M4 Sherman vs Tiger

[Grumbler]

WW2 was about attrition. The side with the biggest factories won. The Sherman was produced in enormous numbers. So many that some are still around today, I think. I could be wrong about that. I know a decade ago a few were soildering on in South America. Parades and such.

[wulfir]

The 743rd Seperate Tank Battalion lost 96 Medium tanks during the European campaign (mostly to antitank guns and Panzerschreck/fausts).

I made a campaign once, roughly based on the 743rd.

According to Folkestad's A View from the Turret the 743rd was in near continious action during it's year of war 44-45 sustaining 141 KIA, 22 MIA, 316 WIA. The three line companies lost 96 tanks (65 burned) and the light tank company lost 15 light tanks (most burned). Taken together this represents the battalion at near full strength. Non-battle losses not factored in. In terms of M4s it's nearly the entire complement destroyed twice.

The tank bn's, unlike the armor bn's, could only move fast if the infantry moved fast. The 743rd was at St Jean de Daye, Mortain, La Glieze etc facing some of the German top armor, not quite the enemy-hinterland area the M4 was meant to to operate in.

But, by comparison, it's pretty impressive wielding a full tank bn - the German infantry division usually had to make do with a handful of StuG or Sfl.Pak.

[Grumbler]

Yep, that was a problem with the way the US built their army. By keeping the tank battalions in a pool and assigning them to an Infantry division as needed, there were not enough Tank battalions to go around as there would have been if a tank battalion had been organic to the Infantry division. So when the Infantry division was pulled out to rest, that tank battalion was assigned to another Infantry division, which meant they got no rest. Plus they lost the advantage or working together with the same guys, so everybody had to start from scratch as a combined arms team. The Army stopped doing that after the Korean war. Now days the difference between a US Inafntry divison and a US Armored divison is ( was, they are rearranging things again) the ratio of MBT's to IFV's.

[shortreengage]

[wulfir]

By keeping the tank battalions in a pool and assigning them to an Infantry division as needed...

:conf:

I thought the Tank Bn's were more or less permanently assigned to a specific infantry division. Apart from the initial period after Omaha Beach the 743rd was attached to the 30th Infantry Division when it arrived in Normandy and remained so for the duration of the war...., another famvourite of mine is the 746th, it fought with the 9th Infantry Division from Normandy to the end in Germany...

[shortreengage]

Some of the attachments were habitual or at least semi permanent with the same Battalions rotating between divisions.

[McIvan]

"Since 1 August 1944, when 3rd Army became operational, our total tank casualties have amounted to 1,136 tanks. During the same period we have accounted for 2,287 German tanks, of which 808 were the Tiger or Panther variety, and 851 on our side were the M4. These figures of themselves refute any inferiority of our tanks, and let me add that the 3rd Army has always attacked, and therefore better than 70 percent of our tank casualties have occered from dug-in antitank guns and not enemy tanks, whereas a majority of the enemy tanks have been put out by our tanks"

The 743rd Seperate Tank Battalion lost 96 Medium tanks during the European campaign (mostly to antitank guns and Panzerschreck/fausts).
They destroyed 41 Mark IVs, 26 Panthers, 4 Tigers and 10 SP guns along with 100 pillboxes/machinegun nests, 36 AT guns, 9 field pieces, 4 armored cars and 125+ trucks.( [/i]Steel Victory[/i], Yeide 2003) That's a pretty good trade-off unless of course you one of those 96 crews.

The main point being that the big gunned tank was'nt needed in the ETO because large tank on tank battles were rare. Most of the TD battalions were used as SP Arty because there was'nt much to hunt.
And what was the level of distibution of Tigers anyways?(I don't mean in SP games which is likely most games) 1 Battalion per Panzer Korps?
Very bad if it's in your sector, but they can't be everywhere.

I'm a bit dubious about taking kill claims by anyone at face value. Patton was notorious for inflating his force's claims...I've heard it said (can't put my finger on where) that 3rd army collectively claimed it killed/wounded/captured and destroyed more forces than the Germans fielded in the entire Western ETO. I don't see that his argument follows either way. Even if we assume those figures are correct, however, it could as easily be a function of increasingly veteran US crews, and not their tanks as such. Some of the 3rd army tanker units were outstanding.

Very good point, tho, that Allied tanks mostly spent their time shooting off HE and MG ammo at non-armoured targets, or being knocked out by AT guns or fausts that they likely never spotted. But surely the average US tanker would still have been much happier in a fleet of mechanically reliable and well supplied & maintained "Panther equivalents", with a good high velocity gun and still just as much HE and MG ammo? The "we won, therefore our tanks were better" argument seems beside the point to me.

Possibly the Brits had close to the right idea with the 2-3 75mm Shermans and 1xFirefly Sherman with the 17pdr per troop....perhaps not every tank needed to be an armour buster.

[McIvan]

Excerpt from William B. Folkestad. The View from the Turret: The 743rd Tank Battalion during World War II. Shippensburg, Pa.: Burd Street Press, 1996. vi + 146 pp. Notes and index. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57249-001-7:

"The inadequacies of the M4 Sherman tank--insufficient firepower, too high a silhouette, insufficient armor protection, gasoline engines, narrow tracks--are brought up time and again by the tankers of the 743rd. Of particular interest are the innovative means devised for offsetting the Sherman's shortcomings such as sandbagging the hull to make up for insufficient armor protection, and welding additional ammunition-ready racks in the turret to provide easy access to the additional ammunition needed to score a kill on German armor. Despite these innovations, the 743rd lost 96 M4 Shermans and suffered 141 killed, 22 missing, and 316 wounded. The total casualties, 479, represented the battalion at nearly full strength (p. 126). By comparison, the Third Armored Division lost 780 M4s and the equivalent of 583 tank crews (p. 127). As Folkestad so poignantly notes, "the price for technical inferiority was tremendous" (p. 127)."

[shortreengage]

[Grumbler]

Actually the M4A3E8(w) wasn't that bad a tank... for late '43 or early '44, when it could have been standard except for Ike, Bradly and Patton not wanting it. When it did show up in late '44, early '45 it was obsolete.
The M-26 was as good as anything the Germans made. It could have beeen rady by D-Day, except for the shipping probelm. You could get almost 100 M4's on a Liberty ship and a little more then half that in M-26's. It wasn't the weight, but the width. If the M-26 had been a few inches narrower, it might have been doable. Or at least that is what I have read. Keeping in mind that the US had to ship everything across the pond, and there was always more to ship, then there were ships to carry it, the logistics guys stopped prodution of the M-26 in december of '43, IIRC. That 8 month hold was used to re-design the turret and transmission, I think. I would rather have 42 M-26's then 96 M-4's, but I'm not a Major General in the US Army.