Why couldn't the Allies produce a decent tank in WWII?

Factual Questions
41

AWOL. Dammit.

Right up my alley, too. I gotta get over to GQ more often.

The Allies did produce decent tank designs in WWII, but, as has been pointed out, not in sufficient numbers or a timely fashion. To get into the war quickly, off-the-shelf components were cobbled together into a design that would have been sufficient for 1935.

The rapid technological advancements and refinements made designs obsoloete just as fast as they were designed (look at the plethora of aircraft types we came up with to meet the strategic needs of the Pacific Theater, which was fought and won on the nascent carrier doctrine).

Overall, it was deemed (and I can safely agree in hindsight) that it was better to arrive in battle, in superior numbers and a timely fashion, with a marginal design that could be rapidly mass-produced, than to arrive later with fewer numbers of a more refined design that may be more difficult to manufacture in quantity, even with mass production techniques.

This dovetailed nicely with the massive mobilization of the population, both in the workforce and in the armed forces, with their assembly-line basic-training methodology designed to get people into battle quickly with the basics and then rely upon competent leadership and superior firepower to minimize casualties until people and units could be “Baptized Under Fire”.

The evolution of accurate close-air-support, both fixed- and rotary winged, has largely rendered that concept obsolete on the modern battlefield, and without air-superiority in Desert Storm, my butt may not be sitting here debating the topic.

Note that these methods were not employed with our pilot training program, just the dog-faces and DATs in the trenches. Which is one of the reasons our pilots enjoyed phenominal success in the latter phases of the Pacific Theater, whereas just the opposite was true in the earlier phases. The AM6 Zero was an excellent fighter. For 1940.

By '45, it was outclassed by better American aircraft, and attrition had pared the ranks of veteran Japanese pilots who may have been able to offset the American edge to some degree. The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot and Leyte are good examples of this.

At least that’s my johnny-come-lately armchair take on the matter, given the excellent commentary already provided on the topic.

42

Ok, I finally got to the end of the thread so I wouldn’t step on anyone’s toes with my comments. First of all, the Zero: In December of 1941, the US Navy had 2 fighters. The F-3 Brewster and the F-4 Wildcat. The Brewster was certainly outclassed by the Zero. I think it was a near tie between the Wildcat and Zero but favoring the Zero. In different flight regimes, their ‘superiority’ sort of changed hands. And of course, any fighter pilot is going to praise the hell out of any aircraft that he defeated. It reflects on him as so great a pilot that he was able to outfight a superior pilot in a better aircraft.

Now, the tank debate. I wonder if the poor quality of German tanks which admittedly had a superior design was a side effect of the labor force building them? How many tank assembly lines were manned by German civilian laborers and how many were manned by slave laborers or concentration camp inmates?

Maybe the following is a tangent, but I think it’s relevent.

I think you have to look back to see where you were before you can figure out where you are now and how you got there. 2 things happened in WW1 that I feel have a direct affect on the Armor battles in WWII. First of all there was the machine gun which pretty much put the kibosh on mounted cavalry and let many to believe that Cavalry was dead. And then trench warfare, which was the necessity that was the mother of invention of the armored tank. Well, generally, you outfit and train to fight the last war, and in WWI, tanks were self propelled pillboxes. They moved at walking speeds. And I’m also thinking that the Lts and Capts who commanded Armor platoons and companies in WWI were the Majors and Lt Colonels who were the plans and training officers in the 1920’s and 30’s and the Colonels and Generals who commanded divisions and brigades during WWII. What I’m implying here is that the TO&E of Armor units were developed to fight WWI tactics and by the time WWII came around, the men who made the plans now had enough rank that it took a defeat like the Kassarine Pass to convince them that those tactics were no longer sound. And by that time, the design of the Sherman Tank was pretty much set in stone. I suspect most of them were former Infantrymen. But the notible ones (Rommel, Guderian (sp?), Patton, Harmon and I.D.White)were former Cavalrymen who remembered the role of Cavalry: A swiftly moving armed force who can 1) exploit breeches in the enemies front lines, 2) attack the enemies flanks and 3) disrupt the enemies lines of communications.

