Like Butter!

First off, the Sherman weighed 37tons not including any additional 'protection'added on in the field.
Any and every tank could and was penetrated by AT fire.No one could put a foot of armor everywhere on their tanks.

Certainly no tank was above getting turned over by a bomber run or ship bombardment.


Heartland. The U.S. simply out-produced Germany...comparing apples to oranges there are'nt you?
10 Shermans vs 1 Tiger,sooner or later they'll get a hit.
Your sources say "axis"tanks dis-abled by mines and abandoned or out of gas?

 

10 Shermans to 1 Tiger doesn't sound very good to me. Once the Pz IV's were depleted the Allies/soviets found more and more of the low and eadly Stug III's filling in for the second Pz. Abteilungs. From what I have read and heard from German veterans the Shermans brewed up like a torch in no time from one 75mm hit. As mentioned several times the sherman was not a very low to the ground armored unit. It reminds me of a armored cavalry more than anything rolling through Normandie and Germany during 45. since most of the Shermans riding high in the lend lease program on the Ost front, the GErmans set up traps for them as they could be seen from some distance. The soviets were not very keen on using natural materials to break up the high silhoutte of the Sherman.

Good thread keep er going.....

 

What Cooper's book really misses is that tank fighting didn't occur in a vacuum. There are a myriad of other considerations here that need be discussed.
By 1944 German tank tactics were often just plain bad. They had learned a good many really bad lessons fighting the Russians that they applied to fighting the Western Allies much to their own demise. Here are a few with examples:

1. The idea that Tigers were invincible and Panthers nearly so. Wittmann's battles prove the case here. At Viller's Brocage his boldness worked. A few days later against the Canadians he died in a hail of hits as the Canadians easily plastered his exposed Tiger with round after round. Unlike the Russians with their nearly blind T34/76s that mostly lacked radios and other refinements, the Canadian Shermans had better vision equipment, radios and, better crew efficency. Too much time in the East had taught Tiger crews to expect a lethargic response in tank on tank combat.

2. "Leading with your face" as I like to call it. The Germans regularly attacked in the East without prior reconnissance and often with very imbalanced units. It wasn't uncommon for units to be mostly or all armor, go unsupported by artillery and, not infrequently, infantry. In the West this was simply disasterous. Wittmann's run at Villers Brocage was meaningless in the long run. He lost his tank, and the other three vehicles with him for an unsustainable tactical success.
In the Lorraine in September, the 106th Panzer Brigade led by Obrest Dr. Franz Bake, a Knight's cross holder and panzer legend got literally shot to pieces in a single engagement against the US 90th Infantry Division.
Dr. Bake's command attacked without artillery or reconnissance. His command was split down several routes for speed.
Instead of routing each small group of defenders he encountered as usually happened in the East, the 90th got on the air and within minutes after the first engagments Bake found he was attacking into an alert hornet's nest of resistance. Artillery followed in short order. The attached 607th (towed 3") Tank Destroyer Battalion was ready and engaged his columns very successfully. His flanks were quickly threatened by counter attacks by the attached 712th Tank Battalion.
After blundering into repeated ambushes, he called off the attack having lost nearly half his command and accomplishing nothing. His losses were 762 casualities or captured, 21 of 47 tanks lost, 60 of 113 halftracks destroyed and 100 supporting soft skins lost. Only 9 tanks were reported operational.
This story repeats itself from Normandy to VE day in the West.
Why? Because the Germans lost badly enough each time and lacked the capacity within their largely abbreviated training periods to digest the lessons being learned in these disasters and change their tactics. They simply lacked the corporate memory necessary to enact significant change.

3. Speer's decision to reduce non-combatant vehicle production and related items in favor of more arms also had an effect. By late '44 there were few, if any, German mechanized divisions that had anything close to their full maintenance capability. Most lacked ARV making recovery of damaged vehicles difficult or impossible. This made everything from refueling to repairs more time consuming and difficult.

These are but a few of many different causes that led to heavy German casualities and go a long way to explain why the loss ratios favor the Western Allies in armored combat.

 

In addition, it is worth noting that among Allied tank losses, around 70% came from German anti-tank guns (according to Patton, as well as British post-war study) rather than tanks. The question is just how big an influence a more dedicated "tank-duel" design such as the M-26 Pershing would have against ambushing AT guns?

 

Nope, I'm considering overall losses here, as that is what counts. If the Allied forces, through whatever means, managed to get a roughly equal kill ratio versus German tanks, the Sherman and other Allied tanks must be considered adequate for the job. Not perfect by any means, but hardly "death traps"!

Now, throw around 30% of the Soviet tank forces at Kursk into the mix, there are some death traps!

 

Like Erich said, good thread.

Gotta head out to work but I'll leave you with this,Heart;

What would you rather be in crossing the battlefield at Kursk? A Sherman

make mine a Stug :stugg:

 

Compared with the flimsy armour with a pop-gun that was the numerous T-70s...heck YES!

