US AFV Development in WW2, or, "Why the Sherman was what it was"

so for shipment as high up as it goes good evening so today's talk is on what would you vehicles the procurement or why the Sherman is as it was that's actually not a very good title but it was the best I can come up with when I was asked by my Rob does hey will you give us a talk so on that I would like to thank the nigh mass for inviting me out here because I've seen some of the other speakers that have better spoken here and my god there there is some high-end personnel I do not have any letters after my name I do not teach at a university I work for an unrealistic video game so I'd like to thank them for taking the gamble and bringing this guy ed who is no history whatsoever to give give you guys a talk however despite the disreputable background from as far as the academics are concerned I do promise you that everything in here is either sourced from the archives or is as accurate as I could make it this thing will actually come across if c-span can't hear me I'm sure they will make it mention so the background initially I always asked to come here and do my midst of American Armour talk and I had to think that it's on YouTube if you want to listen to it go to youtube google mitts of American army you'll find it and in this I took some of the common conceptions about the m4 medium tank and to an extent the Pershing and basically said look these are the common conceptions and they are wrong but because I had already given the talk and said well look let's modify it a little bit and we'll go instead of how good was the tank will go with why is the tank the way it is so that's the theory behind this now I don't know your knowledge level again some of the speakers I've heard you hear on the podcast are very high-end but every now and then it's good to just go back to some of the lower levels and make sure that the fundamentals are still good so audience participation question number one the rifle is the m1 garand what was better out in service common service in the m1 garand as a rifle pretty much nothing you can make an argument maybe for this Jerome Guevara 44 but that wasn't this common the m1 was probably the best piece of equipment of its type in the world and the u.s. produced it what was a better fighter than the Mustang a better destroyer than the gearing a better carrier than the Essex a better artillery fuse in the VT we had the best all right land-based fighter or the non-combat stuff we no other country had the the handy talkie the CC kW Deuce and a half Higgins boat some people say the Higgins boat won the war some people say the Jeep won the war the victory ship were putting these things out in two weeks flat the record I think was six days in California so you can go on and on with a couple of exceptions I mean the other countries had their own areas of expertise I mean we didn't touch the British with cryptography and some of the radar as they can so on the British had us the Germans had a few advantages and so on and so forth but as a general rule anything that the u.s. went to war with was the best in the world that was out there what happened how did we go from the best that pretty much everything to this I'm gonna argue that actually we did not get it wrong and that the there were very specific decisions made in the u.s. as to why the m4 ended up the way that it was and over the course of the next hour or so I've been asked to try to keep it to less than 60 minutes I don't think I'll make it but I'll try hopefully you guys will get an understanding of the levels of thought that went into the design process so audience participation question number two hands up for the chicken who votes the chicken who votes the egg all right in 2006 the University and Norwich concluded it was the egg however that finding was Native reversed by the universities of Sheffield and work in 2010 in a paper entitled structural control of crystal nuclei by an eggshell protein current scientific thought therefore indicates that the answer to your chicken or egg question is the chicken so I bet you've learned something this evening my mission is complete now why do I ask any guesses sir looking forward as in history versus looking back in hindsight okay so how would that apply to this this talk that is an excellent point that is not the answer to this question but it is actually a very good point and I was mentioning earlier how I was talking about British Army operations in Northern Ireland which I to an extent I lived through but then I did an assessment of it last year for the army and it's it's very interesting the different perspective depending if you're involved in the matter or if you're dealing with it after the fact objectively sir [Music] you're getting there this process that's deep here are your chicken and here your egg on the left side is a symbol for army ground forces these are the guys who develop doctrine they equipped the force on the right hand side is the bomb of ordnance branch ordnance branch are the guys who developed the equipment so the question is should doctrine match the technology that is being created or should technology be geared towards meeting whatever the doctrine requires so here is your next question audience participation question number three who thinks that or that doctrine drives the technological design okay who thinks that the technology drives what the doctrine does okay a few more people who doesn't care okay so this is gladion Barnes I've referred to him as the mad scientist of the US army he comes up with all these wonderful designs and pieces of equipment and he believes that he knows better than everybody else what the army needs and to quote him for those back he can't read it is not well understood that tactics are usually written around a weapon thoughts field operations ordinarily do not generate ideas leading to new material a new piece of equipment must first be produced such as for example a machine gun before the tactics can be devised for the exploitation capabilities of the weapon for these reasons it is necessary for ordnance department to take a strong lead over the using services in the development of new equipment and then to get the help of those services in determining where the weapon best fits into battlefield operations so if you talk to ordnance technology drives doctrine and it's kind of hard to argue the fact that well how can you know how to use a machine gun if you didn't know that such a capability exists however this is what army ground forces thought the the bottom line here is that army ground forces would draw up the specifications and they would then be submitted to ordinance and ordinance would then design equipment to match what army ground forces wanted the equipment to do and the quote is from the written history of army ground forces I have a picture of narrow up there yeah granted in 1940 armor ground forces and exist as a entity but you know we will leave that aside now if you are curious so just just to be clear here we have the user saying that they're in charge you have the developer saying that they're in charge and both have actually reasonable arguments if you are curious this is the process today and I have had to learn this as part of my majors course and I am very glad I'm not involved in procurement this is the army side of it if you can understand this you're a better man than I but the bottom line is that in today's military it is driven by the operational needs not by the technology so you start off with let's say an operational needs statement such as for example the 30 millimeter strikers that are now being field in Europe this came from the field the second brigade said we need vehicles with a cannon capable of engaging BMPs and then the engineers went and they built them a vehicle with the cannon and now got fielded such operational needs statements did exist in World War two for example there was one lovely one I saw this says we want a device that you can fit onto a tank then when it's driving along at at least 15 miles an hour it will detect a minefield before it hits the mine now we haven't really gotten to that today but these requests were being fielded from the field to ordnance and a lot of times ordnance did develop material which met the requirements of the feeling force but any again I digress the bottom line is that ordnance thought that they were in the Laden AGF thought that they were so if you go back to the start before the u.s. joined world war two you can see what army ground forces said the equipment of the army was and it was terrible basically the US was starting from scratch so reduced it to its simplest terms the problem is to determine the kinds of equipment which will be needed most and could be manufactured in the required hundreds thousands or millions in time to be of use and again that's a quote from a GF note in time to be of use you got a war to fight you can't hang around waiting for the perfect piece of equipment now in January of 1940 in a lecture before the army industrial college the then chief of ordnance Major General cm Wesson estimated that the development of a major item of material required a minimum of three years from requirement to feeling now in the existence of war they cut that down to usually one and a half to two years sometimes even as little as one and this timeline generally matches with the development of any piece of equipment developed by anybody else the British the Germans the Russians about one and a half to two years yes audience participation question number four in one word each what are the two biggest problems facing the United States as it prepared to fight World War two production logistics shipping you guys are very close you're bouncing around the right idea bingo the two problems are called Atlantic and Pacific there we go anything which is being built to fight is going to be fighting many thousands of miles away and a couple oceans from your nearest factory it has to get there and when it is there it must also be sustained so this means that you need to have as few parts break as possible in order to reduce a need for space to be shipped over the need to ship those spares and then all you've got all the consumables like petrol pol petroleum oil lubricants across the ocean and note also that unlike the Germans who could if they had to do a complete refurb on a tank they could ship the tank back to the factory what so could do Soviets if they hadn't need to we could not anything that we sent over was there to fight until it was either discarded or destroyed so major repair in the u.s. is not an option and you have to think about the entire chain from the factory floor to the battlefield now here's an example of one of the problems in 1948 there were 12,000 122 flat cars in the United States will she carry a Pershing tank in May of 48 to have an exercise and they wanted to get a battalion of Pershing's from Fort Knox to Fort Campbell the other end of Kentucky it took 40 days to collect all those flat cars and that was in 48 so if you go back to say 42 how many flat cars were capable of carrying a 45 to 50 ton tank and everything else that had to be carried to get to the ship and then when he got to the shipyard you have Liberty ships that we've been building you know once every 10 days what is the lifting capacity of a Liberty Ship crane if you make these 60 ton monsters can you actually get it to the fight arguably well you probably could but could you get them in sufficient numbers to make to make it have an effect so again in the simplest words what use is having the best equipment in the world if you can't get it to the fight or if it gets in a fight then it breaks down no use you just wasted all that shipping all that effort to get a tank overseas just to see it break down and sitting in the 3rd Armored Division motor pool or wherever so that's some of the the basic problem so let's get down to somebody and nuts and bolts so again I'm gonna quote army ground forces a GF established two general criteria for the development and approval of new equipment the first is genuine battle need it was reluctant to who to initiate development of any equipment not considered essential to increase combat efficiency attended to