OT: Between the Sherman and the Mk 14 torpedo

[GaryChildress]

Came across this by accident while browsing some gameplay videos on youtube. It sort of got my blood worked up while watching it. Beware part of it is really hard to watch and stomach. But it really underscores the impotency of US armor during WW2. I can't believe that Patton thought the Sherman was a great tank. I remember in the movie "Patton" toward the end Patton wants to invade the Soviet Union. Soviet armor would have annihilated our tanks. Reminds me a bit of the Mk 14 torpedo. Is it me or does it seem almost criminal that our soldiers had such crappy equipment to fight with in some circumstances?

I sort of wonder if there wasn't a degree of cover-up after the war. I mean was anyone ever court martialed for allowing the continued use of the Mk14 torpedo or for promoting the Sherman tank for so long after it was obsolete? I know the Mk 14 torpedo has been talked about a lot in the forum but it just seems like US industry could really have equipped our troops better in some cases. Yes we had some great planes and ships but who looked the other way while our tanks and torpedoes were letting the troops down?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns6l7sCoWX4

PS Sorry for the rant. I guess watching this video really set me off. Maybe I'm missing some bigger perspective on things or something.

[Terminus]

That's what happens when things get tied up in the prestige of senior people.

[Dili]

Sherman was much inferior to T-34? I don't think so.

[wdolson]

The Mk14 torpedo was a decent torpedo by the end of the war. They worked out all the bugs in the first couple of years. Now they shouldn't have had to, but it was OK once fixed.

The Sherman and the Lee/Grant were very effective against Panzer III vintage tanks. They gave the Afrika Korps fits when the 8th Army started getting them. Against the Panzer IV the Sherman began to show its weaknesses.

The Sherman was incredibly reliable, which does give it one leg up on its competition. They were also very easy to get in and out of which meant a lot of crew survived getting hit. (British armor, even late war, had very tight hatches and the crews hated them for that reason.)

The Sherman did have a lot of negatives though. Among them a generally weak gun vs the competition after 1943, gasoline engines that tended to catch on fire when hit, and poor armor compared to the competition late war.

The US was focused on getting by with what was "good enough" to win rather than what was the best possible. There was some talk of putting Packard Merlins in the P-38 and Lockheed drew up the plans to do it, but while everyone agreed it would have dramatically improved performance (huge weight reduction), it was never done because the War Department didn't want to disrupt production.

Numbers trumped combat effectiveness of individual units. Ultimately it was the more effective idea. Germany wasted lots and lots of critical time developing new weapons that either were never deployed, or were deployed way before they were ready. The Germans lost more Tigers to mechanical breakdown than to enemy action.

Bill

[Flicker]

The old guy on the video is Belton Cooper, who wrote the book "Death Traps" which recounts his experience as a junior ordnance officer during WW2.

From a review:

...Patton favored the smaller (and supposedly more mobile) Sherman, noting that "tanks were not supposed to fight other tanks, but bypass them if possible, and attack enemy objectives in the rear." Ultimately, senior Allied commanders - including Gen Dwight Eisenhower - backed Patton and decided to increase production of the Sherman. It remains one of the most disastrous choices of World War II - arguably, a decision that lengthened the war and became a literal death sentence for thousands of tank-crew members.

The consequences of the Sherman decision are brutally detailed in Belton Cooper's vivid memoir Death Traps. A maintenance officer who served in the legendary Third Armored Division ("Spearhead"), Cooper was charged with the critical task of locating damaged Shermans, directing their recovery, and ensuring the flow of new or repaired tanks to frontline units. From the Normandy invasion to V-E day, Cooper witnessed the folly of Patton's logic firsthand. The author calculates (with only a touch of irony) that he "has seen more knocked out tanks than any other living American."

...Over the next 11 months, the Third Armored Division, which began the Normandy campaign with 232 M4 tanks, would see 648 of its Shermans destroyed in combat, with another 700 knocked out of commission before being repaired and returned to service - a cumulative loss rate of 580 percent. Casualties among tank crews also skyrocketed, producing an acute shortage of qualified personnel. By late 1944, Cooper recalls, the Army was sending newly arrived infantrymen into combat as replacement tank crews. Some of these recruits received only one day of armor training before being dispatched to the front in their M4s.

http://www.3ad.com/history/wwll/feature ... .traps.htm

[DOCUP]

what about the Pershings and other heavier tanks the US had? How did they match up againist the Germans and the Soviet tanks?

