If the Pershings didn't cross was probably becasue the bridge was heavily damaged by previous bombings.Bgile wrote:There were several Pershings at the Remagen bridge, but couldn't cross because they were too heavy.
I agree the weight of the Pershings given the bridge condition was almost asuredly a factor. I recall hearing that everyone pretty much held their breath when any sort of vehicle crossed.Company A of the 14th Tank Battalion, less its 90-mm platoon, crossed successfully
Byron Angel wrote:..... The AP performance of the Soviet 85mm gun was approximately equal to a German/Western 75/76mm high velocity gun...
The "botched" aspect IMO resides in the fact that AGF (Army Ground Forces) and BuOrd, after watching the ground war in general unfold for about three years, after watching the tank war unfold in N Africa, after witnessing the introduction ofthe Tiger I in Tunisia in late 1942 and having the opportunity to test its armor in the USA, after encountering the Panther in the Italian campaign during 1943, after presumably receiving status reports re developments on the Eastern Front (the US actually received a T34 for testing in the US during this period), still insisted that there was no need to provide a gun with up to date anti-armor capability for the principal main battle tank design with which the US Army would fight the war.lwd wrote: I don't see anyting that poitns to a "botched" project to mount a 90mm gun on a Sherman ....
There's a bit of 20:20 hindsight there though. The Tiger was eployed in pretty small numbers up through the Italian campaign and so was the Panther. The intel guys thought that the Panther would likely see the same employment as the Tiger. The question then was it worth disrupting the production lines to respond to a fairly small set of German tanks. As for the T-34 it was doing well on the Easternfront but was basically on a par with the Sherman and for US usage inferior to the Sherman. Note also that early war most of the 90mm guns were being allocated to AA units and a fair amount of them to continental defence (which I think was an even more serious error). If you look at the history of US AAA in Europe the attitude by higher level command was on the order of "Go guard a supply dump or something ... just don't get in the way"Byron Angel wrote: ... The "botched" aspect IMO resides in the fact that AGF (Army Ground Forces) and BuOrd, after watching the ground war in general unfold for about three years, after watching the tank war unfold in N Africa, after witnessing the introduction ofthe Tiger I in Tunisia in late 1942 and having the opportunity to test its armor in the USA, after encountering the Panther in the Italian campaign during 1943, after presumably receiving status reports re developments on the Eastern Front (the US actually received a T34 for testing in the US during this period), still insisted that there was no need to provide a gun with up to date anti-armor capability for the principal main battle tank design with which the US Army would fight the war.
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I don't think you've got that quite right. I don't believe that the doctrine was that they shouldn't engage enemy armor the doctrine was that the primary AT elements were TDs. I.e. tanks could and would engage opposing tanks it just wasn't their main job. That's pretty much the way it worked out as well. Although it turned out TD's spent most of their time at other jobs as well.Byron Angel wrote: ... Pre-war US doctrine, which defined the tank arm as an instrument of operational exploitation that should not engage enemy armor, was IMO fundamentally faulty in its assumption that "should not" implied "would not" to the degree that the design parameters of the M4 reflected. Slavish devotion to this theory in the face of actual developments, cost a lot of UK tankers their lives.
It worked out that way because the US enjoyed an incredible numerical superiority. In a parity term that doctrine would have been torn to pieces by any heavy tank batallion or even by Pz IVs.That's pretty much the way it worked out as well.
That's not the conclusion reached by the auther of When Odds Were EvenKarl Heidenreich wrote:lwd:It worked out that way because the US enjoyed an incredible numerical superiority. In a parity term that doctrine would have been torn to pieces by any heavy tank batallion or even by Pz IVs.That's pretty much the way it worked out as well.
A straw man that is very easy to disprove. It's not particularly difficult to find posts of mine where I criticize certain US decisions.Karl Heidenreich wrote:According to lwd and Bgile the US have never commited a single mistake in anything.
I'd like to see any battlefield evidence that the T-34 was superior to the Sherman. As for flammability all tanks of the period tended to burn when it. From the stats I've seen I'm not sure that there is a significant difference between the M-4, Pz-IV, Pz-V, and Pz-VI. Indeed if you take the means 2 of the 3 Panzers tended to burn more often than Sherman's did although as I said I'm not sure it's a statistically significantly difference.Despite that it is proven the absolute battlefield characteristics of the Sherman in comparison, let's say the T 34 (so we do not use the Tiger here) to the degree it was labeled after a cigarrete lighter by its own crews, they still believe that because it uses a white star on it's turret it was the best damn tank in the world.
Do they? I don't think so. Certainly the M-26, M-46, M-47, M-48, M103, and M-60 all show their M-4 heritage much more than they show any relation to the German tanks. I don't see much of a German heritage in the British tanks either. As for the latest generation it's harder to judge by I like to see someone make a strong case for them being more German like.I wonder why is it that all post war tanks of Europe and the Abrams M1 resemble more a Panther or a Tiger than a Sherman.