oppose development of new equipment which though perhaps desired by the men in the field was not absolutely essential and might prove to simply be a luxury or excess baggage this was a clear-cut policy of general McNair one which he often emphasized it was eventually adopted formally as War Department policy so who determines battle need who determines what is an essential piece of equipment versus what of the in luxury equipment so one school of thought said the theater commanders the other school of thought said that the decision should be centralized in the US who thinks they went with theater commanders who thinks they went with centralized decision in the u.s. you are all wrong I see where you're going on that that was done centrally yes but one city oh and he was was set up like we will have so many personnel we will have so many tanks the actual nature of those tanks and improvements to them was not centralized and I should explain so the reasoning from the idea behind the guys who wanted a centralized decision was that theater commanders might be too strongly influenced by the limiting local conditions of their own tactical situation to exercise proper overall judgment which seems a little bit distrusting in the reasoning of four-star generals they also believed that theater commander recommendations were colored by the combat soldiers natural attachment to reliable equipment with which they were familiar so basically they were worried that the troops in the field were very happy with what they had and would not request additional information or additional equipment and there is some evidence to support this so for example witness six armored division in October of 44 who reported that they had received no 76 millimeter tanks and had no particular desire for any the 75 had gotten all the way across France why rocked the boat and what they had was working now the War Department and to a large extent McNair went with the former view they did not produce and ship material overseas unless the end users were asking for it so even if the guys in DC's thought this was a great tank and it should be shipped overseas they asked the commander's in Europe North Africa if they said no the equipment did not go overseas so the second criterion reliable performance in combat this standard sometimes referred to as battle worthiness meant that the equipment having been proved capable of performing the function for which was designed was sufficiently rugged and reliable to withstand the rigors of combat service without imposing excessive problems of maintenance they an excessive problem Jimmy the thing will break down forget yeah it will happen and now there is perhaps a subcategory which I would call immediate capability army ground forces was willing to accept sub capable equipment if it was the case of that or nothing but it still had to be reliable so cases in point there will be your tank destroyers m3 or m10 so this situation of tanks so what we have here is an m2 medium that the US started the war with and as you can see it needs a fair bit of track tension here the US had at the time what Harry ID has called the cult of the machine gun the infantry were owning the tanks the cavalry had combat cars they're basically tanks with them anyway and the infantry were quite interested in the tanks ability to deal with enemy infantry so hence you can see sponson how do that sponsored machine guns everywhere deflectors on the back here so you fire out will you sponsor machine gun will deflect off this and shoot down into the trench that you were walking past the 37 mike-mike the the that was an anti-tank gun and which were trained for anti-tank capability because somebody figured out if we have a tank they might bring a tank and we have to be able to kill their tank but the main weapon was a machine gun and this tank was limited to 15 tons by policy because that was the average weight of an American railroad bridge at the time a road which I'm sorry so in 1939 the u.s. conducted a series of tests to determine if machine guns or a 75 millimeter hey cheer and would be more effective at killing infantry survey says 75-millimeter good to know but what they've done is they've added a 75 into the hull of an M 2 medium and this should start perhaps looking a bit familiar then this happened that is photograph taken near Saddam the Germans very quickly overrun friends and a couple of lessons are taken by the US from this firstly a 37 millimeter is not gonna cut it in the anti-tank role that forget you need something bigger bigger fortunately they had already tested the 75 millimeter fantastic the second problem and well this is where the lecture is gonna kind of take into a fork into two tracks and they created tank destroyers as a result so we're gonna talk about not only why the Sherman was designed the way it was but also briefly about the TDS so solution build m3 so you take that m2 you take that 75 and then you add a new turret on it you add a couple more gadgets and gizmos and you've made an m3 nothing in this tank is particularly new it's always improving on something that they know already works and this is a sort of thinking which will dominate army development of procurement for the next one they built Detroit Arsenal so connotes indeed if you don't know who this Knudson chap was look him up he's probably the most important man in the war he talks with et Keller Chrysler and together Chrysler in the army built the Detroit tank plant initially the army only wanted 350 m3s the problem was that the Russians and the British were in such demand for these tanks that they couldn't stop producing m3s to switch over to the m4 so they built about 6500 of them something similar happened with the six pounder the British six pounder was developed before World War two but after the fall of France they realize bugger we can either not produce anti-tank guns while we tool up for the six pounder or we just build a 2 pounder the British went with what they had ready to go the Soviets the same the t-34 was supposed to be replaced by the t-34 em with new suspension and so on and so forth didn't happen the Germans invaded we'll go with what we have so there were gradual improvements on the m3 and a former new stabilizers heavy-duty bogies for the a4 which was the the Chrysler multi bank engine tank some came with cast hulls so the army is getting experience with the cast whole tank now of interest in terms of design barns was not in favor of keeping that 37 millimeter on the turret he was happy enough to go with a turretless tank with the 75 and so was armored force but infantry who at the time still was in charge demanded that the 37 be retained so that's why we still have a 37 so the I said this is gonna break in two different directions so then you had the question of how do you stop these Panzers because what was happening obviously was not working the idea of having anti-tank guns with your frontline with the infantry was not working and the solution as I go past a couple of hidden slides was you you figured you had to cut these off for loss there is no way you could put enough anti-tank guns to stop a concentrated Armour attack so the solution was to have mobile rapid anti-tank guns that could meet the enemy attack at the point of penetration and the idea was that these would beat up all the tanks hence you have the tank destroyer branch purely defensive organization if you look at the manuals if you look at the doctrine that there were never you boo to be used in the attack and not everything was a tank destroyer for as a towed anti-tank gun that could be an anti-tank gun I have a video on it as well if you go google or my on my youtube channel which explains in greater difference the difference between an anti-tank gun and a tank destroyer so this is the other problem that the US had this was the thinking of anti-tank technology at the beginning of the war can you throw rifles and ba RS into a tank track to stop it this is my favorite photograph I've ever found in my in in the archives it is a Declassified photograph of an anti-tank Rock which failed to stop the tank and you can see where the tank sheared the rock he also had Molotov cocktails caliber fifties the the us's anti-tank systems were a little lacking fortunately they eventually selected the 37 millimeter kind of taken from the Germans not exactly but you know they bought a couple to look at before they built the 3037 and they started to play C's in construction in 1939 so a little bit late late to the party so now you have the question do you want these fast mobile anti-tank tank destroyers you want them to be towed guns or do you want them to be really really fast and yes I know that's a Cromwell not but go go with it and the thinking was that these towed anti-tank guns will be very hard to spot they would be the master of the tank McNair use the the comparison of coastal artillery versus battleships which apparently the US Navy didn't believe in that either because about their battleships engage coastal artillery and the fact that these things are much much cheaper than tanks because it didn't he didn't feel I'm gonna come back to this a couple of times but money was a really big problem for the army procurement hey buy war bonds do this we need money to fight so if you can make a really cheap tank destroyer that's better for the army than a really expensive tank destroyer but in the end Bruce who is the head of the tank destroyer branch won out all the tank destroyers will be mobile and self-propelled and for the record the chief of infantry said that the best weapon to kill a tank was another tank and this was back in 1940 or 41 so what I got here is a couple of examples of designs just for the light platoon of the anti-tank company I love the tank destroyer companies and the light platoon was to be equipped with a 37 millimeter the heavy platoons will get to 75 on a half track and so we have 82 we got a t14 we got a t2 II sorry that's the t 2 e 1 that's the T 2 Jones and the t 8 all designed to get a 37 millimeter into the fight these are also good motor carriages t 33 22 T 21 and nm 3 many different designs were tried out to fit the requirement the doctrinal requirement of we must have a self-propelled anti-tank on so this is an example of the doctrine driving the development and of interest this tank destroyer was not approved for production but armored force liked it and it got turned into DM a greyhound the final winner was the m4 it's a the t21 it was a fargo 3/4 ton got 437 mike mike on the back and it was selected for production not because it was the best but because it was the first to meet all the requirements they actually turned out that the t eight and a t14 were better vehicles but again you had to have something in the field to fight the enemy this was it so there were a couple of other issues but it was it was developed as e m4 then somebody realized hang on a second we were just invented the m4 tank this will get confusing to the renamed at the m6 they were sent to africa were singularly useless and immediately withdrawn from service but the idea behind though this is to show the swarms of masses of development that was going on to meet one single tactical requirement which all cost money back in time to end the m6 so obviously whoever got the memo about renamed the m4 not to confuse it with the m6 didn't get the company who didn't get the same memo 60 tonnes three and a half inches of armor in a three inch gun which at the time was considered to be the biggest gun anybody in the world was trying to put into a tank it actually turned out not to be but that was the thinking you also have a little coaxial 37 millimeter and thousand horsepower radial engine various different transmissions there was hydraulic there was an electric and so on but it did use a horizontal volume suspension system you can't see it but it is hvss now I refer you back to the earlier issues about flat cars and chip cranes and besides the problem was in testing it didn't work anyway so Devers the head of armored force looks at this and said look due to its tremendous weight and limit tactical use there is no requirement in the armored force for heavy tank the increase in the power of armament of the heavy tank does not