Nikademus
Posts: 25684
Joined: 5/27/2000 From: Alien spacecraft Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: anarchyintheuk quote:
ORIGINAL: Nikademus quote:
ORIGINAL: anarchyintheuk Iirc the US declined the 'funnies' for DDay but they did use dd tanks. Unfortunately, for the Omaha beach landing contingent they released them too far from the beach and they sank. and some high level movers and shakers (including Patton) declined to support pushing forward the deployment of the T-26....it being felt the Sherman would be the more mobile of the two. Odd, Patton would have been privy to a lot of post-Kasserine reports when he took over II Corps and seen the relative effectiveness of the Sherman during NA and Sicily. Maybe he still believed in the tank vs. inf, tank-destroyer vs. tank theory. Actually, I call that another wtf moment. According to Belton Cooper, Patton was most worried about mobility in his tanks and was under the impression [mistaken according to Cooper] that the "heavy" tank M-26 Pershing would be less mobile. While not mentioning Patton specifically, this was later confirmed in Zaloga's recent book on the Sherman, stating that men within the higher army command and procurement/dev branch were of similar opinion. In reality the M26, was if anything more mobile than the M4 due to superior off road performance and wasn't the 'gas guzzler' feared on roads. Had the M-26 been more enthusiastically embraced prior to D-Day, alot of tankers might have lived in cases where they got taken out. The other prob of the period though was that during Tunisia and North Africa, the M4 was a fully modern tank and compared well to both enemy tanks and AT weapons. This fostered a sense of complacency. However by D-day....the situation changed but the M4 didn't in the large part. Thats the heart of Cooper's point in his book. He wasn't saying the Sherman sucked......but that it by 44, it was inadequate vs. the most common AT weapons now 'standard' in the German army (mainly 75AT weapons and inf-AT weapons). The occasional clash with heavy German tanks only added to the woes and the earlier M4's prior to the A3 wide track performed poorly offroad. The M-26 would have addressed much of this and in that author's opinion would have both saved lives and allowed the Allies to advance faster. I found it an interesting revelation as i'd not realized the Pershing tank could have been ready far sooner than it was.
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