Evolution of the Sherman | Was it any good?

with almost 50,000 produced between 1942 and 1945 the Sherman tank proved to be one of the most important tanks of World War II despite seeing service with all alied armies and in all theaters it's been constantly derided it's undergunned under armored and generally pretty inferior to the German armor that's being sent to face but how accurate is this assessment now this is a huge subject it's been debated for years so what we've been trying to do in this video is to give you an idea of the strengths and the weaknesses and also the modifications the Sherman underwent during its very long production run this video has been made possible by our supporters on patreon our YouTube members and our super thanks donors please join them if you can and support the tank Museum and thanks for watching the M4 Sherman was an american-built tank that first saw action in October 1942 with British Army at the Battle of el alamain during the Western desert campaign the tank had arrived at the right time the British Victory represented a turning point in the whole War as well as Battlefield attrition the older British tank designs were beginning to be outclassed and outgunned by the improved Panza 3es and fours fielded by the Africa Corp the arrival of around 300 Shermans in September filled a major Gap in the British Arsenal and that allowed it to take the offensive it was better than what they had and it was better than the light and medium Italian and German tanks of 1942 by this time the German Army is starting to improve its tanks uh like this Panza 4 bigger guns thicker armor uh so even by time of el alamain some of Sherman's flaws are starting to become apparent one is is a lack of hitting power when it comes to the heavier German armor and the other is a tendency to burst into flames when hit and this earns at the subri well from the Germans they called it the the Tommy cooker Allied troops refer to it as the Zippo after the cigarette lighter but it was reliable easy to maintain and relatively quick and now it's available in large numbers it's not untrue to say this is precisely what led to its widespread adoption by British Commonwealth us and even Soviet forces Wars are won as much in the factory as on the battlefield we should remember the USA had very little experience of tank design or production yet effectively became the Arsenal of the Free World within just a couple of years nothing is a better symbol of this incredible industrial mobilization than the Sherman [Music] Tech following the Dunkirk evacuation it was always going to be a difficult task for British industry to meet the requirements of Warships planes and tanks on its own so the government began buying from the USA this was initially paid for in Gold but in March 1941 at a time when British money was running out and despite the objections of isolationists as the USA had yet to enter the war President Roosevelt's lend Le scheme was introduced lend Le would benefit all the Allied Nations it meant equipment could be supplied at no cost with the idea that only anything that wasn't destroyed or returned after the war would have to be paid for or be it at a massive discount it was only in fact in 2006 the British government finished paying for vehicles like the one I'm standing in front of this is an M4 A1 Sherman and it's named Michael after Michael duer he was the British industrialist who negotiated the support that resulted in the Lend Lease Act it's actually the oldest surviving Sherman we think is second off the production line in March 1942 Michael was considered such an important symbol of transatlantic cooperation that when it was shipped to the UK it was displayed in public on horse guards parade before being put to work in Army trials looking at my you can see some of the distinctive characteristics of the Sherman tank looking at the Sherman it's actually really quite tall compared to a lot of British tank designs of the time there's a couple of reasons for this one is the M4 A1 is powered by the right r975 radial engine um that is an engine designed to power aircraft they put it in the Ford Tri motor and that's quite tall so that actually makes the tank tall to start with but the other thing is it's rear engined but the transmission is at the front what that means is the drive shaft has to pass all the way down the tank under the turret cage and that is what results in the sort of humped shape of the thing the gun you can see here is the 75mm M3 but we know from photographs that the tank was originally fitted with the shorter barreled M2 that's because like so many features of these early Sherman tanks it was taken from this the M3 leag Grant and that was very much the father of the Sher the grant was a stop Gap tank which was again first used by the British in May 1942 in North Africa it was a stop Gap because the US designers and their British customers were very keen to see a 75 mm gun mounted in a medium tank the 75 was a very good weapon for delivering H in an infantry support role and without going into depth on us tank Doctrine this was what was intended to be the Tank's primary purpose the problem was that when the design process began in mid1 1940 us industry didn't have the capability to produce a turret capable of mounting this gun now the solution was to put in a sponson on the side but of course there's a problem with that it limits the Traverse to 15° right and left the other problem is the height and this is obviously exacerbated by the fact that we've got a another turret on top for a 37 mm gun and