compensate for the heavier armor and also they were prefer to ship to 30 ton tanks instead of 160 ton tank and that was assuming that could actually fix the problems in this which then they never did so the m4 it is and note they still have all the machine guns at the front but hasn't quite gotten rid of that idea and if you look at the front of every m3 medium you'll see holes for the fixed Ford firing machine guns which are completely useless but the Americans kept them anyway for a while but the thing about this there are two things to note I guess it's all about reliability and sustainability so everything in here has been done before the engine was used and known to work for the m3 the suspension system known to work for the m3 the 75 millimeter known to work for the m3 there were a couple of other improvements like a new a new gearbox a new stabilizer system in the gun and so on and so forth now the other thing is how easy is it to maintain it so these are bolts you simply unbolt the front of this tank and the front comes off with your final drives in your transmission very easy to maintain suspension if you have a problem with with your suspension system there are 16 bolts undo the 16 bolts swap out the bogie you're done try doing that and the t-34 or a panther or whatever no one near is easy now the second thing is that everything fits from the factory and the British tank mission guy G McLeod Ross made mention in his book of to never ever seeing a vise in an engineer's workbench in the US factories because the only reason that you would have a vise is to hold a piece of equipment while you were modifying that piece of equipment to make it fit if you did your job right in the first place he wouldn't need a vise to make your part fit everything that left an American Factory was to specification and would fit in it was completely interchangeable now if you compare it let's say Germany see if go on YouTube find a video by John partial about the Navy guy but someone haven't got roped into doing this tank talk about the construction techniques in a German Factory in World War 2 and everything was made to suit the tank if they try the piece if it didn't fit that lop apiece on or the welder piece on the tank is also reasonably well armoured so the front slope people say oh the t-34 had front slope tanks and you know American tanks didn't have snow but that's a sloped front and if you take into account the thickness of the armor and the slope it's almost as thick the armored as a tiger is there's 12 what there's like one centimeter in the difference this is actually pretty tough tank and the 75 mike-mike will kill pretty much anything on the battlefield it is also very easy to drive it is ergonomically sound I'll come back to that however like anything it can be improved and the tanks that left the factory in 45 are completely different from the tanks that were in the factory in 42 and so they sent it out to the field reports start coming back in to glowing from the British the tanks m4 have made a great impression on everyone and the troops are thrilled with them the long gun is magnificent both in accuracy and in penetration and the sights are a considerable improvement on the ground users are giving unstinted prayer I can't do the English accent I'm sorry you have to imagine users are giving unstinted praise to all American equipment particularly m4 on the some of the Irish Guards maybe which embodies all desired improvements except ideal gun sights would stress again it is vital we receive earliest large numbers m4 regardless of the availability of tools and spares for which we are prepared to wait so this tank was walking I was doing well but real for improvement so the first problem that was the primary sight the linkages because the primary sight is up here the linkages between the gun and the sight were a little bit wobbly in the repair kits so the solution was you add a new telescope that pops out the side here a coaxial telescope we now have a more accurate sight something that I I don't know what they were thinking there is no hatch for the loader and it took them nine months to figure out how to drill a hole in the roof if there is one thing that you look at at the Sherman of 1942 and hand and it stops it from being hands-down the best tank in the world it is the lack of a hatch here they also had a little bit of applique armor minor improvements so you see people complaining about German German tanks so for the multitude of changes on the production line what the Americans did the same thing we changed our tanks rapidly we just made them standardized when we did it so moving on to guns the 57-millimeter was not invented here and you'll hear that argument the Americans very proud people they or you could say Santa phobic they don't believe that anybody else can make anything better than the Americans can and this is this is patron II not true I mean what powered the p-51 Mustang a Rolls Royce it was a British engine dude they did a better engine a we did well better Nick it and this the six pounder was a saint they did the American army looked at six pounders as was a better anti-tank gun than we have let's make it they made a 57-millimeter m1 so the idea was well can we put this into a tank into the same seven or into this t49 tank destroyer and the idea was he have a high velocity which made it more accurate it made it slightly harder hitting higher what made her fire it was lighter all these wonderful good things about the 57 but tank destroyer branch said hang on a second at over five hundred meters the little light round loses penetration to 75 is still better armor forests say well hang on a second if we're shooting a round we want we're degrading our capability to kill infantry so the 57 mullah murder fell out of service not because it was foreign or anything like that but just because it didn't work so the replacement the 3-inch gun mounted on the m10 which was another interim vehicle now remember general booths and tank story branch did not want something like this he wanted something that was bad as hard-hitting as a tank but much much faster much more mobile but you have a war to fight the t6 the the t40 t-49 / 67 70 was still in development so m10 it was but as an interim vehicle it had to be cheap so there's no turret Traverse motor in this vehicle because you're trying to keep the costs down and again it's using the same bogies the same sprocket wheels the same engines in the back as the m4 so they're trying to take proven already extant equipment and make their vehicles with that now the problem with the 3-inch was that you couldn't put into a Sherman they tried the initial requirement back in 1941 was put a 3-inch gun into the Sherman but it was too heavy didn't work they had to wait until something else came along and that's something else is a 76 millimeter so what happened was he had new alloys were created and you can either make the same type of gun for half the weight or you can make a bigger gun for the same way so compared to the three-inch the 76 was half the weight and the 90 millimeter was the same weight so that's why he got that little divergence there so general Devers head of armored force was notified of the existence at a 76 by way of a telephone call and it's fascinating in the archives you'll find actual transcripts of telephone calls in the archives room obviously had to be important enough to have somebody listening in and typing but you don't get that today I don't think so Deborah said a couple of questions this first question is how long is it then the Oh me and I'm gonna quote here the only thing that worries me a little bit now is that this isn't gonna throw us off on our present setup so we can get to fighting I'm anxious to get m4 tanks with anything in them so we can go to fighting and this is if you've heard the phrase perfect is the enemy of good enough we've got a war to fight we can't wait wait wait for this new development to come out before we go hey guess what happens to the Germans to Kursk they wait wait wait how we have this new Panther and we got our asses kicked and the Panther broke down anyway so as in this so once he had that question out of the way then he had other questions like how many rounds can I carry how heavy are the rounds and ammunition capacity is that Cup is a repeating theme in the archives it was a stated policy that if you needed more punch to punch through armor the first choice of action is to increase velocity and only if that wasn't good enough woody then move to a larger caliber because this meant that with a larger calibre you could carry fewer rounds he had a slower rate of fire the chances are the RAM was less accurate because it was slower so ammunition Quebec was a huge thing you'll see it come up time time in the archives however by the middle of 1942 summer of 42 ordnance branch the-- the designers managed to stuff the 76 into an m4 turret huzzah they sent it to Aberdeen Proving Ground and it passed all the tests the gun technically fit it didn't break the tank when it fired it generally hit what I was aiming at fantastic and it was a rush they wanted a thousand of these things to partake in the invasion in North Africa and the thing to remember is that by 1942 summer 42 the biggest nastiest thing the Germans had was the Panzer for which the 75 millimeter Sherman was quite capable of dealing with so this is the case of the the army wanted bigger equipment just in case the opposition came up with something bigger unfortunately armored force finally got a hold of one when they tested it themselves as the end user and they concluded that I don't care what you engineer say yeah it may technically work but you don't have to fight in this damned thing it is incredibly cramped inside the crews could not make the most of their tank the sights were a little bit unsuitable and fundamentally it was just too cramped to be effective armored force rejected it said try again give us a proper tank and off arm off the Ordnance branch went audience participation number five yes you're not off the hook yet what do these vehicles have in common so you got you are correct you said that you saw my other talk didn't you you did the but he is quite correct these were all tanks that were approved for production and in the case of the m7 on the right here they actually built a factory just to build these things and then once it was approved and the contracts were signed they realized we don't need these or we don't want them or whatever this was a heap of rubbish that didn't work I talked about earlier this I'll come back to and that they couldn't figure out a point for it so they built in that entire factory that they built in the Iowa or Illinois to build six prototypes and seven production models isn't that great stewardship of the taxpayers money so they invented what was called the special armored vehicles board also known as the polymer board and this met in late 1942 and its purpose was to look at all the various different designs that were being created to meet individual requirements like an armored car a tank destroyer a light tank and they started off with like nineteen vehicles and he cut it down to maybe four and they were ruthless about it said that yeah it's got promise but we cut it out we'll focus on this instead because we think that's even better promise and again this comes down to a case and we're spending man-hours we're spending dollars for spending steel which we cannot afford to squander because we're trying to win a war now in the meantime of course we are still helping out the British this is a salt tank t14 and it uses some of the developments of the m6 and you can see it looks kind of vaguely Sherman esque the US Army did not want this thing for the same reason that they didn't really want the m6 but the British wanted an assault tank and they said hey look we're gonna build Excelsior and the camera was a 33 or whatever the other one was you Americans can you build one that will fit the job and so the Americans built one actually the bill to restore look we're gonna build one let's build one for ourselves we'll try it out since we built it anyway and does it work well the answer is no there are fumes in the fighting compartment cramped conditions