And Created The Sherman
The tank, that is, named after General William Tecumseh Sherman, a man who had been at the sharp end of war and had no time for anyone who considered it noble or glorious: "War is hell" is one of his pithier sayings. Art!
Art!
Ready to render Hell unto Heinies
Most of this Intro, if not today's whole second blog, is going to be given over to annotations I made of an excellent 'Historical Notes' Youtube vlog about the Sherman, which I'll provide a link for at the end. The title is "The Sherman Tank Was Never A Death-Trap", which is setting out your stall with confidence.
First, we travel back in time to 1998, when the work 'Death Traps' by Belton Cooper was published. Art!
DANGER WILL ROBINSON! AVOID!
There's only a couple of problems about that status, in that DT is almost completely wrong, and it's almost completely wrong. I realise this is the same thing twice but I wanted to emphasise the point.
Cooper spent the Second Unpleasantness, not as a Sherman crew member, but as an Ordnance Officer in the South Canadian 3rd Armoured* Division's Maintenance Battalion. It was his job to co-ordinate the recovery and repair of damaged or destroyed Shermans, NOT surviving Shermans. Also M5 Stuarts, though they don't get a mention. Art!
3rd Armoured fielded around 230 Shermans and up to 50 Stuarts.
So, Cooper's assertions and allegations were made on the basis of 100% failures and are a classic example of 'Confirmation Bias', where prejudices act to focus attention only on facts that confirm those same prejudices.
DT was highly influential because it sold so many copies, and Cooper's claims were widely believed, that is, the Sherman was rubbish and Teuton tanks were better. Art!
'Historical Notes' drolly comments "None of this survives contact with the actual evidence". For example, the Office of the Adjutant General compiled statistics as seen above, which detailed casualties in the European Theatre Of Operations, ETO hereafter. Steven Zaloga, the widely-respected author of military histories, used this source to provide hard numbers for branches of service.
Total armoured vehicle personnel in ETO = 49,000
Total armoured vehicle personnel in ETO killed, injured, missing or POW = 1,581
Thus a 14% casualty rate, compared to the 80% in infantry units. So a Sherman tank crewman was x6 times less likely to become a casualty than the PBI.
None of these statistics are provided in Cooper's work.
A Dubious Dateline
You may be ahead of me here, as the publication date for DT was 53 years after the end of the Second Unpleasantness. Cooper was born in 1917 and jitterbugged off this mortal coil 19 years ago, so this blog won't upset him.
HN points out that Cooper wrote DT from memory, 53 years after the events he had witnessed. So there is an element of doubt about how well he recalled these events. Art!
Steve has a Bachelors and Masters in History. When he wrote the above tome he went back to primary sources, a touchstone for historians, using South Canadian After Action Reports compiled at the time to inform his work. Art!Salute for Steve!
This is one of the essential reference works on the Sherman, compiled by Ol' Hunny from original South Canadian Army sources.
The Question Of Fire
Or, why the Sherman was equated with the Ronson lighter, which 'Lights first time', an urban legend that only originated long after the Second Unpleasantness was over. Art!
A bit of gaffer-tape and it'll be fine
Cooper's assertion is that the Sherman was dangerously flammable due to the petrol engine, which would ignite if hit. Curiously, I have recently read somewhere that a diesel engine, thought to be much safer thanks to not burning readily, would suffer aerosolisation of the diesel fuel if hit and burn just as readily as petrol. Not sure how true that is.
ANYWAY British and South Canadian Operational Research Teams found that between 60 - 80% of brewed-up tanks were caused by ammunition cooking-off. Bagged powder charges stored in bins along the side of the hull interior would explode if hit. Stowage was redesigned to place these on the bottom of the hull, and the bins were double-walled, with ethylene glycol filling the void - known as 'wet' storage. If a bin was hit, it would immediately be swamped with the fluid, extinguishing any fire. Art!
This redesign came in mid-1944 and dropped the brew-up rate to between 10 - 14%. British Operational Research also found that if a Sherman suffered a penetrating hit, there was on average one fatality in the five man crew, or an 80% survival rate thanks to there being 5 hatches to get out of.
Combat Exchange Rates
No! Nothing to do with currency, you bafunes. The statistics of tanks versus tanks. Back to Ol' Zally again. He worked out that the South Canadians lost 1.9 Shermans to every 3 Teuton Panthers, which must upset the Wehraboos terribly. Art!
A case in point. This Panther doesn't appear to be damaged or burned out, the tracks are still attached and intact and children shouldn't play with tanks. Note that the hull machine gun is gone, either salved by the Teuton crew, or removed by Allied soldiers, and that the towing cable has been attached to one of the towing lugs. It may have broken down or, logistics logistics logistics, simply run out of fuel.
ANYWAY AGAIN back to Zally. Why were Shermans so much better in action that the much-vaunted Panther? Because, even a year after their introduction, Panthers were still horribly unreliable with severe final drive and transmission problems. You could turn the 60-piece gearbox into iron filings with ridiculous ease. To swap out the engine, a 30-minute job on the Sherman, you needed to practically take a Panther apart in a task that took hours. Art!
This is the unglamourous side of military hardware. As per Zally, it meant that Panther units were normally at less than 50% readiness for combat.
There's another factor that HN doesn't address, so I shall <puts on military historian hat>: crew quality. At the Battle Of Dompaire, the French 2nd Armoured Division came across the Teuton Panzer Brigade 112, and, thanks to having far more experienced crews (probably motivated by a lot of Gallic spite) and air support, absolutely malleted the Panther-equipped brigade. The French lost 7 tanks, the Teutons 69. Art!
French Sherman. Note 'Continental' 7 on turret
At Arracourt the South Canadian 4th Armoured Division ran into the 111th and 113th Panzer brigades, again equipped with Panthers. HOWEVER - O that word again! - the 113th crews had only been given 2 weeks training, could not read maps and had no idea what combined arms warfare was. The South Canadians lost 55 tanks, the Teutons 331. Sorry, Wehraboos.
Okay, back to HN. They sniffily dismiss the Tiger as a 'boutique tank', intended to weigh in at 45 tons and actually hitting 57, a gas hog, wildly unreliable and needing special tracks to be moved by rail, combining all that with an inability to use many bridges. Art!
Thus they issued the first 500 with a deep-wading kit.
'Boutique' may be right. The Teutons built 1,347 of them during the Tiger's production run, essentially making them by hand. 1,347 might sound good but contrast it to the Sherman's 49,234 total, meaning 36 Shermans for each Tiger, and it looks a bit sick.
Well, we are now at Count and the whole blog has indeed been about the Sherman.
Here's the link to 'Historical Notes'
The Sherman Tank Was Never a 'Death Trap'—Here's Who Lied
The whole vlog is about 20 minutes long. Now, there is a vlog by Nick Moran about myths concerning South Canadian armour, which is 45 minutes long. I am tempted, I am tempted.
* Note CORRECT spelling.
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