UrsusArctos wrote:Bullshit.
No, they
were reserved for their best. The Germans started their war at a deficit, fighting superior French armor, and had to become experts in aiming for weak spots in order to compensate.
That expertise certainly degraded over time, but that doesn't change who they typically reserved the Tigers for. Experienced tankers who could place their shots.
Not to mention, German ammo had less time to target and less drop off at the ranges they would have been engaging at than the Sherman 75mm.
Anyway that you look at it, the Germans had the advantage and would have been expending less rounds to take out their American and British opponents than the vice versa.
Absolutely wrong. Look up the armor loadouts on the tanks that were used in testing. Plain vanilla 75mm M61 and M72 rounds. No fancy HVAP shenanigans.
Read the results more closely. The M61 in all but one case failed to penetrate beyond the 400m test, and even then, the damage was relatively minor.
The M61 also was
not vanilla APC,
not standard ammo. Rather, it was APC Ballistic Cap Shop, which wasn't handed out to tankers under orders of General Lesley McNair.
Ironically enough, if one wanted to see Shermans firing these rounds you'd have to look East, at the
Russians. The very people who produced that test.
And most German heavy tanks reserved one or two rounds of APCR at most for priority targets because the PzGr.43 APCR was in severely short supply due to a crippling lack of Tungsten Carbide.
Far enough, the APC Ballistic Cap Shot then. The Germans adopted them almost at the beginning of the war,
well before any another nation, and were part to what gave them an edge in Africa.
(for 88mm) 101mm penetration at 1000m.
Shermans were far less likely to be knocked out from a glancing blow than a Tiger due to their ductile armor being highly resistant to spalling. Besides the field tests, did you see the combat statistics showing the actual ranges at which these weapons were used? The field tests make complete sense and show what the weapons on these vehicles were capable of
Again, no, because that test wasn't of the standard APC ammo, which most Shermans without the 76.2mm upgrade would have been using.
Half a decade? The units were in Normandy for only a matter of months at most and weren't fighting in those areas for "half a decade",
You're being too literal. Units like the 7th Panzer Division had been station in and out of France since 1940. They had been there before, and fought there before, which is more than the Allies had going in.
even if they had the advantage of knowing the terrain better. And even so, it only took a 2.2:1 superiority on the behalf of the Allies to practically assure victory. Even if the German tanks and SPGs had the advantage of firing first and engaging most of the time, Shermans and other allied tanks were perfectly capable of-and routinely did- turn the tables.
Yes... Because of American Doctrine's love of Artillery, and theatre air superiority. The Germans focused too much of their resources into too narrow a capability. They towards the later stages of war failed at a combined arms doctrine, which left them vulnerable.
You've been reading too much of Belton Cooper's bullshit on it.
He's just one voice,
listed here among others.Another myth. The gasoline engines weren't the problem at all.
True, my mistake.
The Sherman had excellent build quality and was very reliable
Important logistically, which I'm not trying to discount. But that's beyond the bounds of AFV vs AFV combat. Morale suffered among American tankers during the war, because they faced a superior opponent, with superior armor, superior guns with superior ammo and, if it was the Panther D they were facing, even superior mobility.
- and it wasn't an economic disaster like the Panther (with its miserable final drives) or the Tiger. The MBT concept wasn't adopted until the 1960s,
Again, too literal. The MBT is essentially an up-gunned Medium, which could strike at virtually any armored target. Proto-concepts existed, like the British "Universal Tank", that filled the space in the 1950s until the name of the MBT developed.
The US has had a long history of autoloading vehicles,
Not tanks, certainly none in the vein of the Pershing or Patton series. Any that did exist were just prototypes.
the only reason they haven't been adopted is the complexity of the equipment and the large size of the tank,
And because it limits how many round types you can select, damaging the turret de facto knocks out the tank, it's far more difficult to isolate the ammunition from the crew in case of cook-off, etc.
(It's fully restored and operational aswell)
This thing was the second largest tank ever made next to the Maus. Did I mention it carried 800 rounds for its main cannons and 21,000 rounds for its machine guns?