Doesn’t an Abrams have thermal imaging? The Sherman would have to have a pretty good hide position.
Yes, the Abrams has IR that can see through camoflauge. But it’s possible the a Sherman could hide around the corner of a building or something like that.
The most vulnerable would be the individual soldier. There simply isn’t that much of an advantage on the individual level. Well, outside of night vision. However, morning still comes.
Increased communication, tactics, logistics, and such would help larger groups not not individuals.
Next, I think tanks. Throw together a mix of various models as well as the M18 tank destroyer which has a top speed close to that of the Abrams. As others said, the modern weapon will eventually run out of ammunition and it could be disabled with shots to the treads.
For ships, maybe you could overwhelm a modern ship by the entire US navy. You would inflict a lot of damage, but they could eventually get you.
Aircraft would be harder. They couldn’t touch you until you had to land for refueling.
Subs they could never get you.
A Seawolf-class SSN might operate with virtual impunity, taking out entire Midway-type carrier groups.
“Fair fight” is an oxymoron. 
Yes. It’s not Hollywood see through walls thermals though. Till you get to the M1A2 SEP and it’s second generation thermal site, the Abrams thermal wasn’t even as effective as the one on the M60A3. When tankers talk hide position they are generally referring to nothing exposed above intervening dirt, whether that’s a prepared three tier position or being behind intervening terrain that they could then pull up from behind to engage forward. If you don’t care about being able to engage forward a tall enough wall/building blocking you to the front is enough.
Did some googling found this, not a Sherman but close enough.
Look at the first Gulf war. That was circa 1990 American armor, air and naval against Soviet-built equivalent from maybe a decade or less earlier.
For tanks, I imagine the limiting factor would be until the Abrams tank or Bradley IFV ran out of main gun or TOW rounds. I don’t think any tank in WWII could penetrate an M1 and the Bradley can just stay out of range. Heck, even a TOW mounted HUMVEE could just dart around the battlefield taking out Panzer tanks with impunity.
Planes, I suspect that modern Raptors, F18 Super Hornets and whatnot might have trouble engaging targets like Zeros or Messerschmitt Bf 109 because they are so slow. Then again, I don’t think they have trouble taking out helicopters so again, it’s probably just a question of how many missiles and gun rounds they carry.
Ships are more interesting as WWII had battleships. But as they were obsolete against carriers by the end of the war, I suspect that they would be even more obsolete against a Nimitz or Ford class carrier battlegroup and its air wing and escorts of guided missile cruisers and destroyers.
Individual soldiers, the WWII era soldier might actually have an advantage of range against a modern soldier with his M16. But if you are talking platoon or company sized units with their ability to coordinate and maneuver, or if time or terrain becomes a factor, certainly the modern soldiers have an advantage with their lighter equipment.
Of course, all that is 1v1 or at most small equivalent platoon or company sized units. If you are pitting an SS Panzer army group, with support from an Luftwaffe air wing and naval units against a modern heavy armored division (2 armor brigade combat teams, 1 stryker brigade combat team, plus air and artillery) plus a carrier battlegroup and it’s air wing, each team with era appropriate logistics, I imagine the answer is “all of them”. The WWII forces simply could not keep up with the tempo, situational awareness and coordinated attacks of a modern army benefitting from 70 years of technology advances.
What about the modern soldiers body armor? Could it stop a round from a WW2 rifle or heavy machine gun?
One thing I think US forces would get confused when they saw American soldiers wearing German style helmets.
This along with what Tokyo Bayer noted, night vision equipment, are two of the three most important differences IMO in capability between WWII and modern infantry, again as far as their own organic equipment (ie what they normally carry themselves, not other supporting weapons they can call on like artillery, tanks, air support etc). The third would be small Unmanned Aerial Systems organic to small infantry formations.
Before even considering rifle bullets, body armor which could not stop them but could stop some/most mortar and artillery fragments was important, since those caused the majority of casualties in most situations in WWII. That was a significant advance for US forces even by the time of the Vietnam War (such vests were used experimentally in the Korean War).