this bow machine gun had a tendency of breaking the Gunners arm there were suspension problems inaccessible components this thing was not fight able not sustainable so that's why the t14 never showed up to the fight but they are still they are still helping at the Brits so this is a British Crusader in test in Fort Knox that's an American crewman and the US did test these not because they wanted to see should they build it locally but to see what design features were actually a good idea that they hadn't thought of themselves such as that say the turret Traverse motor in the Matilda they looked at that so that's a pretty good idea so a British guy called Alex Richardson was present for the demonstration of centur and Cromwell did connect the Schurmann counterparts and they didn't do well to quote his letter back to the UK these tanks have made us a laughingstock out here the Cromwell has had a variety of troubles and it was mad only sending out one of each the Americans are politely indifferent to what happens to them and Waller the rolls-royce man is most unhappy and he wants them withdrawn as soon as possible we are undoubtedly the world's worst salesman and again I apologize for my lack of English accent so down underneath here and I have this online googling the Chieftains hatch operation Dracula and that was a month long 2000 mile test that they drove these tanks all over England on roads and then a lot of mileage offroad now the given idea of what this is in England they get from Southampton at the very bottom erinc land to John O'Groats at the top of Scotland according to Google Maps is 700 miles said it went all the way from the bottom of the country up to the top of the country all the way back down the country and then around for another same amount of distance two thousand miles and note how the amount of specialist man-hours is half to maintain the Sherman versus maintaining the British tanks now the the Ordnance tested things I won't say to destruction but they tested them a lot I ran into rapport in the tank destroyer archives that over a 2,000 mile course the average speed of an m10 a1 is 1 mile less than that of an m10 and this is doubtless vital important information but they tested it did any German vehicle do a 2,000 mile endurance test before they put it into production well given what happened to the panther aren't going to guess no I I found a report for the MA team stating that a lock or a lock washer I don't know what a lock washer is but a lock washer on the transmission seemed likely to fail by 4,000 miles so it needs to be redesigned before the m18 is put into production now as I can tell the lock washer it's a one of those threaded washers they yes school you're not on - and it just holds it in place and it can't be that hard to repair it but because it might fall before 4,000 miles redesign the tank so I had a couple of other thoughts for Dracula but for the interest of time I'm gonna hold back a little bit but a couple of excerpts anyway it is evident that the commander of a unit equipped with Sherman's can be confident of taking 99% of his vehicles into battle at any way during the first two thousand miles of their life on the other hand if you hear equipped with Cromwell's or centaurs he might be in a continuous state of anxiety as to whether enough of his tanks would even reach the battlefield to carry out the normal tasks expected of his unit now it was also observed that the crews and support personnel will be better rested so if a Cromwell is driving from A to B and breaks down on roof you have to take the time to stop and repair it either the crew themselves or you get the maintenance guides out which means that they don't get their rest and then when the finally gets to the motorpool you got all the cooks are still awake waiting to feed the crews after they get there and in terms of the amount of man-hours not only raw man-hours but the effectiveness of those man-hours the American tanks reliability was key because he made just huge gains in efficiency both combat and personnel so American tanks were tested in the deserts of Indio California and the snows of Fort Greely Alaska and the takeaway here is they worked and I can't overemphasize this enough Italian was a battalion when it got to where it was going wasn't most of a battalion and it wasn't a full battalion which then had to stand down for maintenance which you know some soon as other countries would have to do and if you were a unit let's say you're an infantry division and you were relying on support of your attached tank battalion you knew that every company in your infantry unit would have tanks support it wasn't a case of okay a third of the tanks broke down so Charlie Company you're at a look you're gonna charge that German a position without a tank and get a ridiculous level of detail you go to the organ or ordnance archives and it's box after box of the effects of mold on rubber in the Pacific Theater and every individual component the fuel pump will be subjected to a battery of tests and even once the tank was approved for production there would still be QA I mean you'll come across a report saying test report of Chrysler tank m4 serial number twenty six thousand five hundred and forty eight which you just randomly took off the line and tried it out to make sure that the quality control was still exactly what it was supposed to be so sustainment again you've got the whole thing amateurs talk tactics professionals talk logistics another vehicle that won the war the CC kW on the road it's called a two and a half ton truck but on the road is rated carry five tons and the red ball of course was completely on the road that's two hundred and fifty five-gallon cans or 1,250 gallons of fuel a one-ton trailer will carry an additional 40 cans brings us to one thousand four hundred and fifty gallons and of course the Americans tested all this this chart which I guess you had to get online for a bigger image is fuel and oil requirements per 1,000 miles for a company of seventeen medium tanks and each barrel represents one hundred gallons so in other words one CC kW will move a 17 tank m4a1 company one hundred miles one single truck of fuel and red ball had 5500 trucks rolling at once so that gives you an idea as a just how much fuel tanks suck and B how efficient the info was at all that fuel which had to be shipped again you got to get it from wherever it is to the refineries from refineries in England then along the pipeline under the ocean to get the friends and then into five-gallon cans and then shipped over every piece of this requires a like energy and power it requires personnel to man them and requires trucks it requires mechanics to maintain the trucks that requires ships to carry two spare parts to maintain the trucks it requires ships to carry two spare parts to maintain the trucks to carry the food for the mechanics who drove the parts to get from uc1 during going maintenance the German military suffered a significant capacity problem you could either make new tanks or think make spare parts for the old tanks so with the target one entered production for every 10 tiger ones that left the factory they also built one additional transmission one additional engine and so the Germans had this massive parts shortage and you put armed guards on to supply trains because the units will be stealing the parts that did stage raids to get their spare parts mechanics will be dispatched to the rail stations to stake their claim and if there's waiting for their parts to arrive they're not repairing tanks Americans did not have this problem oh and again look at John partials video war there's the Center for military history have a pamphlet on German tank maintenance the u.s. bought spare parts they brought lots of them and they all fit and tanks were rarely down for long so by way of comparison I'd mentioned this is how you take off the transmission on an m4 undo the bolts pull off the front leave it aside get another one put it on done a couple hours to a panther in this case but the panzer 4 was the same in a few other vehicles you have to take off the roof of the hull you then have to pull out the drivers position the radio men's position the radios which are kind of in the middle half way down here again you look at my videos he just go to look at my Panther video and part three I'm in the driver's compartment you can see all the bits around the driver that have to come out before the transmission can be pulled out back up through the roof your three mechanics here are gonna repair one German tank in the amount of time it takes you three mechanics here to repair maybe two or three Americans now granted this heavy welded armored front is really tough to get through but in the large scheme of things is it worth the additional hassle of having your tanks down because again your tank may be the best in the world but if it is down for maintenance it is not contributing to the battle if it is not contributing in the battle why have a tank also these things have to be generally replaced after about 1200 miles and again we have the Sherman at least 2000 and of course whether or not the tank survives to get to 1200 Mazdas and doesn't matter entirely but alright so he 23 and this is one of the this is where ordnance really sours the army on the Persian so generally in 1943 the first of the t20 series tank shows up in the general idea is you take a tank with a 76 millimeter gun a lower overall silhouette than a m4 you should have a better tank the m4 is now in series production so they'd met the immediate requirements can we improve so the t20 had issues with the transmission the t22 had problems the t23 had an electric drive which is in theory wonderful it would spin on a dime it'll go backwards as fast it would go forwards very mobile you could control the entire tank in theory this tank could drive and fight with one man in theory no me you wouldn't want to what's not the low profile fringe and what's not to like so after a demonstration in April of 1943 two generals McNair Devers Somerville and Marshall it was agreed to build 250 of these tanks as an initial production run and ordnance promised that all the issues would be fixed now in hindsight about 50 of them would be upgunned but we'll come back to that so when they showed up armored board again starts testing them in details and a number of were found some of them were small things like the tallest gunner when he's sitting to see could not see through the site because the site was too high most of them would be easy fixes some would not we'll come back to this so the m-46 was the series modifications to simplify production increase ergonomics and increased firepower and survivability now again go what can best sustain the war in 44 you have a choice you can either try to refine and improve the m4 which you knew would be available in numbers or you can take a gamble go with what could potentially be a substantially better tank the t23 what still had some bugs to work out but it may not work or may not be available in the required numbers and you're gambling with the entire future of the world here you can perhaps understand them being able to be cautious and as part of the overall progression we now have seventy six millimeter gun on the teach one two three turret you have a steeper front slope which simplifies the production and also makes bigger hatchets it's easier to get out of you got more room inside and to make up for it to make the front a bit thicker wet stowage which returned which changed the burn rate of the tank from average to this thing almost never burns and that again i was the result of testing he had a bet you can't see it but he had a better vision cupola up here to see the opposition and this was all done very very quickly the idea of putting the t23 turret was march of 1943 the finished east six was in aberdeen being tested by june the testing was completed and the design was approved in September by September 43 was decided that all factories would stop producing seventy five millimeter tanks for the army in by January of forty four with a few exceptions such as lend-lease or Marine Corps tanks or contracts that already been ordered but the problem was that all these tanks are now