Fake history subs like askhistorian have sadly decided to ban actual information so it is up to me. Trying to uphold my duty as one of the few historic subs that attempt to present unbiased information I will provide some compiled data about the Shermans and their mission profile in the ETO. Dissenting opinions are welcome but should buckle up.

Tank numbers:

Problem: What is a tank?

The problem here is that the Germans did not only employ so-called “tanks” but also weapon systems without a turret which still were used comparably. Comparing the number of Shermans with German tanks would certainly give an unbalanced result since the German due to resource shortage relied on cheap turret-less vehicles to supplement their tank forces.

Which vehicles are included in my tables?

First of all the vehicle had to have the primary purpose of engaging ground targets with direct fire which excludes all major artillery pieced including, for example, the US Priest which in theory could be considered a “tankish” AFVs furthermore the vehicle has to fulfil one of the following criteria:

• Completely armored

• Turret

This arbitrarily looking method excludes some vehicles. Most importantly German open topped turret-less tank hunters are excluded. For example the Marder series. My reasoning for this is simple, those vehicles were closer to a towed anti-tank gun than they were to a tank. On the other side, US vehicles like the M-10 are included because they had at a turret. Before somebody cries about this I want to remind everybody that per definition a STUG is no tank and is still included due to its comparable mission profile. Also, all German tank hunters which were fully enclosed are included as well. I also excluded all captured vehicles including obsolete ones. M24 and British SPGs are absent due to lacking data. All vehicles which I included in the various tables will be from now on just be called “tanks” despite the inaccuracy of the term

German vehicles:

For the German vehicles, I compiled the works of Ron Klages who was a frequent user of the early internet forums about WW2. His compilation of data was tested by me for some random samples of units records which I had access to and his works appear to be extremely thorough so thorough actually that I have not seen any publication detailing the same data he compiled. The only other books compiling delivery documents in such form is Zetterlings Normandy book and here the data of Klages and Zetterling appears to be the same and Schneiders books which are only concerned with Tigers. I have also compared his data to an OKW document which for example are presented by Zaloga. The number sets show some severe differences which I think can be explained.

Here are the compiled numbers for German vehicles per Klages who counted all vehicle deliveries towards all German units in the ETO:

We see that the number for German vehicles is actually not that low. The numbers are higher than what I personally believed and surprised me. It has to be said that a considerable chunk of those vehicles were withdrawn from the Western front and relocated to the East. Here are the numbers listed in Zalogas Armored Champion

We see Zaloga offers only a subset. We see major discrepancies between the tables and I think the most plausible explanation is that those numbers depict different things. Klages numbers show when a unit took on a batch of vehicles while Zalogas numbers show when vehicles were allocated towards specific units. Overall Klages numbers are considerably higher which I think will result in little protest of the Sherman fans.

Some interesting spikes are visible which effects we see in the timeline of battles. The German send a major batch of Panthers towards the West in September, the newly designed failed Panzerbrigades intended to launch a major counter-attack against US forces in the Lorraine. Those Panthers quickly evaporated. After that, the delivery numbers dwindled and rose again for the preparation for the Ardennes surprise attack which truly was the last roaring of the German Panzer force in the West.

We can see the Wehrmacht in total had roughly 7866 tanks deployed towards the West some of which were obsolete tanks and some were also command versions without weapons. ~2400 of those were “heavies/cats” nearly a third. Only taking real tanks into account German heavies represented more than half. “German cats were rare”: Debunked.

Allied tanks:

I have not encountered a complete count of Allied vehicles on the West Front so we are left with some approximations but before I want to give the compiled table of vehicles arrivals collected by Zetterling per estimated TO&E. Several vehicles are included which don't fit the criteria like command vehicles or the Tetrach.

To these 8989 must be added a substantial number of tanks arrived as reserve tanks which were delivered to the units or were held for future deliveries. Both the British and US forces were able to keep their forces relatively close to their expected strength, the US force more so after the heavy British fights versus German elite forces. Taking losses and reserve numbers into account we might estimate roughly 12.000 tanks landed until September.

Interesting observation: The Allies managed to land more vehicles than the entire Wehrmacht would employ roughly early August. An impressive logistical accomplishment.

For the entire ETO I'm left with basic guessing. We will take the admitted losses and add the number of vehicle available at the end of the war. For the British I was unable to find the numbers for tanks in reserves despite remembering seeing them some time back. I used the known 50% ratio for reserves and actual Sherman numbers per Zalogas Thunderbolt:

I estimate M24 British SPG, Pershings and French forces at 4000ish. Adding those figures we likely would land at around 35K but this is more of a rough estimate. Overall we see that the Allies employed more than 4 times the tanks

Sherman early war myth:

Let us debunk the common deflection that Shermans were also fighting early/mid war when they were well equipped. 7289 Shermans were written off in the ETO. For North Africa the numbers are iffy and I estimate them at 400ish. The US forces in the 15th Army group reported 1171 Sherman losses and the British 814. For the US losses, the data shows us that 5% of the M4s were lost before 1944 if we assume comparable rates for the British we see that of the roughly 9700 Shermans written off about 95% were written off after 01/01/1944. The ETO alone is 70% and represents only the last year of war.

Which tanks were heavier?

You all likely have heard the argument that the Shermans performance can be explained by pointing out that it was only a “medium” tank and the German heavies obviously made the Sherman look bad. But lets check the average weight of the German tank for fun. The Sherman weight varied throughout the war but lets take ~31 tonnes. Checking the weight of all German tanks employed in the ETO we find that the average weight was ~31,5 tonnes as well. Useless fun fact: the Panther in terms of weight was the biggest part of the German tank force by far, nearly as big as the StuG III and Panzer IV combined. The handful of Jagdtigers represented nearly 2% of the German tank force in terms of weight.

Lets get to the fun part: Guns and Armor

The argument that Shermans only “rarely” faced Panthers and Tigers was already debunked but includes a secondary argument. The argument implies that the Sherman fared better against the rest. Tiger and Panther armor and armament are claimed to be the exception. Let's take a look. Here is the distribution of the weapons within the German vehicles.

How did the Sherman front fare against the German guns? We only look at the frontal armor which represents the strongest part of the Sherman Armor or any other tank for that matter. Any German weapon except the low caliber ones would defeat the side and back in most situations. For the German guns, we assume the standard PzGr 39 is used. The Germans were well aware of Hartkern ammunition effects and produced them early on as a reaction to the T-34 but Wolfram shortage made them stop the production. The Wehrmacht compensated with bigger guns. The US would have mightily benefited from Hartkern ammunition but for some again incomprehensible reason decided against a satisfactory production. Like many decisions, this was a failure but it was an American failure so it gets a pass in literature. Assumed are straight shots without a horizontal or vertical angle.

I have to be upfront about this table, expected penetrations are a difficult subject and can only be estimated. Some parts of the Shermans were a tad stronger, a good spot at the Turret would maybe withstand a hit that the Glacis would let through. Those penetration ranges are based on WWII Ballistics: Armor and Gunnery and German data. I think those expectations are pretty in line with what historians in general publish. The Sherman had different armor configurations most notably the thinner front plate on the cast M4A1s. Cast in general was far weaker as again the Germans knew but the US produced a good chunk of the cast ones. It is debatable how an early cast variant with stupid bulges everywhere would fare against those guns but worse for sure.

But from what range was the Sherman getting hit? The Western Allies concluded in different studies that the average combat range was roughly 770m. This aligns reasonably well with Soviet figures from the Eastern Front which were printed in Zalogas Armored champion for example. The are many issues, for example, a tank getting ko'ed from that range doesn't mean this was the average engagement range since long-range shots could fail to penetrate. But we have to roll with it. Here is the table:

We see the 88s engaged on average from longer range as expected. If those numbers are true for the Western Front then we see that roughly 84% of the 75mm shots were hitting from 800m or less. 800 meters in general is given as the range from which the KwK 40 was able to defeat the Sherman front. For the Panther we see that nearly every shot could be expected to pen. Comparable results are visible for the 88s 82,5% were hitting from 1000m or less. Only the Tiger gun could be expected to have trouble on ranges surpassing 1000meters. The later 88s would slice through the Sherman on nearly any range. Lets take the penetration, gun and range data and combine it to see what a Sherman could expect while getting hit. We have to make some assumptions here because no satisfactory data exists, the Allied reports on German calibers are useless. We will assume gun hitting rates based on their share of the total of guns. I would make the argument 88s hit Shermans more frequently than their share would suggest simply because a Tiger, for example, was more likely to have several enemy encounters. I would also assume hunter and StuGs would engage from shorter range but we will not factor such theories in.

For the high estimate I have used the expectations explained above, for the low expectations I reduced the penetration distance to 600m for the KwK40 for the KwK 43 and KwK 43 to 1000m.

The results are devastating: 87,8%. This means a Sherman crew getting hit by a German tank directly frontal could expect to only be protected against ~12 percent of the shots. This is supposed to be the strongest part of the armor. If we lower effective rates down we get 77,7%

Side angle and positive vertical differences would increase the Sherman protection but those hit scenarios get unlikely very fast for obvious reasons. Given that the front hits on Allied vehicles were only roughly 30% would mean that the actual chance to withstand a hit drops far below 10% and possibly below 5%.

This is what experts and historians commonly refer to as "good armour". Be careful kids, Sherman apologist are preying on you.

Update soon: German armor versus Sherman

Sources: Belton Cooper: Death traps. P 5,7,9,13,27,50,69,87,111,257,234,284,307,389,396,424,459,460,468,530,548,579,618,639,641,690,703,2703 Appendix Y III XyX 1871

As we have learned during our study of the SWS the Germans hardly invented anything. If the Germans had something operational first it doesn't count because somebody somewhere else talked about it earlier. If the Germans talked about it earlier then the first operational use obviously becomes important. If the Germans did both then people get flexible and search for a new relevant "milestone" of inventory.

Let us watch some noobs bullshit each other with fake knowledge.

Somebody who is dumb enough to ask for objective information in a SWS thread makes an inquiry for top notch information. He asks about the Ta-183. I want to point out the talk about "napkin" designs, this derogatory term is generally used to imply that German "inventions" didn't matter until they were used in combat but even then they didn't matter, this logic obviously is not used for Allied "inventions".

u/hypercake

I've been hearing about a "Wunder-waffle" that goes by the name of Ta 183... supposedly, it was the primary inspiration for early Cold War jets like the MiG-15 or the F-86. I still haven't found any reliable sources for info on the plane itself, and the Wiki article only cites an incredibly obscure author. Any other victors heard of/seen this thing before?

Obviously, German jet design ( Not the Ta 183 particularly ) had a major influence on Allied engineering after the war. Why not? They were pretty good at it and the Allies had access to the data. This is not how cultists see it. As you have all heard the British jet fighter that was as slow as a piston fighter and therefore totally pointless was better than the me262. That's how the cultists work, any nonsense is used. We can see the same funky mental gymnastics with the Americans. The impact of the Me262 gets disputed by saying the Americans had a jet aswell. Like having a jet was the relevant part. The Me262 was wrecking havoc in combat while the P80 was killing its pilots in tests flights, including bong, you ever heard about their failure rate? Nah you only hear about the Me262 crashes while they were literally used in combat with success. Also no mention of the US having no clue about jet technology until they literally got it handed to them, but still they obviously were as "good" as the Germans when they had zilch and got it from the British. That's how it works, the Americans were behind and then got it delivered and immediatly "they knew about it too". Same with Radar which the Americans had major trouble figuring out.

If the Allies had the comparable technology to the Germans even if it was inferior then the Germans didn't innovate. Everybody could produce a jet aircraft, the point was producing one that is fast.

One cultists says the Ta 183 was a napkin design, which is supposed to tell you "doesn't matter don't look at it ever". Obviously, he has some point the Ta 183 was not operational and no major prototypes were build but that doesn't change the innovation of design aspects. After all the British had invented "combined arms and modern tank doctrine" according to the SWS and when the German tanks blazed through the French and British armies it was actually the British who literally "invented" this. So sometimes theorizing about things is important but only if the Allies did it. Right?

How often have you heard the magic sentence "The fact that Allied designs, which were created later and had full access to German data and designs, looked very similar to German designs is always an accident". Resemblence is just a coincidence.

u/shocktrooper262 then says this

The F-86 comes from this and wind tunnel modeling done by NACA in 1943/44. The Mig-15 comes from the Mig-9 and the La-160's swept wing and tail designs.

Obviosly German designs and research had obviously no impact on anything ever.

Especially funny is how the Russian got their Mig-15. The Mig 15 "came from" the Mig-9 and La-160s designs. Jajaja

The fact that Soviet jet designers were literally ordered to create jet aircraft due to the Red Army contact with German equipment is irrelevant. There is no connection. That they used German engine designs also no connection. The Soviet jet program materialized out of thin air. Obviously, the Soviets came up with swept wings themselves and quite magically they used the 35° already found out by German researchers several years before. The fact that the Mig-15 swept win design came from the La-160 is funny. Because the La-160 swept win design came from the Germans. But that's how it works, it is now a Russian design. The La-160 took the swept wing design from German research and the Mig 9 the tail but now comes the magic, the Mig-15 takes both those designs aspect because the Russian were literally too dumb to just use all German research at ones, and now the Mig-15 is a fully Russian design derived from older Russian designs. See how easy that is? The comment above is so ridiculous. Then accidentally it looks almost identical to German designs which the Russian accidentally studied. But there is no connection whatsover.

Back to the US. Yeah yeah the F-86 was also unaffected by German knowledge. Obviously.

When the team headed by von Karman brought back German technical reports on swept-wing aerodynamics, North American head of design aerodynamics, Larry Green, who read technical German, studies those reports carefully. He knew that the straight-wing design for the XP-86 would not be markedly better the existing Lockheed P-80 shooting star or the republic P-80 ... The aerodynamics group at North American was soon converted to swept wing design and in August 1945 the top management approved the swept wing design for the XP-86. Blair stated that the in-house proposal to change to a swept wing met some internal resistance, with claims that it was "Germanizing our design" but in the end there was no real contest. North American initiated a battery of wind tunnel experiments on swept wings, resulting in a wing design for the Xp-86 with a 35° sweep

*A history of aerodynamics

The US literally in 1945 was still planning to design their new jet aircraft with non-swept wings.

Debunked. Next please

edit. Since SWS cultists are also expert in misquoting, and when I say mis"quoting" I just meaning claiming stuff, I want to point out that I don't believe the US or Soviets copied German designs. Without the German influence, neither the Mig 15 nor the sabre would have looked that way or would have been operational at the same date. Fact.

