The performance of Shermans versus the better German tanks obviously wasn’t good, but in reality it had little to do with the outcome of the war. The German Tigers and Panthers were in such small numbers that their impact on the end stages of the war really was fairly minimal.
For the job they had before them, the U.S. Army was a lot better served by tens of thousands of Shermans than a few thousand Pershings. Namely because their goal was to take and hold territory formerly held by the Germans. To do that you need infantry, because “cavalry” can’t typically hold territory by themselves. So for that reason having tens of thousands of tanks in units attached to infantry results in an overall stronger invasion force. A lot of the heaviest fighting involved us pushing against fairly dug in German lines at the end, sure once we broke loose in France it was a bit of a race but actually pushing into Germany having a ton of powerful tanks was less important than having a lot of tanks to help the infantry push against the tons of Germans still lined up to defend the home country.
Those production figures linked upthread are interesting but I’m betting most people don’t recognize one of the most important sets of figures:
Military trucks: 3,060,354 Allied 594,859 Axis
Then of course oil production: United States alone produced 833m metric tons of oil, more than the entire rest of the world combined during this time. The total Allied production massively dwarfed the Axis production in total.
Trucks and fuel are important because that’s the backbone of the logistical system of the Allied forces that defeated and invaded Germany. This ties into armor, because lack of logistics capability and lack of supply took out more Tiger tanks than American enemy fire, with some 50% of American captured Tigers being captured because they ran out of fuel on the battlefield. Aside from its general hopelessness, a big part of the reason (aside from lack of numbers needed to really be successful) the Battle of the Bulge didn’t work as the Germans planned is they were running out of fuel in the middle of a relatively short distance offensive.
But of course in the Western theater, the lack of fuel for the Germans was more important than the overwhelming Allied raw production, because it had to be shipped in to France. The relatively fuel-efficient Shermans also helped in this matter because they used less gas than heavier vehicles did.
Pershing was developed too late to be used in multiple formations-- I don’t think
more than 200 of them ever got to the ETO.
It would not have been a simple matter to convert mass production from ~30-35 ton
Shermans with 75mm guns over to 40+ton Pershings with 90mm guns. Early US war
planners favored mass production of one design with an emphasis on mobility, and
that turned out to be the Sherman, which had a decent chance vs all German tanks
except the Panther and Tiger. The UK was able to substitute its much more powereful
76.2mm/3" “Firefly” gun for the original 75mm Sherman gun, but the much heavier 90’’
would have had a serious effect on stability and mobility.
Pershing was as you say held back.
I had not heard 90mm guns were primarily allocated for AA, but maybe so, even though
by 1944 the US-UK enjoyed air dominance on all fronts except perhaps ETO strategic bombing.
In 1944 1400 90mm guns were mounted on the M36 MGC “Stonewall Jackson” tank destroyer
and another 924 were in 1945. Only 40 Pershings were produced in 1944, and the 2162
produced in 1945 were too late to have a big impact.
IMO it is too bad Pershing production did not gear up a year earlier, but then as the
tables show the US was grossly underequipped in AFV when it entered the war, with
zero Shemans yet in service. Planners must have felt the most pressing need was to
get as many combat-worth AFV into action as soon as possible, and that approach
necessarily favored lighter designs.
Also recall that the Tiger tank did not see action until 12/44, and it and the Panther
were not used in mass until 1943. US planners could not wait around to see what the
Germans had up their sleeve!
I do not believe doctrine was geared to infantry support as of 12/7/41.
If you want to point fingers at one man, General leslie McNair is the one who had the most influence upon the American decision to design and field tanks for infantry support while simultaneously fielding anti-tank “tank destroyer” formations. His decision held back US tank and tank gun development for years…until McNair lost his life in Normandy when US B-17’s mistakenly dropped bombs on US troop formations, including the one McNair was with. After his death, the “pro-tank” lobby (so to speak) in the US Army was able to take the growing evidence after D-Day that American tanks were under-gunned and used it to push for fielding the M-26 and increased numbers of 76mm armed M-4’s. At the same time, TD’s were increasingly armed with 90mm guns. All this served to push the TD community out of the way over time and after the war, the TD Command was totally disestablished and all its TD’s were scrapped or given away by the US Army.
