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Subject: M 5 Sherman tank. What would you have done?
Herald1234    2/24/2007 3:24:09 AM
If you were receiving the first British battlefield reports about the performance of the M3 Lee/Grant, as the technical head of US tank production and you had the 1942 US automotive technology base, what would you have done with the Sherman design? Herald
 
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Herald1234    That idiot, General Leslie McNair.    3/17/2007 3:01:57 AM

Consider that both the defender and attacker are part of combined arms teams. The defensive combined arms team will include supporting infantry, mortars, machineguns, probably artillery and tanks as well. These supporting arms will help the ATGs by making it hard for infantry to attack them. Meanwhile the ATGs help to defend the infantry and artillery from tanks. If the infantry are in good positions it will not be easy for the tanks to find them, so the infantry will either have to find them first, or the tanks will have to get close.

 

Similarly the enemy will not just be tanks and infantry they will have their own artillery and mortars in support. If the antitank guns are part of an advancing force they will not have much time to dig in. If they don't have time to dig in, they are very vulnerable to artillery. They will probably have hasty fighting positions or even foxholes for their own protection but they won't be able to man the gun while sheltering there. However if they can dig in more they may be sufficiently protected to man the gun even in the face of artillery fire.


Jeff,
I've thought about the actual campaign that the US Army fought in France.What you and JFKY may have come away with reading, is the impression that I am not cognizant of WHY the US went with and stuck with the Shermans and thought that those tanks were adequate. You assume that I'm one of those simplists who take a single piece of equipment and says "AHA! The Sherman was no match for the Panther, therefore the idiots who fielded it, long after the Germans put forth the Panther killed hundreds of US tankers unnecessarily.
 
That is not how I analyze a weapon's effectiveness.
 
I actually suspect that the effort devoted to the Sherman 76 was a huge mistake. Likewise the effort to deploy large numbers of towed 5.7cm.L60 antitank guns. These were efforts that McNair supported. Why?
 
McNair thought that the 7.6cm.L50 gun on the Sherman M4A3E8 would be adequate to deal with the German armor the American tank encountered. Part of the argument that General Devers used in arguing with McNair for the 9.0cm.L50, even if it was on an M-36 was that the 9.0 gun was a dual use gun that fired a very effective high explosive shell. You could use that gun as direct fire artillery. It is significant to me that most TD work in the US Army was not just shooting holes in the occasional Panther. Do you realize how many thousands of HE rounds that a typical M-36 battalion fired off in a week's time, as self propelled artillery in support of US infantry? 
 
That was the most common use of the Jackson, alongside with its occasional overwatch role in supporting attacking Shermans, who would try to outmaneuver the usual dug in German panzers.
 
Thus you could argue that the type tank destroyers that the US built, if properly equipped with adequate dual use guns and properly employed as self-propelled artillery in the combined arms team was actuially infantry useful.
 
The mistake that McNair made was in not recognizing that the weapon had to be designed to fit inside the combined arms team. He lunatically insisted on forming towed antitank gun battalions. 
 
Devers pointed out rightly that the tank destroyers as self propelled artillery had the following advantages;
 
a. The tank destroyer took a crew of five per gun as pposed to a towed antitank gun's TEN men.
b. The tank destroyer was a self contained unit that could emplace and fire in seconds while the towed antitank gun once emplaced could not displace from its position once emplaced. The tank destroyer could thus shoot and move quickly alongside the infantry as self propelled artillery. Note that this was as ARTILLERY and not as tanks. Devers argued that tank destroyers should be used in this fashion, and as such when American commanders weren't stupidly trying to use the TDs as tanks, the better ones were using the TDs as artillery. A towed AT gun crew usually died beside their gun when the second PZKW IV opened up with machine guns and sprayed the AT gunline with hosing fire.
c. The towed AT gun required a truck to tow it, and didn't have onboard ready use ammunition to use when opportunity fire presented itself.
 
 
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JFKY    McNair an Idiot?   3/17/2007 9:45:09 AM
Two points:
1)   As tiresome as it is, let me repeat, the M-4 was going to be the tank that went to the Rhine.  The best Herald puts the M-26 on the battlefield as during Cobra and the Breakout.  Already, the M-4 would have taken tremendous casualties in the bocage fighting. 
 