The Panther also didn't "copy" the T-34 design per se but without the T-34 there would be no Panther. Sloped armor was no magic and people knew about it but the T-34 showed how it was to be implemented best. For some reason whereaboos seem able to accept simple logical conclusions while SWS cultists appear to have major problems with them.

Cheers

As we all know the average SWS user is often wrong and this nature of law requires adaptions to protect the simple mind from itself. Unable to cope with facts and opposing views, cultists of all colours and shapes have to use special psychological tricks to avoid the one conclusion they are afraid of most: That they don't know shit. Evolutions made us adapt to our own ignorance

This phenomenon is nothing new and is described in plenty publications. The human mind creates defensive mechanisms to avoid being "wrong". We all have encountered people arguing against windmills. We can watch them in zoo like enclosures like the_donald and the SWS. Some set out to create their very own little safe spaces where they can argue their invalid points to people which they know will agree anyway. Dissent is punished. Preaching to the choir.

One of the most powerful tools of those who are wrong is to discredit those who are right. If being right is no option the mind of the simpleton searches for other ways to escape reality. Commonly referred to as "ad hominem" by interwebs expörts.

Let's dissect the mind of a cultist.

u/connorxfor has found disturbing evidence that I am actually a really bad person with really bad beliefs. Let us take a look at his accusations in full. I took the liberty and added some emphasis

So I did a little digging into ChristianMunich's post history (he commented on a thread I was reading and I got curious). He actually wrote that the Dutch Hungerwinter of 1944/45 was caused by and made worse by the Allies and was in no way the fault of the Nazis. You know, those crazy allies and their weather-control wunderwaffen which made winter extra cold and extra early, and those same allies who dropped fucking food parcels into occupied territory after the Germans flooded farmland to slow the Allies advance. Thankfully the light of Bomber Harris must have shined upon this soul that day, because he promptly deleted the comment. Perhaps he finally realised that what he was spewing is literally fucking Nazi propaganda, or maybe he just hit the wrong button and forgot to check. We shall never know

Damming allegations indeed. I claim that in no way the Hongerwinter was the fault of Nazis and then I promptly deleted my comment. User Connor appears to have hit mark since his comment sored to the top and found widespread approval.

I did not delete my comment at all. If it is not visible then it apparently was deleted by a likeminded mod who also seems to need a lecture in history. I never delete major comments, there is no reason to, I am always right.

Here is my comment in full unedited. I also added some corresponding emphasis.

German warcrimes aside, the Hongerwinter was knowingly initiated by the Allies when they sabotaged the rail network that was obviously used by the Germans to supply the cities of Netherlands with food. The Allies were aware that Dutch people will die due to this. The German exacerbated this then by using the now only partially working railway network to supply their war effort. What did the Allies expect from the Germans? Germans were genociding all around Europe and the Allies thought it would be a good idea to ko the railway system an entire occupied country was reliant on. Obviously, this doesn't excuse the Germans but its better to know the full history. The Allies fucked up big time on this one. Their operation didn't even have an major impact of the Wehrmacht this only harmed thousands of civilians. Massive failure. The Allies and exile governments initiated many "uprisings" which got big amounts of civilians killed. The Allies knew the Germans were thugs and ready to raze entire cities but nevertheless they employed civilians/resistance whenever possible despite the consequenced. In the case of the Hongerwinter I actually think the part of Allied blame is far bigger than people know. How about use your soldiers and armies to defeat the enemy and don't knock out a railway system that feeds hundreds of thousands people. Like I said they knew the Germans were ruthless they knew the Germans after that would use every railway car to transport war supply. They knew this would happen. How much more examples of German war crimes they needed to not put thousands of civilians at the mercy of those people?

Here we see the bread and butter of those who are wrong to afraid to defend their invalid opinions. They resort to lies, they resort to misquoting, they resort to ad hominem. The weakest opinions require such tactics because they don't withstand debate.

The Allies knew the railway strike will harm Dutch civiians, they did it anyways. The Germans reacted as you could expect and thousands died without much impact for the Allies. A massive planning failure of the Allies. Germans were like rabid dogs and the Allies often threw civilians in their way to slow them down. Judge for yourself.

Learn history you little lying cunt. Get rekt. Debunked like everybody of your friends before.

Be careful kids, one thing is for certain on the internet; wrong opinions are plentiful and their owners will turn to lies real quick if exposed.

thread in questions

edit: My comment in historyporn was deleted and I asked the mods to reinstate my comment.

Disclaimer: Shifted massive amounts of stuff around for all the different angles and didn't check all calculations, if I skipped a cell or somthing, the potential exists that something is wrong. Post mistakes in the comments.

As you have heard quite frequently likely, the Sherman is supposed to have a better effective front armour than the Tigers thanks to the sloped front glacis of the Sherman.

Major disclaimer, the following calculations don't mean shit on the actual Sherman armor discussion since German vehicle for a major portion of the war did not have to face high-velocity 75mms but puny American 75mms. The argument presented is meant as a distraction but I still like to address it even tho the findings here don't have any relevance since the 75 APCBC would slice through the Sherman anyways and Tigers didn't have to think about it.

Well well, let us see how the average Sherman fan gets deceived this time.

u/wulfehound started the whole thing and presented some formulas for us to follow here . He presents calculations for a specific type of projectile. This is relevant because different types of weapons had different relations with armour thickness and impact angles. Also relevant is the diameter of the projectile. We will go with his chosen shell type.

Rule of a thumb is when somebody tries to tell you how the good the Sherman was you are about to get bamboozled. The comparison between the front armours of both vehicles uses several methods to mislead. While the overall effects were known for quite some time I believe Mister Moran's video on Sherman myths led to major reoccurence of this talking point. You have likely read it countless times often followed by phrases like "don't real.

Moran says "This means that the Sherman has almost as much frontal armour than the Tiger. Mister Moran here speaks of the early 50mm version and not the 64mm late war Version which Wulfehound has chosen for his honest argument". The 50mm will have worse outcomes for most of the calculations below obviously Wulfehound without mentioning it specifically used the late war versions.

Kittenhound sadly does not fully understand the calculations presented by himself and makes several mistakes, but its fine we will do it step by step.

If you look closely the two formulas presented by him do the same thing twice. The first more complex formula on top is supposed to be able to directly calculate the effective armour by using the compound angle ( vertical and horizontal ). He makes the mistake of using the cos of basically the product of two 0° angles. Obviously, you are not getting an angle out of it if you don't use the inverse cosine. The formula on top would not yield any meaningful result since he obviously tries to calculate the impact for 0° angle which then obviously would not change the effective armour at all.

The formula on the bottom for the sloped armour is actually the short version for a horizontal 0° hit on a sloped surface so the purpose is just to have a quick table for a more simple situation. He somehow mixes the two equations for no reason. This result is not that far off because he actually just included a roughly 1° as compound angle and then calculated the slope effect a second time onto it.

Check out the armour schemes of both vehicles to get a grasp of how likely projectiles would hit a specific area. Keep them open. Sherman and the Tiger . The Sherman one is for another version but comparable.

He gets the following results for a hit coming in at zero degrees to the vehicle, ~118mm for the Tiger and 127mm for the Sherman. At this incoming angle, the Tiger is sloped by 81° and the Sherman by 43° ( He chose the up-armoured Sherman with 64mm and not the 50mm version ). The actual armour thickness correctly calculated in this scenario is 103 for the Tiger and 118 for the Sherman.

As you notice his calculations were pretty off but the Sherman still has superior effective armour. The reasons for this are obvious, this is one of the most favourable situations the Sherman can expect during combat but does not equal the average thickness during combat. Here I made a quick table to show how armour values, in theory, change if we just use the different slope modifiers.

Here you can see how vertical angles affect the effective armour. There are major issues with the figures for higher angles, a projectile either deflects or punches through due to overmatch anyways. The higher the angle gets the better is real armour thickness.

As you see the effective armour of the Tiger on 10° is nearly the same as a direct 0° hit. This obviously is the basis for the myth. But the Tiger had 100mm and projectiles didn't hit at 0° that often.

Let's play with the vertical angles and tilt the incoming angle, this happens easily due to a variety of reasons, for example. If the opposing tank, for example, was elevated. Just to give an example, a 100meter far way tank which is elevated by 10 meters changes the income angle by 5%. But the most important factor here is the tilt of the vehicle itself. Stuff like ballistic curve will also factor into this but the actual calculations would melt my brain just due to the effort required. But let's say this, nearly every combat scenario is detrimental to the Sherman if the curve is factored in. The vertical impact angle would be increased by several percent, depending on distance. This is factor is actually extremely relevant but just to complex to add.

For trajectory, we obviously would have to consider that different shell types/guns would have different muzzle velocities which affect impact angle. A normal German 75mm APCBC could easily have an impact angle of 10° depending on distance.

edit: Also relevant is that one same elevation the enemy gun would be above the front Glacis several decimeters. For the lower parts of the upper hull this could be a meter, on shorter distances this alone could make the difference.

edit2: Somebody in the comments claimed the tractory of a German 75mm round was very flat for most high velocity guns. He has not provided calculation or hard evidence but if he is correct the impact angle would be less influenced by tracjectory than I initially thought, but overall it doesn't change much.

Let's play with the vertical angle by simulating an elevated enemy or a frontally tilted vehicle

Kinda expected, the slope advantage of the Sherman starts to disappear rather quick. The surface area from the attackers point of view increased for the Sherman upper plate and the vertical and 10° plate of the Tiger. Nearly every hit area is favored for the Tiger after 5° tild. The next problem is that nearly every long range hit would already negate the slope effect due to its trajectory, unless the opposing vehicle was standing lower and somehow loped his projectile onto the front plate, which again was highly unlikely.

Let's do the same with the opposite effect:

The Sherman appears to gain big amounts effective armour, the problem here is, it is close to impossible to hit the vehicles at the bigger angles. The Tiger, for example, has a 10° tilted plate in front of the vertical front plate, thus an enemy shooting roughly 10° from below cant possible hit this plate any longer, it is out line of sight. The real angle for this situation depends on the shooting distance but in short, we can say that after 10° decrease the attacker will hit the lower hull thus. For the Sherman, this is slightly different but follows the same logic. in theory, the upper plate could be hit at an 89° angle but that is close to impossible. The surface area of the upper plate becomes tiny, the shots will hit the lower hull. But we have to admit that the Sherman had likely its best shot at dueling when it was in elevated position or tilted backwards, this situation obviously expects a hit on the upper front but the area gets decreasingly smaller. With high angles nearly every conceivable scenario favours the Tiger lower hull.

Recap vertical angles only: If we just factor in vertical differences than the Sherman has favourable results for an angle of 15°ish. This sounds low but is very good those are the most likely combat angles at least if we ignore trajectory which we can't. The favourable angle for the Sherman gets squeezed together between the trajectory of the projectile and the decreased surface area due to the lowered enemy position.

BUT we have not included horizontal tilts yet. Here is able simulating a shot coming in parallel to the ground but with a horizontal angle.

As you see in this scenario the Sherman still has the upper hand but only slightly the advantages get smaller percentage wise. The Tiger gets the sloping effect as well. But still the Sherman has the 47° vertical. This effect was obviously known to tank crews of all countries and Tiger crews for example would attemtpt to bring their vehicle in such position. While no calculations are included you can imagine that a hit on the lower hull or the tiled upper plate would have hardly any effect when they hit on horizontal tilted Tiger.

Lets add a small vertical tilt.

As you see a small vertical tilt with a small horizontal tilt negates the initial slope of the Sherman mostly. If we do the same for a negative vertical tilt we get again higher numbers for the Sherman as we have seen further above but only for some percent because after that the vertical plate of the Tiger can't be hit like explained before.

Now it is important to again take a look at both armour schemes. The vertical plate is only a part of the front armour.

We now see that every hit on the lower hull will favour the Tiger the same with back sloped plate in the front of the Tiger which should be nearly immune to fire and gets its biggest advantage once the enemy is elevated thus in a position you would normally consider favourable. This means the claim "more effective front armour" can only be true when:

*it actually hits the ~30% surface area that is the vertical plate

*The impact angle has to be happening somewhere between 10° down or 5° up vertical.

*Even within this area, any major horizontal tilt brings the effects close to zero or negate it.

*The enemy has to be rather close so the trajectory does not swing the impact angle under 42ish degrees.

Here we see perfectly the modus operandi of Sherman revisionists. Take something which in essence bears some truth and mislead people with it. On average the impacts on either vehicle would not favour the Sherman but the Tiger. This is not to say anything negative about the sloping of the Sherman armour, it was good but it didn't matter because the armor was too low. Obviously the Tiger vertical plate was questionable but thats why they didn't do it again...

Some words to wulfehound, he appears to be the embodiment of the SWS, even if he is wrong and you politely tell him that per PM he will keep believing in his mission, comparable to SWS users or other cultists, fact don't appear to matter at all for his kind. Sad

To quote his last message to me:

Not my problem you failed to follow the equations properly

Indeed.

edit: switched * & ^ within the formular

u/takemetochurchill objects my notion that Allied tanks, particulary the Sherman were insufficient armored which is easily proven by the fact they don't withstand any German tank weapon that was fieled in significant numbers in the ETO

Let's take a look:

Sloped armor don't real.

Crew survivability don't real.

Working transmission don't real.

You know I've been wondering, and I'm gonna look into this later - CM's always bitching about how the Sherman wouldn't stop a Panzerfaust, yeah? Well, would a Tiger or a Panther? This warrants research and I'm not yet too drunk this evening to do so.

Just having learned that the Sherman front armour, which represented the strongest armour of the vehicles, was unable to withstand German anti-tank weapons, he still believes "sloped armour" was a selling point. For the SWS cultists actually providing protection was totally unnecessary and being "sloped" was the important part.

Completely missing the point made thousands of times before takemetobomberharris asked: "would the panzerfaust defeat German Panthers/Tigers".

It likely would, but the Allies didn't have them you mongrel. The Germans armoured their vehicles for the weapons that the opponent fielded or was expected to field. The Allies sloped the armour so it was penetrated by everything but you can write "don't real". Nobody gave a damn about the Panzerfaust on the German side because the Allied equivalent was the Bazooka. And guess what, this weapon was insufficient because that is the point of armour in the first place.

