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Sometimes a “good enough” military technology can achieve victory over better military technologies. Such a fact probably gave very little comfort to the five-man crews of U.S. Sherman tanks who faced an uphill battle against more powerful German tanks during World War II. British tank crews gave Sherman tanks the unflattering nickname “Ronson” — a grim reference to the Ronson cigarette lighter’s ad slogan “lights first every time” and the unfortunate fact that Sherman tanks often burned after taking just one hit. But that did not stop the U.S. from supplying tens of thousands of Sherman tanks to U.S., British, Canadian and other Allied forces, tipping the scales against the smaller numbers of elite German tanks on World War II battlefields.
The armchair historian debate over the Sherman’s war legacy could blaze up once more with the new war film “Fury”, starring actor Brad Pitt as a U.S. tank commander leading a five-man Sherman crew deep within Germany in the closing days of World War II. Some historians and military history enthusiasts still scoff at the capabilities of Sherman tanks when compared with the German Panther and Tiger tanks that carried both more armor and more firepower. But the U.S. strategy of mass-producing a reliable tank in large numbers should not be underestimated, according to the book “Armored Thunderbolt: The U.S. Army Sherman in World War II” by Steven Zaloga, a military historian and senior analyst at the Teal Group Corporation. The tale of the Sherman tank’s road to victory represents a history lesson with implications for the future of warfare.
“In battle, quantity has a quality all its own,” Zaloga writes. “Warfare in the industrial age requires a careful balance between quality and quantity.”
“Overwhelming adversaries through greater numbers is a viable strategy for technology competition, and was used successfully by the United States in World War II,” writes Paul Scharre, a fellow at CNAS, in a preview for the new report titled “Robotics on the Battlefield Part II: The Coming Swarm.” ( http://www.cnas.org/sites/default/files/publications-pdf/CNAS_TheComingSwarm_Scharre.pdf )
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/lovesick-cyborg/2014/10/16/good-enough-us-tanks-won-wwii/#5465
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday November 13 2014, @08:41AM
No it was Stalin with the T-34. he also said the IL2 was as important as air and bread (in his threat to deal with the manufacturers who were following behind) because of how well it worked at the front. It was cheap, easy to fix, and hard to destroy, just like the T-34.
I would argue the USA is following Germany of WWII while Russia and China are following the old Soviet/American model which is a BAD idea for the USA. Instead of building "good enough" fighters that can employ the latest tech like the F-15 Stealth Eagle we are blowing boatloads on "wonder weapons" that suffer the exact same problems the Germans had with the ME262, the Panther, King Tiger, etc in that they are 1.- Extremely expensive which means, 2.- They will always be in VERY short supply, which means 3.- Parts will quickly become an issue and 4.- Maintenance will be a serious issue which adds 5.- longer downtime and shorter time in service and of course 6.- keeping it functioning even at current levels will be harder as the old gear wears out without replacement and 7.- The enemy will be able to put out dozens for every one of yours.
You would be hard pressed to find anybody who knows tanks who would say the Tiger wasn't superior to the Sherman across the board, why did it lose? because there was 25 Shermans for every single Tiger, simple as that. With those kind of odds no matter how advanced your tech is YOU ARE FUCKED. Well what about now? The F35 if everything goes perfectly (highly unlikely considering how many setbacks its had) will cost $142 million a pop for the first run, this pares up with the F22 which ended up costing $150 mil a pop...how many of the F22 did we finally end up with? 187...that's it, 187 planes for a program that cost 66.7 BILLION dollars. Now lets look at the only other countries roughly our level, Russia? Mig29 cost 29 million and they got at LEAST 1600 of those. Their stealth fighter? 50 million a pop, so they can have nearly 4 for every 1 of ours. China? Just use Russian numbers as most of their fighters are tweaks of Soviet/Russian tech, so they will likewise be able to put up dozens to 1.
Of course all this ignores the giant elephant rotting on the coffee table which is it is all pointless as the ONLY countries we will be fighting in the future will be the skill level of an NK or one of the African tribals so all this high tech wonder weapons are nothing but worthless circle jerks to keep the MOC will fed and fat, why? Because everybody with the ability to design anything where we would NEED a high tech weapon HAS NUKES and that ends the chance of anything other than backward ass proxy wars ala Vietnam. I mean can you imagine America using a stealth plane to attack Russia or China? You'd end up with cities like LA ending up craters so nobody is gonna do that, no chance in hell. Like it or not I would argue that the MAD theory is the most perfect elegant thing devised by man. After all you'll never have another WWII with huge technological equal countries like the USA and Russia, why? Because the second one of them was at real risk of losing the missiles would fly, that's why! Hell it even works for smaller fry like India and Pakistan, neither will do more than minor border clashes for fear the bombs will fall, its bloody brilliant!