[Terminus]

Indifferently.

[GaryChildress]

@WDolson: True, I suppose in the end it was all about economics when it came to winning. We won the war relatively quickly and maybe it would have taken longer had we stopped periodically to retool. I wonder what things would have been like had the Germans not continually retooled their industry? What if they had stayed with the PZIII the whole way through as their primary battle tank? In the end I suppose it didn't make a difference one way or the other. They would have lost either way.

@Dili: OK maybe not the T-34 but the JS tanks would have been hell.

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: DOCUP

what about the Pershings and other heavier tanks the US had? How did they match up againist the Germans and the Soviet tanks?

The Pershing was a nasty surprise for the Germans, but only a small handful were available to be rushed into frontline service by VE Day. The Pershing had its drawbacks, it probably would have been inferior to a Stalin tank, but could probably deal with a T-34 on equal footing.

Bill

[Terminus]

The Pershing had no opportunity to prove itself in combat against the heavy German tanks it had been designed to best. In Korea, it performed relatively well against the T-34, but had issues with reliability (it was too heavy for its powerplant and drive train).

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress

@WDolson: True, I suppose in the end it was all about economics when it came to winning. We won the war relatively quickly and maybe it would have taken longer had we stopped periodically to retool. I wonder what things would have been like had the Germans not continually retooled their industry? What if they had stayed with the PZIII the whole way through as their primary battle tank? In the end I suppose it didn't make a difference one way or the other. They would have lost either way.

The Germans had the Panzer IV from the start of the war. It was still a front line tank right up to the end of the war, though it was getting very obsolete vs Russian armor. What drove everything in tank development was the arms race on the Eastern front. German mid-war armor was adequate against the western powers right up to the end of the war. Even Lee/Grants were superior to Japanese armor right up to the end of the war.

If the Germans had standardized on the Panzer IV, the war in the Eastern Front may have been over earlier than history. On the other hand if they had more total tanks it might have gone on longer. It's a good "what if" question.

Bill

[Jorge_Stanbury]

Against the Soviets (assuming a long, total war); the Pershing would had been replaced quickly by the more reliable M-46/ M-47

[zuluhour]

Gary, I'm with you. The M4 was obsolete as a MBT before it hit the shores of Africa. I never read much about it, but I wonder what the design was supposed to accomplish. The same goes with the British stuck on the cruiser tank mentality. It was evident to Germany that to accomplish more with less, superiority was to be achieved tactically with superior equipment to complement training. Without tactical superiority, strategic aims could not be met.

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: Terminus

The Pershing had no opportunity to prove itself in combat against the heavy German tanks it had been designed to best. In Korea, it performed relatively well against the T-34, but had issues with reliability (it was too heavy for its powerplant and drive train).

I've seen some footage of a Pershing hitting a Panther in combat. I think it was on YouTube. The Pershings did engage the Germans, but it was very limited.

Bill

[GaryChildress]

ORIGINAL: wdolson

ORIGINAL: Terminus

The Pershing had no opportunity to prove itself in combat against the heavy German tanks it had been designed to best. In Korea, it performed relatively well against the T-34, but had issues with reliability (it was too heavy for its powerplant and drive train).

I've seen some footage of a Pershing hitting a Panther in combat. I think it was on YouTube. The Pershings did engage the Germans, but it was very limited.

Bill

Check out the video in the OP. Toward the end it shows a Pershing hitting a Panther.

[Bo Rearguard]

ORIGINAL: Gary Childress


I sort of wonder if there wasn't a degree of cover-up after the war. I mean was anyone ever court martialed for allowing the continued use of the Mk14 torpedo or for promoting the Sherman tank for so long after it was obsolete? I know the Mk 14 torpedo has been talked about a lot in the forum but it just seems like US industry could really have equipped our troops better in some cases. Yes we had some great planes and ships but who looked the other way while our tanks and torpedoes were letting the troops down?