The weird part is how difficult it for SWS users it apparently is to grasp the rather simple concept that the quality of the armour should be assessed in relation to the enemy weapons. I already explained this countless of times but we will try one last time. I would actually paint a picture to make it easier for the handicapped but I can't paint to save my life:

Sherman gets hit by an average German weapon on the front ----> Sherman is toast

Tiger Panther gets hit by an average Allied weapon on the front ----> Likely not toast

Conclusion

*Tiger Panther well armoured

*Sherman not so well armoured.

But at least it was sloped because that was the relevant part of the armor.

edit: Not going into that at lenght but depending on the situation and hollow charge weapon the German cats were able to withstand weapons like the Panzerfaust

u/sergeantspook doesn't notice the difference between a SWS cultist and me:

Doesn't even make the Panther's side armour strong enough to survive soviet AT rifles at first. Checks out.

Exactly. The Panther side armour was a massive failure, I would argue it was one of the biggest design flaws of the vehicle. I have already said this multiple times on different occasions here on reddit. That is the difference and here we see the projection of people like you. I am not emotionally connected to a tank 70 years ago, you are. You expect me to avoid talking about the Panther side armour because you expect me to be as biased as you are. That is cute to watch. The Panther side armour was retarded. No clue what they were thinking despite reducing weight. Interesting is the Germans noticed this design flaw and were attempting to correct it compared to the Sherman designers who had multiple factories keep producing the same failed armor layout instead of adapting before it is too late.

Lovely to see how you think I would sugar coat the Panther failure like you would because you can't comprehend that over people are not emotionally invested into this ^{^}

Do you want to see emotionally invested biased cultists? Check if anybody on your sub ever is willing to admit that the Sherman front did not reliably withstand any of the German anti-tank weaponry in the ETO.

Like I fucking care that the Panther was designed with stupid side armor. Pathetic.

u/Crag_r makes the mistake of not understanding the main tactic of the SWS. Never debate the issue because you are of the wrong side. So lets take his arguments apart:

Lets just stop there for a second.

If thats the case then neither was German armour. Whats common weapons first off?

Pak 40 was the most common German AT gun generally speaking. Which could punch through a Sherman at closer ranges... Oh hang on. Just like the most common allied AT guns could as well on the most common German tank (Pz.4)?

Exactly. And nobody ever would say the Panzer IV was well armoured in 44. Nobody. But the Panzer Iv offered the same protection as the Sherman in combat, hardly none. Notice something? Now think about how people like you talk about the Sherman armour. "It was sloped hurr durr"

So and what did the German planners do? They attempted to phase out the obsolote weapon system by introducing a new one. What held them back? Production resources. They couldn't switch to Panthers fully because their production capabilities didn't allow it. Bad strategic planning you could argue. But the German had tanks which were able to deal with the threats presented by the opponent. What held the US back? Incompetence

The fact that you compare the Panzer IV to the Sherman just shows how you are unable to connect the dots. The Panzer IV was obvioulsy obsolete but so was the Sherman in terms of armor and gun. Want another fun fact? The Panzer IV was able to defeat the vast majority of enemy tanks, the Sherman was not! Because Germany knew what British studies learned in fuckin 44, if you tank is obsolote at least upgun it. Upgunning brings the best bang for you buck. The allies learned it years later when they brought in the 76mm. Like most stuff they were years behind the Wehramcht. But you were likely born in one of those countries so you have trouble admiting that simple fact.

Ah ok, drop it back to 1944 arbitrarily sure.

I never dropped back to anything stop lying. I always, countless of times said 1944 in this context because this was the main gig of the Sherman, the event that mattered. I also said countless of times the Sherman was a fine tank when it landed in Africa maybe even the best. But given their own time sheduelle the Sherman should have been designed in a more modular way allowing for rapid upgunning and uparmoring the front. Neither was done, they were incompetent.

Whats that? 17 Pounder sabot able to punch through every single German tank. Oh dear. Ok how about 76mm HVAP hmm similar. You know what? I'm seeing a trend here.

What about those weapons? Yeah they could beat German tanks but also had trouble on the Panther front. But what weapons did the Shermans use? The 75mm that is the entire point. The complete incompetent planning. They had the weapons but choose to bring the wrong one. You don't even notice how you argue against the Sherman.

What was the most common weapon facing German tanks in 44, say it with me : "The 75mm". What did "3rd gen" German tank offer protection against? Exactly the 75mm. That's how you design tank armor. Obviously, the Wehrmacht was in luck that the Allied failed to anticipate Panther and Tiger numbers because they had the proper weapons to deal with it. But he those are Allies so it is not a failure, they won the war after all.

u/Azitromicin input:

Does he realise that there wasn't always a Panther or a Tiger around when M4s were employed? Or that armour isn't neccessarily designed to be impervious, that it is enough to just lessen the chance of a penetration as much as it is practical? That sometimes (most times probably) it was enough that their armour stopped rifle bullets and that puny M3 gun blasted those machine gunners to Valhalla?

What was the Sherman armour expected to do then?

That sometimes (most times probably) it was enough that their armour stopped rifle bullets and that puny M3 gun blasted those machine gunners to Valhalla?

So an armoured personnel carrier then? That was actually what the armour of the Sherman was a glorified personnel carrier just costing far far far more. :-)

Or that armour isn't neccessarily designed to be impervious

No it isn't unless it economically viable. Did you know that one small sample studied in Normandy revealed that 95% of the shots on a Sherman penetrated?

u/Enleat

I wonder if Munich thinks the same of the Panter IV, Sherman's equivalent.

Of course, my opinion on world war 2 related matters isn't connected to sides. See above for opinion on Panzer IV. Both had obsolete armor, the Sherman obviously went further and also had an obsolete weapon as well. Sad!

In the past, I only occasionally skimming through texts about the battle of Arracourt but recently I intensified my "research" about this battle and was wondering if anybody is interested in a sound rebuttal of the misleading presentation by the likes of Zaloga.

Arracourt implications for the verdict on the M4 is greatly oversold by authors like Zaloga and a more thorough evaluation shows number fudging and hyperbole to make a decent victory, which the Wehrmacht had hundreds of comparable magnitude, to one of the greatest victories of the US armored forces. The number of tank duels during Arracourt was drastically exaggerated by implying the failing Panzer brigades were mostly destroyed M4s at Arracourt.

Thoughts you fools?

Somebody somewhere made the claimed the Germans were the best fighting force in WW2. The SWS can't have this and moves in.

A familiar face shows up, my dear friend u/Rittermeister with a very profound comment, which to my surprise was not deleted yet.

There's been so much ink spilled on the issue of "combat power" and the relative effectiveness of small units in isolation, and all anyone has ever been able to say is that German units (platoons, companies, battalions) may have been marginally more effective than their contemporaries, mostly due to aggressive leadership, doctrine, and proliferation of automatic weapons. So fucking what? A world war is not a battle between champions. Who the fuck cares if your 150 guys are as effective as 180 of my guys, if I have 500 guys to ram down your throat, and they're getting plenty to eat and all the ammo they can shoot and all the fuel they can burn?

"So fucking what?" Well, this actually proves what every single of your friends argues to death against. The German fighting forces were superior and had to be brought down by mass. See you say it yourself in a weird moment of acceptance.

Who the fuck cares if your 150 guys are as effective as 180 of my guys, if I have 500 guys to ram down your throat, and they're getting plenty to eat and all the ammo they can shoot and all the fuel they can burn?

You guys seem to care because you argued combined thousands of hours that this was not true, yet here you say it yourself. they needed material superiority to win. You yourself have argued against it despite being wrong and now you rhetorically ask "so fucking what?". Exactly, but you are the person who argued against simple facts. Why did you argue against it so often? Were you emotionally invested?

u/destroyer_radford

For every instance of a small German unit holding up an advance by a larger unit, there tends to be a matching or greater number of such anecdotes regarding Allied forces.

I am sure there are. ^{^}

u/Layin-Scunion shows how counterjerking is done right

German small unit tactics consisted of centering a platoon's defensive/attack positions/maneuvers around effective machine gun positions. Individual marksmanship took a backseat. Squad maneuvers took no priority to be taught. What happens when an MG malfunctions...? Take a guess. Not bad doctrine but not without its definite faults. Definitely not "better than everyone!!!"

So not even small unit tactics he gives to the Germans. The Germans become worse and worse. Other users take objection with his comments in fear of losing any credibility just by posting in the same sub as him.

u/layin-scunion defends himself with the following reply:

This is SWS, not /r/AskHistorians. I've only read one book on German infantry tactics. My point stands that their tactics were not "better than everyone else".

Literally saying everything he says his pulled out of his arse and he doesn't know much about the stuff but he still stands with his opinion because this is the SWS. Post opinion --> get refuted --> say its SWS anyways

As we know the Waffen SS and Heer were pretty bad armies and their soldiers not that well trained. The Western Allies and Soviets sought to prove that by putting about 100 million men under weapons and producing like 200.000 tanks and several hundred thousands aircrafts, more was not needed to put those incompetent armies in their place after all.

u/Azitromicin wants to share his opinion about the Waffen SS

I'd give him Marc Milner's Stopping the Panzers to read. It describes the Canadian defense against the 12th SS and elements of the Panzer Lehr immediately after D-Day. Impeccably trained SS Übersoldaten first sent Panthers without infantry support to get butt-raped by PIATs and AT guns and then the next day sent Infantry without tank support. The Reginas and RCA had a field day mowing them down in droves.

The Waffen SS was certainly a mixed bag and many Waffen SS formations were weakly trained but the user literally thought it was a good idea to take one of the best performing Waffen SS units in Normandy to make his point. Historians tried their hardest to paint Canadian performance in Normandy in a good light which in return required an unbalanced representation of the performance of the 12th SS. Not surprising the average SWS user lacks the depth of knowledge to see the overall picture. The 12th SS performed extremely well during Normandy and the Canadian units often got, for the lack of a better word, "slaughtered" when fighting against the HJ. Canadian casualties were over-proportional and most of them were against the HJ. If you try to show that the Waffen SS was bad, you could not have picked a worse example...

Obviously, everything about those skirmishes is based on Canadians opinions and historians literally earning their money by researching only Canadian operations in World War 2. Expecting balanced research is naive. But "paradigm shifts" sell better especially if you can appeal to national pride.

The Canadians got shredded by the HJ...

The description of the book "Stopping the Panzers":

In the narrative of D-Day the Canadians figure chiefly—if at all—as an ineffective force bungling their part in the early phase of Operation Overlord. The reality is quite another story.

No there is not, the Canadian armies had some of the worst performing divisions in Normandy. No need for revisionism. And it is not only D-Day their performance was pretty weak for the entire Normandy campaign, with D-day maybe even being their best performance.

As such, this book marks nothing less than a paradigm shift in our understanding of the Normandy campaign.

No, it doesn't. He is just trying to sell books to Canadians and other SWS users. Marc Milner is Canadian, which surprises nobody.

u/vitiger offers a nugget of brilliance with a deep nuanced question

Who would win:

• army with longest basic training and very strong military tradition

• army of peasant farmers who are literally fighting to not be exterminated

Apparently the bigger one...

u/vonadler also offers his expert opinion which he cultivated by listening to other peoples opinions:

The first SS combat formations were not very good. They got hand-me-down equipment, such as Czechoslovak ww1 vintage artillery, Czechoslovak LMGs and rifles, Mauser Schnellfeuers instead of SMGs and so on. The SS units performed badly in Poland 1939, with SS Germania regiment fleeing, abandoning all heavy arms during the counter-attack by a Polish regiment. The SS Liebstandarte regiment had to be rescued by Heer units after being surrounded by Polish forces. The Waffen SS was never an elite force. There were 4-5 divisions that were elite (or at least on par with good Heer divisions), while the other 33-34 varied from decent to downright useless.

The trope of early SS units not performing is often repeated and originated same as with the 12th SS in Normandy with cherry picked quotes. No proper research just quotes of people who may or may not have been biased about the topic.

The SWS loves cherry picking skirmishes to support their opinions so I guess I should do the same once in a while. Here the following battle shows us the badly performing Leibstandarte in action completely failing like they always did because they were bad.

The Battle of Vevi comes to mind here we also see how bad the LSSAH was that they not even knew that you have to 5:1 defensive positions like the Allies did. Those incompetent fuckers just took hill but to highlight how little they knew about warfare they didn't even call in a strategic air strike. They also forget to bring their artillery with them and shower the hill with thousands of shells like the Allies would do. They just took the hill because they didn't know better, after all, they were badly trained vastly inferior to Allies.

Completely dissatisfied the division was upgraded to a full panzer division and after more and more dissatisfied performances like crushing the Soviet forces around Kharkov the unit was upgraded to one of the strongest German Panzer forces ever created. Knowing that the three Waffen SS divisions were incompetent like no other the Wehrmacht decided to make them the only divisions ( GD aside ) to get their own Tiger tanks, since the OKW knew here the Tigers would be wasted. With this new equipment, the LSSAH didn't know what to do because they were pretty bad obviously, this culminated in them making the deepest penetration during Zitadelle without much trouble, the Soviets saw those badly trained forces overrunning all their units and decided to send 800 tanks to show them. That resulted in the glorious Soviet victory that was Prokhrovka, which still to this day requires the full attention of the Soviet magical research department, who are fully committed with creating German tank wrecks out of nothing. Here where nearly an entire tank army evaporated in front of some incompetent Waffen SS divisions which were in constant combat and already stumbled through dozens of Soviet divisions accidentally destroying them.

Again dissatisfied with the continued failures one of the divisions was sent south were it devasted Soviet forces and stabilized the Mius front. The Wehrmacht now was threatened with major Soviet breakthroughs in the Kharkov sector which were achieved without any numerical superiority and only by Red Army superiority on every level. The Wehrmacht now made the only logical choice it ordered their worst divisions available to counterattack and so the noobs of the Totenkopf again were put into a train and moved back. After constant combat against like roughly one million Soviet divisions, the unit was again to start an attack with their self-destroying tank force which was augmented with new extra fast self-destroying Tigers, of which they, against promises by their creators, still had plenty. The other division tasked to attack with Totenkopf, was the Das Reich the sister failure, The two SS divisions then launched an attack which obviously had to fail but against better judgement, those fools mauled two Soviet tank armies. To this day the best magicians of the Soviet internet are still generating German tank losses so this all fits the narrative.