Modern so called Level IV body armor can stop rifle bullets in many cases, including full caliber (ie like 7-8mm) full power ones used by many WWII rifles and machine guns. ‘Heavy machine gun’ in US parlance tended to refer to the Browning 0.50 caliber: individual body armor cannot generally stop its rounds and definitely not the specialized armor piercing ones. However in other armies in WWII ‘heavy machine gun’ tended to refer to machine guns fired from a tripod rather than bipod, usually still rifle caliber.
Body armor and especially the rigid ballistic plates used at Level IV do not cover the whole body: they of course don’t make people anywhere near invulnerable to rifles, machine guns or artillery or mortar fragments. But do they make a significant difference.
Better communications might also be argued as a significant advance of modern infantry among themselves. But the main effect of communications and other related electronics (laser rangefinder/designators, fire control computers etc) is to bring supporting arms into action more quickly and effectively. That could be an overwhelming advantage for a modern infantry unit, but again might be distinguished from the equipment a small infantry unit (say up to a company) carries itself.
Of course, the majority of casualties in a firefights in Vietnam were within the first few minutes because people got low really quickly. Being able to bring in coordinated fire control was a strong advantage for the Americans.
Another advantage with modern infantry would be the advances in proximity fuses over the WWII shells which were introduced by the Allies late in the war.
In a desert battle scenario, like say the modern battle of 73 Easting or the tank battles of North Africa in WWII, the Abrams would be nigh-invincible, and could almost certainly kill as many tanks as it had ammunition for, and would only stop killing Shermans when they ran out of ammunition.
Reading about 73 Easting should be pretty instructive, it’s insane in open field the advantages conferred by:
- Thermal vision against an enemy who is reliant on traditional visual target acquisition
- Massively more powerful defensive armor
- Higher speed
- Greater accuracy
- The ability to fire while maintaining high speed, and hit a target accurately
A Sherman would have almost no chance of successfully hitting an M1 in open terrain, even if they were in range–because the M1 isn’t going to stop moving and the Sherman is going to have to do so if it wants a chance at hitting the M1. Stopping to ready aim and fire will likely result in the Sherman being destroyed instantly.
At the beginning of 73 Easting, the commander on the ground (Capt. HR. McMaster–I was in the Army in this era and he literally became a legend overnight) with his tank literally killed 3 T-72s in 8 seconds. The Shermans would think they were fighting god on earth.
Now, even modern armor has weaknesses. In urban combat it’d be possible to get close range and the M1 at a disadvantageous position and take it out, take away its tracks or engine and it won’t move again.
In the early 1980s movie The Final Countdown, a modern aircraft carrier time-travels to December 6, 1941. The movie includes this sequence, in which a pair of F-14s encounters a pair of Zeros; it’s a bit of a lopsided contest.
The production notes on the Wikipedia page included this detail:
Which somewhat parallels the difference in the M1’s fortunes in the 1991 war (very few M1 combat losses) to the later Iraq War (eventually and cumulatively pretty numerous M1 combat losses).
Besides the default assumption of conventional armies’ usual tactics in WWII, in the real case of Iraq an enemy reached a high level in planting explosive devices in closed/urban terrain in semi-conventional/guerilla warfare. If there’s enough explosive in such devices, no tank can emerge operational (although M1 losses in Iraq from 2003 also sometimes involved high capability infantry anti-tank weapons which could penetrate the tank’s armor from side or rear, the Iraqi Army of 1991 didn’t have as capable light AT weapons, nor did their infantry often have the determination to use such weapons after being bypassed in open terrain).
The USA called the .30 watercooled Browning a heavy Machinegun.
Right, a tank isn’t magical. Tank doctrine has usually not favored urban warfare, but the reasons tanks get pressed into it can be obvious–a tank is imposing to light forces causing trouble in urban environments. But you risk of losing tanks in urban warfare are far higher.