The U.S. Army in 1939 ranked 17th in the world in size, consisting of slightly more than 200,000 Regular Army soldiers and slightly less than 200,000 National Guardsmen--all organized in woefully understrength and undertrained formations. The Army possessed only 329 crude light tanks and only a handful of truly modern combat aircraft within a total inventory of just over 1800 planes. It was a force equipped with the leftover weapons, materiel, and doctrine of the last war.

Considering the speed with which the cobwebs were swept away and the US military ballooned into a global force fighting on two fronts and on every sea and lavishly equipping it's allies as well, I would find it inconceivable to believe there wouldn't be some deficiencies in equipment or doctrine along the way. No nation in WW2 came up with a ideal well-rounded weapon in every category. Even the Germans started the war with a dysfunctional torpedo.

[zuluhour]

combat camera men.

[jmalter]

'Death Traps' was a good read. In it, I got the impression that Patton came down against the Pershing b/c of its lower mobility & higher fuel consumption, roughly twice that of a Sherman. He was proven right - awful weather & low fuel availability were limiting factors for Allied ground operations in the post D-day NW Europe theater.

The German PzIV was originally designed as an infantry-support tank, w/ a short-barrelled 75mm howitzer. War-experience in the North African & Russian theaters resulted in successive upgrades to its armor and gun, & it became a decent tank w/ a long-barrelled 75mm KampfWagenKannone. Similarly, the M4 Sherman underwent a series of design changes, these mostly dealt w/ increased armor and improved ammo storage to increase 'survivability', though the Brits developed the 'Firefly' variant w/ a highly-decent long-76mm gun.

The T-34 is widely recognized as being the best tank design of WWII, due to its well-sloped armor and high mobility, it was the tank equivalent of the AK-47. It also got upgrades - improved armor & an 85mm gun. Most Western objections to the T-34 focus on its 4-man crew & lack of a radio.

wrt the Mk14 torpedo, its poor performance was beyond scandalous, & well into treasonous. I'd agree that those responsible should have faced courts-martial. It took far too long to recognize and fix its faults, we could've lost the war!

OTOH, look at the multitude of cases where the US got it right - there's plenty of evidence in WITP:AE that proves it. Ships, planes & LCUs improve throughout the war. Yard-time for a CV, BB or AK adds vastly improved AA & ASW armament, better ships arrive monthly, airgroups can upgrade through a series of ever-more-capable planes, LCUs upgrade to more powerful squads & weapons, fuel & supply are always available.

[Lokasenna]

Having just re-read Dick O'Kane's Wahoo book, he mentions that pre-war Mk 14 torpedoes performed just fine. It was only when mass production started with subcontractors and such making disparate parts of each torpedo that they became faulty. Anecdotally, as far as the Wahoo was concerned, this seemed to hold true - the first few patrols, no duds. The juicy patrols they later conducted with post-1941 manufactured torpedoes in the Sea of Japan, plenty of duds (columns of water from the air flask rupturing, but no "whack" of a detonation) and premature explosions from magnetic exploders.

And I know O'Kane hated the Mk 18 electric also, thinking it susceptible to circular runs, and blamed the loss of his boat Tang on that. There was an article somebody posted up here about a year ago or so on USN torpedoes during the war, as well. It touched on the reluctance of command or supply chain folk to admit that it was faulty. Something to do with the test warheads/equipment causing the torpedoes to run shallower in tests than in deployed situations.

[pmelheck1]

The only issue I have with some of the stuff written today is it is filtered through today's risk averse culture. Some of the designs were the best at the time under the conditions they were designed for at the time(Sherman for instance). If we had tried to design the mustang today lord knows the war might have been over before we could even come to a consensus as to what it's specs should be much less mass produced and into the front lines. As for the Mk14 being scandalous into treasonous, as a retired scientist things can get pretty arrogant when we think we are right. Some of the stuff I've seen about the Mk 14 wasn't so much incompetence but rather the design was so awesome in the minds of it's designers that to even question that it wasn't the greatest thing ever was an insult before even getting onto the classified aspect of that project. I've seen things that looked perfect on paper and were just taken as a given it would work perfect that blew up most spectacularly in execution. People meant well it just didn't work out as expected. Not to say it wasn't a terrible situation for the sub crews but things like the Mk 14 to me illustrate most vividly the old saying "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Such massive well intentioned blunders become tomorrows vivid lesson learned.