43

Some interesting points, Ranger. Certainly the Kasserine Pass led to the formation of the ‘light’ armored division in late 1943, (for those not in the know, TO&E stands for “Table of Organization & Equipment”, i.e. how many tanks, guns, etc an up-to-strength unit has) and that battle was won & lost not because of tank vs tank superiority (the Germans had a few Tigers, but mostly MkIIIs and MkIVs, which the 1st Armored’s Shermans and Stuarts were easily as good as) but because of better German tactics (massing their armour, against an inexperienced US division which spread its forces thinly).

IIRC, the US was the only major WW2 participant to formally organise its armoured units into combined-arms units, with its Combat Commands. Even the vaunted panzer divisions had to form kampfgruppen (“battle groups”) on an ad hoc basis, from their single-arm panzer and panzergrenadier regiments.

On your point about slave labour, I remember reading about a B-24 Liberator which was hit by a burst of gunfire, but to its crew’s surprise, kept flying. When they got home and checked the shell-holes, they found unexploded cartridges with notes inside saying “This is all we can do for now” or words to that effect!

44

You get what you pay for.

45

To reply to the OP(sort of):

The reason the M4 Sherman series tanks were so pathetic in tank vs. tank combat is because they weren’t really intended for it.
Originally, the US Army had the idea that tanks were for infantry support and exploiting breakthroughs, while special-purpose tank destroyers were supposed to destroy tanks. These tank destroyers(M10 Hellcat & M36 Jackson) were HEAVILY armed- the M10 had a high velocity 76.2 millimeter gun, while the M36 had the same 90mm gun as the M26 Pershing, but much earlier in the war.
The tradeoff was that the tank destroyers were lightly armed, and open-turreted, with the idea that speed, mobility and visibility would compensate for the lack of crew protection.

On the Eastern Front, the Germans and Russians were fighting tank vs. tank from the start. The German assault guns and tank destroyers were never intended as the primary tank killers.

So, when the German tanks designed & tested fighting other tanks on the Eastern front faced relatively untested Shermans, they tore them to shreds.

One other thing- the Shermans were comparable to Panzer IVF2 onward, especially the later Shermans with the more powerful guns. The only tanks that were particularly deadly were the Tigers and Panthers, and they were generally deadly to all the Russian ones too, with the possible exception of the IS-1 and IS-2 heavies vs the Panthers. The Tigers, when running, pretty much dominated the battlefield with their long ranged, powerful 88mm guns.

46

"Quantity over quality and size was General Marshall’s deliberate choice. He wanted more, faster (and thus lighter) tanks, in accord with American doctrine, which held that tanks should exploit a breakthrough, not fight other tanks.

“Marshall’s first problem was that American tanks had to cross the Atlantic to get into battle, and the number one strategic shortage of the Allies was shipping. Experiment showed you could get two Shermans into the space required by one larger tank on an LST. Of course, that equasion didn’t work out if one Tiger could destroy four Shermans, which sometimes happened. But not often, because there were so few Tigers compared to the number of Shermans.”

–Stephen Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers, p. 63

Nice work, folks. I think cornflakes also deserves a hand for pointing out the necessity of a unified fuel solution. When you’re fueling a half-dozen armies by jerry-can, you don’t want to have to be selective. Fuel economy of a medium tank over a heavy tank no doubt played a role in sticking with the Sherman, too. For half a year, the Allies experienced almost the same fuel shortages that the Germans suffered.

One thing worth remembering is that inside of about half a mile, a Sherman could outrun the traverse of most German turrets. My friend’s uncle once told me that when it came to fighting another tank–any tank–in a Sherman, you never stopped moving, not even to fire. That guy managed to be the one of the first tankers (14th Tank Battalion, IIRC) across the bridge at Remagen, and survived the war, so he made it pretty far on those principles.

47

Didn’t the Israelis develop a Super Sherman that remained operational at least through October 1973 war?

48

Yep… had the famous British 105mm rifled gun, IIRC.