7 Things American Soldiers Hated About Their Own Sherman

Normandy, July 1944. An American gunner puts a clean hit dead center on the front plate of a Panther at a few hundred yards, and the shell skips off like a stone on a pond. Now the German crew knows exactly where he is. The men who fought in the Sherman tank complained about it in writing, to their generals. The Army read every page, and kept ordering thousands more anyway. This is what the crews actually hated about it, one complaint at a time, and what was done about each. Some fixes came from the factories. More of them came from sergeants with welding torches in a field behind the beaches. And one of those complaints was aimed at the wrong thing. Ask a crewman why his tank burned and he would blame the gasoline. That is where the Ronson nickname comes from. The Panther and the Tiger ran on gasoline too. When the analysts went through knocked out Shermans, the real danger turned out to be stacked right beside the crew's knees. The last complaint explains the other six. If the problems were this clear, why didn't America just build a better tank? The answer does not start on the battlefield. It starts on a ship, a dock crane, a rail car and a portable bridge, a long way from France. What we go through: Why the Sherman stood roughly nine feet tall, and the driveshaft that forced it The bocage hedgerows, and the few seconds a climbing tank showed its belly The Culin hedgerow cutter, and the German beach obstacles it was cut from Sandbags, spare track, logs and concrete, and why Patton's Third Army discouraged them The 75mm gun against a Panther's sloped front, and Eisenhower's dismay over the 76mm HVAP ammunition, and why a tank got only a handful of rounds The Ronson nickname, and what the loss studies really blamed One hatch for three men, and the loader who had no exit of his own Wet stowage, and how the W tanks burned far less often Narrow tracks in the Lorraine mud, duckbills, and the Easy Eight McNair's doctrine, tank destroyers, and the Pershing arriving in February 1945 The March 1945 statements from the 2nd and 3rd Armored Divisions 49,000 Shermans against about 6,000 Panthers and 1,350 Tigers Said plainly: none of this makes German crews worse soldiers. Many were superb, and in a head-on duel their tanks usually held the edge. But a duel was rarely the whole fight, and a brilliant crew in a better tank could win the afternoon and still lose the month. The tankers who signed those statements were not wrong. They were describing the price of a strategy from inside the turret, and that price was paid in men. Tell me in the comments if anyone in your family crewed a Sherman, and which outfit they were with. And tell me this: of the seven, which complaint would you have hated most? #Sherman #ShermanTank #WW2 #WorldWar2 #TankHistory #Normandy #Panther #TigerTank #Bocage #Patton #Eisenhower #MilitaryHistory #WW2History #Tanks #1944