The M-3 medium was authorized for production in Aug 1941.  The war ended in Aug 1945.  The intervening period is 48 months.  In that time, the US Army moved from the M2 Medium, to the M-3 Medium, to the M-4 Medium, to the M-26 Medium.  That is THREE transitions of armoured vehicle, in 48 months.  The US Army cycled thru its medium tanks then on about a 16 month cycle.  Herald that pretty darn quick, and I don't see the US Army arriving at the M-26 much faster than it did.  Again the M-4 was going to be THE medium tank of the US Army, for the period of the War in Europe.
 
2) Herald you rather and altogether too freely throw out the word "Idiot" for McNair.  I'm sorry Herald that is just more than silly.  I don't care for this discussion to devolve into the sort of nasty name-calling that boards discussing the F-35/Rafale can devolve into, but your statement is a foolish one.  Please note, McNair was Commander Us Army Ground Forces, not the US Army Armored Forces.  McNair oversaw the development and deployment of the most well equipped and most devastating army the World had yet seen, the US Army.  I think you wold be well advised to grasp that fact and realize that he was NOT an "idiot,"  but rather a man who believed in the power of the Infantry/Artillery Team and that who had less practical experience with armour.
 
In his universe armour supported infantry and moved to exploit.  Tank Destroyers fought tanks.  Ok, he was wrong.  He was RIGHT about a whole lot more than he was wrong.  The proof is in the pudding.  Who celebrated a victory parade in Berlin in 1945 Jodl or Eisenhower?  Whose army defeated whose army?  McNair's Army was the superior army.  The US infantry division and it's powerful artillery support...McNair.  The pooling of resources...McNair.  The focus on reliability, ease of maintenance, and transportability...McNair. 
 
McNair oversaw the design and production of the US Army's GROUND team, he foresaw that the "next war" would be overseas and would require a massive logistics operation and that to win the US Army had to be a simple as possible.  Unlike the Germans who created dozens of division types, and then created hundreds of weak divisions, and produced something 150 truck types, the US Army produced TWO divisions, Infantry, and Armour (supplemtned by a small number of other divisions).  The US Army kept its divisions supplied and equipped, though the supply of Infantrymen was tragically under-estimated, at a distance of tens of thousands of kilomtres from its industrial heartland, something no other combatant could.  The US Army's Ground Forces were McNair's and I think that rather than say he was an "Idiot" I'd say he was pretty darned good!
 
I challenge YOU to tell me, given what the US Army knew, AT THE TIME, bearing in mind that any decisions McNair et. al. made would not bear fruit for 12-18 months "should have" been different or how YOU would have fought the war, better.  Again, bearing in mind that the forces in June 1944, were the result of decisions made in 1943 or earlier!  Pagonis in Desert Shield said he tried to play with the Deployment Plan to get the right troops at the right times, but he found that given the time scale involved he could NOT micro-mamage the deployment of units, and this is for a force of 500,000 troops.  He found that the best he could do was take what came out of the pipeline, form provisional units to accomplish specific taks and make do....Senior managment is NOT going to be able to respond to battlefield changes on a weekly/monthly basis and NOR SHOULD THEY! 
 
Bottom-Line: McNair had a vision of the Next War and the US Army needed to fight that war.  By and large he succeeded.  I don't consider that Idiocy, but Brilliance.
 
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scuttlebut steve       3/17/2007 7:01:52 PM
herald's last post describing the radio problems that shermans often had reminds me that the M3s had to have their radios replaced by british radios (part of lee to grant conversions), so I correct myself in my list of changes i would have made regarding sherman designs based on british M3 reports....I also would have ordered the british radios/liscense built them for use in the sherman design as that was one of the first reported deficiencies from british commanders.
 
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Herald1234    JFKY reply.   3/18/2007 9:31:07 AM

Two points:

1)   As tiresome as it is, let me repeat, the M-4 was going to be the tank that went to the .  The best Herald puts the M-26 on the battlefield as during Cobra and the Breakout.  Already, the M-4 would have taken tremendous casualties in the bocage fighting. 