It is not statisticaly significant because the beligerants were using different shells/rockets. It would be significant only if you would have 100 Panthers and 100 SHermans lined up and fired upon by the same type of AT weapon.lwd wrote:I'd like to see any battlefield evidence that the T-34 was superior to the Sherman. As for flammability all tanks of the period tended to burn when it. From the stats I've seen I'm not sure that there is a significant difference between the M-4, Pz-IV, Pz-V, and Pz-VI. Indeed if you take the means 2 of the 3 Panzers tended to burn more often than Sherman's did although as I said I'm not sure it's a statistically significantly difference.
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Which you didn't even care to quote, just mention to show that you also have something as a document support. A mediocre work at least, not like Glantz, Dupuy or Willbeck's. A review which can be completely read at:That's not the conclusion reached by the auther of When Odds Were Even
It goes on and on and the complete reading can be found in the link posted above. Still, the Germans had a much better, the best, army of WWII, acknowledge so by the same officers of the army that fought it.Mythos revisited: American Historians and German Fighting Power in WWII
by Thomas E. Nutter
In 1994 Keith E. Bonn published his tendentiously titled work, When the Odds Were Even.(100) Bonn is a 1978 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, and at the time his book was published, was serving as an infantry officer at Fort Lewis, Washington. When the Odds Were Even grew out of Bonn's doctoral dissertation in history at the University of Chicago. While it would appear from Bonn's Acknowledgments that he had access to original German documents in both the U.S. National Archives and the Bundesmilitargeschichtliches Forschungsamt in Freiburg, Germany, in fact he relies upon primarily American sources to tell the German side of the story. His Acknowledgment also reveals that he interviewed only American veterans in the preparation of his work.(101)
In his Introduction, Bonn sets the tone for When the Odds Were Even , and indeed for the entire genre of which it is a part. In the process of decrying the "selective" use of history, Bonn states that
[O]ne of the most recent and unquestionably most alarming trends in the historiography of World War II in the ETO [European Theatre of Operations] is the use of the events of this era by certain military reformers to justify recommendations that the contemporary U.S. Army should discard its own uniquely evolved institutions and doctrines and instead simply imitate the Wehrmacht.(102)
Particularly offensive to Bonn in this regard are works which "inaccurately represent the facts bearing on the respective combat accomplishments of the American and German armies" or compare those accomplishments unfairly.(103)
Bonn must at least be credited with admitting that the Unites States Army enjoyed certain critical advantages over the Wehrmacht in the ETO, namely (i) tactical air superiority, if not supremacy; (ii) a gradually improving logistical situation; and (iii) a relatively favorable manpower situation, advantages which "colored the outcome of very campaign, every battle, and every engagement in which they (the Americans) participated".(104) Because of these significant disparities, a "truly fair and accurate comparison" of the two armies is difficult to construct. Bonn finds his ideal field for comparison, however, in the Vosges campaign of the Fall-Winter, 1944/1945. Having reached this conclusion, however, Bonn immediately moves to debunk it. In the early portion of the campaign, for example, the Germans not only enjoyed the benefits of prepared positions in terrain naturally suited to defense, but also disposed of veteran troops who, though "sometimes outnumbered…still had their full complement of mortars and machine guns", weapons the author describes as the most important under the circumstances.(105) On the other hand, the American units involved are described as either totally green or burned out from campaigning in Italy. In spite of these disadvantages, the "mixed bag of American units" succeeded in prevailing over their opponents in the first phase of the battle, as well as its succeeding phases.
Bonn begins his work with a brief discussion of the then existing historical literature touching on his subject, with regard to much of which he is very skeptical. Bonn is highly critical of Martin van Creveld, whom he describes as "notorious". After condescendingly referring to Creveld's "admirers" as "well-intentioned but uninformed", he decries the latter's work as historically inaccurate and "the worst kind of revisionist history". Bonn claims that Creveld's work is shot through with historical inaccuracies about the U.S. Army. To illustrate this, he claims that Creveld represents that U.S. combat divisions used such things as pigs, bees, monkeys, centipedes, and belligerent dogs for their unit insignia, and that these "whimsical" designs embarrassed American troops and adversely affected their morale.(106) In fact, the passage in Creveld's work to which Bonn alludes reads as follows:
Like their German counterparts, American units were known by either roman or Arabic numbers. Most also had nicknames, though the enormous variety of whimsical designs---belligerent dogs, ducks, centipedes, spiders, bees, bulls, birds, monkeys, wolves, bears, horses, pigs and cats, among others---that accompanied American units into combat suggests that these meant little to the troops. Except for Meril's Marauders, an outfit operating against the Japanese, I know of no case in which an American formation was known after its commander.(107)
At least two things are evident from the foregoing passage. First, Creveld does not refer to U.S. combat divisions, as Bonn claims, but to "units", a fact which is evident from not only the paragraph in question, but from the surrounding context as well. Such "units" could include something as small as an armored company or platoon, or a fighter or bomber squadron, or even an individual aircraft. Second, at least one of the animals referred to by Creveld---"birds"---was in fact used as a divisional symbol by at least two
U.S. combat formations---the 45th Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne Division---and at least as far as is known, the soldiers in those formations were not "embarrassed" by those symbols. Moreover, one need only consult any one of a number of works on the Eighth Air Force to determine that many of its units bore symbols such as belligerent dogs, bees and hornets, ruptured ducks, bulls and the like.
