The inferiority of American tanks led to some of the worst setbacks of the war, prolonging it in Europe. US tankers ultimately prevailed, but over 60,000 armored division soldiers were killed and wounded;
According to British historian Sir Max Hastings, "no single Allied failure had more important consequences on the European battlefield than the lack of tanks with adequate punch and protection." The Sherman, he added, was one of the Allies' "greatest failures."
How could American and British industries produce a host of superb aircraft, an astonishing variety of radar equipment, the proximity fuse, the DUKW, the jeep, yet still ask their armies to join battle against the Wehrmacht equipped with a range of tanks utterly inferior in armor and killing power?
The distinguished American historian Dr. Russell Weigley made a similar argument.
"Perhaps the most questionable element in American ground fighting power was the American tank," he wrote. "[The Sherman] was inferior to the German Panther as well as to the heavier Tiger in always every respect save endurance, including armament and defensive armor."
Dr. Weigley noted that the US, went all through the Second World War refusing "to develop, until too late to do much good, heavier tanks comparable to the German Tigers and Panthers, let alone the Royal Tiger or the Russian Stalin."
After debacles like Sidi-bou-Zid, Kasserine Pass and El Guettar, General Dwight Eisenhower admitted in a private February 1943 letter to U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, that "we don't yet know exactly how to handle the Mark VI [Tiger] tank."
The US military was stuck in a doctrinal debate over the role of tanks: Were tanks to focus on "soft" targets in the enemy's rear, like trucks and light armor, using hit and run tactics? Were they slow rolling pillboxes, used to support infantry assaults? Or should American tanks go looking for a fight, boldly seeking out the enemy's heavy armor to slug it out one-on-one?
In November 1943, even after disasters in North Africa and Tunisia, Chief of Army Ground Forces, General Leslie McNair insisted that the Sherman would deliver victory.
"I see no reason to alter our previous stand…that we should defeat Germany by use of the M4 series of medium tanks," he wrote. "There have been no factual developments overseas, so far as I know, to challenge the superiority of the M4 Sherman."
But tank crews actually fighting in the Sherman knew better. The Battle of the Bulge exposed deficiencies in the M4 so glaringly obvious, what became known as the Sherman Tank Scandal would be splashed across front pages all over the Allied world.
"Whoever was responsible for supplying the army with tanks is guilty of supplying material inferior to its enemy counterpart for at least two years or more," one an angry armored cavalry lieutenant told the New York Times in March 1945. "How anyone can escape punishment for neglecting such a vital weapon of war is beyond me."
The young officer didn't stop there:
I am a tank platoon leader, at present recovering from wounds received during the Battle of the Bulge. Since I have spent three years in a tank platoon doing everything, and at one time or another held every position and have read everything on armor I could get my hands on during this time, I would like to get this off my chest. No statement, claim, or promise made by any part of the Army can justify thousands of dead and wounded tank men, or thousands of others who depended on the tank for support.
To Corporal Francis Vierling of the U.S. Second Armored Division, "the Sherman's greatest deficiency lies in its firepower, which is most conspicuous by its absence." He continued:
Lack of a principal gun with sufficient penetrating ability to knock out the German opponent has cost us more tanks, and skilled men to man more tanks, than any failure of our crews- not to mention the heartbreak and sense of defeat I and other men have felt when we see twenty-five or even many more of our rounds fired, and they ricochet off the enemy attackers. To be finally hit, once, and we climb from and leave a burning, blackened, and now useless pile of scrap iron. It would yet have been a tank, had it mounted a gun.
Yet for top Allied commanders, the official position was that the M4 Sherman was the right tank at the right time. It seemed that at the highest political and military levels, the fix was in.
"We have nothing to fear from Tiger and Panther tanks," insisted British general Bernard Montgomery, even as Allied troops in the summer of 1944 were stricken by the "Tiger Terror" in Normandy. "We have had no difficulty in dealing with German armor."
Later, when the Ardennes Offensive led by German Panzers forced the Sherman Tank Scandal onto the front pages of the nation's newspapers, the U.S. Army's Chief of Ordnance, General Lewin Campbell, doubled down on the whitewash.
"We need not only have no apology for any item of American ordnance in comparison with that of the enemy," he stated in February 1945, "but we're leading them all the way."
At Aberdeen Proving Ground, Colonel George Jarrett, one of the U.S. Army's most respected ordnance experts, was often in "hot water" for his refusal to "toe the line" and lie to the civilian press about how American tanks stacked up against the enemy's. Privately, he damned the army bureaucracy's "refusal to realistically face tank facts…our blind refusal to face the truth of the situation," in spite of what he called an ongoing "sales program" of propaganda.
"We are little better off than at El Alamein," he wrote in early 1945.
While German tank technology had advanced as the war progressed, to Colonel Jarrett, the U.S. effort was "always the same story."
"I've seen this day by day," he fumed. "We never beat Jerry, but catch up to last year's model, next year."
Quantity vs. quality — Allied factories produced nearly 50,000 Shermans during World War Two and the Russians produced over 35,000 T-34s, over 23,000 T-34-85s and over 3,000 KV-1s and 4,000 IS-2s. By comparison, Germany manufactured just 6,000 Panthers, 1,300 Tigers and just 500 Tiger IIs.
Certainly, the Sherman was a decent design, simple to build in large numbers and maintain, easily transported, adaptable to multiple roles and mechanically reliable. But in the three most basic requirements of a decent tank — firepower, armor protection, and mobility — it fell down in two out of three.
"We were never able to build a tank as good as the German tank," recalled General Lucius Clay, "But we made so many of them, it really didn't matter."
As a German officer noted, "I was on this hill with six 88mm antitank guns…Every time they sent a tank, we knocked it out. Finally we ran out of ammunition, but the Americans didn't run out of tanks."
In the end QUANTITY triumphed. German kill ratios were inconsequential. At 20:1 the Germans still lose the war of production.