Compared with the "grave for seven brothers" M3 Grants...heck YES!

 

OK, I give. A Sherman with the 17pdr. :bullet:

...be a firefly

 

Yes, this is an interesting thread and shows again how hard the 'best...' question is.

It's all very well having 'wonder weapons' but you need a lot of them and everything was diminishing for Germany, increasing for the Allies, post D-Day.

To me, the Tiger Is/IIs are like the Me262 - wonderful things, and maybe a better fighting design ( who knows ? ) but, if the air is full of P-51s and the ground is crawling with Shermans.....

( Just as an anecdote to the main topic, my Uncle was in Shermans at the very end of the war and told me that the 'Ronson' reputation made him very uneasy - his crew were in constant fear of being 'brewed up' ).

 

The thing about German tank crews was that they were truly confident about their tank- Tiger and Panther.

They trusted they could take alot of hits and survive and if you have that advantage-I think that´s quite a big thing in a battle.

 

Morale can really make all the difference - b/t German and American tank crews - if you don't have confidence in your equipment, your efficiency suffers. It seems the only way you could feel "safe" in a Sherman is to HAVE tons of Shermans crawling all over the place - more targets, the less odds that you're going to get hit....

 

In one of my books there is a picture of a Panther Ausf A disguised with tinplate and paint to resemble a M-10 motor carriage. It was supposed to have been used by a unit under Col. Skorzeny in the Ardennes for scouting behind allied lines. The tank looks very similar except for the wheel layout.

Perhaps they should have disguised the Sherman to look like a big German tank.

 

I know the photo, Ta - the tank is lying next to the railway station at Malmedy.

 

Kai is quite right here. The differences between allied and german tanks has become known in history circles as 'The Tank Gap' While in actual fact there is not mcuh difference in between the main combat tanks,the Sherman, especially the marks used in NW Europe, the Cromwell and the MkIV, the major problems was pscychological. To every allied tank crewman each tank round the corner was a Tiger and that created a real fear in them. They also had the reassurance, confirmed on them by there generals, thats the tanks could be replaced but they could not. This meant that allied crewman were much more ready to abandon a damaged, not destroyed though, tank than the germans, for whom saving a precious tank was important. General Dempsey even went so far as basing Operation Goodwood on the premise of tank replacements were greater than infantry replacements. (D'Este 'Decision in Normandy' (Penguin:2001) p. 355)

It is the similar effect that allied air power had on the Wehrmacht. By 1944 all planes in the sky were considered allied even though they might not be.

[ 13. March 2005, 10:11 AM: Message edited by: Mahross ]

 

Having struggled through almost all of Chapter 4 of Buckley's 'British Armour In The Normandy Campaign' I'm approaching Chap. 5 ( 'The Tank Gap' ) with keen interest to see what light is shed on this subject....

 

These writings of the Tigers to be superweapons is a bit rich for me. The use of ratios used by allied tanks to overcome a tiger is even more suspicious. The main enemy for allied tanks in the Desert and Normandy was a dug in Anti tank gun.

The simple fact is that in the race between Warhead and Armour, is that the warhead will always win.

In addition we have the asymetrical fighting aspect. 'Limejuice' called on the radio and smoke deployed on the target are would destroy or chase away the threat. There is from what I gather a lot of controversy about the effect of close air support now, but still everyone agree that the germans lost their possibilitys to attack efficiently when they lost air superiority.

Another issue is that once the allies breached the front in Normandy, and their Armour could operate as intended (mobile warfare) they performed well. A role that the Tiger NEVER could do given maintenance, mechanical reliability and fuel consumption.

For me it is a great puzzle that the allies denied their tankers to use the countermeasures from the desert against the 88mm. Bricks and sandbags to act as 'skirts'

 

If there was no operation Lüttich and the German tanks were in reasonable numbers there to fight back..who knows how fast the allied would have gone forward...

 

I'm puzzled here Kai.

Operation Lüttich lasted from 7th August till the 13th. So any effects for scrapping that operation would be effective from 7th August and forward right?

The germans never managed to replace their tank losses in Normandy. Something that I guess that Martin can comfirm as he advance in the book he is reading.

I recon that most of the german tank losses had already occured by Operation Lüttich. That and the loss of other units too.

Op. Epsom 25-30 June.
Op. Goodwood 18-20 July.
Op.Spring 25-27 July.
Op. Cobra 25-31 July.
Op. Bluecoat 30-7 July August.
Op. Totalise 7-13th August.

So abandoning Operation Lüttich would do what?
Caen is captured, and Patton is driving like hell through the countryside. Pandoras box is already open.

 

If they hadn't had Luttich, anything and anyone that was not lost would still have hade to make it out at Falise.

 

curious from our English forum members Jaeger has posted some important land actions of Normandie, and we refer to all the German armor losses as something they could never regain.

question: anyone ever put into effect a true loss(s) of British armor during the time frame ?

I know full well about the claims - over of both sides