 

{The decisions that led to the continued use of the M-4 as our principle tank in 1944 were made when the US Army was in the midst of designing the follow-on to the Sherman in October November 1942. That the US Army, at least the Ordnance element of it, recognized that it was a year behind in the gun/armor race with the Germans was already known. The chance to leapfrog a whole development cycle was there, and the Ordnance department was prepared to try. The ultimate formula to stick with a tank that had the ’s qualities in a  better protected package with a better gun was the ultimate goal. The dithering that delayed the Pershing I’ve already sourced repeatedly so let me summarize here. McNair and Devers, Army Ground Forces and Ordnance continuously fought each other over what the doctrinal role of the anti-tank defense was. Both agreed that the armor was the exploitation arm,  but neither general was truly prepared to yield to the other on the question of how the infantry was supposed toi defend itself against enemy tanks.

 

That is the biggest problem you have with me, JFKY. You are willing to overlook McNairs predeliction for distributing tank battalions among corps  and armies as units to be under higher headquarters control, instead of forming armored divisions and giving the infantry divisions their own organic tank destroyerm battalions as part of their unit organization.  You arer willing to overlook McNair’s obstinant refusal as the AGF commander to listen to the pleas of the actual combat units for what they wanted, instead sticking to his “doctrinal vision” of a basically infantry army that had an armored corps designed to exploit the infantry breakthroughs.

 

You want a list of McNair’s stupid mistakes that weren’t rectified until our Air Force did the best bombing work they did during the Normandy Campaign?

  1. He kept refusing to allow the allocation of resources for upgunning  US tank destroyers with the 9.0cm.L50 gun. The M-36 Jackson was LATE because he wouldn’t approve the emergency program to upgun the M-10.
  2. Because of his protracted fight with Devers over the way future tank development should go, the lost 6 months time in the development cycle trying to decide between a 7.6cm.L50 and a 9.0cm.L50 gun armed successor to the tank. When the impasse couldn’t be resolved the T-23 turret from the T-23A1 which contained the 7..6cmL50 gun was slapped onto a as a stopgap and then 1 out of five ’s shipped was the 7.6cm.L50 .gun armed . If Devers had won, those would have been M-36s and M-26s along with the 7.5cm.L50 gun-armed tanks-going to -a far more useful mix: even if the numbers needed weren’t in the pipeline before May 1944.
  3. McNair continued to champion the towed anti-tank gun-especially the relatively useless in US service 5.7cmL60 antitank gun M-1; which unlike its British counterpart had no useful HE shell, that could at least made it an effective infantry bunker buster. Once again, the industrial effort that went into building the 2500 CWT Dodge truck prime mover plus the ten man antitank gun crew was twice the logistics effort spent as would be spent for an entire M-36 Jackson using a 5 man crew with its far superior dual use 9.0cm.L50 gun. That tank destroyer could be used to not only knock out tanks but also knock out strongpoints and shell enemy infantry with HE shells; plus you didn’t need scarce and unavailable to the US Army, tungsten cored AP shot to knock a hole in a Panther at <300 meters. You could use the standard steel 9.0cm. APCBC shot and do the job on that PZKW V quite nicely.    
  4. McNair continued to insist on independent tank battalions and severely limiting the number of armored divisions in the US Army. Perhaps he had a valid point in insisting that logistically it made sense to place the burden at corps or army to sustain these units. I don’t think so. It always struck me that when the US Army went to they, the Army in , tended to ignore what the stateside doctrinalists pronounced as gospel. Th
 
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Jeff_F_F    That Idiot Barnes   3/18/2007 2:26:23 PM
An attempt by the Armored Force Board in the fall of 1943 to provide the M4 with a more powerful gun, the 90-mm., had failed. Ordnance had begundevelopment work on the 90-mm. antiaircraft gun to adapt it for use on tanks and gun motor carriages early in the war, after reports from Cairo had indicated that the Germans in Libya were successfully using their 88-mm. gun against tanks, and the new antitank 90-mm. was standardized as the M3 in September 1943. Thereupon, the Armored Force Board, believing that the M4 tank was the one tank that could be delivered in time for the invasion of Europe, recommended that the 90-mm. gun be installed on a thousand M4A3 tanks. Maj. Gen. Gladeon M. Barnes, chief of the Ordnance Department's Research and Development Service, refused to go along with the recommendation; and General McNair turned it down on the advice of his 6-3, Brig. Gen. John M. Lentz.