being produced in January of 44 they still have to get them all the way overseas competing with everything else that's going overseas like trucks and fuel and I my own personnel and rifles and everything else the medical equipment and they also seemed to be a nice to have you remember that luxury versus essential the 75-millimeter army was killing everything that came across including Ferdinand's and tigers and Panthers in Italy now there was a fine detail in there but I may not have time to get to but generally speaking 275 was working so the Americans who are about to invade France go oh we have a couple hundred of these 76 millimeter gun tanks which means a new line of supply is necessary for the ammunition we have to retrain our tankers who are ready good shots with a 75 got to retrain all loaders why bother with the hassle it's not worth it so they left the 76 in the ua in the UK in hindsight this is what is known in technical terms as a whoops but it made sense at the time going back to your point i mean v army the the guys who are winning in italy they were saying give us all the 76 as we can get yeah we're killing these things but it's costing far too much hassle to do it by me anyway now there was another minor issue and that was the tungsten shortage since there was no particular required no particular indication that the 76 could do the job if the 75 couldn't they didn't spend any tungsten building hvac ammunition the high-velocity armour-piercing ammo they had other things to do with the tungsten it was used for making machine tools lots of different things and in hindsight perhaps a bad decision they should have developed the HIV ammo just in case benefit of hindsight and if there is any one single flaw I could point to an R in the US Army's tank production I would say you should have developed a chap you should have issued it now the other thing is the e8 and yes you're still not off the hook audience-participation question number six what is the advantage to having narrow tracks and why did the u.s. build them sir correct the difference in weight between a 16 inch track and a 21 inch track is a full tunnel that's an additional ton that the drive wheel at the front has to haul around to get the tank to go to the same speed plus your hinges are longer and each hinge has a set as an amount of resistance in it as well so it actually made a lot of sense to go with the narrower track in hindsight again perhaps not the best decision so the solution was the easy eight suspension the horizontal value which had been tested earlier in the heavier tanks so again this isn't a new idea they actually tried a whole series of different suspension types you look at all sorts of weird pictures but they went with this thing that they tried before wider tracks and the result if you put everything together is the m4a3 because that was the preferred engine 76 horizontal valued suspension system which is commonly and incorrectly known as the ez 8 the definitive Sherman went on to Korean War and then courses Sherman's with SI service I think Paraguay just bought them back into service two of them famous saves again the Israelis and it was arguably the definitive best Sherman now you do have the question of protection and this is not a typical a lot of crewmen would add on armor onto their vehicle now to quote army ground forces another point to consider is that any slight addition of armor to existing thickness only adds weight but creates a false sense of security without actually providing material additional protection the penetrative power of large caliber tank and anti-tank weapons research that existing armor would almost need doubling in order to provide real protection within medium ranges additional protection afforded longer ranges by slight increases of armor would hardly justify the additional weight and consequently increased load on engines and suspension so you're a tank crewman you figure out oh these German 88's and 75 the long 75 s are punching right through my Sherman I must do something to make my Sherman tougher and you put sandbags Crete or whatever it is is a sandbag going to stop an 88 is your transmission going to be happy with the extra two tons of sandbag that you just put on your tank and both the Germans and the American engineers looked into it and said no the way it comes from the factory is the way it is supposed to be and only patent enforced actually so somebody that heavy was needed the assault tank I'm being told I'm running out of time so I'm not gonna go about e to now go back to the T 23 so it splits into two the t 23 and then the 19 millimeter gun that he 26 the 780 v tank battalion were given t 23 s to result 300 man hours of maintenance for every 100 hours of operation absolutely unacceptable they came up with a list of 26 must fixes if our if the ordinance fixed it armored force would say fantastic we'll send them overseas and declare a battle where the ordinance said well we can't actually fix all 26 but we can fix most of them and then you can send those overseas and army ground forces was not enthusiastic this okay look we don't like it but for you we'll let the commander's in Europe know that we have a hundred and fifty of these 76 millimeter lightweight tanks and they can use it if they want now by the way we're sending them our copies of the test reports nobody took him up on it Dever correction the initially the responses were good but then they read the test reports and that was the end of it so I'm gonna skip over that slide go to this t25 T 26 I have a lot on this online and in the other videos bottom line nobody really wanted the 19 millimeter tank initially again about the size of ammunition or whatever but ordnance and general barns are so determined that he knew that this was a tank that would win the war that he asked the British actually he designed the tank to take 17 pounder and the theory was if the British liked the tank the British would order the Pershing and once the tank was now in production then his genius design would then be produced by the army because the factories are already making them well the British ended up going with centurion tank which is arguably a better decision and army ground forces tested the Pershing said it doesn't work it keeps breaking now we don't want it so again I've gone on to that in detail elsewhere TD lessons towed TDS are better than mobile TDS according to North Africa well that was the lesson that they learned however in practice it didn't work because in North Africa they weren't attacking the Allies weren't doing most of the attacking the guns were much smaller and so on and so forth I'll skip over the t53 I will mention that the 90 millimeter Jackson was not wanted because again there was it wasn't the fast mobile tank destroyer and nobody had a need for the 90 millimeter gun however there was a change of heart and by July of 44 June 44 they decided to type classify it and this is what they really wanted the crews didn't want this Barnes wanted this he wanted it for his doctrine the crews look at this thing say my god has got no armor I could get a said I could get a pickaxe and punch through this one unit actually mutant eight they did not want the m18 but that said india the end they got a reputation for killing tanks with the same 76 millimeter gun that the sherman had so the sherman was quite capable of killing tanks as much as the m18 so what was the m4 good at well firstly it was there as already mentioned it was reliable it worked you knew it would do what it was supposed to now here's an example of design the gunner in all three of these tanks is watching you Panther Panther for Sherman which one is better at ambushing the enemy and it's a simple design I don't know why the Germans did not put a roof-mounted sight on their tanks but the first tank to fire in an engagement wins four times out of five hmm he's gonna get the first shot off and then there's economics so this is the inside of a panther it's still from a video to get that round crouch down like this I'm kind of manipulating the round in on the m4 I'm sitting down on my chair very comfortably down up in down up in highly comfortable now survival rates Sherman is a death trap and I go over this again in greater detail in the entire you war armored force KITT lost that many tankers killed the entire war in all of North Africa Sicily and Italy 80 tankers were killed which if you think about the reputation is amazingly low and part of the reason for it is how easy it is to get out of one of these things and in my video I have what I've called the oh my god the tank is on fire test how quickly can I get out of the tank if it is on fire and with the m4 the hatch is right above you pop it up out you get and you look at the Panther in the commander is doing this or the tiger and he's getting out like this so a very very survivable tank very very versatile tank flamethrower you could do anything with this thing rejected developments 17 pounder I can go on about this forever but the bottom line is that the Americans didn't think it was a good idea in hindsight I'm not sure it was a good idea they would have been better off actually building the 76 but they didn't that's why the Firefly has a reputation infrared oh the Germans had infrared well the Americans had infrared they just realized that it didn't work and guess what when the Germans tried it they realize it didn't work the difference was that the Germans realized it didn't work after they spent the time and effort putting it into the field and then it didn't work they took off this is a target range timer which basically it applies lead to your horizontal lead tear it here gone this is an autograph if you're in the middle of North Africa how do you know where you are and this is basically a moving map use you set the start position and the tank figures out where it's going by way a compass and a Dominator and whatever not battle-worthy enough great idea the Americans were willing to to develop an experiment and try but if it wasn't guaranteed to work if you could not rely on your equip the troops will not have confidence in the equipment and they'll stop using it and what's the point troops who are confident in their equipment will fight better and everything that the American armored forces used to go overseas was reliable and the the the end result pretty much is is the proof is in the pudding so again the important thing if I'm going to finish with one sentence shall we say it is important to note that the m4 together with every other piece of equipment in the Army is built to win a war as quickly and effectively as possible the military as a whole is organized and equipped to do as much as possible to defeat the enemy while protecting US lives and so on the m4 is not built to face off in tank duels it's not purely face off in tank tools and a lot of people that look at it tactically they look at the Sherman and they'll compare it tactically to a German tank some people will look at it operationally few people look at it strategically and in the in the grand scheme of things the designers don't really care or did not care for T you know 80 70 years ago what the folks today on internet for would be complaining about penetration values and armor values for wargaming statistics or other things like all they wanted to do was build an effective vehicle that would win the war as a FET is what effectively as effectively as possible and in that I would argue the m4 did exactly what it was supposed to do and off what are your questions Oh world the tanks folks please leave any World of Tanks related questions till after this this little Q&A is just on the design it's well known that engineering has to be done at the production site because the the production workers have to be able to talk with the engineers and back and forth you know that this wasn't done in in wartime the engineers were stateside and and then the production people were the ones doing the fighting was that the major problem a the there wasn't an adequate communication between the engineers and the people in the field a bit of both the the development division did send personnel to the field units and indeed even even Barnes endeavors will go on fact-finding tours and they'd