of speed and maneuverability. Their only downside was in reliability…
