Best/Favourate Tank in the west

Whats is the Best/your favourate tank from in North Africa

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Btw, the T30E16 projectile was the US 90mm HVAP round. With HVAP rounds even a 6 pdr could prove a danger to a Tiger because of its straight armour, albeit only at close range.
 
The Pershing was so scarce that it's not even worth mentioning... it is a footnote at best. I wouldn't even consider it as a combatant in WW2..

I put it in the same curiosity category as the TA-152 and the HE 162

.
 
Soren said:
Haha, you're the most easily agitated man on this forum! Say one thing that can in extreme cases be taken like some sort of negative insinuation about an Allied tank and you go nuts.
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I simply try and help out when someone posts without checking the veracity of his contribution

Take this for example:
Soren said:
3 Pershings got knocked out before the war ended, two by Tiger I's and one by a Nashorn TD. The first was by a Tiger which fired an AP shell through a building which then continued through the side of the Pershing's turret
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Tigers did not destroy 2 Pershings and there was no 'shot through a building'.







No HVSS there is there?


US Tanks were advancing down a number of streets to reach the Cathederal. A check of the After The Battle Magazine No. 104 shows just how many Shermans were present. The Panther fired at the Shermans (Plural) in front of it in Komodien-Strasse. Almost at the same time a Pershing advancing down Marzellen-Sreasse saw the Panther and within seconds of the Sherman being hit knocked out the Panther. No stalking or creeping about involved.





Soren said:
Well m_kenny I'm sorry but the camera man himself mentions that the Pershing was stalking the Panther and caught it offguard from its' right flank.
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Which cameraman? There were several present:
Captain Charles Malley.
Sargeant Voight Carrell
Sargeant Harold Robert.
Tech/5 John Himes
Tech/3 Leon Rosenberg
Tech/4 James Bates
Fred Ramage
Eric Schwab
Allan Jackson

A link for more info

http://www.anicursor.com/colpicwar2.html
 
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Well that was actually an excellent coverage of what happened. It was in a National Geographic documentary that one of the camera men were interviewed and he said the Pershing was stalking the Panther after the Sherman had been hit.

The Panther apparently opened fire from over 300m away and knocked out the Sherman. After that the Panther continued straight ahead closing on the burning Sherman, and when it was about 120m away the Pershing came in from a street to the left of the Panther, (The guy says it had been stalking it) knocking it out with 3 shots. And looking at the link you provided that is indeed what is described there as-well.
 
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Fred Ramage (who took the photo of the crewman falling from the back of the Sherman) was present when the tank was hit. He states that the Panther was visible to the Shermans.
The film of the Panther being hit was taken by Rosenberg and Bates and they say that the Panther was in full view of them and they thought it was knocked out. It did not move and they were suprised when it started firing at The Shermans. That is when they started filming it and they caught the Pershing knocking it out. The building they were in (from the link) precludes them seeing the Panther if it had fired from the tunnel.
Note the link says :
"When the Panther had shot he probably was located in or near the dark tunnel (white arrow) and the US troops were not able to see it there before."

Ramage says he could see it.

"There are records saying the Panther was already located at the crossing when the Sherman reached Komödienstrasse and they thought it was knocked out."

Clearly the author decides to discard these records.

"Tank positions are yellow points, red point the tunnel Trankgasse, from where the Panther probably had shot."

'Probably' shows that even with as well a documented an event as this not everything was clear to all the participants.
 
Well m_kenny it really doesn't matter wether it was at 340, 200 or 120 meters away that the shot was made, the 7.2 kg APCBC shell fired by the Panther would've cut straight through the Sherman had it even been 2 km away.

I however find it quite unlikely that the Sherman commanders could've missed a Panther sitting out on a street in open sight, so it seems a lot more logical that it fired from the dark tunnel some 340 meters away. And esp. since you can't see the Panther out on the street in any picture before the Sherman was hit or emmidiately after.

So the link describes the incident completely accurately if you ask me. You are ofcourse free you draw your own conclusions, but this is mine.
 
Here's the clip I saw, just found it on youtube: View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt5bJQOkI1g

As you can see the Pershing did stalk the Panther.

As for the Sherman hit, if you look at the loader jumping out you can actually see his leg fall off before he himself falls overboard the tank and bleeds to death.

War is a terrible thing.
 
Doughboy said:
I have a question...How in the world does the M4 Sherman have 14 votes? The tank that is famous for bursting into a fireball!
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The Sherman did the job it was supposed to do.. fast, agile, versitle, easy to maintain, cheap. IMO, When deciding on "The Best" (favorite can be anything), you have to consider how well the machine is fulfilling the doctrine it was designed to execute. I didnt vote for it but just because it couldn't stand up to Germany's best in a shoot out, doent mean it was a bad tank.

What would you rather have? 15 Shermans or 1 Tiger?