The Allied tanks weren’t crap compared to the Axis tanks. You can’t compare them one-to-one because the whole point of the Allied planning was that they went for quantity rather than quality. The Allies realized that five good tanks were better than one great tank. And history proved them right.
So the question isn’t why the United States screwed up by building second-rate tanks instead of building great tanks like the Germans did. The question should be why Germany screwed up by building so few tanks instead of building a lot of tanks like the Americans did.
More time appropriately the US could have gone with the British Sherman Firefly with a 17 pounder rather than the M4A3E8 ‘Easy Eight’ with a 76mm gun when up arming the Sherman from a 75mm. The 17 pounder was a far better anti-tank gun than the 76mm; it could actually out penetrate the 88mm L/56 of the Tiger I and the 75mm L/70 of the Panther. I don’t know if there were practical reasons it wasn’t considered or if it was simply a case of NIH (Not Invented Here).
The 90mm gun was originally built and issued as an antiaircraft gun. In another case of the realities of the war differing from doctrinal expectations, the US Army raised far, far more AAA battalions than it turned out to actually need. From here:
Thank you for the information-- I had no idea so many men and so much equipment was
squandered in AA units. It appears from the link that the 90mm was one of several guns
allocated to AA. All of them would have been more rationally deployed as anti-tank.
I guess in defence of US Army planners German air arm ground attack took a heavy and
well-publicized toll before the US entered the war. There was at first no way of knowing
whether Stukas would be available in waves for use against the new foe.
Some are destroyed, you replace them, the replacements are destroyed, too.
So for example, a unit with 100 tanks, 70 are destroyed, then replaced, then 60 of the replacements are destroyed. So you have 130 tanks destroyed for a unit of 100 tanks = 130% loss.
In fairness, casualties exceeding 100% of authorized strength was very common for all armies; all they had to do was spend enough time in combat. There’s a tabular breakdown of casualties by division in the US Army in WWII here from the from the official Army Battle Casualties and Nonbattle Deaths in World War II, Final Report 7 December 1941 – 31 December 1946. The authorized strength of US infantry divisions was 14,253 men; I count 16 infantry divisions with battle casualties exceeding 100% and several more coming very close, the worst being the 3rd Infantry division with 25,977 or 182% casualties. Worse still the great majority of casualties fell on the rifle companies which were a minority of a division’s strength, 193 men per company with 3 companies per battalion and 9 battalions per division, so 5,211 men in the rifle companies if I did the math right.
By contrast the authorized strength of an ‘light’ Armored division was 10,937 and for the ‘heavy’ Armored division structure of which only the 2nd and 3rd Armored divisions retained it was 14,488; none of the Armored divisions had 100% or more personnel casualties.
The T-34 had a nice gun and good armor but it had a number of serious drawbacks, many related to the crew. The driver had poor visibility so the commander had to keep giving instructions to keep the tank going where he wanted it to. The turret only held two people, so the commander was also the gunner. The turret crew positions didn’t rotate with the gun so those crew members had to be very careful or they would get caught by the recoil of the gun. In most of the T-34’s there was no radio, so if the commander wanted to communicate with other tanks he had to use hand signals. If you haven’t caught on yet the commander was REALLY overworked.
The 17 pounder had problems associated with it, the ones I’m familiar with all relate to the ammo:
Lousy HE rounds - It might have been effective against armor, but not against infantry or lightly armored vehicles. An effective HE round was eventually developed, but it still wasn’t as good as the old 75mm HE rounds.
The sabot round, which gives the high armor penetration was relatively weak (i.e. didn’t do much after penetrating) and early versions were inaccurate.
The rounds themselves were large, so fewer of them could be carried, and they were harder to load resulting in a lower rate of fire. Freeing up space for ammo also resulted in the loss of a crew member and a machine gun. The extra powder in the larger round resulted in an obnoxiously bright muzzle flash which at night would blind anyone in the tank who was looking outside when the gun was fired, and would give away the tanks position to anyone who wanted to shoot back.
The Firefly was a nice tank for what it needed to do, specifically allow the British to deal with the heavier tanks in the SS panzer divisions they seemed to attract.
