http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEeQPUp5VTY&feature=related

Number built ~ 50,000

Sometimes quantity wins the day over quality.

It wasn’t a complete failure. Though it often won more battles by substituting plywood cutouts.

Looked ok to me. It was designed to be fast, portable, and mass produced. It was not designed to face off against a Tiger.

You do not take a knife to a gun fight.

The commanders who sent it into battle against a superior enemy should have been forced to be in the tanks with them.

Kingy said:

Looked ok to me. It was designed to be fast, portable, and mass produced. It was not designed to face off against a Tiger.

You do not take a knife to a gun fight.

The commanders who sent it into battle against a superior enemy should have been forced to be in the tanks with them.

At Tobruk my old man and his mates shifted plywood cutouts around each night.. for Rommel’s dawn surveys. Caused him to run out of fuel and temperment.

party_pants said:

Number built ~ 50,000

Sometimes quantity wins the day over quality.

Aye. Some people tend to forget that the Germans lost WW2. And it wasn’t a near thing – it was the most complete and spectacular defeat in military history. One important reason for this was that in what inevitably became a war of attrition, the German strategy favoured quality of equipment over quantity. But they failed to produced the quality required to overcome the allied advantage in quantity. Thus the Sherman tank, like the T34, was strategically superior to the German machines.

Quite correct in that individually they were utter rubbish.
I recently read a book written by one of the men that used to service them in the field and he had very little good to say about them. They were very seriously miss-matched against every German tank and it was only the support from the other sections of the US Army & Air Force that kept them going.

Nearly forgot, the book is aptly called “Death Traps”, by Belton Cooper.

http://ebookstore.sony.com/ebook/belton-y-cooper/death-traps/_/R-400000000000000077167

Why did the Germans win so many battles in the first half of the war? Because they used their early production tanks (which were pretty crappy, even by the best allied standards of the time) en masse in a calculatedly attritional manner, expecting to lose large numbers of them in rapid attacks that would nonetheless encircle and defeat an entrenched enemy, whose own armour was ineffectively dispersed and often outnumbered. This is pretty much what the Allies did in the second half of the war, and the strategy paid off conclusively. Each German tank needed to be able to destroy many more Allied tanks than was arithmetically feasible.

Why did the Germans win so many battles in the first half of the war?

better tactics and weapons ..

the western europeans pinned their hopes on static defence lines such as the Maginot Line which the germans simply went around – using their mobile warfare – blitzkrieg..

the russians beat them by superior manpower, resources and they’re crazy mofos.

The yanks weren’t alone in building flawed tanks.

The British produced the Churchill tank with a fixed turret. The entire tank had to be turned to change the aim of the hull gun.

“Most apparent was that the Churchill’s engine was underpowered and unreliable, and difficult to access for servicing. Another serious shortcoming was the tank’s weak armament, the 2 pounder (40 mm) gun, which was improved by the addition of a 3 inch howitzer in the hull (the Mk IICS had the howitzer in the turret) to deliver an HE shell albeit not on a howitzer’s usual high trajectory. These flaws contributed to the tank’s poor performance in its first use in combat, the disastrous Dieppe Raid in August, 1942.”

wiki

if i were the germans i would have designed a round for a tank that would perfectly create the most damage that would mean that the sherman could never be used again

ideally you’d be better off blowing the sherman with a shell to destroy its tracks/ chassis and hope that the crew get the hint to get out and get away.

if you overan the positions you’d just have a crew to take the sherman back and use it to melt into something more useful

if i designed a tank i’d use a diesel electric locomotive philosophy. just use a diesel engine to rev within a certain range and use electric motors to drive each wheel, if one gets knocked out the others can compensate. you’d use electric motors to move stuff, less oil and hydraulics slopping around in the event of a hit.

you don’t have a huge gear box, you just use a motor controller system just like on a locomotive

you could use stepper motors i guess or three phase motors to drive the wheels.could be less weight because theres no gear box and smaller engine??

the wheels structural strength is made from the motor that drives it.

wookiemeister said:

if i were the germans i would have designed a round for a tank that would perfectly create the most damage that would mean that the sherman could never be used again

A bit like the 88 mm anti-tank gun they developed?

party_pants said:

wookiemeister said:

if i were the germans i would have designed a round for a tank that would perfectly create the most damage that would mean that the sherman could never be used again

A bit like the 88 mm anti-tank gun they developed?

ok instead of developing a whole new tank to fire a whole new shell make a whole new shell to fit in any tank and do immense damage

it would be cheaper in the long run

the germans were making new tanks instead of making more efficient shells that might have been fired by most pieces of equipment.

wookiemeister said:

party_pants said:

wookiemeister said:

if i were the germans i would have designed a round for a tank that would perfectly create the most damage that would mean that the sherman could never be used again

A bit like the 88 mm anti-tank gun they developed?

ok instead of developing a whole new tank to fire a whole new shell make a whole new shell to fit in any tank and do immense damage

it would be cheaper in the long run

the germans were making new tanks instead of making more efficient shells that might have been fired by most pieces of equipment.

that was the madness of the whole thing, they kept making new tanks/aircraft/subs instead of finding new types of shell that could be fired by anything

maybe they could have created new types of shells to be fired by aircraft that could have been good against bombers?

incendiary shells against bombers ????

perhaps they could have removed the machine guns on a messerschmidt and had a lone gun under the belly and been able to shoot from a greater distance so to be out of effective range of the defending guns on a B17??

you line yourself up and out of harms way start blazing away??

gattling gun arrangement like an A10??

A bit like the 88 mm anti-tank gun they developed?

the 88 was an all round gun. probably the best bit of artillery in ww2.

The 88 was an AA gun but did a good job on taks as well.

Fliegerabwehrkanone gotta love german words where they just keep adding bits. and then them allies come along and call it flak.

Boris said:

A bit like the 88 mm anti-tank gun they developed?

the 88 was an all round gun. probably the best bit of artillery in ww2.

Yes. Started out as an anti-aircraft gun but it was discovered it could be improvised as an anti-tank gun, and a very effective one at that. This lead to further development of sepcialised version.

wookiemeister said:

that was the madness of the whole thing, they kept making new tanks/aircraft/subs instead of finding new types of shell that could be fired by anything

Yes, stupid Germans. They should have found a way of firing an 80 mm shell from the 37 mm gun of the early Panzer III types.

Yes, stupid Germans. They should have found a way of firing an 80 mm shell from the 37 mm gun….

just enlarge the breech to accept the 88 and keep the barrel at 37mm. easy peasy. good job i wasn’t around in 1942 otherwise things may have been different.

The German tank crews actually admired captured Sherman tanks for their superior off-road performance, especially at speed, and above all, for their superior riding comfort.

Peak Warming Man said:

The 88 was an AA gun but did a good job on taks as well.

Good story about the german panzer crews baulking at firing on poor russian women manning the defences at Stalingrad until they realised they were on 88s and the poor russian women took out half a panzer division..

>>>Fliegerabwehrkanone gotta love german words where they just keep adding bits. and then them allies come along and call it flak.

Und “Panzaabwehrkanone” called “pak”, anti-tank gun.