Military History | How To Make War | Wars Around the World Rules of Use How to Behave on an Internet Forum
Armor Discussion Board
Sign In   Return to Topic Page
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
 
Quote    Reply

Email Me When A New Comment Is Made
Show Only Poster Name and Title     Newest to Oldest
Pages: PREV  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19   NEXT
Herald1234    Note that was because of the buingled and protracted delays in 1943 between the end users and the doctrinalists?   3/14/2007 11:58:17 AM
Army Ground Forces and Ordnance were fighting each other all through 1943[citation same article] which contributed to that full year's US tank program delay as I pointed out earlier. It still came down to Devers versus McNair with the end result measured in thousands of US casualties.
 
Herald
 
Quote    Reply

JFKY    To Herald   3/14/2007 1:31:07 PM
 

"I would buy malarkey that if I didn't know that many Sherman tanks weren't shipped as hold cargo. They were shipped as RORO cargo. Ever hear of ships like the SS Seatrain?By the way Pershings were shipped over on Liberty ships.  So what was the problem?"

"SS Seatrain Texas was one of two unusual ships built in 1940 by Sun Shipbuilding & Drydock Company of Chester, Pennsylvania".   A better phrase SOME tanks came by SS Seatrain, MOST tanks were deck and cargo hold.  It was not until the 1970's or 1960's that RORO was widely employed, for car and truck delivery.  The point was not that M-26's didn't come by sea, but rather that existing vessels could carry fewer of them, per trip.  Again it was something to do with hatch size and hold size....So again the M-26 was LESS transportable than the M-4.
 
 
"I've addressed this aspect of infantry engagement twice by pointing out that whenever they could German infantry would fight with Panzer support. You can't escape fighting tanks if the enemy insists on using them as part of his combined arms defensive mix!"
 
Yes but Herald that's the point, the Germans didn't have that many tanks!  Please grasp this, EVERY US Infantry division could be supported by at least one battalion of armour, the same is NOT true of German Infantry formations.  When possible, the Germans with tanks and self-propelled artillery, however that wasn't possible most of the time.  Panzer and Panzergrenadiers constituted less than 10% of the Wehrmacht force structure.
 
 
"The battlefield is where the combat decision in war finally takes place. If what you are doing doesn't work as well as it should, you find yourself wasting badly needed resources in men and material."
 
Yes and YET, the Second World War was won far from the battlefield, in offices where war plans and war production were created.  And the point I am trying to make is that the force structure from June 1944 until the Fall of 1944 was SET IN 1943 and earlier.
 
Which leads to this quote from a website on the M-26:

In May of 1943, a limited production order of 250 tanks was contracted.  The newly developed 90mm tank gun T7 (M3) was to be mounted into the turret of the T23, forty with unmodified armor, and ten in turrets mounted on T23 hulls with additional armor for trial purposes.  The two trial models were known as the T25 and T26 respectively.  A further note on these two models, was the T25 utilized Horizontal Volute Suspension System (HVSS), and the T26 incorporated a torsion bar system.  After repetitive trials, the T26 version was noted as having a better ride, and was thusly chosen for further development.

The T26 utilized some of the features of the original T20 prototype, but certain changes were made to improve on the design. The T26 had an electric transmission, similar to that of the original Porsche design for the ‘Tiger’. Although the T20 was found to have a better overall performance, its electric transmission was deemed too complicated.  The T20 design was dropped in favor of a new rear cross-drive power train mating a “Torquematic” fluid-drive automatic transmission, to an improved version of the Ford V-8 tank engine, the Model GAF.  This 1,100 cubic inch (18 liter), water-cooled, gasoline engine developed 500 hp @ 2,600 rpm.  This combination was designated the T26E1.

By mid-year in 1944, U.S. forces in Europe stated that further tanks with 75mm or 76mm guns were not desired.  Tanks with 90mm and 105mm guns were requested, with 90mm versions the more numerous.  Therefore, only the T26E1 prototypes were approved for further development.  The T26E1 offered firepower and armor capable of taking on the ‘Panther’ and ‘Tiger’ tanks one-on-one, instead of the “by committee” approach then in use."
May of 143 sees the PREDECESSOR to the M-26 authorized for limited production!  Note it's not the M-26 it's the T-23 and T-25!  The M-26/T-26 was not available until the end of 1943, at best!  It was not going to be available for the D-Day Campaign.
 
You also casually note that if we devoted another plant to production we could have had more M-26's?  Uh that's true and we could have more 747's IF Boeing JUST BUILT ANOTHER PLANT!  It took months if not years to tool up a NEW plant and months to RE-TOOL production for an existing plant!&
 
Quote    Reply

YelliChink       3/14/2007 3:21:05 PM
Interestingly, after McNair got killed by friendly fire from the 8th Army Air Force, US Army found themselves with new M26 and M36, which are very effective against anything heavy armor in the world of the day, in just a couple of months. Coincidence? I think not.
 
Quote    Reply

Herald1234    Exactly.   3/14/2007 3:45:58 PM
Herald
 
Quote    Reply

JFKY       3/14/2007 3:57:59 PM
Some evidence would be nice, which is not to say that McNair and AGF didn't interfere with the introduction of the M-26, but that their interference did NOT prevent large-scale production and use.
 
McNair and bureaucratic in-fighting prevented a few hundred M-26's from appearing in Oct/Nov 1944, rather than in February 1945.  It did not prevent the introduction of several thousand M-26's.

McNair got a lot of things right, but he and the Armour Board did not do as good a job as they might have, and that is inarguable.
 