Barnes had nothing against the 90-mm. gun; on the contrary, he and Col. Joseph M. Colby, chief of the Development and Engineering Department at the Ordnance Tank-Automotive Center in Detroit, had done everything they could to get it to the battlefield on a gun motor carriage, over the determined opposition of Army Ground Forces, whose New Developments Division continued to insist that 75-mm. and 76-mm. guns were adequate. Thanks largely to Barnes's efforts, backed up by the Tank Destroyer Board, the M36 self-propelled 90-mm. got to Europe in time to play its part in the Roer plain battles. But Barnes did not want the 90-mm. on the M4 tank. He believed that the gun was too heavy for the tank; that it produced "too much of an unbalanced design."33

So it sounds like AGF wanted a 90mm armed Sherman, but Ordinance wanted a new from the ground up design. I can understand both positions. The Sherman was very old tech, but creating a new from the ground up design would take longer so AGF has a point too. I just don't see how can you make the case that McNair was an idiot from that. Obviously it is possible to mount a 90mm turret on a Sherman chassis, an in fact the Israelis mounted what would have been considered in WWII a medium velocity 105mm ATG on the Sherman.
At the time, Barnes was in the thick of a fight, which he still hoped to win, to get a better tank than the M4 to the battlefield in 1944- The new T20 series tank, authorized by Services of Supply (later ASF) in May of 1942, was designed with more armor protection, lower silhouette, and more speed than the M4. By early spring of 1943, the Ordnance effort was concentrated on the T23. Wider, heavier, and lower than the M4, with wider tracks and therefore lower ground pressure, it had a rear drive and an electrical transmission, which made it much easier to operate. The T23 was highly maneuverable and could do 35 miles an hour, as compared with the 29 miles of the fastest M4; its frontal armor was 3 inches thick, about an inch thicker than that of most of the M4's.34 The design, according to an impartial observer, "would have kept the United States in the forefront of medium tank development."35 In April of 1943, ASF authorized Ordnance to procure 250 of these new tanks.36
 
An impartial observer who was completely wrong. Forefront of medium tank development? The T34 at this time had an 85mm gun, and the Panther had a 75mmL70 very high velocity gun which was superior in armor penetration to the Tiger's 88mmL56 gun, and they think that the 76mm keeps the US in the forefront of medium armor design?
 
Very early in the development work on the new medium tank, in the fall of 1942, Ordnance found that it was possible to mount the 90-mm. gun on the T23-Barnes was all for it, and was strongly supported by Gener
 
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Herald1234    Sorry, Jeff.   3/18/2007 11:48:44 PM
I've looked at this myself. Sure  Barnes championed the T-20's in the hopes that one of those would be a better platform  for the 9.0cm.L50  gun. He had a very good reason for that concern.
 
 
[quoting]
 
M-51 (Isherman)
 
 
When the M-50 designed to defeat T-34 and T-85 tanks with the CN 75-50 gun, with appearance of T-54 and T-55 the new Arab tanks Israeli needed again new gun and as on M-50 Israel used French gun, the new 105mm CN 105 F1 gun. This gun was a 56 calibre and 6m long, firing a HEAT round with a 1000 m/sec. However, this gun could definitely not be installed in a Sherman turret, as this offered not enough recoil space. Israel then came up with a solution of their own: By shortening the gun to a 44 calibre gun (about 1.4 meters shorter) and accepting a lower muzzle velocity of around 800 m/sec. this odification, called the CN 105 D1 gun, could indeed be crammed into a T 23 turret.

This gun was fitted in M4A1... tanks with HVSS, 180 M-51 tanks were ready in late 1960's.

The M-51 Sherman... tank developed with French-Israeli collaboration of the basis of the US Sherman tank, mounted a long 105 mm gun. The tank also had installed a US diesel engine and wide track and suspension. The tank participated in combat during the Six Day War (1967)....  In the famous battle in the
Dotan Valley, as well as in the Yom Kippur War (1973)....