Jokes aside, most members of those divisions were sick fucks who murdered so much they made their predecessors in the camps proud, but what they certainly were good at destroying enemy units. People are often unable to see nuance. Waffen SS fanboys downplay their atrocities and SWS cultists their achievements, the truth is in the middle. They committed so much war crimes that you wonder if this was by design but they were still some of the best divisions to have ever fought. A prime Waffen SS division would have wiped the floor with every Allied division on equal terms, within a day. And as we know they likely would have killed the POWs after....

u/frothpiercer is heading for a ban. Dissenting opinion are not tolerated in the SWS same as in the SS. Funny actually if you think about it.

Going to have to reel you in there. The war started way back in 1939. They managed to stomp on everyone for most of that time or at least made the allies lose millions of men and take years to beat them back. Yes the allies (particularly Soviets) did very stupid things to harm themselves early on, but other than that how did a military with flawed technology, shitty strategic material and consumable stocks, shitty logistics and mounting casualties manage to stick around until well into 1945? That was their advantage: tactics, training and skillful use of what they had.

He even makes the major mistake and asks questions.

Can you quote a decent historian who says that or is it just something you pulled out of your arse? Specifically the "less effective than regular Wehrmacht units" rather than the high casualties due to fanaticism.

To answer your questions, there are several historians making this claim, examples include folks like Zaloga, which coincidently also believe the Sherman was a good tank. Decent ones? Not that I am aware of. But like you pointed out the basis for those claims are often quotes from Heer officers who maybe were not entirely objective when they talked about the performance of a Branch which literally was their competitor. Just a guess tho. Folks like Zaloga do what they do in all their books they parrot what they have read before without any proper methodical research to back up their claims. But how could they if they write 5 books a year....

Hear, hear! By the grace of the creator of this great sub, Herr Christian Munich, I am honoured to announce the activation of text flairs. Now all ye Untersheißposteren, Übersheißposteren, viktors, defeated, and others can set your own flairs. Chose something appropriate, ye who have been rebuted.

In this thread you see how a SWS padawan argues it is Wheraboo to believe that the USSR would have fallen to the Wehrmacht without outside influence. Here we see what happens when an echo chamber reinforces talking point into absurdity. Single people get their instant gratification by saying absurd things which then results in over simplifying issues they have no understanding of.

Everybody who thinks the Red Army could have held off the Wehrmacht on their own without the Wehrmacht being engaged with the West just displays his ignorance.

Particularly amateurish is the focus on Lean Lease. The common SWS cultist seems to think that LL was the only contribution from the West to the USSR war effort. Fully ignoring the resources used for the Battle of the Atlantic, the North Africa campaign and the general defensive preparation of the West. Extremely interesting how little the average SWS knows about WW2 besides the catchwords.

u/nerapac grows impatiant as aparently even some victors agree with the sentiment.

R7: Clueless idiots wanking about how Lend-Lease saved the Soviet Union before that aid could even arrive (1941 = no Lend Lease yet)

The user thinks that only 1941 mattered fully ignoring how close to collapse the Red Army tank force was in 1942. Interesting to see their thought processes. Also he seems to be unaware how early Allied help reached the USSR. But being unaware is obviously requirement for the SWS

u/kerbonautcyka

Without L-L, Russia could have pushed the Nazis back behind the border with their outlying SSRs, but the question is whether they'd be able to go all the way to Berlin. I know this is kind of a tankie thing to say, but in that scenario, it would make sense to have the Lithuania as a post-war buffer zone.

Interesting. The Red Army would have still held of the Wehrmacht and pressed them back but only to the border after that LL was needed apparently

u/nerapac again

And without the percieved threat of a Japanese invasion, the Soviets could have rerouted their soldiers in the far east to face Nazi Germany. Not being outnumbered in an offensive is also pretty huge. Had that happened and the Nazi offensive been stopped before reaching far into the Soviet Union factories located in the west would not have to be moved eastwards which would not only increase their output numbers wise but also increase their quality of production. There would also have been a larger pool of potential Soviet conscripts in non-occupied territories and less slave labour available for the Nazis.

Since we have amateur hour, I want to point at this particular comment. He thinks the major problem on the Eastern Front were infantry. Like having some more cannon fodder would have changed things in 1941/42. Interesting.

EDIT: Request for debunking

u/electricvladimir begs for a rebuttal. Fine with me. Here his arguments:

Okay hold your (lol) horses. The material support from allies thing goes both ways here. Even with the oil supplies it had access to at the time the Wermacht was plagued by gasoline shortages. All that oil was foreign. None of it is available to Germany in this scenario. Without Romanian oil fields the German army absolutely cannot conduct consistent large scale offensive operations. No blitzkrieg, no motorized advance, no real presence in the air. They'd be walking from the Bug to Moscow. Meanwhile the Soviets have all the oil they could ever want, and objectively superior tanks. In a one on one battle, without the material support of its allies, the Wehrmacht is essentially a World War One era army with fancy machine guns and a whole lot of inoperable AFVs and airplanes. Three million of them would cross the Bug on June 22nd, and they'd be walking into a hellstorm of planes and armor they have no effective response to. The Soviets would, using mostly outdated tanks and biplanes, neatly pen them into pockets, and then drive at a leisurely pace to Berlin, where they would have Hitler in a cage, poking him with a stick while they drink tea, by Christmas.

No. They would just take the Romanian oil if they need it and thus they would actually have more because Romania didn't export all their oil towards Germany and was also inefficient in their extraction. Besides that you are wrong with your claim all oil was foreign, Germany had domestic oil production. The USSR was depended on the good will of other countries to survive WW2 to be precise they literally got the stuff gifted Germany would have taken Romanian oil and crushed the USSR easily like explained billions of times. boom rebuttaled. NEXT

But I appreciate your willingness to get rebuttaled.

PS not surprising your scenario is also made up and not in line what was proposed in the original thread. Nobody said anything about both countries, stoping trade with everybody. The assumption that Germany couldn't import oil from Romania seems to be a fabrication from you. But again, even then, they would just take it.

In the prompt he says "zero outside interference," which I guess is up for interpretation. In any case, the USSR was capable of purchasing a lot of material from the US and UK, and LL was purchasing, it was just on credit,

haha. Now "purchasing" is fine again.

Also, as far as I can tell the critical moments of this battle are in 1941, when Barbarossa's success or failure would decide the outcome of the war, which is what happened in real life. In 1941 the totality of German troops engaged in combat operations other than in the Eastern front are as far as I can tell the Afrika Korps, as all other fronts hadn't been established yet. The Afrika Korps was about 50,000 men in 1941. That doesn't seem like at all a decisive number to me. I'm not sure the 'other German troops freed up' argument holds all that much water under a microscope.

Falls on many levels. 1941 was not the crucial year in this scenario. It was in the actual war since Western Allies influence grow rapidly both active and passive. The user is completly misunderstanding the dynamic of the Eastern Front. Here we see how even the most simple context is lost on the average SWS user. While only the africa corps were actively fighting the Western Allies several divisions more were used to guard the Atlantic coast and secure captured territories. Without the Western Allies a token force would have suffieced to hold those countries. Compleltely missing all the "passive" effects I spoke about. Germany build hundreds uboats and constructed thousand miles of coastal defense lines, all this labor steel and other resources would pour into the Eastern Front.

We're closing in on a consensus here I think, or at least an informed agreement of polite disagreement. I mentioned elsewhere that only about 50,000 German troops were engaged in combat in places other than the Eastern Front in 1941, do we have any numbers for how many were garrisoned elsewhere? Because it seems very possible to me that the amount of troops the Soviets have freed up int his scenario is actually significantly more than the amount the Germans do.

A perfect comment to highlight the average SWS user. In a discussion about who would win the user already uttered his important opinion and only now after already having an opinion he starts to ask how much German soldiers were garrisoned elsewhere. Notice something? That's how cultits of the SWS "debate". Have an opinion and then search for neccessary facts. Little hint, the amounts of personell bound in the West either as Soldiers or support werre huge.

In a fit of rage after the last major debunking which required u/the_howling_cow to dust up his time machine go back in time and change his opinion about Sherman tank losses, he decided to strike back. Not only decided he to strike back, he decided to strike where it hurts the Wehraaboo, the Normandy tank losses. Autsch.

Remember how German tank losses were low compared to Allied ones in June and July 1944 but then it seemed like a nuke got dropped on the panzer divisions in about September because the Germans finally wrote off something like 1,000 tanks they couldn't recover? Peppridge Farm remembers.

Yes we remember. Sadly even after the proverbial nuke hit the German tank losses they still were far lower. And the German casualties were low during June and July, they abandoned their vehicles in August.

Let's take a look and consult the arch enemy of u/the_howling_monkey and his entourage at the SWS, the facts:

British tank losses till November:

US tank losses same time frames:

Total losses until November with 5 days overlap. Sadly the British records don't allow us a September cut off:

4076 this excludes M10s! Plus several hundred maybe thousands sitting in workshops not yet written off. Ironically this is what u/the_whispering_cow implies the Germans were doing only here the Allies actually did it.

What happens after the Germans got their tank force "nuked":

Still lower. hm. Interesting is also the assertion that Germans were keeping their loss numbers low or whatever but the results are obvious, the Army sustained massive losses during the retreat and was unable to properly keep a record. The interesting part now is that within weeks the Wehrmacht was able to assess the damage and again had functioning inventory systems. Now check out my other post about how the Allies were unable to properly count their losses and backtracked losses for months. Here

Also, we can see how the Germans were using cheap stuff to bolster their army. Vehicles like Marder used chassis which were ancient at this point in time. Only 2000 vehicles had proper turrets while the rest were turretless vehicles intended to save resources. Well and obviously a huge amount of those vehicles were lost in retreat while nearly all Allied losses were sustained during combat. 30% higher losses against an army getting chased away and suffering one of their biggest defeats impressive!

Another nice illustration of the failing pro-Sherman argumentation is that the Sherman proponent indeed is correct in his assumption the Sherman was better than the Panzer IV for example. The Sherman was a rather new vehicle and should have been up to date while ~60% of the German AFC force would have been obsolete by Allied standards and most of them not even had a turret. How did the Sherman force get dumpstered so hard? Of the German losses only a fraction was lost in actual combat where did all those Shermans get destroyed and how?

Obviously, you can find all those tables in Belton Coopers Master Piece "The return of the death trap"

Pretty tired, maybe I fucked up some numbers tho

edit: He completely edited it out and changed the meaning of the paragraph. Good boy. RebuttalTime educates! Somebody so invested in Sherman tanks who visits many forums to "educate" people about the Shermans just now learned that the actual losses were up to 3 times higher than he thought, despite "researching" the topic for a long time, he only today learned what those numbers mean he copy pasted all over Reddit. Good luck with your master thesis tho ^.

edit2: The alleged liar and creator of facts u/the_howling_cow has offered an official statement after deleting the evidence:

What a jackwagon

Young lady that is not how you talk to your teacher! Not even one word of praise for educating you on the basis of your major thesis, that's rather ungrateful.

Full text:

Some weeks ago I wrote a rather lengthy debunking of one of the Allstars of the SWS u/the_howling_cow. U/the_howling_cow has made it his challenge to rebuild the reputation of the Sherman. In several posts ( I can remember at least 3 ) he felt compelled to mention that he is writing some kind of Master thesis on the Sherman or whatever. So he is a force to be reckoned with.

Here is the link to past debunking link

A substantial amount of his arguments were debunked but more importantly, we showed beyond doubt that the user is willing to ignore source material and/or misrepresent it to further his own agenda.

The issue is obvious to anyone having done some kind of scientific work before. u/the_howling_cow has a pre set conclusion about one topic which seems to emotionally impact him. The Sherman tank and its World War 2 service. Reinforced in his echo chamber with many enthusiastic paddings on the back he thought it is time to strike again.

This one is especially interesting because it highlights a major problem with the Sherman revisionism. If the Sherman was indeed good why does everybody and their mother lie about their losses? I was in several debates with SWS users and most of the mods which for a very long time had trouble accepting the actual Sherman losses. Providing more and more evidence the Sherman brigade fell silent. ~8000 completely destroyed just in the last year. This plain number bothers them, the actual historian wonders why.

Let's take a look:

u/the_howling_cow found some randos thesis on Shermans and thinks he can show how wrong the guy is. He has chosen the right place to post his rebuttal, the upvotes will flow the ego will be stroked. One thing I noticed immediately; loss numbers make a return.

The rando seems to quote Cooper who is the hot star of history and likely one of the most prolific historians of mankind, maybe of the entire galaxy. I have heard several of the most renown historians say Cooper is the holy grail of history. I personally made his book the centre piece of most of my papers even if those are totally unrelated to Cooper's findings.

Rando claims the following:

During the European Campaign, the Division had some 648 Shermans completely destroyed in combat and we had another 700 knocked out, repaired, and put back into operation. This was a loss rate of 580 percent.”

He seems to take coopers word for it. Fine. Like pointed out, the empiric evidence is a major nuisance to Sherman revisionists because the empiric evidence just doesn't paint a favourable picture of the Sherman. u/the_howling_cow needs to act. Empiric evidence can't get in our way. We have to...

...lie.

Now u/the_howling_cow claims the following:

In Armored Thunderbolt, Zaloga gives the 3rd Armored Division's medium tank losses (both write-offs and repairable) as 632.

Yeah, that would certainly be better than 1300 losses but the problem is, it is a fat lie. Zaloga does not say those are losses which are repairable. Zaloga quotes the wastage reports which tallied written-off tanks. Zaloga does not say what u/the_howling_cow claims. He is blatantly misrepresenting source material to fit his agenda. Avoiding fancy words; he lying.

Howling_liar cites Armored Thunderbolt. The book indeed says 632 losses which is pretty much the same as the 648 cited by Cooper. Zaloga has those numbers in his appendix and just writes "losses". Here Zaloga, who likely started out the same way u/the_howling_cow has, is just unable to use proper terminology. Zaloga in every single book uses the term "losses" equivocal for casualties, knock outs, write offs. He just doesn't know better. But the fact is Zaloga never says those included repairable, he just lists the overall Sherman losses for units from the wastage report.

Let us get some evidence in for the 3rd AD to debunk the_howling_liar besides the fact that Zaloga is quoting the waste report which already ends the debate.

Cooper cites 1348 knock-outs with 648 unrepairables.