Bonn's flawed methodology in approaching his topic is apparent very early in the book. For example, he asserts that the personnel strength of German units (which he claims are not available from German sources) may be gleaned from American sources. This can be done, according to Bonn, by "meticulously screening available U.S. intelligence reports" and comparing these to the estimates provided by German veterans of the Vosges campaign in the manuscripts they wrote for the U.S. Army in the immediate postwar era. The numbers thus yielded are then cross-referenced with German tables of organization and equipment to give "accurate hard quantities or numbers". There are at least two serious drawbacks to this method. First, as Niklas Zetterling has shown, while numbers of personnel and weapons may not be available from the records of a large German formation (such as Heeresgruppe G), those numbers are often available, either directly or by "patching together" from subordinate formations such as divisions or army corps.(108) Second, no one with anything more than a passing familiarity with the German army would suggest that cross-checking against a German table of organization and equipment in 1944 would be a meaningful exercise. The fact of the matter is that such tables were fanciful characterizations of what the OKW and OKH would have liked for their formations to look like. For example, on 1 August 1944 Panzer Divisions underwent a complete reorganization, into the so-called "Type 44 Panzer Division". A Panzer Division included one Panzer regiment of two battalions; the first battalion included four companies of 17-22 Panther tanks each, while the second battalion possessed four companies of 17-22 Mk IV tanks each.(109) 21.Panzer-Division engaged the Allies during the Normandy fighting. On 8 August 1944 its Panzer-Regiment 22 fielded a total of 20 combat ready Mk IV tanks, over sixty fewer than its maximum authorized strength. More interesting still is the makeup of 21.Panzer-Division on the eve of the Normandy campaign, at which time it was organized as a "Type 43 Panzer Division". According to this organizational structure, it should have had two Panzer battalions, the first consisting of four companies of 22 Mk IVs each, and the second comprising four companies of 22 Panthers each. In fact, on 1 June 1944 the first battalion of Panzer-Regiment 22 had four companies of 17 Mk IVs each, while the Regiment's second battalion broke down as follows: 5 Kompanie, 5 Mk IV (long barrel), 9 French Somua; 6 Kompanie, 5 Mk IV (long barrel), 13 French Somua, 2 British Hotchkiss; 7 Kompanie, 5 Mk IV (long barrel), 13 French Somua; 8 Kompanie, 6 Mk IV (short barrel).(112) These discrepancies between the nominal strength of the 21.Panzer-Division and its actual makeup are typical of the distinctions between ideal and reality which characterized all formations in the German army at this stage of the war.
Well according to; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_Shermanalecsandros wrote: ... Thus, we have to rely upon the documents that survived the war and that are available to us... Books, memoirs, etc.
The historiography that I've read so far shows Sherman tanks to light up faster than German tanks.
Then it later notes:Research conducted by the British No. 2 Operational Research Section, after the Normandy campaign, concluded a Sherman would be set alight 82% of the time following an average of 1.89 penetrations of the tank’s armor; in comparison they also concluded the Panzer IV would catch fire 80% of the time following an average of 1.5 penetrations, the Panther would light 63% of the time following 3.24 penetrations, and the Tiger would catch fire 80% of the time following 3.25 penetrations.[62] John Buckley, using a case study of the 8th and 29th Armoured Brigades found that of the 166 Shermans knocked out in combat during the Normandy campaign, only 94 were burnt out; 56.6%. Buckley also notes that an American survey carried out concluded that 65% of tanks burnt out after being penetrated.
Which seems a bit much but looks like it would make the Sherman less flammable than any of the German tanks listed. However the numbers were fairly small for at least some of the tanks. When you factor in that German tanks and AT guns were more likely to be firing an AP round with some HE in it it doesn't look to me like there is a very strong case for them being much more flammable than German tanks.The practice, known as "wet stowage", reduced the chance of fire after a hit by a factor of four.
Were they? Are you shure that was a common WWII nickname? Here's what http://socyberty.com/history/m4-sherman ... hat-bad/2/ has to say on the topic:They were called "Ronson's" by their crews, by the way...
However, when this is put into perspective, this is the one and only such case I have ever seen of a wartime document using such a word in that context.
All tanks burned fairly readily. Ammo in particular if penetrated is quite flammable as was the fuel and some of the lubricants. When you are on the offensive particularly against AT guns you are going to see more of your vehicles burning that you will opposing vehicles.Just skimmed through a book about the battles aroun Caen.. The same problem is shown there also: Shermans caught fire to easily... Why ? I do not know. But it seems that their crews had some time to escape, so the fire must have spread rather slowly...
But were the T-34's in 44 and 45 superior to the Shermans of that time? I think that's a much harder case to make. Even in 43 it's going to depend on just what you consider a "superior" tank. How important are the "ilities" for instance or ergonomics. How about stabilization?As for the T-34 vs Sherman issue, I would argue that the early T-34-76 was outmatched by the M-4, but that the 1943 version of the T-34 was superior to the contemporary Shermans... (100mm frontal armor, 85mm gun against 75mm frontal armor, 76mm gun...)