Quote    Reply

scuttlebut steve    back to the sherman thread   3/14/2007 5:38:01 PM
Lets see if we can all agree on the fact that US tank/tank destroyer doctrine (tanks vs infantry, TD's vs tanks) was an absolute turkey, stupid and abominable.  With the policy of meeting tanks vs tanks in place, so much time and effort that went into tank destroyers would have been invested in the sherman tanks and it's successor tanks.  The bulk of US shermans might have already had most or all of these features by the time of the normandy invasion (76mm gun, HVAP ammo, better 76mm HE rounds, T23 turret, HVSS easy 8, wet ammo storage, uprated engine, jumbo armor configuration), and the pershings may have been completed and introduced in large numbers by then or soon after.  I think that the only tank destroyer that should have been built was the M18, and it should have been modified with an enclosed turret with increased secondary MG's and used as fast, light support armor against infantry/light mechanized units.
 
Quote    Reply

JFKY       3/14/2007 7:14:14 PM
"I think that the only tank destroyer that should have been built was the M18, and it should have been modified with an enclosed turret with increased secondary MG's and used as fast, light support armor against infantry/light mechanized units."
 
Well the M-36 carried a 90mm and under your plan the most firepower the US would have would be the 76mm or some 17 pounder Firefly Shermans.  I think rather than the M-18 with it's 76mm gun the US forces would have been better augmented with the M-36 and its 90mm.
 
Quote    Reply

YelliChink       3/14/2007 7:24:00 PM
Another funny thing is that Russians produced 3000+ JS-2 between 1944 to 1945 without sacrificing T-34 production. The only thing they passed on is T-43, which is just a muscle-up T-34, equivalent to Sherman Jumbo. Russians did have some advantage of producing, employing and testing earlier heavy tanks in combat, and their solution is to design and build better heavy tanks instead of relying solely on T-34.
 
 
 
Quote    Reply

JFKY       3/14/2007 8:07:03 PM
Well Yellichink if you read Glantz and Dunn, you realize that the Soviets worked very hard to keep up long tank production runs and to rationalize vehicle production.  In the end they focused on the T-60/SU-76, the T-34 and the KV series.  The Iosif Stalin production came, sensibly, at the expense of the KV production.  The Stalin-series REPLACED the KV-series.  The heavy and medium tank series ran parallel not in competition to one another, so MORE heavy tanks did not, necessarily mean FEWER T-34's.  But nonetheless increased Iosif Stalin tanks yielded a decrease in Soviet tank production, in the production of the KV-series, so there really isn't a comparison per se to the M-4/M-26 series production.
 
Quote    Reply

Herald1234       3/15/2007 12:38:15 AM

 

"I would buy malarkey that if I didn't know that many Sherman tanks weren't shipped as hold cargo. They were shipped as RORO cargo. Ever hear of ships like the SS Seatrain?By the way Pershings were shipped over on Liberty ships.  So what was the problem?"



"SS Seatrain Texas was one of two unusual ships built in 1940 by Sun Shipbuilding & Drydock Company of Chester, Pennsylvania".   A better phrase SOME tanks came by SS Seatrain, MOST tanks were deck and cargo hold.  It was not until the 1970's or 1960's that RORO was widely employed, for car and truck delivery.  The point was not that M-26's didn't come by sea, but rather that existing vessels could carry fewer of them, per trip.  Again it was something to do with hatch size and hold size....So again the M-26 was LESS transportable than the M-4.
 
Not proven and more malarkey.  No ROROs? How about more than 1000 of them purpose built to carry tanks across the Atlantic?
 
                                                                                                                       
"I've addressed this aspect of infantry engagement twice by pointing out that whenever they could German infantry would fight with Panzer support. You can't escape fighting tanks if the enemy insists on using them as part of his combined arms defensive mix!"
 

Yes but Herald that's the point, the Germans didn't have that many tanks!  Please grasp this, EVERY US Infantry division could be supported by at least one battalion of armour, the same is NOT true of German Infantry formations.  When possible, the Germans with tanks and self-propelled artillery, however that wasn't possible most of the time.  Panzer and Panzergrenadiers constituted less than 10% of the Wehrmacht force structure.

You aren't paying attention to how the Germans organized themselves. Where and why do think all those StuGs were popping up everywhere? Those were organized as organic Wehrmacht tank destroyer companies and battalions attached to various infantry formations on an adhoc basis. The \Germans had as many assault guns in the West as they had tanks. It was a total of between 2000 and 2500 armored fighting vehicles of all types mounting large caliber antitank guns exceeding 7.5cm. bore. Oh they didn't have many tanks.  The Germans had 1500 tanks sitting in France in June 1944 and the rest were assault guns
????????????????????????????????


"The battlefield is where the combat decision in war finally takes place. If what you are doing doesn't work as well as it should, you find yourself wasting badly needed resources in men and material."
 

Yes and YET, the Second World War was won far from the battlefield, in offices where war plans and war production were created.  And the point I am trying to make is that the force structure from June 1944 until the Fall of 1944 was SET IN 1943 and earlier.
 
It was bungled in 1943 and earlier. See the excerpt below about the Louisiana and Carolina maneuvers and the battle be
 
Quote    Reply
PREV  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19   NEXT



StrategyWorld.com© 1998 - 2012StrategyWorld.com. All rights Reserved. StrategyWorld.com, StrategyPage.com, FYEO, For Your Eyes Only and Al Nofi's CIC are all trademarks of StrategyWorld.com Privacy Policy