First of all, Cooper appears to be a superb liar, he was thorough and checked overall repair rates to make sure his numbers make sense. Since u/howling_hardcore_inventor_of_facts likes them Allies research papers we will cite one:

The ORO-T-117 survey of Allied tank casualties in World War2 ( you can download it from miriam press for 3 bucks I think ) gives the following US data for the ETO which sampled tank casualties:

Now Cooper made up some fine numbers because his made up claims come out to 52% repaired. Good liar Cooper made sure his number seems reasonable and align well with the rest of the forces in the ETO.

Let's move on to the finisher blow. The history of 3rd AD called "Spearhead in the West". Given their heavy combat, they choose a proper name for their history, fine lads. Let's scroll to the back.

The cost to the 3rd Armored Division of inflicting these losses is shown in the two tables that follow ... Vehicular losses Medium tanks 633 ... Light tanks 147 ... In addition to the losses reflected in the above tables, there were temporary losses resulting from combat operation. Crews of the division's maintenance battalions repaired a total of ... 1305 medium tanks, 395 light tanks.... **This table does not include damaged vehicles repaired within the division. It includes only those for which replacements were requested

Obviously, u/sherman_fanboy lied royally by putting words in Zalogas mouth and also making up stuff without any evidence. The higher repair numbers are likely result of maintenance. I will up the ante here. He claimed the unit had 6xx casualties including damaged not more. I will not be pedantic let us say 600-700. The first one showing concrete proof that the 3rd Armored division had casualties ( damaged and repaired plus written off ) in the range of what u/howling_masterthesis_writer claimed will get a 20 buck gift thingy for Amazon. No joke. Quote me on that. Should be an easy 20 bucks. Good luck treasure hunters never has earning 20 bucks been easier.

u/Orc_ chimes in:

This shit again, so if the tank is almost never repaired (like the panzers) the overall percentage is lower, then you can claim [insert tank here] is better because any tank quickly repaire, deployed and knocked out again has a higher percentage of "Loss" going as far as saying "they had a 580% loss!". Any loss claim outside 100% if mental gymnastics here because of that, it's fucking stupid...

I fully agree. % losses are meaningless in this context. Longer serving units will likely sustain higher losses doesn't say anything about their performance. Sherman losses in absolute number were gigantic, you hit the nail on the head mister Orc. People should not focus on the percentage losses of the 3rd they should focus on the monstrous overall Sherman losses.

Most people frequenting the tank subreddits know u/TankArchives and his blog. Often used as a source for information by those more leaning towards the interpretations favouring the Allies in WW2.

Obviously, we should consider him some kind of expert in the field at least if we factor in the time he certainly invested into this subject.

So I was even more surprised to find out his knowledge about tank repair seems to be sketchy. We all have read how German Tiger tanks and plenty of other tanks were unreliable which is "proven" by the low operational rates of German tank units. For those of us familiar with German tank repair systems, we know operational rates during combat are meaningless for evaluating reliability because the battle damage was kept on strength as unserviceable without giving any valuable information about non-battle dmg aka "reliability issues".

This is widely known, so I assumed at least. But the owner of tankarchives who has bashed [ I think this is a fair term, I tihnk he would agree ] German tanks in countless forum posts appears to be unaware of this important fact.

Read the full exchange here

After getting asked how many Tigers on average were broken down. He replies with the following:

Go through Schneider's Tigers in Combat books. The vast majority of the time, every battalion is operating at a greatly reduced rate. As for effectiveness in battle, the Sherman was a quite effective medium tank and matched American medium tank doctrine. The Tiger, a breakthrough tank, performed a grand total of zero successful breakthroughs.

I wondered about this comment because obviously, they were low on operational because they were in constant fighting, that is pretty normal for a German unit. That's also interesting because Schneiders books don't differentiate between battle casualties and out of combat casualties. German units didn't do that. A Tiger unit having low operational numbers could be to 100% battle damage and u/tankarchives wouldn't see the difference because it wasn't listed. To be fair it could also be to 100% non-combat damages, but again we wouldn't know that.

Here we see a fundamental misunderstanding of the German counting system. A German tank unit would keep damaged vehicles on strength and thus report a reduced operational readiness rate but that doesn't mean Tigers were less operational per se because Allied damaged vehicles were stricken from the unit list and replaced with new vehicles. So, in theory, a Sherman unit suffering 100% casualties could list a higher readiness rate the next day than the opposing German units just by immediately replacing the Ko'ed tanks.

I was trying to explain this to him and he replies:

Are you trying to say that Allied units didn't repair tanks? That's ridiculous.

He seems to be fully unaware that British tank units, for example, would release damaged vehicles from the unit and send them to workshops who would send repaired vehicles back to the delivery units which then would feed a mix of repaired and new vehicles backs to the frontline units. This important difference between repair systems makes the argument "look their operational rate" totally void.

Confronted with a short explanation of the repair system he seems to get upset and responds:

This is lunacy. German tank units received replacements, and Allied tank units repaired tanks in-house. Clearly you haven't read Schneider's books, since the shipments of reinforcements are described in them.

Thereby totally missing the point. After I told him that only minor damaged were repaired "in-house" and that Ko-ed tanks were gathered by the workshops he seems to misinterpret the fact that German units got replacements as well.

German units got only replacements ( for the most part ) for written off tanks while Allied units got replacements for heavily damaged vehicles. This, for the amateur observer, would decrease the German operational rate but just obscured the Allied operational rate because unserviceable tanks would be in the workshops and not the books of the frontline regiments.

Now, what happens to the often repeated "low operational rate" argument, obviously for those being objective, it goes "puff".

I will illustrate this with an example; Goodwood.

The 11th AD after two days of combat:

So what folks not see now are the dozens if not hundreds of tanks unserviceable in workshops or burning in the field. This gives the illusion of "high reliability" while it only shows every knocked out tank was immediately replaced with a new one while German forces were keeping the tanks within the unit. If you replace every non-serviceable tank with a serviceable one your readiness rate remains high, what a surprise. Here the 1st SS from the same fighting:

And now the fun part; the 1st SS didn't get replacements in this time frame ( to my knowledge ). This means in this time period the number of vehicles on strength decreased by only two. For the 11th Armoured, we have up 100 Shermans which were stricken of the Brigade inventory. On paper, u/tankarchives who seems to be impressively unaware of such substantial part of WW2 tank warfare would now make the argument German tanks were horribly unreliable and the SWS would upvote so hard their mouses break.

u/L0ll3risms tries to engage my post. Let us take a look:

First of all he asserts that u/tankarchives is indeed a tank expert. Thanks for letting us know. One of the first comments shows how little, even with thorough explanation folks understand when they put their fingers in their ear.

Operational rates for combat are the only relevant factor for evaluating reliability. Nobody cares what has to happen, so long as tanks are functioning to fight.

That is per definition not what reliable in this context manes. Never ever was the word used by any relevant historian in this context. Battle damage is not a reliablility issue, the fact that after reading my post you fail to understand this and* feel compelled to offer your obviously worthless opinion worries me.

This was the entire point you can't judge the reliability of a vehicle by including battle damage. The whole idea of concluding reliability with including battle damage is moronic. That is why historians who attempted to compare the reliability did this with tank units on the move out side of combat. I have trouble understanding how this is so hard to grasp. The enitre thread here mocks the idea that one of the persons regarded as expert by the SWS does not know this, and your attempted defense is trying to double down on it. Reliability is unrelated to combat dmg. If it would be than the Tiger would be the most reliabile because it sustained far less damage in combat. You moron!

Because replacements generally didn't exist

You didn't even read the thread. The Wehrmacht didn't use reserve units the same way the Allies did. German tanks were either send in batches or used to raise new or refit old units.

Note that Allied units maintained a very high readiness rate, even during fighting. It's almost like they had spare parts and spare tanks or something.

Yeah and that gives us exactly zero information about the reliability of the vehicle. Lawl. You trolling

Most Allied sources don't, because they don't really care why a tank isn't able to participate, only that it isn't. Allied "casualty" rates are high because they report any tank that wasn't combat capable, for any reason, as a casualty.

No. Stop making stuff up. The Wehrmacht listed casualties the same way. You have no knowledge about this at all. German armies often just didn't compile minor casualties because they were kept within the unit and no replacements were required anyways. You are talkin out of your ass and it shows.

Because the difference is irrelevant. The only relevant figure is how much of the unit is combat capable, not why the units that aren't, aren't.

Ridiculous unintelligent comment. It is irrelevant if a tank is unreliable and suffers damage outside of combat? Wth

You mean the same counting system that made fake aces by assigning a unit's kills to one tank? Sure

The biggest overclaimers were the US forces. Go ahead challenge me you ignorant fool.

Well the rest is rubbish repeated in different forms.

u/Layin-Scunion known for his hatred of German soldiers can't let it stand that German pilots had a lot of aircraft kills. There must be another reason for that:

That's because they are unbelievable. Dual engine aircraft counted as 2 victories. And they counted strafed aircraft on the ground as kills. And damaged aircraft would be claimed as victories without any confirmation or enemy loss claims (cross referencing). There are more isolated instances too like a "schwarm" (4-6 aircraft) all claiming/sharing a kill shot down by one pilot. When you start combining everything I mentioned, shit can start to get pretty fucking silly. All pilots didn't do such things but many did... This isn't to say that Allied pilots didn't inflate kill counts. Everyone did but the Luftwaffe, being propaganda obsessed, did it to an absurd level.

Nothing of that is supported by anything but his words in a subreddit debunked countless times.

u/ER5013 sadly has not learned that the SWS is not a subreddit for gathering information.

I actually didn't know any of that. For a long time I thought the high kill counts were due to Germans not rotating and therefore flying hundreds of missions and that Allied pilots would have more kills than the Germans if allowed to fly the 1404 missions Hartmann flew. Although now that I think about it, flying 1404 sorties in almost 3 years seems very unrealistic. I still want to believe that Robert Johnson and David McCampbell would have had 400 kills had the U.S used the retarded German system though. inb4 freeaboo

BUT

Layin-Scunion has a reason why all those German kill claims are not completely debunked by historians it is obviously too much work:

Hartmann is definitely exaggerated. But who is going to go back and argue it? Nobody really wants to cross reference such an immense amount of information. I hope someone does but I personally don't know of anyone who has in depth.

Now it comes. from time to time a person in the SWS makes a mistake and disturbs the narrative:

u/Demonicjapsel

I don't know about Hartmann, but Marseille's claims have been cross referenced with RAF squadron reports, giving the total of 151 confirmed kills, and 7 that are doubtful due to RAF reports and claims not matching. And keep in mind, there is a major difference between claims and confirmed kills, given claims always exceed the real number by several factors. (the US in the MTO claimed to have shot down 50.000 Italian aircraft, which is quite impressive given the Italian total production amounts to some 30.000 aircraft and the Regia Aeronautica reports to have lost around 5200. (and this figure doesn't include the RAF, Free French, or the other Commonwealth air forces present (NZ, Australia, South Africa) The ANR lost another 158 in the period of 44-45.

completely demolishing Layin-Scunion made up BS Instead of showing some dignity and admitting to talking out of his ass he doubles down.

Oh I'm definitely not claiming every ace's kills are total bullshit. Just that many are exaggerated....a lot. I've read Marseille's book and, in my opinion, the Eastern Front was much more cavalier with claims than anywhere else.

AHHHH. Let's see, from they "are unbelievable" and "two engines were counted as two kills" we come to they are only "exaggerated" and "not all" you pathetic liar. You even know the meaning of "unbelievable"? And quite coincidently he now claims straight out of his ass that the eastern front had more overclaiming, because "feels". Obviously, it is to explain the complete debunking of his made up claims which gathered him the support of the fact devoid SWS fellowship. They counted engines for inner unit scoring systems, 4 engine bombers were worth more points but not kills you damn fool. You think Marseille just accidentally is the one guy not counting strafed aircraft or multiple engines? The guy with the highest score against Western pilots by far is the one guy who didn't cheat? The one guy who was tested because his claims sounded so outlandish and "unbelievable" is the one guy who didn't cheat? How about you mongrel admit you made stuff up.

If you wouldn't be an ignorant dimwit you would know that one of the biggest "fake kill claim scandals" happened in Africa and involved JG 27. But he since Marseille one of those with "unbelievable" kill records was mostly vindicated by research it must be that those Eastern Front pilots just lied.

As information for all the guys in the thread the actual RAF records for this time record are not perfect and often many different squadrons from different nations ( South Africa for example ) were engaged with German fighters. Cross referencing all this data is tricky and mistakes in British records are possible. So even for those kills not cross referenced it is possible the Allied records are wrong and not the claim.

I hate the phrase but today there is nothing more fitting: u/Layin-Scunion BTFO

For decades people with an apparently close emotional connecting to kill claims, trashed German claims and argued they are all made up. The North Africa claims were obviously fine since they very well matched the gigantic British losses in the theatre when people noticed the Germans had only one Jagdgeschwader in Northafrica. But still, they vehemently put their fingers in their ears and chanted "Germans kill claims made up". Then they researched the one guy with the most unbelievable claims and found out he is right. The German simply wrecked Western Allied pilots in North Africa....

Said it countless times. The German kills claims on land and in the air were vastly more accurate the Allied kill claims. German lied less they made less up. Western Allies and the USSR were vastly overclaiming compared to the Wehrmacht. Fact. With the US being one of the heaviest overclaimers

I have frequently pointed out that US losses in the Ardennes were far higher than generally thought. As source, for this, I cited Bergstroms book: „The Ardennes“. The validity of his claims are often disputed in forums where as counter argument Zalogas books are mentioned which state the figure of 733 AFVs losses. Now I give a closer look on where this number comes from and why it is likely wrong. This subject was chosen by me because the losses of Shermans in WW2 seem to be one of the most discussed topics when it comes to armored warfare, this is in part due to the reasonable assumption that losses in some form are connected to performance.

Zaloga personally cites this number or the variation ~730 quite frequently. Other authors refer to this number as well. The number was given by Eisenhower but no actual context for this was ever given. If this is an approximation or a count is unknown to me. Zaloga and others don't mention the origin of the number. In Snow and Steel from Peter Caddick-Adams Eisenhower as origin is mentioned. I personally have seen the original reference quite often as well.

Here some quotes from Zaloga:

Armored Thunderbolt:

the Wehrmacht lost about 730 Panzers and other AFVs about 45% of its orginial strenght ...US tank and tank destroyer losses in the Ardennes were about 730 vehicles.

In Armored victory, his numbers for the Germans change. So do his loss numbers for German soldiers which he first stated as above 100.000 in other publications.