Tank on Tank violence was only part of the equation... supporting infantry was the primary role.

.
 
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Also people tend to ignore the fact that the Sherman was nomore prone to bursting into flames when hit by the German 75 88mm guns than the Soviet T-34.

Tiger crews reporting about the effectiveness of the 88mm gun mention that the Soviet T-34 had a high tendency to emmidiately blow its own turret sky high after just a single hit by the 88mm main gun. T-34s bursting into flames seemed more rare than the ones exploding emmidiately after having been hit.

So atleast in the Sherman you had a small chance of escaping, while in a T-34 you'd usually be blown to bits and pieces after the first hit.
 
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Soren said:
Here's the clip I saw, just found it on youtube: View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt5bJQOkI1g

As you can see the Pershing did stalk the Panther.
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You must always be careful when viewing edited sequences. The mistake is to believe they were sequential.
Note the buildings bing hit by tracer at 0:49 - 0:52 are the same ones being shelled at 1:40 - 1:46.
Also that the Pershing at 1:22 has no jerrican on the engine deck
At 1:38 it has the jerrican
At 1:46 it has gone again.
Only by viewing the raw footage can one be sure of the timeline.


The survey of Allied tank crew casualties showed that the AVERAGE tank hit had 1 dead and 1 wounded crewman. It also showed that you were more likely to be wounded outside your tank than in it. Small arms/mortars/mines were just as lethal as A/P hits.
As for burn rates the Normandy surveys showed 80% of 'dry' Shermans burned when hit. For the Panther it was found 60% caught fire. Not that much in it really
 
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Well.....Considering that if I chose the 15 Shermans, I would be causing alot of tankers to die.... So I guess 1 Tiger... I care more about the people in the tanks, than how many tanks I produce.IMO
 
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Doughboy said:
Well.....Considering that if I chose the 15 Shermans, I would be causing alot of tankers to die.... So I guess 1 Tiger... I care more about the people in the tanks, than how many tanks I produce.IMO
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That only works if you expect to lose 15 Shermans as opposed to 1 'Tiger'. That clearly did not happen and thus the logic is flawed.
Doubly flawed if you realise that there were 48,000 other German AFV's that were not Tigers.
 
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m kenny said:
That only works if you expect to lose 15 Shermans as opposed to 1 'Tiger'. That clearly did not happen and thus the logic is flawed.
Doubly flawed if you realise that there were 48,000 other German AFV's that were not Tigers.
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Thank goodness doughboy was not a strategist for the US. If human lives were deemed more valuable than the strategic accomplishment, we likely would have lost the war.
 
vikingBerserker said:
I thought the reason why Shermans burned "so well" was due to the use of aviation gasoline whereas the Panther was diesel.
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Nope, both were gasoline powered.

One possible reason for why Allied tanks tended to brew up so easily was the fact that the Germans primarily used APCBC-HE shells to dispatch enemy tanks. These shells contained a small explosive charge (A very smart type of gravity fuze was used, the BdZ type, and unlike its' Allied equivalent this one actually worked) which was set off once the projectile had penetrated the first layer of armour, generating a high overpressure inside the tank which alone would either kill the crew emmidiately in the case that the tank was completely buttoned up, or set off the ammunition due to either the pressure or the melting hot fragments sent flying around inside the tank.

Allied tankers however tended to prefer subcaliber AP rounds as their main round for dispatching enemy armour, mostly because of the fact that the std. TD only had a 76mm L/53 gun which wasn't particularly powerful with the std. APBC round. And while the subcaliber HVAP round was deadly in that if it penetrated it sent deadly fragments flying around inside the the tank, it would usually have to hit vital parts of the tank to take it out of action with the first hit. For this reason Allied tankers tended to spend a lot more shells pr. knocked out tank than did the Germans for example.

The Germans experienced the exact same however in the early phases of the war on the eastern front, where in 1941 their 37mm 50mm AT guns had to use subcaliber AP rounds to be effective against the new Soviet heavy tanks such as the KV-1 2 as-well as the new medium tank the T-34. So the Germans learned their lesson early on.

So in short it wasn't really a design flaw which led the Sherman to brew up so easily, it was more the type of rounds used by the Germans which created the problem.
 
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On average, it took ...
... 1.2 hits and 1.2 pens to KO a Pz IV. It also took 1.5 hits and 1.5 pens to brew a Pz IV.
... 2.55 hits and 1.9 pens to KO a Pz V. It also took 4.0 hits and 3.24 pens to brew a Pz V.
... 4.2 hits and 2.6 pens to KO a Pz VI. It also took 5.25 hits and 3.25 pens to brew a Pz VI.
... 1.63 hits and 1.55 pens to KO a Sherman. It also took 1.97 hits and 1.89 pens to brew a Sherman.

Pz IV gets the booby prize.
 
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