Busting Tank Myths: M4 Sherman

so far in the smith series we focused a lot on the modern era even videos dedicated to individual tanks follow this theme with the m1 abrams and mirkova being discussed so far today we're going to shake that up we'll be taking a look at the m4 medium tank also known as the sherman one of the most prolific tanks of the second world war the m4's history is very interesting but its reputation is even more so most people fall into one of two camps either you hate the thing and think it was total garbage or you think it was the best tank of the war people have been fighting over this tank for decades and it should go without saying but many myths have spawned from that we're going to be taking a look at a few of them whether negative or positive so without further ado let's get into it first we'll talk about a myth i've touched on before that the m4 is wet ammunition stowage worked i know a lot of you guys are already starting to write angry comments but hear me out after m4 has received what ammo stowage the number of ammo fires dropped drastically the change did massively improve survivability but not for the reasons most people think you see wet ammo storage supposedly works as so the ammunition is kept in a bin this bin is a jacket filled with a water glycol mixture when the bin is struck the jacket is perforated so the mixture will flood the bin hopefully preventing any fires this is great in theory but in practice it really didn't work out the soviets conducted tests with wet ammo stowage and they found that the jacket did help but really only through catching spall it was essentially acting as armor the flooding of the bin didn't actually help much but even then that's not the primary reason ammo fire stopped happening so much when the wet mrx were installed the ammos moved from the sponsons down to the whole floor this might not seem like a huge change but think of it this way the sponsons are one of the most likely places to be shot the bottom of the hole is one of the least likely so yes if your m4 had wet ammo stowage it was much safer to be in but not for the reasons most people assume for units that had these tanks they reported burn rates as low as 10 to 15 percent prior to wet ammo stowage it was more like 60 to 80 percent next the idea that it took five shermans to kill one tiger this one is fairly popular but mostly with people who aren't really into afvs that being said i think it's worth talking about anyway as the chieftain pointed out a platoon consisted of five tanks so you always had at least that many tank fights are not chivalrous or deals you don't fight one-on-one you use every advantage you have to win some people say oh but that's what the kill ratios are kill ratios especially those derived from kill claims are highly suspect even more so if they are german claims this isn't a matter of bias or anything it's a very well documented fact german kill claims are highly exaggerated if you want to assess the effectiveness of a vehicle kill ratios are not a good way to do that this is true for every nation but especially for nazi germany if you want a famous example outside of world war ii in the korean war the air force claimed to have killed pretty much the entire north korean armored force by themselves i shouldn't need to tell you that this was not the case moving on it's often said that the m4 stabilizer either sucked or wasn't used like a lot of miss this one is based on reality but it is highly exaggerated if you compare the m4 stabilizer to modern systems it's obviously going to seem lackluster but for the time it was introduced it was actually a pretty big deal technically speaking it didn't allow for true fire on the move capability but skilled gunners could use it to do so it's like using a civic to transport furniture you could do it but it's not exactly ideal if you can fire semi accurately while moving at 15 miles per hour as the stabilizer allowed that's much better than having to come to a stop that wasn't the main advantage though it allowed m4s to fire much sooner after stopping because of this many people called a shortstop stabilizer at one thousand dollars per unit or about 17 000 in today's money the stabilizer is actually quite cheap it was also easy to produce the issue was that for quite some time crews weren't taught how to maintain a thing so inevitably it would break and they wouldn't know how to fix it because of this a lot of crews just stopped using them this was eventually recognized and fixed now you might be wondering if the stabilizer worked so well why didn't the m26 pershing have one they actually did have a stabilizer for the pershing's gun and it worked quite well but there were a few issues for any tank entering service there is a mandate that they should carry at least 70 rounds and in the m26 there wasn't really enough space to do that in order to make it work they had to dump two things wet ammo stowage and the stabilizer they also wanted to pursue dual axis stabilization so the single axis stabilizer was dropped i know that doesn't make a lot of sense because why not keep the single axis stabilizer in the interim but that's what the document says when it comes to military procurement things rarely make perfect sense anyway that's pretty much all i've got to say for now if you guys have missed suggestions leave them in a comment i'll try to talk about them in a future video as always i hope you guys enjoyed the video and i'll see you on the next one [Music] you

Channel: Spookston

Views: 180,795

Keywords: gaijin entertainment, war thunder gameplay, if war thunder was historically accurate, war thunder spookston, war thunder tiger problem, war thunder experience, war thunder problems, war thunder gaijin, spookston war thunder problems, spookston how bad, spookston tank myths, tank myths, busting tank myths, m4 sherman documentary, m4 sherman medium tank, m4 sherman history, m4 sherman myths, m4 sherman tank, war thunder m4 sherman, war thunder sherman jumbo, war thunder m4a1

Id: AbpcBX8hZPM

Length: 5min 8sec (308 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2022