A lot of the IEDs that took out tanks were so large that there’s just no way to stop it from taking a tank out of action. Insurgents in Iraq would string together 3-4 155mm artillery shells then detonate them under a tank. Remarkably very few Arbams crewmembers actually died in their vehicle (I believe it was under 10 in the entirety of the second Iraq war.) So even when an Abrams was taken out of the fight its crew generally survived.
By general international terminology it was a heavy machine gun. But the US official designations of the weapons themselves didn’t include such an appellation either way. The water cooled Browning was officially Browning Machine Gun, cal .30, M1917A1. Likewise the air cooled version often called a light machine gun though tripod mounted had the same designation but just finishing with eg. M1919A4. The BAR was officially ‘…Automatic Rifle… M1918A2’ though it was a light machine gun by some other countries’ concepts. In US Army WW2 tables of organization the term HMG would be used for mg’s in weapons companies of battalions, as opposed to those in the weapons platoons of companies*, which generally equated to M1917 v M1919. Although in WWI tables (the M1917 was fairly widely used in the AEF in the closing weeks of WWI) again just machine gun.
So much stuff has been written afterwards, and often by Brits in the English language, to standardize and avoid confusion…that it can cause confusion. Also there has been a concept of a ‘medium machine gun’ to include air cooled tripod weapons, though a post WWII term AFAICT.
I still think it’s relevant to clarify that ‘heavy machine gun’ doesn’t necessarily refer to the weapon officially designated in WWII as ‘Browning Machine Gun, Heavy Barrel, cal .50, M2 HB’ which might otherwise be assumed in US usage even by fairly knowledgeable people.
*in German tables, the same exact gun, either MG34 or the MG42 was a light machine gun at platoon/company level, a heavy machine gun at battalion level. The only difference was that in theory the battalion weapons were issued with tripod mounts and equipment and training for indirect fire and the lower level ones not.
Eh, modern body armor might stop some rounds fired by a light machine gun but survivability for a soldier caught in the stream of one’s firing would be low.
An M249 who caught someone wearing Type IV body armor would still likely take them out of the fight. I believe the Type IV standard is it can stop one hit from a .30-06 rifle round. It may be able to stop more, but it isn’t something you could be sure of. To achieve Type IV classification armors need to be worn with their ceramic plate inserts and these break apart as they’re hit. So it’s definitely life saving for one round that hits the plate, if your plate is hit you’d want to replace it whenever you could.
Taking a full barrage of automatic fire even from a weapon like the M249 that fires 5.56 NATO rounds would likely take any modern soldier out of the fight. Light machine guns of the past would likely do the same.
I think they would get confused when they saw American soldiers wearing what looks like something out of science fiction (which I suppose it would be to them). Assuming they even see them at all.
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Body armor could certainly stop rounds from something like a Thompson submachinegun. Probably not so much against a rifle like the M1 or M1903, a .30 cal machinegun or the BAR.
But modern soldiers would be fighting with better armor (than typically “none”), lighter gear, better camo, better targeting optics on their weapons, and better tactical communication equipment.
I agree as I said, even the highest capability modern body armor is far from making anyone invulnerable to small arms or machine gun fire. However you must also consider that the majority of WWII infantry casualties were to mortars and artillery, sometimes numbers like 70-75% are thrown out but it really depended. Rifles and other small arms were a very small %. Machine guns were a significant %, and higher in some cases, but definitely a minority. And then further reduced just considering when someone was hit multiple times in the torso. Mines were another significant cause in some situations, or somewhat similarly IED’s in particular recent situations, and then torso body armor might be of limited effect (or still might help, WWII bouncing mines, etc).
But even just postwar anti-fragmentation body armor was significant. That’s why it was worthwhile to have such armor back when it didn’t come close to stopping rifle bullets. Considering what the latest stuff also does against fragments, it’s a very significant advantage of modern over WWII infantry, more for example than the differing characteristics of their small arms and machine guns, if considering the better armed WWII forces.