in the back is a very tall radial engine the Sherman would inherit other features from the grant including the tracks the vertical Volute spring suspension the transmission and many other parts the Sherman was effectively designed as a carrier for the 75mm M3 gun and in fact that is the gun fitted the majority of Shermans but was it any good the m61 75 mm APC round had a muzzle velocity of 619 m a second and that would penetrate up to 60 mm of rolled homogeneous armor at a M now for that early to midwar period that is pretty good performance but as the enemy began to introduce heavier tanks with thicker armor from the end of 1942 it became much less effective the prevailing view of the US Army's general staff at the time was the main job medium tank was to sport infantry by delivering H and for this the M3 gun was very good this partly explains why so little appears to been done to improve the Sherman's Firepower though this would be tackled eventually to fight tanks US Army Doctrine dictated the use of tank destroyers like this M10 um and these begin to appear from 1943 this is actually based on a modified Sherman chassis and this really goes to show the versatility of the basic Sherman platform Sherman tank had many variants named M4 M4 A1 M4 A2 and so on these variants all had different engines required because Shermans were being manufactured in such large numbers and in so many different factories across the USA between 1942 and 1945 but these variants don't represent a linear evolution of the Sherman tank and it wouldn't be true to say that an M4 A2 was better than an M4 A1 however there were upgrades applied to all the different variants including new guns new suspension and new tracks and that means that M4 A2 from 1945 was better than M4 A2 from 1942 it's also important to remember that these changes were only applied to new tanks and older tanks weren't rebuilt if it survived an early Sherman could well be in combat at the end of the war the M4 A2 featured the diesel general motor 6046 engine and the M4 A3 would feature a petrol Ford V8 called the GAA the m4a4 was slightly lengthened in order to fit the Chrysler a57 multibank petrol engine the reason that a range of different engines is used in the Sherman is really nothing more complicated than industrial Logistics there weren't enough of any one type available um they're all good power units reliable produced between 400 and 500 brake horsepower as to which is the best there is one school of thought that suggests that might be the Ford V8 as fitted to the M4 A3 it's certainly true the US held on to the M4 A3 for their own use with the majority of Sherman supplied for Lend Lease being the M4 A2 and A4 the M4 A1 is visually quite distinctive uh because it's got a one piece cast hole um that gives you this rounded quite organic shape the M4 A2 A3 A4 they are of welded construction cast hols had one advantage in that they eliminate the need for welded or riveted joints and those are if you like built-in weak spots the problem with them is that they are technically difficult to produce and and they required facilities a lot of us tank factories didn't have welded holes required skilled welders and took longer to assemble but apparently performed slightly better shot stopping than the cast HS the frontal armor is 50.8 mm that's 2 in thick and on early models it sloped at 56° giving an effective thickness of 90.8 mm against a round hitting it horizontally and that really isn't too bad the early to midw period the armor here in the sponson area is just 38 mm 1 and 1/2 in thick and it's vertical it's not sloped the reason the Shermans were prone to brew up when hit is nothing to do with petrol fuel anything like that it's to do with the fact that the ammunition is stored here in the area just above the tracks to try and remedy the weakness and beef up the armor protection a little bit a ple K armor patches were added as you can see on this M4 A4 not everyone was convinced they did any good liutenant steel brownley the second five and four fire yry said of his experiences in Normandy the armor was thin the ammunition was stowed in open bins that exploded if there was any penetration a hit almost inevitably meant a brew up some bofin hitting the idea of welding bits of armor to protect the bin but the only effect so far as we could see was to provide naming Mark I certainly saw many brewed up Shermans with a neat hole in the extra armor this problem was only remedied with a major redesign that began to roll out in 1944 now this introduced wet storage uh with the rounds stored lower down and in liquid filed containers and that decreased the risk of an explosion if you were hit the storage system is said to have reduced the chances of a penetrated Sherman catching far from 60 to 80% to just 10 to 15% although of course there were plenty of older dry storage Shermans right around the end of the war more app was also added in front of the driver and the C drivers hoods now from late 1943 the Sherman's Hull is redesigned to make it easier to manufacture and the glassy the thickness is increased to 632 mm but slope is now 47° so actually no overall gain there so how vulnerable was the Sherman it's fair to say that the Sherman was never designed to resist the Tiger's 88 mm gun which one German Source suggests was able to penetrate the glassy armor at 800 M and any other part of the tank armor at up to 2 km and that is way out of the standard Sherman's range but it's also vulnerable to the armored Vehicles it was most likely to encounter the Panza 4 and tank destroyers such