mdiehl
Posts: 5998
Joined: 10/21/2000 Status: offline
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quote:
Yes, I'm sure they loved the thin armour, and the way it caught fire when they ran over a speedbump. Idiot... The Soviets had mixed feelings about the Sherman. At the tank battle distances waged in Ukraine they definitely did not like the 75mm gun (bear in mind the Soviets got few if any of the 76 armed M4s). The armor was definitely not thin and it definitely was sloped, giving it effective thickness comparable to a PzVIe (but, unfortunately, with the short 75 Shermans, lacking a gun that could easily HOLE a PzVIe). They loved the Sherman in secondary theaters where they could count on facing Balkan troops, Italians, and Germans possessing a propensity of things built on PzIII and early PzIV hulls (like Stugs, PzIVs, hetzers and other weak AFVs). The Shermans had other admirable qualities as fighting vehicles. Lots of MG firepower, and, with the diesel/wet stowage Shermans, decent survivability. And of course in the later M4s, gyrostabilized guns, which made them the best scoot n shoot "tanks" on the battlefield (here leaving out the stabilized M36B1 with the 90mm turret situated on the M4A3E8 hull and chassis -- which I regard as a better mobile tank killer than pretty much everything other than the Sherman Firefly and the JS2). The 76 armed shermans had no trouble penetrating the front of PzVIEs but more difficulty with PzVs beyond 1000m range (again, because properly sloped armor makes a huge difference). As for catching fire running over a speedbump. Sorry, but that was a characteristic of PzVs (especially the early ones) and all forms of PzVI... too much weight for the transmission. Shermans were mechanically the most reliable tanks in the Soviet arsenal and more reliable than any of the German heavies. Shermans had no trouble with spontaneous combustion as German vehicles did.
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Show me a fellow who rejects statistical analysis a priori and I'll show you a fellow who has no knowledge of statistics. Didn't we have this conversation already?
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