During the First Army breakthrough battles in July and August, the 2d Armored Division tankers had learned how to fight German Panther and Tiger tanks with their M4 Shermans. They knew that the ammunition of the 75-mm. gun with which most of the M4's were armed (a low-velocity shell about 13 inches long, as compared with the 28- to 30-inch high-velocity 75-mm. shell of the Panthers) would not penetrate at any range the thick frontal armor of the Panthers and Tigers, but could damage the sides and rear. Therefore the tankers had used wide encircling movements, engaging the enemy's attention with one platoon of tanks while another platoon attacked from the rear. They had suffered appalling losses: between 26 July and 12 August, for example, one of 2d Armored Division's tank battalions had lost to German tanks and assault guns 51 percent of its combat personnel killed or wounded and 70 percent of i
By 1945 the tankers urgently needed a more powerful gun than the 76-mm. Firepower was their first consideration. The second was speed. Armor came off a poor third, for most believed there was more safety in speed and maneuverability than in armor. Maj. Gen. Ernest H. Harmon, commander of 2d Armored Division and one of the foremost armored commanders of the war, spoke for the majority of his fellow tankers when he described the characteristics the tank should have as "First: gun power; Second: battlefield maneuverability; Third: as much armor protection as can be had after meeting the first two requirements, still staying within a weight that can be gotten across obstacles with our bridge equipment."30 The main reason the tankers welcomed the 200 up-armored M4 (M4A3E2) "assault tanks" (promoted by Army Ground Forces but opposed by Ordnance) that got into action in the fall of 1944 was that the tankers needed more armor in order to get close enough to the German tanks for their 75-mm, and 76-mm. guns to be effective.31
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 begun development 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
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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.32
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
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
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 General Campbell, Chief of Ordnance; but Maj. Gen. Jacob L. Devers, then commanding general of the Armored Force, refused to go along, and in the end the
The ZEBRA Mission of February 1945
As head of a technical mission (ZEBRA) to introduce the new tanks to the European theater, General Barnes, accompanied by Col. Joseph M. Colby of the Tank-Automotive Command, Col. George Dean of the Armored Branch, AGF New Developments Division, two Ordnance captains, a representative from General Motors, and a gunner from Aberdeen Proving Ground, arrived in Paris on 9 February 1945. First there were conferences with Eisenhower and other SHAEF and COMZ officers, including Sayler and Holly, at which it was decided to get the twenty tanks into action as soon as possible. Eisenhower assigned them to 12th Army Group, and Bradley sent them all to First Army, dividing them equally between the 3d and 9th Armored Divisions. By mid-February the tanks had been delivered to the 559th Ordnance Battalion at Aachen, training was under way, and Barnes had embarked on a series of visits to army group, army, corps, and division commanders.45
In addition to introducing the T26E3's, the purpose of the ZEBRA mission was to obtain as much information as possible on the performance of Ordnance materiel in Europe, especially such new materiel as the M24 light tank (armed with a new 75-mm. gun) that had begun to arrive in the theater in December 1944. Barnes was also very much interested in the performance of self-propelled field guns. As an improvement on the M12 with the M1918 155-mm. gun, which had given an excellent account of itself, he had sent to the theater one experimental model of a gun motor carriage, the T83, mounting the M1 (Long Tom) 155-mm. gun; and another experimental model, the T89, mounting an 8-inch howitzer. Both were sent to VII Corps for testing. Other items on which the planners in the United States wanted reports were bazookas and rockets fired from multiple rocket launchers. Before D-day, 4.5-inch artillery rockets (designed to be fired either from aircraft or from the ground) had been sent to the European theater. They were fin-stabilized, that is, stabilized in flight by fins that opened when the rocket left the tube. Two types of multiple launchers had been provided: the T27, an 8-tube launcher on a fixed framework mount, which could be fired either from the ground or the bed of a truck, and
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the T34, a 60-tube cluster to be mounted on the Sherman tank.46
In his conversations with the commanders in Europe, Barnes described new materiel that was not yet ready for shipment: a "supervelocity" 90-mm. gun, the T15, with which he said a large portion of the T26E3 tanks were to be equipped; and three heavy tanks, the T28, an "assault tank" weighing 90 tons with twelve inches of armor, mounting the new 105-mm. antiaircraft gun; and the T29 and T30, which were similar in chassis to the T26 series, but mounted, respectively, the 105-mm. gun and the 155-mm. Barnes also had photographs of the new 57-mm. and 75-mm. recoilless rifles and a wheeled mount for a multiple rocket launcher, the T66, which would fire a new 4.5-inch rocket that did not depend on fins, being "spin-stabilized"?rotated by a flow of gases through eight canted vents.47
The response to the ZEBRA mission showed plainly that theater needs could be summed up in two words: firepower and mobility. The commanders liked the T26E3 Pershing tank and would have liked it even better if it had carried the T15 90-mm. gun. They liked the light tank Ms4 very much. They had been converted to self-propelled field guns by the M12, and wanted large quantities of such guns of the Long Tom and 155-mm. howitzer type. They did not want the T23 tank with the electrical transmission. Most commanders were not very much interested in the very heavy T28, T29, and T30 tanks, for they did not see how these tanks could be got over roads and bridges. They were definitely interested i
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