I have been reading Commanding the Red Army's Shermans by Dmitry Loza. The Soviets sure did not have any trouble taking on the Panther and Tiger tanks with the Sherman. Interesting that both Sherman equipped Soviet units achieved Guards status as well.
In your book "Commanding the Red Army's Sherman Tanks" you wrote that the 233rd Tank Brigade's M4A2 Shermans were armed not with the short-barreled 75mm but the long-barreled 76mm main gun in January 1944. Wasn't this a bit early? Didn't these tanks appear later? Explain one more time which main guns were mounted on the Shermans of the 233rd Tank Brigade. - Hmm, I don't know. We had very few Shermans with the short-barreled main gun. On the whole, ours had long-barrels. Not just our brigade fought on Shermans. Perhaps these were in other brigades. Somewhere in the corps I saw such tanks, but we had the tanks with the long barrels. http://english.iremember.ru/tankers/17-dmitriy-loza.html?q=%2Ftankers%2F17-dmitriy-loza.html&start=2 How did you fire, from short halts or on the move? - Both ways. If we fired on the move, the speed of the tank did not exceed 12 km/h. But we rarely fired on the move, only in order to incite panic in the enemy ranks. Primarily we fired from short halts. We rushed into a position, stopped for a second, fired, and moved ahead. - What would you like to say about the German Tiger? - It was an extremely heavy vehicle. The Sherman could never defeat a Tiger with a frontal shot. We had to force the Tiger to expose its flank. If we were defending and the Germans were attacking, we had a special tactic. Two Shermans were designated for each Tiger. The first Sherman fired at the track and broke it. For a brief space of time the heavy vehicle still moved forward on one track, which caused it to turn. At this moment the second Sherman shot it in the side, trying to hit the fuel cell. This is how we did it. One German tank was defeated by two of ours, therefore the victory was credited to both crews. There is a story about this entitled "Hunting With Borzois" in my book. ---------- So they had fireflys early on?
I don't think they got any Fireflys. The "long barrel" likely refers to the 76mm gun and the "short barrel" to the 75mm gun. I'm not sure if they got any of the 105mm variants either.
I'm half way through the book and they have lost only a handful of Shermans. Seems like they had their precision shooting down to a art because I have not come across any situations where they have had that much trouble dealing with the Tiger for one small exception when the Germans had one well entrenched. Loza waited until it became foggy and outflanked the Tiger and shot it in the front of the turrent. The Tiger commander popped up out of his hatch and a sniper did him in.
USSR [edit] A Soviet M4A2 near Smolensk before the start of Operation Bagration The Soviet Union's nickname for the M4 medium tank was Emcha because the open-topped figure 4 resembled the Cyrillic letter che or cha (Ч).[citation needed] The M4A2s used by the Red Army were considered to be much less prone to blow up due to ammunition detonation than T-34 (T-34-76), but tended to overturn in road collisions because of much higher center of gravity.[9] A total of 4,102 M4A2 medium tanks were sent to the U.S.S.R. under Lend-Lease. Of these, 2,007 were equipped with the 75 mm gun, and 2,095 carried the 76 mm gun. The total number of Sherman tanks sent to the U.S.S.R. under Lend-Lease represented 18.6% of all Lend-Lease Shermans.[10] The first 76-mm-armed Shermans started to arrive in Soviet Union in the summer of 1944.[11] In 1945, some units were standardized to depend mostly on them, and not on the ubiquitous T-34: 1st Guards Mechanized Corps, 3rd Guards Mechanized Corps, and 9th Guards Mechanized Corps.[11] "From Wiki" Not always the last word but looks like reasonable data. I think the near 50/50 mix of 75/76 guns is smarter than our 75/25 mix. Since Sherman's were used by the US, Brits, Poles, Czech's , Canadians, Aussies, Kiw;s , I do not imagine the Russians handled them any better than Western armies. Perhaps Comrade Loza added a bit of propaganda to his writings. No denigration to the brave Soviet tankers, just cannot understand how they are much different. It appears the Sherman's were issued to Guards units for uniformity, not necessarily that the Sherman equipment units won the designation because of the tanks. I do like the idea of a M4A2 , 76 mm gun and diesel engine. Sounds like a good read.