as the stug 3 and mder 2 armed with the 7.5 cm KW K40 gun in archive photography we can also see how Crews attempted to improve their protection later on in the war with field modifications which included sandbags tank track and even concrete perhaps an acknowledgement that Sherman could be better protected came in the for the M4 A3 E2 the Sherman jumbo which pretty much doubled the armor all over these arrived in Europe towards the end of 1944 and proved a success although they were designed for specific purpose and the extra armor considerably reduced the speed and maneuverability of the tank so it was a tradeoff it's one thing for a tank to get hit but it also needs to be able to hit back now the standard M3 7 25 mm gun wasn't designed as an anti-armour weapon and this is more of a problem as 1943 unfolds there are two solutions to this one British one American the British solution was a piece of inspired improvisation the Firefly was a standard Sherman but upgunned with the British 17 anti-tank gun now that is a much bigger weapon than the m375 so there were some modifications needed um for the tank itself the back of the turret they had wed on a bsel to take the radio equipment and at the front I had to lose the bow Gunner um and his position is welded up closed off and that's to create storage for the much larger ammunition that the gun takes around 2,100 Shermans were converted to fireflies most being deployed at one per troop of four alongside three regular 75mm gun armed Shermans this was all done in a massive hurry to be ready for the Normandy invasion Trooper Joe ekins the Northampton she yry recalled that he'd only fired five practice rounds on a range before being sent to France lacer practice didn't seem to do Joe much harm though in his first engagement near K he knocked out three tiger ons in 12 minutes with five rounds and then rounded things off with a brace of Panzer fors Joe did pull off an incredible feat of Gunnery uh but he was assisted by an excellent weapon an apds round fired from the 17 pound a gun has a muzzle velocity of 1,23 m a second and that will penetrate up to 230 mm of armor at 1,000 M even the apcbc round would penetrate 150 mm of armor at that distance and that's twice as much as the 75mm gun and it was more accurate at longer ranges the American solution was better planned but it took time to arrive from mid 1944 factories were fitting a new 76 mm gun and this solved the problem of under gunning be Sherman first Saw Service in July 1944 when the need for increased Firepower is becoming abundantly clear to us commanders on the ground in Normandy the 76 mm M1 A2 gun could penetrate 88 mm of rolled homogenous armor sloped at 30° at 1,000 yard using the m62 apcbc roundout that had a muzzle velocity of 792 m a second this Rose to 134 mm using the hvap m93 round with its higher muzzle velocity of 1036 m a second although these were very rare the US Army got around the problems the British had had with the Firefly by fitting the gun in a new and larger turret uh they also rearranged the ammunition storage and they Incorporated the wet storage that we looked at earlier and that increased survivability in case the tank was hit it also enabled them to keep the B machine gunner the 76 mm gun didn't have as effective a high explosive round as its predecessor the 75 uh but it did go quite a long way towards leveling the playing field against enemy armor and of course there were still lots of 75mm armed Shermans around right up to the end of the war so what can we say about the Sherman well I suppose the first thing to realize is that there's no perfect combination of armor Firepower Mobility compromises have to be made secondly uh when there is a need for Mass industrial production especially in Wartime this is going to lead to further compromises Sherman was a well-built reliable tank that arrived in numbers when it was most desperately needed it was relatively inexpensive it was well for a tank it was quite easy to maintain and there were some sophisticated features things like the stabilized gun and also and this is quite remarkable relatively effective coms kit it's often criticized for its tank versus tank performance but that's not really what it was originally designed to do even though it found itself in that position quite often but the fact remains it could still hold its own against the majority of enemy armor it was upgunned and better ammunition sturge improved it survivability however except for the specialist jumbo its armor didn't change and this left the tank increasingly vulnerable against heavier German guns with all this in mind um I think it has to be recognized Sherman is one of not just one of the most important tanks of World War II but one of the most important tanks in the history of armored Warfare we do hope you've enjoyed this video if you did please subscribe and if you can please support us on [Music] patreon

Channel: The Tank Museum

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Keywords: Bovington, Dorset, Tanks, Tankfest, tanks, tiger, chieftain, tank museum, second world war, world war two, top five tanks, tank chats, david fletcher, british army, tiger 131, royal armoured corps, tank regiment, RAC, tank museum bovington, tanklife, bovingtontank museum, military history, ww2, ww1, armoured car, tankchats, army, veteran, wwii history, world war 1, world war ii, war history, royal navy, ww2 history, royal air force, wwii museum, wwi, ww2 tanks, ww2 weapons

Id: Bw9-EJKnRjU

Length: 20min 53sec (1253 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2023