Easy Eight v Firefly?

Thumpalumpacus said:

17-pdr, great gun. E8, numbers, decent gun, decent frontal armor.

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Humblebee said:

Also the E8 had a better suspension (horizontal volute instead of vertical volute springs) for a better ride and wider tracks for lower ground pressure, also wet stowage for ammunition ( for less risk of fire, but the army later changed its mind). Apparently the 76 mm gun on the American Shermans had mediocre armor piercing ammo during the war. It was also less powerful of course compared to the 17 pounder of the Firefly.

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Thumpalumpacus said:

I think they were used differently as well. IIRC, the Brits used Fireflies on "overwatch" where the Firefly would stay back to use its standoff knockout where it was seen needed, where the Easies were, when available, used more for breakthroughs. Am I wrong in thinking this?

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Humblebee said:

I believe the specialized breakthrough Sherman was the M4A3E2, or "Jumbo" that had the much thicker armor. It still had the old style suspension, and were a bit overloaded as a result, sacrificing some reliability. But they became very popular although few were made (about 250). One of them spearheaded the 4th Armored Divisions drive to relieve Bastogne.

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Thumpalumpacus said:

Thanks for that. So were the Easies used similar to the Fireflies, split between platoons for needed gunpower?

ETA: Don't mind answering, I did a little digging.

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Niceoldguy58 said:

The U.S. introduction of the HVAP tungsten ammunition in 1944 - however limited - appears to have made the 76mm gun Sherman at least as effective a tank killer as the 17pounder.

Is this accurate?

Niceoldguy58

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Humblebee said:

The HVAP 76mm round was effective, but it was rare. The standard AP round wasn't very good. Even the HVAP wasn't as powerful as the APDS ( discarding sabot, whereas the HVAP was the ballistically inferior composite rigid type) of the 17 pounder. The 17 pounder may have suffered from accuracy issues (in U.S. army testing, even with British operators), although PM Knight claims that British tank destroyer crews found it very accurate. He hints that the TD crews' artillery background could explain their better shooting.

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PStickney said:

The 17 pounder's APDS could give good penetration, but it couldn't hit the broadside of a barn until about 1947, when they redesigned the sabot to detach without changing the trajectory of the projectile. Note that the US Army tests didn't include APDS, but regular shot.

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EwenS said:

Gross exaggeration even from the earliest tests. There is a long discussion over on the WW2talk site about the supposed accuracy or not of the 17pdr APDS rounds and the reasons for that.

17 pounder APDS - & 17 pdr in general.

Extracts from a US report: U.S. Army Firing Test No.3 U.S. Army Firing Tests conducted August 1944 by 12th U.S. Army Group at Isigny, France....

ww2talk.com

And remember that the 17pdr equipped Firefly was such an awful tank (and gun) that ETOUSA wanted several hundred of them in, IIRC, late 1944 and into 1945. I'd need to go back to Mark Hayward's book to confirm the exact details.

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