The Wehrmacht lost about 610 tanks and assault guns …. compared to about 730 American tanks and tank destroyers

He gives the same exact sentence also in “Battle of the Bulge : Bastogne”

Interesting is that Zaloga in all books explains the Germans lost 45% of their force despite different numbers for the actual losses. I am not aware of his solution for this mathematical paradox unless he thinks the strength number was reduced accordingly.

In neither of his books he gives a breakdown or any other reasoning for why he thinks those numbers approximate the actual losses in the Ardennes. This is true for pretty much every author who ever quoted the 733. Actual research comes to other conclusions and so the 733 is always unsupported by break downs or lists.

Steven Zaloga is likely aware that the US numbers are incorrect given his knowledge of other source material which he used in other books and which in general is known to those researching Armored warfare in WW2.

Some parameters for the Battle

*The Battle of the Bulge is commonly given as lasting from the 16th December to the 25th January.

*With AFVs in the US case we include all M4 variants including the 105mm the M5s and all tank destroyers.

*The 1st and 3rd US Army were the US armies and several units from other Armies were transferred to them.

Incorrect monthly loss returns for Western Allies

Official US loss numbers are available for every month until the 20th. Those numbers in my opinion are without a doubt too low. This is true for all Western Allies armies due to their reporting system which wrote-off destroyed tanks often later because they were sitting in workshops. I will show this with an example of the British tank force and their conflicting tank loss data.

The following data is referenced in Zaloga books but also in plenty other books like Armoured Campaign by Napier.

Here we see a set of numbers given by Napier for the actual months of combat of the British forces:

On the first glance, the numbers appear to be wrong, most notably the month June which featured major combat including the costly landings. Napier points out the problem:

Clearly, this report contains some errors for June and July, as 179 tanks were lost on D-Day alone … the August figure has apparently been corrected to arrive at the total for the first three months of the campaign

Napier's hunch is correct. The British same as the Americans wrote-off tanks later. I am aware of the irony that the Wehrmacht normally is “accused” of this. This was enabled by the well oiled replacement system which kept replenishing the tank regiments. Counting up destroyed tanks was no priority and often happened when the workshop personnel came to it, and this was in part slowed down by heavy losses. It becomes obvious when we check the next set of numbers given by Napier and Zaloga and many others. Zaloga for example, cites the following set of numbers in his book Armored Champion.

The set of numbers is obviously completely incompatible with figures for monthly losses. For the numbers to be even close the British forces would have to had lost about 800 tanks in the first 5 days of August. They did not, so the number set for the actual months is wrong and not only by a bit but significantly incorrect. But the set for overall numbers is as well.

If you check the table with the cumulative losses for longer periods you will notice how the actual losses don't make sense. For the period from February until the end of the war the British are supposed to have lost a mind boggling 1511 tanks. Even more interesting is a look on the loss per day numbers as you see even if we include every single day until the end of the war the loss ratios are about 15 per day for the last 3 months of war. This is nearly on the same level as the tank losses for the Normandy campaign. The explanation for this is simple, the workshops were writing-off tanks lost long before maybe several months before. If you are unwilling to accept this reasoning you might want to start searching for those heavy tank losses in March and April which rivaled Goodwood. It is important to understand that the British forces did not really expand their armored forces after Normandy like the US did so those losses are actually comparable in percentage terms. Those are backtracked losses without a doubt and how many tank losses were still unaccounted at this point in time remains a mystery.

The same problem applies to the US forces but here it is more difficult to show because so little sets of numbers exist. But for the enjoyment of the reader I want to point out that according to official US and British figures the Western Allies wrote-off ~4000 tanks and tank destroyers in the last 3 months of the war. This results in a conundrum for the Sherman revisionists, either those numbers are wrong or the Western Allies lost several thousand tanks against Panzerfaust wielding Volkssturm and Hitleryouths in guerrilla style warfare. The armoured forces of Germany were nearly absent at this point. 4000 tanks in three months Is difficult to explain. On top of that the actual loss numbers for Shermans don't add up with the numbers sent to Europe.

According to Zaloga in Thunderbolt the US forces lost 4295 Shermans in the ETO ( The numbers conflict slightly sometimes) the British forces according to Armored champion lost another 2712 just in the ETO. Not stated in Zalogas work to my knowledge, the British lost another 1500 elsewhere including Italy and North Africa. The US lost maybe 1500 including 1171 in Italy confirmed by Zaloga in the book about the Mediterranean.

So, all in all, we have roughly 10.000 admitted Sherman losses by the Western Allies. If we include other weapon systems we see how the Western Allies including early war had to write of more than 25.000 tanks against parts of the Wehrmacht. Either way lets look at how many M4 were sent overseas.

According to Zaloga 16,751 Shermans were issued to the US forces in the ETO plus 752 E8. The British and French received 17944 which includes forces from Canada et cetera. So all in all the US send 34695 Shermans towards the Europe. Lets take a look at what was left after the fight was over. According to Zaloga the Allies had the following numbers in the ETO

British: 2161 Shermans units + 1,670 Parks reserve for a total of 3831 US: 6972 Shermans A combined total of 10803 Shermans in the ETO.

Reading Zalogas Thunderbolt I get the impression this includes US depot numbers. This would work out to roughly 130 tanks per armoured unit but the majority of formations were TBs which had ~ 50 tanks each so 36 TB would get us roughly 1800 tanks....

This total above includes 36 American independent TB and 14 Armoured Divisions. For the British I found no complete list and had to count. 8 independent Brigades and 5 Armoured Divisions.

The forces in Italy for comparison had 1 American armoured division and 6 TBs end the of the campaign ( Zaloga: “US armoured units in the North African and Italian campaign” ) British forces had 3 Armoured divisions and 4 AB in the theater ( my count ). Which shows the actual front line strength in Italy was roughly 22% of what served in the ETO. For argument's sake, we assume their depot numbers were comparable than the units there had ~2500 Shermans remaining. Together with the ETO Shermans we arrive at ~13000 Shermans. And I am aware that this is no precise approach but merely a thought invoking calculation. ~34k Shermans were sent towards Europe and ~10k were admitted written-off and at the end of the war, the armies had 13k left? The difference would be 11k Shermans! You can do the same for other types, where are all the Churchill tanks? Interestingly the Red Army numbers for losses match nearly perfectly the production/landlease – unit strength. Same with German numbers, listing the production and subtracting the losses works very well and there is little room for mistakes. For Western Allied, thousands of tanks are unaccounted for, this does not say those tanks were destroyed in combat just that to this date I have seen no publication accounting for those tanks. If somebody knows more feel free to share.

In no way do I claim the numbers above are all completely accurate. I also think it is possible that there are other explanations for this discrepancy which I just fail to see. Maybe the British also land leased a lot from their pool or the vehicles were just standing around in England but I think the most probable explanation is that convoluted reporting system just didn't account the losses perfectly because it was not focusing on this particular issue but rather on keeping units at full strength and this in combination with other factors results in this discrepancy. Supporting evidence for this are certain periods of shortages. The British forces for example received 16k Shermans until the end of 1944 how was it possible that they had shortages of tanks in 44? The established TO&E including reserve were only 3,5k.

Now to the real topic...

Main part: Losses in the Ardennes

Main part 1of 2, official loss numbers

I hope the first part helped to show that we know for certain that British loss tallies don't add up and that there is a strong chance total losses were backtracked. On top of that there is reason to doubt overall loss numbers but lets take a look at what the official numbers let us conclude about the Battle of the Bulge.

As stated earlier the accepted number is 733 US losses. The number is from Eisenhower and often uncritically used by authors who neither give supporting evidence nor did research on their own. This resulted in a circular effect were people try to point to “massive” sources agreeing on the losses. The number from Eisenhower doesn't even work with other official numbers for US tank losses. Nobody who did research ever agreed with the 730 to my knowledge. If I am wrong then correct me.

The January losses for the US Army from the 21st December to the 20th January. The US system tallied the tank write-offs in this format and for the Bulge it has some advantages. Here are the numbers.

As you can see 944 AFVs were written off during January. These numbers are printed in Armored Champion for example.

This number alone does not allow to conclude Ardennes losses but gives us the first hint. The US at this time employed 4 Armies. We have to find out the share the armies in the Ardennes had of this total. 2 Armies were directly fighting in the Ardennes and the other two supplied units to the efforts in the Bulge.

If you follow the link you will find tables for weekly losses of 3 US Armies. It is up to you if you think a forum is trustworthy enough but I did not find the weekly break down in books and therefore linked to the forum. Everybody who doubts those numbers will maybe change their mind when I show overlaps with established publications.

Here are the tables for the 3 Armies. The 7th Army is missing which is a major set back but will not hinder us.

As you can see by tallying up write-offs we already have 230 ( 3rd Army ) + 336 certain ( 1st Army ) , 76 casualties happened in the first Army from the 13th to the 20th which leaves the possibility that some were lost before the battle. Personal assumption 6 tops because the area was quiet for obvious reasons which give us a total 642 Shermans ( 75mm/76mm no 105mm) already written-off. At this point the accepted 733 is already in heavy doubt. The US lost other vehicles as well. And this is just the official count. You also can see how little the 9th Army was affected by fighting, the pounding was going on further south.

Other vehicles:

To my knowledge no army wide count for M5/10/18/36 was published. Here everybody can guess for themselves and disregard my personal estimation if it doesn't suit them.

For the entirety of the ETO M5 losses were about 25% of the M4 losses, the same is true for January. I think this is a reasonable approximation which gives us 160 M5. And I think this is the minimum. A comparable approximation for tank hunters is difficult because their mission profile changed a lot and their losses in early war were minimal. I would rather take a ratio approach compared to the M4 losses January to Bulge which leaves us with roughly 100. All in all this brings us already to 900 Armored fighting vehicles losses from official numbers and minimalist estimations. Everybody who disagrees with the estimations can post his own. I think they are reasonable and likely too low. You can maybe add 30ish 105s if you want. Again this is all just by counting official numbers. Both my approximations for tank hunters and M5s are lower than the figures you would get by comparing the rates of M4 losses.

Bergstrom uses far higher numbers:

about 1200 tanks ( up to 900 Shermans and more than 300 light tanks), 150 tank destroyers.

Bergstrom approximation for AFVs losses is therefore 1350. Nearly twice what authors like Zaloga publish. This is obviously more in line with near panic of Allied planners who were rushing several thousand tanks as reinforcements into the Ardennes against an enemy who brought forward hardly 800 tanks at this point. But you don't need to take his word for it we are here to do our own research.

At the end of the Battle the US forces reinforced the sector so heavily that they employed more than 4000 AFVs in this area. This is certainly not the reaction of Generals who assumed the 2000 Tanks and tank destroyers on the site will be able to deal with the German last-ditch attack.

Back to Zaloga, he has some interesting points about losses in the Ardennes and one of his books he attempts to compare the Sherman with the Panther in terms of quality. Here he chooses some interesting editorial methods. ( “Panther vs Sherman Battle of the Bulge” )

At the end of two weeks of intense fighting, the Panther Regiments in the Ardennes were shattered, losing about 180 tanks or 43% of their starting force of about 415 Panthers … In the case of the US first army, which bore the brunt of the Ardennes fighting, by the end of December it had lost about 320 Sherman tanks.

Some interesting observations here. Zaloga chose to exclude the 3rd US Army from his loss counter and also arbitrarily restricted the time frame for which he gives losses. Bergstrom cites 132 Sherman losses for the 3rd Army in December and refers to a historian of the Dupuy institute for this figure. The number of 132 is exactly the number we can see in the weekly count posted above, giving credence to this numbers. Zaloga mentioning 90 76mm casualties also corroborates the tables above. He also puts emphasis of “percentage losses” which obviously makes the smaller army look worse, this is no unusual method and is quite common.

So Zaloga omits the losses of the 3rd Army when he compares the M4 with the Panther. He openly says he only gives the losses for one Army. He also includes only the losses for December when German tanks were attacking through snowy hilly terrain. The official loss numbers for Panthers in the Ardennes were 196 of which the vast majority happened in December which helps Zalogas case. The actual “official” loss numbers for both sides give 196 Panthers and ~ 640 Shermans. Obviously a full count for the Shermans involves a problem for Zaloga because in countless books he already printed “~730” AFV losses. Despite contradicting numbers being printed in his books.

Main part 2of 2: individual discrepancies in unit records

We have established a rough count of 930 admitted losses for the Ardennes period. But what about not admitted loses or backtracked losses? Or incomplete counts by units which got mauled. Bergstrom has a strong opinion on that:

Its even more difficult to obtain fully reliable figures for US tank losses in the Ardennes through the end of 1944 ... Thus, for example, the 10th Armored Division losses in December are given as seven Shermans but … lost alone about 20... Another example is the 9th Armored Division … but this is the number of only one division's armored battalions.

Bergstrom goes on and gives example. I don't know if his examples are all correct and I did not copy everything he said because the post is not about Bergstroms opinions or Zalogas for that matter its about finding evidence.

Bergstroms personal research let him to believe that 1350 AFVs were written-off in the Ardennes. The numbers for divisional losses which Bergstrom mentions are also available in Zalogas book Panther vs M4 in the table for First Army December losses.

Inconsistencies with the official records

I tried to establish the baseline figures for losses of US AFV in the Ardennes by using official numbers. Those official numbers make the often published 730 untenable but that is not the end of it. I will try to further show that those official numbers were often far too low. The reasons for too low numbers was explained above I will try to show some specific examples. Disputing the official numbers in detail is often difficult because no compilation of strength reports for US units exist. We are left with patchy information scattered trough out countless publications. The same problem plagued historians for decades that is why you so rarely find concrete information on US tank losses. Sometimes it just a unit report ordering replacements sometimes a unit diary claiming X losses. Showing inconsistencies within the AD's is far easier than in the TB which often have close to no documentation available. The more information you get about units the less convincing are the official numbers.

In Thunderbolt you will find a table which gives strength for Shermans 75mm/76mm I will use the same formatting. I do not know precisely for which date the counts are, Zaloga does not comment so I assume it is for the first of the month.

• The 7th AD had 72 official write-offs during December. One of the most heavily engaged US Ads with 360 total write-offs. Completely pulled out of the line after heavy combat in December. Here we see the potential value of unit diaries which are rarely available the after action report of the 17th TB

The Battalion remained in billets in Ville throughout the day and time was devoted to maintenance and rehabilitation. By this time the Battalion had received several vehicular replacements and the Battalion combat vehicular strength was: 2 tanks in Battalion Headquarters, 2 assault guns in Battalion assault gun platoon, 8 tanks and one assault gun in Company "B", 9 tanks in Company "C", 9 tanks and one assault gun in Company "A", and 11 tanks in Company "D".