When the Six Day War (1967)... war broke out, Israel had 515 Shermans ready for battle of total 520 Shermans, and when the Yom Kippur War (1973)... war broke out, Israel had 340 Shermans.

In the mid to late 70s, Israel  had supplied over 150 M-51 Sherman tanks to the Chilean army. 
 
M-50 & M-51
 
M-50
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Jeff_F_F       3/19/2007 12:25:46 PM
Agreed, the M-51's gun had to be modified. The original 1000m/s MV is in the same class as the guns of thePanther and Tiger II. The lower 800m/s MV is in the class of the M10 Wolverine and the Soviet 85mm gun, and just a bit under the MV of the Pershing, according to my link data.... Assuming otherwise similar characteristics, a 105mm gun of similar MV to a 90mm gun has at least 50% more recoil energy. Of course, the Israelis are well known for thinking outside the box a bit, and I don't know how long it took them to make this work. Could be that it still couldn't have been ready before the of the war. McNair clearly wasn't indifferent to the need for a *tank* with a 90mm gun. And his opposition to the Pershing wasn't motivated by blindly following tank destroyer doctrine, but rather by desire to get a 90mm gun on the ground ASAP. His objections don't seem to have significantly delayed getting the Pershing into the field. For every delay in the production of the Pershing there was mechanical work needed on the design was actually preventing the design being produced. The simple fact is designing a new tank from the ground up takes a long time, as my examples in previous posts show. McNair must have known that, having watched the M4 being designed--and that was just a new turret ring and turret on an existing chassis--and knew that building a new tank would take too long to be practical. Maybe the Sherman couldn't have been adapted any faster than the Pershing, so I'm by no means certain that Barnes was an idiot. That was my Devil's advocate side showing. I'd personally favor a hull gun stopgap--either JagdSherman or upgunned M3 without a turret--but given the tactical limitations of a design with a gun in the hull, I wouldn't be suprised if both of them rejected that option together, or simply never considered it. Also, the length of such designs when equipped with a long gun might have been judged prohibitive. We like to believe that we are in control of our fates, both as individuals and as a nation. When something terrible happens we like to believe there is a reason that if we had been smarter we could have avoided, or if our leaders were smarter they could have avoided. Thus we are tempted to scapegoat our leadership for not being smart enough. But the simple reality is that we can't control everything. We couldn't control the production schedule of the Pershing any more than we could have prevented 9/11 by being a bit smarter. No one is to blame except Mr. Murphy. $h!t happens and then we move on.
 
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Jeff_F_F       3/19/2007 12:27:51 PM
Let's see if the link to link gun data... works correctly this time.
 
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Jeff_F_F       3/19/2007 12:28:04 PM
Let's see if the link to the gun data... works correctly this time.
 
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Jeff_F_F       3/19/2007 2:24:30 PM
Sept 1942 - T20 designs drawn up, 90mm gun suggested www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showt...
March 1943 - protype 90mm gun mounted on T23 model www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showt...
 
April 1943 - Construction of prototypes ordered: T25 with T23 Armor & T26 with upgraded armor www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showt...
 
January 1944 - First completed T25 prototype www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showt...
 
May 1944 - 40 T25s completed: Too late for D-Day after this emphasis switched to T26 www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showt...
 
June 1944 - 10 T26s completed: decision to switch to Hydramatic for next series of prototypes www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showt...
 
July 1944 - Pershing production has highest priority for production : 10 were scheduled for October, 30 for November, 50 for December, 125 for January, and 200 for February. www.army.mil/cmh/books/wwii/Be...
 
October 1944 - First 10 Pershings produced, changes requested, production put on hold. www.army.mil/cmh/books/wwii/Be...
 
December 1944 - T26 ordered shipped to ETO without further modifications. Judged satisfactory at the front. www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showt...
 
It looks like the changes ordered in October weren't really needed. The T26 could have been shipped at that point and have been available in limited numbers perhaps as early as Novemember. The sources sited don't document whose call that was. I'd suspect McNair, though. It looks like a 3 month delay because of that though. Certainly not a year or more.
 
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