If we would invest in affordable weapons we'd at least have a use for those, look at how well the F15,F16, and F18 have worked out, instead we waste billions on lame ducks like F35 which will NEVER be used against a country with enough tech to make those features useful! Oh and before somebody brings up using the F117 and B2 in desert storm? That was a joke, an excuse to find a use for the things because then as now sat images let us know to the foot where every target of interest was, a handful of cruise missiles that together were a couple times cheaper than a single F17 could have disabled every radar installation of any note and left us rulers of the sky. Instead like the F22 what you'll end up with is the stupid thing being trotted out once or twice to blow up some goat herders with AKs before it ends up in a museum, just another billion dollar boondoggle.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @01:14PM
Forgive me, sir, if I don't subscribe to your theory that there will not be armed conflict in the future. A quick glance back at both the history and the present seems to indicate that armed conflict occurs frequently (if not constantly) in human history.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Thursday November 13 2014, @02:59PM
Utter nonsense. Most military historians make fun of the Tiger for being too heavy and having low mobility[*]. Unquestionably the Sherman did have far better reliability and fine mobility. The Tiger outclassed it in hitting power and armor; simple as that. The tradeoff was that they were never able to produce more than a pitiful number of them. In battle the Tiger was in fact defeated by Shermans on numerous occasions. Maybe it took 4-6 Shermans maneuvering in concert against a single Tiger for the ambush. So what; there were plenty of them.
But the mission of the tank in the US Army at the time was not considered to be dueling with enemy tanks, but infantry support, and it was extremely good in that role. For defeating enemy tanks there were anti-tank guns and tank destroyers. The US 90 mm and the British 17 pounder anti-tank guns were very capable of dealing with Tigers.
The tank destroyers had very thin armor, but fully capable gunnery (much more suitable than the Sherman's for killing heavy tanks), and were fast and maneuverable as hell.
By spring 1945 the US and Britain were bringing on line heavy tanks that could duel with the Tiger on equal or superior terms. So it isn't that we couldn't produce them; they just weren't considered a priority, and the destruction of the Wehrmacht in France proved the decision making to have been very effective.
Essentially all the German, as well as US and British tanks used GASOLINE. Certainly the Tiger did. As such, if you hit any of them in the fuel tank they would burn. Duh. And one man with a cheap bazooka or Panzerfaust who got close enough could knock out any of them with one shot. And the armor on the underbelly and the roof was practically paper thin on all tanks. Mines and air attacks decimated tanks including Tigers.
The Russian T-34 used DIESEL FUEL and as such was a little harder, though hardly impossible, to set afire. But more importantly it had the reliability, mobility and production of the Sherman while being more than a match for anything but a Tiger.
[*] This is the consensus, but it is rather trite and silly. Nobody ever ridicules the US M-1, and it is heavier than the Tiger. (Looking at the M-1's battle record you would have to be stupid to criticize it.) As for mobility, yes, a lot of bridges could not support the Tiger and that was a limitation (which the excellent Panther medium tank addressed). The intention was for the Tiger to be able to ford a stream completely submerged except for a snorkel, and that capability was developed and tested. In the event it doesn't seem to have been enough of a problem that the Germans ever bothered to actually utilize this capability in the field.
As for cross-country speed and grade climbing, the Tiger was hardly the helpless slug that many picture it as. Nor was the ground pressure unduly high; it had wide tracks.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday November 13 2014, @10:45PM
DaFuq? If you consider losing a dozen Shermans to take down a single Tiger a "success" I'm sure fucking glad your ass is just an armchair general! The Germans nicknamed the Sherman the "Ronson" because it would erupt in a fireball on the first hit. And you can't seriously be bringing up the hellcat, can you? The TD that the military brass fought like hell to NOT deploy and which were always in such short supply as to be a non issue? Look up "Killer Tanks The Sherman" or frankly any other major documentary on allied tanks of the western front and you'll find the brass did NOT want to field anything but the Sherman which was getting bitchslapped by the Tiger because they had cranked out so many of the things that the Stalin quote applied!
I'll never forget a quote in killer tanks from a PAK-88 commander in Italy who had set up a perfect killbox on a hill where the Shermans had to go single file. It was perfect, he could hit them, they couldn't hit him, and the road was so narrow they had nowhere to dodge, it was a slaughter ...he ended up having to retreat, why? "I ran out of rounds before the Americans ran out of Shermans" simple as that. Like it or not the Americans won because the Germans couldn't affect our manufacturing, we could crank out 25 to 1 and most of our parts were interchangeable while nearly everything they had was incompatible, but as far as quality and firepower on the ground? The Americans blew ass, a Sherman would have difficulty taking out a STUG or Panzer 4 from 42, much less anything they were fielding by 44. The western front if it proved anything was that control of the air trumps everything as even our grasshoppers had bazooka mounts and could take out tanks while BF109 and FW190s were getting eaten alive by the Thunderbolts and the Mustangs. If you would have taken airpower out of the equation? You probably would have had a different story on BOTH fronts, which is why Stalin threatened to have the ones making the IL2 shot for falling behind.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14 2014, @03:18AM
If you consider losing a dozen Shermans to take down a single Tiger a "success" I'm sure fucking glad your ass is just an armchair general!