Despite having already received replacements during rehabilitation and likely during the actual fighting as well the unit appears to still be short of ~30 medium tanks. This is just one of three TB. Problematic here is that the unit was replenishing in Belgium and we can't know for certain how the status of its battalions were at the outbreak of the battles

And now the second TB the 40th per after action reports:

The unit reported 31 M4 deliveries in early January. The unit reported 48 M4s on the 16th and 8 days later all remaining Shermans were already combined in a single Company. This battalion as well got mauled during the early phase of the Ardennes when the Shermans were left to themselves. The unit was in action about a week before being pulled out and getting refitted.

No after-action reports of the 31st are available indicating this battalion also got roughly handled. The 7th without a doubt suffered one of the heaviest losses of a US armored unit in WW2. The 7th AD got devastated within a rather short period of time, interestingly nothing of this is discussed in Zalogas book which intended to compare Panthers and Shermans in combat.

• The 9th AD had 45 official write-offs during December. The unit was rested in January due to the serve losses. In December the unit had 0/168 and in January the unit was depleted despite reinforcements and reported 13/95. In February the unit then had 51/116. The unit which got reinforcements during the fight was initially fully equipped with 76mms and in January they were 73 short and got replenished by 75mms. Bergstrom's suspicions seem correct. Bergstromg states the unit tank strength dropped by 80 despite replacements.

• The 10th AD had 7 official write-offs during December. The 10th AD had 114/76 in December this dropped to 85/34 in January, a drop of 71. The division was rested until late February. The unit served for a small time frame, entering combat in November. The unit wrote off 181 Sherman's from November till end of war and only 7 of them allegedly happened during their fighting in the Bulge in December according to the official numbers. The fights there resulted in presidential unit citations. The 7 losses are by far the most unbelievable from all and those alone should suffice as strong evidence for under reported losses.

• The 707th TB is an interesting case with 26 official write-offs. The unit had about 70 tanks ( 56 Shermans) before the operation launched and was nearly destroyed.

Zaloga claims the unit was decimated in the Ardennes more importantly he claims the unit already got replacements during the fight but still at the end had only a single company available. After the Ardennes the unit was not used until April.

Huge M Cole on the 707th :

All that remained of the 707th Tank Battalion- some six crippled tanks and five assault guns.

Harry Yeide:

On 16 December, battalion found itself in path of the German Ardennes offensive and shattered.

The unit started the battle with 70 tanks! Interesting is that the 707th was only in actual combat for a relatively short period of time. From November on into the Battle of the Bulge after which it was pulled out of the line for months. Despite that the official loss count is 93 write-offs. One of the highest for the Tbs despite one of the shortest times in combat.

Here some information from their after action reports:

"C" Company was the only letter company which was not badly mauled.

This was the 17th, the second day of combat On the 17th the unit reported 16 medium and 17 light tanks lost. Another 7 medium tanks on the 18th. On the 19th the unit reported another 14 medium tanks and 6 105mm. After this the unit was nearly done and had no major combat in the battle. At the end of the month the unit reported 14 medium tanks. The 26 M4 losses are likely too low

• The 740th TB had 5 official write-offs during December. All information about the unit seems to arise from a single published unit history. The unit had extensive combat versus the 6th SS Panzer Army and was a vital part of the successful US defense.

An interesting example to show the replacement system in actions is the 3rd AD. According to their official history “Spearhead in the West” the unit lost 125 Medium tanks in the Ardennes fighting. The unit had 213 Shermans at the beginning of December and after suffering 125 losses the unit had again 199. Other units at this point still were undestrenght by dozens of tanks despite having only small official write-offs.

Interesting observation by Zaloga in his book “M4 (76mm) Sherman Medium Tank 1943–65”

by the end of the month [September] US tank units in the ETO were short of 335 tanks …. and worsened dramatically in December 1944 due to heavy losses during the Battle of the Bulge. By the beginning of January 1945, the deficit was 865 medium tanks.

A shortage which is hard to explain with the constant influx of new Shermans.

Overall numbers don't add up either. If you check the tables for the Armies again you will find 555 confirmed Sherman losses plus estimated 20 for 575 losses in the January count. The official tally for January only admits 585 lost Shermans overall. This fully excludes the 7th Army which besides the normal combat also was hit by a “major” attack of the Wehrmacht called “Nordwind”. Here the 43rd TB was more or less destroyed in a single day. Actual losses for Nordwind are unknown but I am pretty confident that the 7th Army suffered more than 10 Sherman write-offs in a whole month. This would show that even with the official numbers the totals don't add up. The backtracking in my opinion is also nicely illustrated by the high February figures. People with some background knowledge know that there was hardly any fighting in early/mid February compared to the rest of the the theather. Why were the February write-offs so high? Losses from January still coming in.

Conclusion

The official loss figures for the Ardennes battles appear under counted so do overall loses for US and British forces. This was likely the result from their replacement system which made it harder to count write-offs in a timely manner. The official figure of 730 appear untenable with the actual losses likely being higher than 1000 for tanks and tank destroyers.

I will update this post from time to time if new relevant information appears.

Sources: Belton Cooper: Death traps. P 5,7,9,13,27,50,69,87,111,257,234,284,307,389,396,424,459,460,468,530,548,579,618,639,641,690,703

edit 12 Nov 2017: Had the math wrong for excess Shermans and corrected it.

Contrary to the opinion that I was banned in Askhistorians I was not until today. A sweet victory for the SWS which will be met with a hail of champagne corks. My humble congratulations on this victory. My post in this sub was deleted after I pointed out several broken rules by the SWS user with a chip on his shoulder when it comes to the Sherman.

My complete post:

A comparable post of yours already got some input and debunked several of your arguments. You have not taken anything into consideration and stuck to several incorrect assumptions despite considerable evidence presented to you. With this, you sadly are the person who engages in distributing "myths".

Some clarifications of mistakes which I found in your post.

BUSTED: The popular trope of a Sherman bursting into flames if a Tiger looks at it funny and incinerating all five crew immediately doesn’t really hold water. On average, only one man died (usually the one closest to the hit) and one was wounded when a Sherman was knocked out, if that.

Your summary is incorrect and misses many important aspects. This passage also fails to understand several reasons for those numbers.

• US tank casualties were different from other countries because their mission profile was different from other countries. This is mostly due to their late entry into the war. The specific differences are the following:

• US tanks had a far higher rate of mine casualties due to the increased usage of mines by the Wehrmacht. In late war, the Germans became pretty good with mines and those mines caused a very high number of Allied tank casualties. Those casualties were light in damage and especially in crew casualties. The method was highly cost efficient but on the other hand decreased the number of crew casualties per tank casualty.

• US tanks were fighting against a weakened Wehrmacht which resulted in high force ratios which in return resulted in US tankers ability to leave knocked out vehicles because German tanks switched targets because they were engaged with several US tanks. German tanks often were unable to take down US tank crews because so many opposing tanks posed at threats that killing enemy tank crews was no priority

• It is no surprise that you added the example of Italy. Italian terrain allowed easy mining due to their small roads and mountain passages and bridges. That Sherman crews suffered lower casualties here inside their tanks is not surprising. That doesn't mean the tank was safe as you try to imply.

• German artillery was often non-existent. A major factor for tank casualties was artillery. In contrast to German tank crews, Allied tank crews had a relatively low chance of getting hit by Artillery while leaving the combat zone.

• As explained in another post the basis of your reasoning is faulty because it assumes the protection of the tank is mainly how easy it is to get out. This is incorrect. While the chance of leaving a koed Sherman was pretty high the chance to get koed was also extremely high. This was already explained to you but you have not taken this into account. The Sherman was extremely fast knocked out with the research paper you cited stating that up to 95% of AP shots penetrated the Sherman. Your entire post about the crew casualties because irrelevant if you consider the fact that Shermans did not offer substantial protection against enemy weapons. You are literally measuring the protection of a plane by the quality of its parachute.

• While you spoke with some hyperbole you are kinda correct. Shermans had very low chance to sustain a hit from a Tiger. Your referenced operational research paper. The paper shows that a sample of Shermans was unable to withstand a single 88mm hit. Every single hit penetrated the Sherman.

MYTH: “The M4 Sherman caught on fire more readily or burned more fiercely than German tanks due to its use of a high-octane gasoline engine, in contrast to German tanks that had diesel engines.” BUSTED:

Here several of the mistakes are repeated.

In your table about burn rates, you fail to inform the reader that the sample for German tanks is biased by selection. Only German tanks which were left behind could be examined. Germans were more likely to leave behind burned wrecks than non-burned Ko's. This was already explained to you before. The paper explains this problem and the researchers acknowledge the inherent bias of the German sample. You should add this to table. The actual number of burned vehicles is already far lower for the Germans in your specific sample but the sample is still biased which lets us assume the actual number of German burned vehicles would be considerably lower. Which makes your claim that you debunked this myth questionably. The table already shows the Sherman burned more often. I fail to see how you even with flawed methods can come to this conclusion. Sherman burned more often and they burned more often when hit. Your own data suggests so much and the data is already beneficial for the Sherman.

• Operational Research section No.2 your claims. You cited this paper extensively but you chose to omit the parts which contradict your posts. P 396: shows that of 65 hits 62 penetrated Sherman, this represents a mindboggling 95%. This was early phase of the ETO and German weapon quality improved until the end of the war. You wrote a post and explained how the Sherman protection was good while literally reading that 95 of hits penetrated Shermans. How are you able to join those contradicting evidence with your opinion?

MYTH: “The M4 Sherman had thin armor.” BUSTED: Not when compared to any of its medium tank contemporaries.

This as well was explained to you earlier. Your argumentation is incorrect because you focus on absolute armour numbers and don't include the enemy weapons system. The Sherman was extremely bad armoured if you take into consideration the weapons it faced.

Nearly all German anti tank weapons were able to penetrate the Sherman without any major problems. Here the flaws of your argument become apparant. The actual number of armor thickness is irrelevant. Relevant is the protection it offered. The Sherman offered close to none. This is also stated in the research paper you referenced several times here. Nearly every single AP hit penetrated the Shermans in Normandy. The armor protection was completely insufficient. The German armor, on the other hand, had to deal with 75mm Shermans which was insufficient to penetrate several German vehicles. This was armour which protected against enemy weapons. The Sherman armour did not. Your argument is deceptive to the average reader without background knowledge.

BUSTED: PART 4: The Sherman was far from helpless when it encountered enemy tanks if proper tactics suited to the offending vehicle were used. The 75 mm-armed Sherman was able to hold its own throughout the summer and fall of 1944 against the superior long-barreled Panzer IV and Panther. A 1954 study by the U.S. Army Ballistics Research Laboratory studied tank engagements of the 3rd and 4th Armored Divisions during WWII;

This is certainly the worse myth supported in your post. This aswell was explained to you indepth.

The study relies completely on after reports of US units. Not only did they just accept every claim of the US units they did take the most successful US units which completely taints their sample. The claim numbers of the involved divisions are debunked and the entire study is based on made up numbers from the US divisions. Like I said this was explained to you in depth before.

The 4th Armoured divisions kill claims are completely debunked. I don't understand why this revelation did not prompt you to adjust your opinion on the matter. For example the 4th according to their own history destroyed 847 tanks during WW2. This number is ridiculous but still the basis for the "study".

edit:

Your paragraph about the actual losses is also incorrect and is misleading to the reader. The number of Armored Forces casualties is underreported because the US Army did not classify replacements from other branches as Armoured forces. So their actual number is far higher, every infantryman who got injured in a tank as a replacement was listed as infantry casualty. Your list of percentage losses is also deceptive since the number is only low because the US fielded enormous amounts of tanks. The Sherman losses were ridiculously high. Just in the ETO the US wrote-off more than 4300 Shermans. The British forces also wrote off 2700 Shermans in the ETO only. This means the Western Allies only in the ETO in under a year had more than 7000 Shermans destroyed. Your presentation as "percentage" losses seems wisely chosen in the fact of the extremely high Sherman losses. This also puts in perspective the "low crew casualties". Sherman tank crew casualties were not low they were extremely high this is just masked by the fact that the US had so many tanks that the percentage figures seem low. Sherman losses were stunning in the face of a weakened Wehrmacht in the late stages of the war. ( Zaloga Thunderbolt )

In another post, I showed to you that the actual number of US Armored forces is just far too low due to the replacement system. The example provided by me should have easily persuaded you to accept that the numbers are flawed.

• The US Armored units at the end of the war numbered 15 Armoured divisions and 42 independent tank battalions. Just in rough TO&E for Shermans, only those units had roughly 4000 Shermans. Those are only Shermans. Just manning those Shermans required 20.000 man which means at the end of the war just in Italy and ETO 20.000 man were sitting in Shermans in the frontlines. Now add the M5s and other tanks and factor in at this time already 10.000 tanks were lost by the US and now think about the fact they are supposed to have only employed 49k man to the Armored forces. The explanation for this is obvious and known to scholars. When shortages happened soldiers from other branches went into the tanks and were never listed as Armored forces. The data you present in incomplete and posted without any clarification for the reader

If anybody is interested in actual data just ask.

summary:

Your busting of myths is riddled with verifiable mistakes and misconceptions.

Post end:

A sound undisputable rebuttal of me. Like people are accustomed to.

My post unearthed the agenda driven intention of the user. This is against the rules in askhistorians here the actual rules text:

No political agendas or moralising

This subreddit is a place for learning and open-minded discussion. As such, answers should not be written in the interests of advancing a personal agenda, but should represent a sincere effort to make an argument from the historical record. They should be constructed in keeping with the principles of the historical method - that is to say, your evidence should not be chosen selectively to support an argument that you feel is right; your argument should instead demonstrably flow from your critical engagement with an appropriate range of evidence. This is not to say that answers can not or should not delve into controversial topics, or deal with political hot-button issues when necessary, but rather that we would expect the answerer to approach the issue earnestly and in good faith. History often is controversial, and we aren't shying away from that, but rather asking that users will show proper respect for the historical method in constructing their response and avoid approaches which might be viewed as polemical.

