I am a tank platoon leader, at present recovering from wounds received during the Battle of the Bulge. “How anyone can escape punishment for neglecting such a vital weapon of war is beyond me.”
“Whoever was responsible for supplying the army with tanks is guilty of supplying material inferior to its enemy counterpart for at least two years or more,” one an angry armoured cavalry lieutenant told the New York Times in March 1945. The Battle of the Bulge exposed deficiencies in the M4 so glaringly obvious, what became known as the Sherman Tank Scandal would be splashed across front pages all over the Allied world. Sherman crews were less than enthusiastic about their tanks than the generals were. “There have been no factual developments overseas, so far as I know, to challenge the superiority of the M4 Sherman.”īut tank crews actually fighting in the Sherman knew better.
WORLD WAR 2 TANK BATTLES SERIES
“I see no reason to alter our previous stand…that we should defeat Germany by use of the M4 series of medium tanks,” he wrote. In November 1943, even after disasters in North Africa and Tunisia, Chief of Army Ground Forces, General Leslie McNair insisted that the Sherman would deliver victory. Were tanks to focus on “soft” targets in the enemy’s rear, like trucks and light armor, using hit and run tactics? Were they slow rolling pillboxes, used to support infantry assaults? Or should American tanks go looking for a fight, boldly seeking out the enemy’s heavy armour to slug it out one-on-one?
WORLD WAR 2 TANK BATTLES HOW TO
Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, that “we don’t yet know exactly how to handle the Mark VI tank.”īut the doctrinal muddle over the role of tanks, unresolved for decades within the U.S. Weigley noted, went all through the Second World War refusing “to develop, until too late to do much good, heavier tanks comparable to the German Tigers and Panthers, let alone the Royal Tiger or the Russian Stalin.”Īfter debacles like Sidi-bou-Zid, Kasserine Pass and El Guettar, General Dwight Eisenhower admitted in a private February 1943 letter to U.S. “ was inferior to the German Panther as well as to the heavier Tiger in always every respect save endurance, including armament and defensive armour.” Almost as soon as it appeared on the battlefields of North Africa, the Sherman’s many deficiencies became evident. “Perhaps the most questionable element in American ground fighting power was the American tank,” he wrote. Russell Weigley* made a similar argument. How could American and British industries produce a host of superb aircraft, an astonishing variety of radar equipment, the proximity fuse, the DUKW, the jeep, yet still ask their armies to join battle against the Wehrmacht equipped with a range of tanks utterly inferior in armour and killing power? Great cinematic moments like these are spot on, aren’t they? The Sherman was the tank that won the war, right?Īccording to British historian Sir Max Hastings, “no single Allied failure had more important consequences on the European battlefield than the lack of tanks with adequate punch and protection.” The Sherman, he added, was one of the Allies’ “greatest failures.”
THE SHERMAN TANK - who hasn’t cheered it in Hollywood epics like A Bridge Too Far, Band of Brothers, or The Pacific? Just when all hope seemed lost, a column of Shermans arrives in the nick of time to save embattled American soldiers. (Image source: WikiCommons) “The Battle of the Bulge exposed deficiencies in the M4 so glaringly obvious, what became known as the Sherman Tank Scandal would be splashed across front pages all over the Allied world.” But as a fighting machine, it was easily outclassed by most of the German tanks it went up against. The M4 Sherman is remembered as the tank that won World War Two.
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