fly all the way to North Africa and they would ask what's going on themselves and then interview folks they would also do surveys by mail that they'll send a telegram over say hey these are a list of 25 questions we have for you what are your responses and they'll feed those back as well as well as well as just sending liaison personnel over who were permanently attached so there was always a communication as how you realize that hey the sites are wonky or hey we need this the problem scenes for being a lack of realization even at the using level of what was required so again I'll go back to 6 armored saying look we don't want any 76 millimeter tanks and probably the reason that they're saying that is because they never met anything that needed a 76 millimeter gun so if the people don't realize what they need it doesn't matter how good a communication is with with the designers so Barnes was always going we want a bigger gun we want a bit more mobile engine the problem was that he wanted technology that was not battle worthy that was not reliable enough and that's probably where your distinction failed both sides were fighting for the same and you're both talking to each other they were just talking from different perspectives and I think if there is any conflict that is where it is thank you I'm gonna ask a tangential question raised by your presentation as far as what the two biggest problems were for the u.s. going to war and that was the Atlantic in the Pacific General Smedley Butler wrote the book Wars a racket and one of the things that I've always raised and talking about the Americas need to go to foreign war is that any enemy that attacks us they can attack us but they can never wage a war against us the reason being is that you've got the lines of supply and the logistics of crossing the Atlantic and the Pacific and to the north of Canada and Mexico and the South in your time in the military and studying military history have you ever heard an argument that defeats that with regards to strategic planning for war as to why we should be not be more of a defensive nation versus an aggressive nation doesn't that go back a little bit though to the where was the money going during the during the hard times in 230 was going to the Navy because they realized that if the priority number one before the military was to defend the u.s. territory it would the Navy was the organization that was going to do it so I I have not heard any argument saying that yes the opposition can come attack us on land and overthrow us once they've gotten past the Navy is that where you going [Music] even sustain that to sustain that attack for any period of time as far as wage a war against the United States there's no country in the world that could and if they were gonna have a sustained attack that was a war it would have to either come from Canada or Mexico a great nowhere else all right yeah the the short answer to your is I have not seen anything that would possibly argue against that and even to support it look at Operation Sea Lion the German attack of 20 what's the 24 miles to get just across the English Channel there's no way the Germans could sustain an invasion like that either the wrong lady would have a significant issue with us that's the assuming they could even come up with a plan right yes just getting to the Firefly yes there was a demand I would imagine that there must have been a demand in the American army for something at least similar to the Firefly I know in Normandy there's the famous story that one Firefly took out six Panthers with seven shots in five minutes and then with the tiger there they should have known that the Germans were going to attempt was to keep on upgrading the tiger as well so wasn't that a case with the foe as far as the Firefly or something similar to it where I don't know what commanders were saying we don't need the upgrade we don't need the extra firepower but I know troops I know people in armored regiments who said they needed it oh they did it and there's there's two problems here they need for a bigger gun was certainly identified and there were two solutions to it one of them was a 76 and the other was in a 90 and if you look at the weight and the size of the gun the actual equivalent to the 17 pounder is the 90 millimeter and ordnance tested the 17 pounder side-by-side with the 90 and they decided that then the 19 was actually the better gun which i think is arguably the the correct move the difference though is that the british stuffed their 17 pounder into a turret that the American armored forces thought that the 76 was too big four so if the Americans thought the 76 is too big to effectively fight this Firefly what would the 17-pounder do now again this is people looking at the outside not on the inside if you look at how a gunner is situated in the Firefly his right hand is here his head is here and his left hand down here with the elevation trying to get on to target the guy I've done a video on the Firefly the rounds are huge you can you only got five of them the hand and they take forever to load now the I'm gonna count to part two of this in a moment but for every time you see yes the Firefly knocked out six tanks in five minutes how many times did a Sherman with the much higher rate of fire destroy seven Panther Panther Panzer force in three minutes or more likely six machine-gun nests in three minutes and Firefly really sucked as a tank and Firefly was a tank killer but let's the jury sucked as a tank now the other problem from the American perspective though was they acknowledge we need a bigger gun what they didn't acknowledge was that the bigger Gong that they were building was not big enough and they didn't realize that until they put it into combat and then he had the famous Eisenhower quote that hey ordnance are telling me the 76 millimeter will kill everything you know you said now you're being told that like in one knockout a damn thing what actually is in reality is not true as is evidenced by the fact that lots of German tanks got blown up by you by American tanks not easily perhaps but the Americans managed in this goes back to the bigger question of how it's a system of systems its artillery is obscuring the Panther while the m4 goes around the side I think you look at our records as an example of 75 tanks destroying Panthers which they should not have done so the fire fly in itself not only was cramped but you also have the problem that nothing else in the American system used a 17 pounder ammo and on the converse side the British are going nothing in our army uses a 76 so there that's why they started the rearmament program is well we want a bigger gun but we don't want your bigger gun because it doesn't fit with our logistical supply the one interesting exception is the American production of about a hundred fireflies at the end of the war and the question is why did the US make the order these to be made and there is a couple of interesting problems firstly are as mentioned the the capacity you're now adding a 17 pounder ammunition supply line system to your entire army for a hundred tanks what good is a hundred tanks gonna do to the entire US Army and I think enough this is hypothesis but I think this was actually purchased for other armies to use and as there is all the history for this the Polish Brigade for example started off with fireflies they ended the war with 76 millimeter tanks because they actually got their supply of replacement tanks from the Americans and so if the Americans had fireflies in the depots that they had gotten from the British they could then we replenish their allied units with the correct type of equipment now this is speculation but again it has happened like the biggest single foreign purchaser of the Centurion was the u.s. ro as US military or US government but they bought them to give to the Danish into deduction to everybody else so that's kind of a long-winded way of saying that Firefly did not suit the Americans what did suit the Americans turned out not to be good enough until they got a reality check and they started building either the m36 with a 90 or the HV ammo which never really made it in large numbers but then again fortunately there were not large numbers of heavy tanks to shoot at in the first place hello if belt Belton Cooper was here the author of death traps what would you say to try to change his mind or to to debate them my other question is if the US military had gone ahead and produced the pershing and not the Sherman what kind of problems do you think would have results on the battlefield second question first the problems of Pershing would be very similar to the problems of Panther so we saw how how good Panther was in its introduction in combat why would we expect that Pershing would be any different so you would have lots of vehicles out there which are broken down theoretically they could work but even then he had a limit so America captures the Ludendorff bridge at Remagen the bridge is damaged the infantry cross over fantastic they need tank support they call up there happen to be Pershing it's on the far side the person cannot cross the bridge the Sherman can cross the bridge how quickly does it take an engineer unit to build a Bailey bridge to class four versus to build a Bailey bridge to class five and bridging the engineers either had a veto in tank design as well they would always pass around to logistics and engineers and so on hey armored force want this tank do you guys have a problem with it and the transport guys will look at the dimensions and say yeah but it won't fit through a British railroad bridge and the engineers there big question was bridging capacity will this thing hold away so with Pershing you would have a lane dock which in theory in a few circumstances will be far better than the Sherman but in most circumstances would not for the level of combi that was going on at a time obviously as technology and time develops you get to Korea it's a different matter to answer your first question what would I sell the Burton Cooper is all these tankers that you keep meeting that say this is a deathtrap how many of them were not dead and the problem is that the entire premise is based on confirmation bias his job was to repair destroyed tanks all he sees are destroyed tanks destroyed American tanks he does not see the tanks that were not destroyed he does not see the German tanks that were destroyed because why would he see them so he's making his perception on a a small subset not a complete subset of the of the data that's available to him now whether or not I could actually convince the man who's at the time would have been maybe 90 something years old that he's wrong you just smile and nod and let him go let him keep thinking I guess yeah yeah one question is on you know the the famous funny structure used at d-day which is I've read is that those you know mindful tanks but also obviously the DD tanks well is that was that part of cover the initial design like it was the the Sherman was designed for those kind of attachment or that's okay there was actually a pretty good book about Hobart I can't remember the name of it but it's livery is like a thick and all it is about Hobart and his command at the 79th and the thing to remember these funnies did not start with Sherman they started with usually Valentine's so the ideas were worked out with the British tanks and then they were modified and there and there were funnies from the front of Churchill's as well there were Churchill funnies but they took the Sherman because that's the next tank that was being built I said well what can we do the same thing with the Sherman and the answer was yes we can because it is such a wonderful tank and just a quick question how much of it advantage is the power turret Traverse on the Sherman a lot I may not have seen I just published an article last week and I got another one coming out tomorrow about the average combat range or correct not the average the median combat range so people realized that the average is about 700 yards the medium was actually about 300 yards and if you re defending let's say you have a line of Tanks you can have a couple hundred meters between each tank so if you have a tank over there and another