Please cite the after action reports where such a thing happened? You won't because you can't because that never happened. Tigers were always too few and too mechanically unreliable to be anything more than an inconvenience.
http://forum.worldoftanks.com/index.php?/topic/91572-us-guns-german-armor-pt-2/ [worldoftanks.com]
The Germans nicknamed the Sherman the "Ronson" because it would erupt in a fireball on the first hit.
Wrong again. Early dry ammo Shermans that stored ammo in the sponsons burned about 80% of the time when penetrated. German tanks like the PzIII and PzIV burned about...80% of the time when penetrated, exactly the same.
Once wet storage was introduced the chance of fire when hit went down to 10-15%. A wet ammo rack Sherman was the least likely tank of WWII to burn. Also, it was common practice to shoot a knocked out tank until it caught fire, since a burned out tank could not be repaired. Another issue that caused a large number of fires was British crews stuffing main gun and machinegun ammunition anywhere and everywhere it would fit in the interior of the tank. Once this stopped the number of fires went down considerably.
References to "Ronson" don't appear until well after the war. The "Zippo" was a flamethrower variant of the Sherman so there were lighter references during the war in regards to those tanks.
Stop watching History/Discovery/TLC documentaries. Their primary function is to protect the commercials from smacking into each other.
I'll never forget a quote in killer tanks from a PAK-88 commander in Italy who had set up a perfect killbox on a hill where the Shermans had to go single file. It was perfect, he could hit them, they couldn't hit him, and the road was so narrow they had nowhere to dodge, it was a slaughter ...he ended up having to retreat, why? "I ran out of rounds before the Americans ran out of Shermans" simple as that.
No, he ran out of rounds because US air power had cut off resupply in Italy by bombing bridges and anything that moved on the roads. Airpower in WWII was VERY ineffective at taking out frontline troops. Taking out trucks, trains and the like, it was VERY effective. Also, he had probably been spotted and withdrew before the Americans had ranged in sent him a 75mm or 105mm shell to the face. AP looses effectiveness with range, HE does not. Even a near miss with a 75mm shell is enough to take out a PAK
ANYTHING well into the 50s could be penetrated by the Pak 43. It wouldn't have mattered what the tank crews were driving. Italy was very tank unfriendly country.
The Americans blew ass, a Sherman would have difficulty taking out a STUG or Panzer 4 from 42, much less anything they were fielding by 44.
Seriously, STOP WATCHING HISTORY CHANNEL. The Sherman was more than a match for a Stug or a PzIV and the Panzers and Tigers were too rare and too mechanically unreliable to be significant. Hell, the Germans were terrified of the M3 Lee, a stopgap design, when it first appeared in 1942. Its armor was invulnerable to German shells at ranges where the M3s 75mm could easily kill German tanks and AT guns, thanks to it firing both a good AP and HE shell.
There is more to tank design than a big gun and thick armor. The biggest thing that determined who won a tank engagement, which were rare in the first place as 75% of the rounds fired by Shermans were HE for dealing with infantry, was who got off the first shot and got the first hit. The Sherman outclassed EVERYTHING the Germans fielded in this regard. The gunner had both a wide angle search periscope as well as his magnified scope, meaning the gunner had great situational awareness and could quickly bring the gun to bear on target. The gunner in the Panther by contrast had to be walked onto the target by the commander as he only had the magnified sight. The Panther gunner didn't even have a brow pad so couldn't even begin to aim the gun until the tank had come to a stop. The Sherman had a brow pad for the gunner so the gun could be roughly laid in before the tank had even stopped. Also, what is the only WWII tank that came with a vertical stabilizer as STANDARD equipment? The Sherman. Granted it didn't allow for firing on the move, didn't always work well, and was more for allowing the gunner to get the gun roughly aimed while still moving, but it still had one and it was a technological marvel for its day.
You know less than nothing when it comes to tank design and how they were used and performed in WWII.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 13 2014, @11:36PM
The Bf 109 was well-respected and built in significant enough numbers to be very useful.
The Me 262 was 100mph faster than anything else in service.
The say that it was respected would be an understatement.
The problem with the 262 was that everything that was German and able to fly was viewed by Hitler as a vengeance weapon (a bomb delivery platform).
Now, if you meant the Me 163, yeah.
Something with 10 minutes worth of very human-hostile fuel was not an effective weapon.
(The Allies learned to avoid them till they were low on fuel then follow them home and shoot them as they landed.)
-- gewg_