Soviet tanks weren’t crap. In the early part of the war, the T-34 was the best tank in the world, despite drawbacks already mentioned, such as the 2 man turret. It may have been surpassed in firepower and armor by the Panther and Tiger tanks-- which were designed in response to the T-34 and KV tanks-- but was upgraded to the T-34-85. Wikipedia has a telling paragraph:
For some reason, people sometimes look at the victories the Germans enjoyed using Blitzkrieg tactics and assume that tank quality is a, if not the, main reason, as if the Wermarcht was fielding Panthers in 1939. My understanding is that even the disparaged French army fielded comparable, maybe even superior, tanks to those of the Germans, and certainly appears to have had a great advantage in terms of mechanization. Again, Wikipedia:
It would be a hijack to go into the reasons behind the French defeat at length. Short version: there were three main reasons behind the defeat.
[ol]
[li]The French armor was dispersed all along the front in small quantities (“penny packets,” in the memorable phrase of one observer) in an attempt to “stiffen” a continuous front. The German tanks were massed into dedicated armored divisions and hurled at a single point in the line. Result: most of the French tanks never saw a German tank or even a German soldier; a few French tanks saw waaaay too many German tanks and were quickly overrun.[/li]
[li]The German battle plan happened to prey on the weaknesses of the the Franco-British battle plan very effectively. The Franco-British forces, assuming (correctly) that their Maginot Line was invulnerable, were poised to hurl themselves forward into Belgium the moment the Germans violated Belgian neutrality. They expected the Germans to swing around the Maginot Line and come through Belgium, and intended to meet them head-on to try to hold as much of the country as possible (and, not incidentally, keep most of the battle from reaching French soil). Instead, the Germans attacked on a narrow front right at the juncture between the end of the Maginot Line and Belgium, through terrain (erroneously) considered impassable to tanks (the Ardennes Forest) and thus held by weaker forces. This resulted in the Franco-British lunging forward into a relative vacuum, while the German spearhead split the “continuous front” near Sedan and drove across the base of the advancing Allied salient to the sea, cutting it off (and eventually forcing the evacuation at Dunkirk). A classic “revolving door” offensive.[/li]
[li]Lastly, panic. Blitzkrieg was new, few people understood how to fight it, and nobody was prepared for how fast things developed (not even most of the Germans – several generals and Hitler himself kept trying to slow down their advance.) Although the French fought bravely at first (the Indo-Chinese French colonial units earned a particularly hard-core reputation, foreshadowing how doggedly they and their children would fight after their homeland was renamed Viet Nam), the new experience of facing massed armor coordinated with tactical airpower was unnerving, and the constant reports that the Germans had broken through behind them undermined their willingness to stand in place. Eventually it turned into a rout.[/li][/ol]
*Allies: 3,383 tanks Germans: 2,445 tanks, from here.
As the best generals knew, it was far better to occupy a position with an inferior force before your enemy could, than it was to assemble a superior force and have to wrest a position from the enemy. In a war of maneuver, the combat strength of your tanks is less important than the tactics and doctrine they employ. Advance far enough into an enemy’s rear, and it doesn’t matter how good his tanks are; he’s already lost the battle.
The Germans were the first to master massed tank actions. As was pointed out, this was part of their “Blitzkrieg” style of making war-it was predicated upon:
-quick victories
-massing overwhelming force at the enemies weak points
-exploiting the enemies shock and confusion
This worked well against France and Poland, because both country’s generals had prepared for a replay of WWI. But against a well prepared, well supplied foe (the Russian Army after 1941) it was disastrous. Tke the Battle of Kursk-the Germans with their Leopard and Tiger tanks, made no headway-they were beaten from the start. Yes, the Tiger was a powerful tank, but it was complex, consumed fuel like a hog, and broke down frequently. When allied tank destroyers became available, it was toast.
Which leads to a question: are huge, expensive main battle tanks worth building today? Robotic tanks would be cheaper to build, I would think.
There doesn’t seem to be much of a strategic role for the MBT now or for the foreseeable future; from what I’ve heard, they come in handy tactically, on occasion, but are probably not worth the headache of getting to a foreign theater of operations, and all the logistical support that implies, just to fight insurgents.
As far as robotic tanks are concerned, do you think AI is advanced enough to be responsive to a flexible tactical environment?
Or are you secretly in league with SkyNet in a bid to bring on Judgement Day?