tank or an anti-tank on three hundred yards over there that is a 60 degree slew that you've got got a cover which means you need to have a nice big wide optic which is Sherman had and you got to be able to traverse from here to here really quickly because firefights are over very quickly and again the first person to shoot usually wins four times out of five first person to shoot will win so you get the tert the Sherman gets this gets over on the flank shot of the Panther or whatever he'll get the shot off before the German tank over part will reply back so yes very important sir major Morello xns g10 sweet excellent informative and exciting talk I can make you so much for one minor correction Gordon welchman said that the BRIT are the Americans were better in crypto and radar slightly better than the Brits but that the Brits were better a slightly better and azdak and Magic II W and sonar significance question about going from why we didn't have armored cars we had the combat cars why we really didn't have armored cars there's a famous tank commander movie where the tank commander barks where they show depict a urban battle and the Sherman's are defeat some Tigers with some armored cars because the Sherman's were better for urban warfare than the Tigers my question is armored cars were very good in urban warfare and we had the combat cars why didn't we go into the armored cars well the combat car was simply a workaround because the by law the cavalry Corps could not have a tank so they had the tank they just refused to call it a tank hence you got to come on my car in terms of armored cars the US Army took a fair look at armored cars as primary combat vehicles as well it was a vehicle called the trackless tank which was big 8x8 was being tested about 1941 and initial initial testing was was very good it was fast it was quiet had all the advantages of an armored car but the there were some again the reason why until very recently armored cars were not as prevalent when it came down to general-purpose combat our urban terrain is not as common back then it is is today so today 70% of the part or in urban terrain back then it wasn't the case so you had to have your tank capable of going off-road very very well and this is why the are the wheeled tank destroyers now and I'll just show you a few of them they went all the way up to three inch guns there was a there were a lot of attempts at real tank destroyers but they never got to the same level of mobility as a tank so that's why they never went anywhere as for the armored cars I can only assume the same thing they had the Stuart they had the Chaffee the British liked their armored cars I don't know why I've not looked into it yeah I tend to agree that yes because the end result was we won so ago whatever we made was appropriate but then again you know your argument that in the in the procurement process you look at the logistics and you look at the Liberty ships and you look the rail that's not an argument because the argument is what you got at the end result is when you go into battle and so yes the m4 is adequate but there are battles lost because it was only adequate operation Goodwood Operation Torch these battles were lost if you're gonna end the war sooner you've gotta win those battles so whatever was was decided upon way back when it's not an argument to say you can't put it on a rail line and it's not an argument to say you can't put on a living ship you make them fit the tank because you understand that there's eighty-eights out there and that there's bigger tanks you should have known that intelligence should have known that so to say that it's good enough no it isn't the the end users one I I don't know if tortures really a loss Goodwood I would argue did not fail because of the tank design have failed because due to manpower issues the British simply did not have enough infantry it was not Monty's first ideal plan but the British Army was out of infantry they had descent tanks in unsupported and with the unfortunate and inevitable consequence he was even made a gamble that the opposition weren't as heavily forces they were the unfortunate loss he didn't have a choice he had to make the attack because good wood was a decoy for Cobra but anyway when it comes down yes the person in the tank at the time probably does not care about all the logistical things that ended up with him being there there are two counters to this one is that the general surveys that the American tango said no I've not seen the British once if the American surveys basically said we can handle the amount of armor we have we need a better gun which in the case of Goodwood it was it was as I say it was 88 a little bit more armor probably wouldn't made enough difference against 88 anyway so that argument is academic the other point is yes it's not very fair for the tanker to say sorry it's fine for the tanker to say I wish I had more armor I wish I had a bigger gun how about his buddy over there a kilometer that way he was an infantryman about to charge of machine-gun nests what's his argument dammit why can't the army build us tanks that are light enough that we can get two tanks here so that not only does Joe have a tank I also have a tank so I don't see I don't see how you can say that one position is the position of the tanker is better than this the position of the person in charge in the u.s. actually trying to ship these things overseas is it unfortunate for the guy there yes it is no two ways about it is it still the better decision I'd argue not Emily we can get out can happily are you gonna come to the dinner afterwards I will happily continue to engage you on this one but we'll move on to another question thank you how uniform was the ammunition given the different situations the tanks were fighting in the news I can tell it was pretty uniform they the projectiles for the 3 inch and the 76 were the same just the casings were different the the projectiles for the 7 for the armor-piercing round for the 75 there were a couple of different was interesting I put up my Facebook page was a photograph of a report to the armored force and they wanted to know how effective the APC ammunition was what were the reports coming back from the field are we suffering a shortage of APC is it working and the report and this was in April of 45 said that our problem is that our tanks haven't found any enemy tanks to shoot at I put this up at a Facebook page it is possibly an exaggeration but I was the I I don't I don't know if I can answer the question other than there were sufficient ammunition of all types except for H fab which had not been designed in July of 44 and only once they said oh my god we need a bigger we need better hitting did the Ordnance brand say AHA policy no more want higher velocity because remember is higher velocity over bigger gun higher velocity had we get a higher velocity and lighter weight shot how do we do that Thomson let's develop this and they decided very quickly the design of the month flatten it's the prototypes are being tested still too late and that again brings it back to the earlier question that was one that they could have fixed and they could have given the American tankers a better gun but they didn't and the American tankers would be justifiably going why didn't you think this now and again I'm saying this not knowing about what other uses the tungsten had could you have afforded to not stand up another factory with these tungsten produce tools I don't know but I my personal opinion is they could have fixed that ammunition problem getting them better Gore you you mentioned at the end of you talk about survivability and you mentioned that the crews were talking about survivability rather obviously rather than being brewed up the planners ever ever get into a sloped armor who's did that ever come up with with them okay thank you is a soaked not as sharply no but it is thicker to compensate so the the effective armor between the t-34 and Sherman is almost to the millimeter the same now the side Armour is not sloped on a Sherman it is sloped on the t-34 this brings you to a couple of problems firstly your turret ring is smaller you have a smaller turret ring that means you have a smaller turi have a smaller term means you can't put a bigger gun in it wit or you have less room inside the other problem is that the you you're making it tank really really big but you don't have very much room inside the tank because of all the armor so what do you put your fuel what do you put your ammo when you put your spare parts so the Sherman and if you look at a modern tank a modern tank is like a Sherman it's sloped its front but even the Soviets by the t-55 have given up on sloping on the sides because it just was not worth it yes good evening good evening I'm thinking about the Calliope you see pictures of them they don't carry very many rockets we're wasting a tank to head to fire a handful of rockets the Germans are using our own half-tracks the Russians are using trucks that what was the theory about putting these rockets you know the Calliope on top of the tank as opposed to another lighter easier to produce vehicle the answer to your question is I have no idea and I fully agree with you and I have found reports coming back into the archive basically saying why are we doing this it must have made a good a good sense to somebody I do not know who that somebody was and I don't know what they were thinking I'm sorry as somebody who has several versions of Sherman's at his ministers collection thank you for a great presentation the tanks may have been the same but the way the armored divisions were structured was not and that varied even within the United States Army and obviously with other armies just talked about as the tank was the building block just talked about how the armored divisions were structured first within the u.s. system and then the heavy heavy armored divisions versus the other later ones and then compared to some of the other nationalities at fault I'm I'm not sure I'm actually able to I'm a technical guy more than the doctor'll organisational guy which I probably shouldn't be because I am in a major tribe you lieutenant colonel the the thing I will say with the US tank tank use philosophy is that you had the difference between your Armored Division and the independent tank battalions the armored division was the exploitation force the tank battalion was designed to do the punching and they used the same tank for both roles now I guess you can make an argument like let's say the British came up there but their Cruiser tanks and infantry tanks the Germans had the heavy tanks and medium tanks the Russians had the heavy tanks and medium tanks did the US get something wrong here by not having different tanks for the two different roles and I think this again brings us back to the whole logistical question if we could build a heavy tank that worked which I couldn't because they tried but if they could would would they have shipped them overseas and I'm not sure there is an actual answer to that so I'm sorry I don't feel confident in going into the details - what year when you moved from a light company to three medium companies and so on standing up here I would need to get my bolts okay in the 1940s the standard American railroad flat car with a 50 ton car that was the basic building block that was the state-of-the-art car for the time there were a lot there were cars with lesser capacities how did that car the eliminate limiting to this design all I know is that the document I found in the archives that are actually talking about the future of heavy tanks so this document was actually written in about 1950 and it stated if my memory is serving on the correct quote is that these 12,000 cars were of sufficient capacity and width to carry the m26 so I don't know why you would have a stand a narrower than standard flat car but apparently they were they did exist because otherwise the the ordinance branch would not have said both weight capacity and width either way the bottom line was that the ordinance branch did not believe that they had sufficient flat car capacity in the u.s. to support significant deployment of heavy tanks in the 1950s let alone in 1940s [Applause] [Applause]

