ORIGINAL: IronDuke
As I've said before, they did this by trading. The Sherman won by attrition. You are making a virtue out of necessity. In the air, the Americans produced weapons like the P51, P47 and Corsair which were as good as anything their opponents possessed and better than most. They mass produced them.
The Sherman was the best design in 1942 that could fit within the confines of the massive US Log window and the port facilities that she would have to capitalize on. The design was constantly and consistently tinkered with to deal with its OPFOR while maintaining for better/and/or worse its original design themes. The US "solution" for a "heavy" until 1943 was the M6, and while there is a part of me that dearly wishes we could have seen her chew on the Afrika Korpse in all reality the correct decision was made as the M6 had NO application in our other Hempispheric war we were waging simultaneously.
The M-26 wound up being a feasible logistical solution to the M4's long in the tooth woes that was also a darn good potential Kitty Killer. Pity McNair and Friends succeeded in saying they didn't need or want it. This leads me to conclude that if you are sincere in saying the Sherman was a damn near suicide machine that:
a) the allies would have a lower % of surviving Tank crews than Fritz,
and
B) US Armor, TD, and Inf branches colluded at near treasonous activities and AGF was in fact a borderline Red Orchestra level capaign against US forces.....
ORIGINAL: IronDuke
At sea, they had the best carriers, and mass produced them. There was little wrong with their destroyers etc either. They had hundreds of them.
and they were being built by the methodology developed by an automaker...
Big Differences between Air, Sea, and Land Log are that a ship or plane is its own legs and can be "whatever size is needed", and the Sherman making a poor submarine. We *had* to be able to unload the damned things rapidly and by available amphib methods....
Life is like that the Army OFTEN has to "just make do" and the USMC if anything has it worse. Funny how the USN and USAF pretty much always get their hotrods though.
ORIGINAL: IronDuke
Only in the field of tanks did the US live with mass producing something average was good, and this to me is a failure given how many they could have cranked out of any better design they came up with.
I agree to a point, you'll note that *I* am the one who pointed out that on D-Day the US could either have had the Upgunned M-4 OR the M-26. That they did not get it was due largely to McNair trying to make sure a bunch of brass got to have their own golf courses back on the block post war. Didn't work out but at least he tried.
ORIGINAL: IronDuke
The USAF did not trade 1-1 in fighters, Navy aviation in the pacific traded at something ridiculously in their favour. They had weapons of the highest order and good training.
What can I say for a bunch of dumb hick farmers and cowboys we sure did do things "almost well" in a lot of things. Nothing like the Ubermen who "really won the war". I am not in the business of underselling or overselling the sacrifices and skill of the players involved.
The Germans and Japanese made pretty much as good a go as you can try on pure balls and tactical skill. It is amazing what running a readiness campaign for years prior to a conflict can do for a force when it initally faces the undertrained and blooded opfor. Of course as the opfor gets bloodied, wise, and angry it is pretty amazing what havinga good LOG net and nice doctrine can do on the rebound.
That is "ww2 in a nutshell" btw.
ORIGINAL: IronDuke
AGF suffered and stuck with the attritional approach, not because they enjoyed losing more Tanks or having to sneak around looking for flank shots but because they possessed average equipment which did not match the best of German equipment, either Tanks or AT guns. To turn it into a virtue here in this thread is to hide the real failures that contributed to this situation. Not everything was because of failure, I contend that greater german combat experience in the east worked against the western Allies in one way, because the Germans went through the action/reaction phases of Tank design more quickly than the Allies did with their more limited campaigning. The russians front meant we had far fewer Germans to contend with, but better armed ones.
Yeah the Maus, the JagdTiger, and JagdPanther were all winning designs. I cannot tell you how horrified I was when I saw the Wehrmacht tossing the US and USSR's battle streamers there at the Berlin parade ground at the end of the war. Still gives me almost as many nightmares as that bawling Fwench guy under the Arc'd'Triomph or whatever.
Fact is if there is anyone who goes on about how assinine AGF's judgement on armor was it is me. As I recall YOU were the one stating they made the conscious decision to go with what they had as "it worked". Due to some creative anachrocistic cognitive dissonance you felt as though when Devers said "no heavies" he was discussing the M-26 and not the M-6.
My understanding of timelines says that that may well not be the case, add in several Armor commanders wanting an upgunned Sherm for TvT in '43 and we are at an impasse where branch loyalty trumped good sense.
Parochialism is never a pretty thing. About the only response I have to it is THANK GOD Fritz had it worse and in spades. Good enough often is, and frankly the Sherman WAS an acceptable design into the '50s, something the Kittens never pulled off.
ORIGINAL: IronDuke
This whole "Sherman was fine" thing baffles me because it flies in the face of everything you read from those that were there. From Belton Cooper to Omar Bradley, they univerally condemn the situation they were in. Now, I don't accept uncritically the words of vets, the wider picure isn't easy to see in the confusion of combat, but its such a widely held perception that there must be something in it. The British were no better but did come up with the better stopgap in the Firefly.
No in a perverse way the postwar publishing machine added fuel to the fire by overhyping US' fears about the German WunderKit. Chuck Yeager summarized it best with his pithy one liner. We stowed their streamers not the other way around on land, air, and sea.
Kind of funny that we now have in this thread Omar Bradley decrying the US armor situation when evidentally Patton and Devers were(in theory) yelling the Sherman 75 was more than adequate? Fact is that GIs are almost ALWAYS envious of opfor tech for good or ill.
There ARE cases where an argument can be made that yes Virginia OPTech is better. I just do not see it in the case of the Sherm v Kittens in a strategic sense. I must be the only guy in North America, and indeed Western Civ who thinks that this bizzare surreal situation where we have Grognards of a certain bent declaiming that "the real elites all have something in common they surrendered in groups of 100,000 and more".
Sorry I don't buy it.
ORIGINAL: IronDuke
In the hands of the Israelis facing enemies poor on the operational plane, the Sherman may have been fine. In NW Europe facing the Germans it wasn't, its as simple as that.
Regards,
IronDuke
So the US was as Good as the IDF in 1951 vis a vis the NorKos but a blind barely mobile child in '44 in NW EUrope? The kicker is of course that the Germans in the IV and even yes the V and VI versus "superior until it was inferior but in the end timeless" T-34 ran into guys that grognardia tells us started off worse than the Norkos but somehow magically became world beaters....
this sure does get confusing....
Germany folded for the same reason Fwance folded a strategy that was flawed at its heart and the implosion of will it led to.
The Sherman was a design that was "good enough" to soldier on into the mid '50s in OUR kit, and until the late '60s in world kit and keep going.....
and I'll be damned if it fails at everything but winning in the end wars.
