Quote:
Originally Posted by tater
Yeah, jap tanks were crap. They had little in the way of artillery, either, actually. WTF were they thinking?
The Sherman was indeed not a great tank, but it did not exist in a vacuum. Nothing on the battlefield does. The Germans made many designs, and didn't make any of them in enough quantity. They also lacked reliability. The US tankers, being Americans, were used to cars, too. Look at the stats on vehicle ownership/familiarity before the war. Most US troops has first had experience keeping a car of that era running (since they could only afford "clunkers" that needed plenty of shade-tree work to keep running). Others were farm boys who had to fix engines as a matter of living on a farm. The Sherman fit well into that milieu. They were easy for our boys to keep running, and at least were not too slow.
And, as was said during the war: quantity has a quality all its own.
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I remember seeing a statistic that the Sherman required 4-5 man hours of maintenance for every hour of service. For comparison, the KV series required like 16 hours of maintenance for every hour of service. The T-34 had a record similar to the Sherman's, and the Tiger one similar to the KV's.
I wonder: did the Soviets use the IS-3 in the '45 Manchurian campaign? I would feel EXTREMELY safe in that machine at that time and place. Of course, it probably drank fuel like a beast and was not really needed, so it probably wasn't.
Did you know that Lesley McNair had plans before him allowing for the mass production of the Pershing as of 1943, and he vetoed it? And than he got killed by friendly fire the next year. Sometimes karma strikes early.