Channel: The_Chieftain

Views: 897,022

Rating: 4.8466573 out of 5

Keywords: Sherman Tank, Wargaming, AFV Design

Id: TwIlrAosYiM

Length: 95min 13sec (5713 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 19 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Thatdude253]

Flair this "Not Wheraboo" so people don't get really confused.

[u/Skip_14]

Expecting a rebuttal from ChristianMunich anytime soon.

[u/[deleted]]

We should all try to not circle-jerk too much and be more like Mr Moran and people like MHV. They do great works in educating people. Hats off.

[u/Iron_Sheik_of_Arabia]

Love the "what you're saying isn't an argument" guy during the Q&A and the way Chieftain handled his statement.

[u/Stromovik]

Why calliope ?

1. Everyone but the germans had MLRS systems on tank chassis. USSR on T-60 chassis everyone else kept them to prototypes.
2. Rockets were a way to deliver a heavy HE load from a distance on relatively light chassis.
3. Some fortifications had heavily reinforced roofs making them invunrable to bombardement from 152mm artillery , but direct fire could destroy those by firing at firing ports or casemates or doors which were hidden. Now driving an unarmored truck into direct fire of MG is not a good idea. This experience in during the Winter war lead to KV-2 and SU-100Y. In Austria one battery commander had to bring B-4 203mm howitzers into direct fire to crush fortifications.
4. Imagine direct fire from like 1000m at a trench line with 20-40 rockets . Now imagine being on recieving end of that.
5. It turns out that driving exposed explosives into enemy fire is not that good of an idea.

[u/Crag_r]

Hat's off to The_Chieftain

Incredibly historically informative talk aside, unlike most historical speakers he's actually incredibly interesting to listen to. He doesn't put you to sleep like most historical speakers and is actually pretty captivating with humour and speech variation mixed in.

[u/pnutzgg]

1:16:38 Nick Moran hears our favourite author and makes appropriate warding gestures

[u/Tammo-Korsai]

It's good to see this has been uploaded to YouTube. That will definitely help more people discover another fine presentation by The Chieftain.

[u/HenkGC]

That belton cooper burn though.