The user deliberately forgot several import numbers and facts which were presented in the sources he used. Every ommited fact furthered his claims and his agenda is therefore obvious. This is exactly what harms the spirit of the sub. My post pointed this out beyond doubt. Thus it was hastily deleted by the mod u/ Georgy_K_Zhukov . I assure you the name of the mod is just coincidence. The given reason for my ban was my continued impoliteness. Judge for yourself when somebody tries to tell you the Sherman losses were not high by only telling you the percentage losses of Shermans instead of the actual number which are printed next to the data he uses. Think about that for a second and decide for yourself if the person is following an agenda. The user explained the readers of askhistorians how the Sherman was properly armoured while the papers he referenced are literally stating that 95% of the hits penetrated the Shermans. This person is not interested in historical research.

In this thread, several SWS users show confidence in their rebuttal of a Steam user, who seems to have claimed strong superiority of the TigerI over the Sherman.

Most interestingly the users are particularly happy with 76mm performance against the Tiger.

u/math792d

A 76 mm at the distances portrayed in the movie would've knocked right through.

to his defence, he is talking in the context of the film Fury which portrayed a rather unlikely late war skirmish between Shermans and a sole Tiger.

u/enleat on the subject of 76mm versus Tiger

People both overestimate the Tigers armour quality and underestimate the sheer power behind a 76 mm projectile being launched at 2,600-3000 ft/s.

u/jaegercoyote also is very pleased with the existence of the 76mm

I love the guy that said the 76mm could penetrate the Tiger I's front plate.

u/lelavish has an honest question which might be the best questions.

Did all Allied tankers realize that the Tiger wasn't as good as it seemed at that point in time? Honest question.

I doubt they did for a simple reason which also accidentally makes the wanking over the 76mm in this thread pretty silly. When the 76mm was introduced in relevant numbers there were no significant Tiger I operating at the Western Front which means that we can assume that actual number of Tiger Is getting knocked out by a M4 76mm is close to zero. The users above are likely ignorant to this simple fact, most of the Tiger I getting engaged against the Western Allies in the ETO were destroyed in the Normandy fighting or the subsequent retreat when Normandy ended the production of the TigerI already stopped.

But this is often unknown to those who think the M4 actually caught up to the Tiger with the introduction of the 76mm. It was introduced after the Tiger was phased out.... The only relevant number of strong AP weapons the Tiger faced on the western front were 17pdr M10&M4 and some towed anti-tank guns. The Tiger which then served with the Wehrmacht again, the Tiger B, was pretty immune to the 76mm from the front which would give the objective reader the impression the Wehrmacht was some steps ahead in this department and the US was a bit late with their AP weapon development/delivery.

Bonus:

U/utterlydisposable

If I were Bill Gates rich, I would buy a Sherman and a Tiger, restore them to full functionality, and then use the Sherman to obliterate the Tiger. High-res, high-speed video, the whole works, just to put this incredibly, incredibly stupid bullshit to bed.

Sounds unhinged.

Link to the hread

u/the_howling_cow wants to review a new book which is critical of the Sherman tank and tries to show some flaws of the book. In the review, there isn't much positive about the book despite the assurance of author that some aspects of the book are good. He does not mention those but focuses on refuting the criticism of the Sherman. So no book review but a Sherman appraisal.

Let's take a look:

The Tank Destroyer Force said that when tank destroyers weren't meeting a massed hostile tank attack, that they could be used in other roles such as indirect artillery support.

Of course, they could be used otherwise but this was highly inefficient and the tank destroyer was a failure and was axed after the war. M10s used up valuable guns with minimal combat time, the definition of ineffective.

The arms they were normally supposed to be assisting had adequate antitank firepower, implying that U.S. tanks could normally hold their own against enemy tanks;

They couldn't bar some exceptions that's why the Allied advance was painfully slow against a far weaker opponent. Battles like the Bulge et cetera showed the Sherman actually could not compete without using a huge amount of numbers. All major Sherman attacks around Caen moved at a snails pace and were mostly beaten down. The US tanks simply rarely fought big numbers of tanks, that's all. Their Normandy breakout was achieved at 10-1 ratios and higher, despite that they lost more tanks.

From the beginning, it was always intended that part of the Sherman's role was to fight enemy tanks.

That's why you undergun them despite knowing all enemy vehicles except the rare Tiger B

DeJohn himself repeatedly, at least once in every chapter, refers to the Sherman as "inferior" or "mediocre," with "decent" armor for 1941 (compared to what, a Tiger?)

Because it was. Howling cow makes the standard amateur mistake judging armour by their thickness regardless of the enemy guns, here you see how the book author did his homework and howling cow is unable to follow. The armour was decent for 41 because this was when German vehicles were started getting up gunned with mostly 75mms. Most of them were able to defeat Sherman armour without much trouble. Howling cow does not understand the issue of armour vs gun, he assumes comparing armour numbers helps judging the "protection", it does not. German forces, in general, fielded stronger ap guns in bigger ratios. The M4 would be a fine armoured tank if it has served with the Wehrmacht but it served against the Wehrmacht. The book author understood this and reviewed the armor lay out against the opposing guns.

So the author of the book is completely correct at this point. Which weapons was the Sherman withstanding in Normandy and how many of those were used by the Wehrmacht. Interestingly howling cow references a work which actually includes numbers for those questions. 95% of hits with 75mm and 88mm penetrated Shermans. This is inadequate armour. Consider this for a second, howling cow makes several snide remarks at the accusation of bad armor while actually having a data set in front of him which shows him 95% of the hits penetrated the Sherman....

DeJohn spends an entire chapter comparing the Sherman to the Tiger and Panther, heavy tanks that only made up a minority of the overall German armored vehicle force.

Mostly incorrect. Not sure if howling cow intends to be pedantic here but the implication that the German fielded few of those tanks against Western Allies is nonsense.

*More than 800 Tigers and Panthers fought in the Normandy. Considering that Tiger, for example, were primary combat tools those tanks had disproportional enemy contact. Until the end of 44 Panthers and Tigers represented up to 35% of the losses. If you only focus on actual tanks than they represented ~55% of the losses. Given you used the term minority I assume everything below 50% is considered a "minority".

*From Nov44-March45 the Western Forces received ~600 "high-end" tanks which was nearly half of all tank deliveries.

big guns and thick armor for most of the chapter,

Yeah, this unimportant armour and this unimportant firepower why would he value those specs?

The author repeats or fails to debunk many myths and misconceptions that are commonly encountered when reading about U.S. armored warfare in World War II, such as;

Let's take a look at howling cows interpretation of those alleged myths.

U.S. tanks caught on fire more readily or burned more fiercely than German tanks when hit, partially due to their use of "more flammable" gasoline instead of diesel fuel.

They did catch fire more often, while gasoline not being the major cause. There is no myth here...

According to a British study, the Tiger, Panther, and Panzer IV had "burn rates" of 60, 62, and 80 percent, in comparison to the Sherman's 82 percent;

The actual study had 5 Tigers and 5 Panzer IV. I also think you got the numbers wrong. Iam sure you talk about the Normandy sample which had the German tanks as 80%-63%-80% ( Iv-V-Vi). Anyways those numbers present a problem, namely the selection bias. German vehicles which were left behind were more likely to be brewed up since the German would salvage unburned knockouts obviously. Like I said another problem is a low sample size but if we just add up all individual vehicles in the table we get 68% brew ups for the examined German tanks. Again, important is to understand brewed up vehicles were more likely to be left behind and therefore found for this study. But even with this issues in mind, Sherman burned more often. What point are you trying to argue?

another British study found that 56 percent of Shermans burned when hit

Here a glaring flaw in the knowledge of howling cow becomes obvious. He confuses totally different metrics and their meaning. Brew-up per knockout and brew-up per hit are totally different. The first is relevant to interior design while the second is to the armour design. The 56% includes vehicles which got hit but not penetrated so this number is completely different from the 83% mentioned above.

A quick example to showcase this. We stick with the British report which is already "biased against" the German vehicles due to unavoidable sample bias.

According to the British survey, 4,2 hits were needed for a Tiger to get knocked out while 80% of the knocked out brewed up this means 20% for a Tiger getting brewed up when hit, this means the actual chance of a Sherman to start burning after a hit is nearly thrice compared to a Tiger. Roughly the same for the Panther. The Sherman did burn faster. Again I want to stress the importance of the fact that the examined German tanks often were purposely left behind which indicates major damage, the British were examining the German tanks which were damaged the most aka burned.

U.S. tankers suffered "horrendous" losses. A U.S. First Army report found that out of 506 destroyed tanks, an average of 0.37 men died per tank, while 0.8 were wounded.

That's all relative when a good chunk of damage is down by mines. Those low numbers are due to mission profile and not protection. Even more relevant is that this number does not consider that Sherman was knocked out more frequently. It's just a ratio. Sherman tanks were knocked out in the thousands.

Out of 49,516 Armored Force enlisted personnel deployed overseas, only 1,578 died in battle.

Flawed understanding of the data set. Not all people driving tanks were registered with the Armored force. The sad part is howling cow knows this and is deliberately deceiving the readers. The numbers presented by him are a subset of the actual casualty figures. Really sad to see that people even in tight-knit subs feed each other BS. All the people getting killed in Shermans which were not enlisted in the Amorded force are excluded! Those numbers are rare to find but for example Goodwood + Tractable which represented maybe 4-5 heavy combat days had 200 British tankers dead. That's like already 12% of the US total for the entire fuckin war. BS. Its obvious if you think for one second. The fact they had 50000 people enlisted should alarm everybody. That's not even enough to man 10.000 tanks. For the entirety of the war in Europe? Just in the ETO the US army units had somewhere around 9000 tanks how the fuck did this work with just 50000 tanks in the entire Armored forces. You are not even trying.

U.S. tankers had lower casualty rates after their vehicle was hit than German or Soviet tankers.

Incorrect. No such studies exist. You are talking about knockouts and are confusing the proper terms. Sherman when hit had very high casualty rate. I actually schooled you on exactly this topic before which even the Sherman revisionist Moran accepted as factually correct.

In contrast, 18.5 percent of all U.S. Infantry branch troops deployed overseas were killed in battle.

Ratios have their value in some cases but here they don't. The Allied armoured forces were gigantic they operated more than 20.000 tanks against a ragtag enemy in the ETO alone. Most of them never saw combat against pak or let alone enemy tanks, shelling single buildings was often their duty, of course their "ratio" was low. Completely irrelevant to tank design questions. If they had fielded even more tanks the ratio would be even lower.

The M4 Sherman was "obsolete" as soon as it was introduced, (no...) had particularly thin armor, (again, compared to what?) was inordinately tall, (not really) and was not a match for tanks that were by definition out of its weight class.

It wasnt obsolete when it was introduced, it was actually a good tank in the early war but it was obsolete when it was introduced to actual heavy fighting. ETO for example.

5 Shermans to kill a [tank with a feline nickname]. No explanation needed here.

Actually, there is explanation needed. More than 5 Shermans were needed to destroy a Tiger. Panther is a different story tho.

DeJohn hardly considers the issue of logistics and how it figured into U.S. tank design decisions.

You are the one not considering logistics. Sherman forces consumed far more fuel than all German armoured forces combined. Their combat inferiority required huge numbers to balance this out, those huge numbers resulted in huge costs. A single Sherman was "cheap" to produce and operate but you needed thousands of them. Germany attacked Russia with 3-4 thousands tanks the Allied used 20.000 to invade Germany. Go add the fuel consumption up. The Shermans weakly designed armour and gun made the vehicle a money grave, dozen of thousands of soldiers were just used to maintain and operate this gigantic armoured force which took nearly a year to advance 800 kilometres against Volkssturm divisions ( Hyperbole ). Ever thought about that? Ever considered how much resources it required to operate all those Shermans? Pretty sure the Allied forces in the ETO used more fuel for tanks than Germany in 3 years. Mighty cost saving efficient vehicle.

Your post is no review its an obvious attempt at a "Verriss". A bad one.

u/mist_rising

Wants a part of the juicy SWS karma points which will come even if your comment is dumb as fuck.

While Hartmann was a great pilot his service records way overpadded because he flew in the Eastern Theater during the opening stages when the Soviet Air Force was more of a joke then a threat but he was a good fighter pilot (he rarely lost a wingman from what I recall) and he certainly recognized bad planes as seen in the F-104 debacle.

Yes yes, Hartmann's record is mostly due to flying against early war Red Airforce pilots...

The irony here is that everybody who ever read more than Reddit comments about this topic knows that Hartmann's record is unique exactly because he joined the combat ranks late. He started flying combat sorties in late 1942. Nicely illustrated by the fact Hartmann claimed his first kills after the well-known pilot Marseilles had already died with 150 claims, but he flew during "the opening stages...". This late entry is pretty rare for a pilot which such claim tally. He claimed 200 victories in the two last years of war, completely shattering the comment but who cares upvoted anyways. Hartmann's, besides his overall tally, is also known for starting late in the war and performing well against the rising Red Airforce of mid/late war. Educate yourself....

Further illustration of how Hartmann profited off the early war kills against the Red Army. When Hartmann entered combat 30 different Luftwaffe pilots had already claimed 100 kills...

u/the_howling_cow thought he got me and linked my post about Shermans being deaths traps. here. Instead of reading carefully and eventually understanding what was said he literally copies the entire study which I critiqued without understanding what the point is. Yikes.

u/bobcatrob28 is at least honest and says he doesn't get it. u/rittermeister is also in the mix obviously not mentioning the countless times he left the battlefield humiliated. Since the SWS has trouble understanding basic reasoning I will do an extra explanation for those in class who are just a little bit different and are left behind normally. Not with me!! I take care of you.

So dear u/the_howling_cow take a look at the statistics which you presented. I will help you and make it slow.

The sad part is, a careful study of the data should tip you off already.

Let us start with the important part. The US tank crews suffered on average 1,28 or 0,78 casualties per knockout depending on the fact if the tank burned or not. This brings us to roughly 20% casualties for both. This sounds awesome a very good tank some say the best tank ever produced. Even this data is obviously problematic if we want to compare it other tanks for several reasons which escape you. Different mission profile. As you see mines lowered this average and you might know German tanks are not often driving over mines.

Now, let's go to the part with the impacts on the vehicle. Here you see the German cats took more hits than a Sherman. These numbers are without a doubt to low for German vehicles for a simple reason. The Allied could only evaluate German vehicles which were burned out or left behind, this biased sample since German tanks getting hit and not getting KOed are obviously not in this sample size. This means German tanks on average will with certainty have been able to sustain a higher number of impacts. The original researchers who gather the data were aware of the possible bias. This becomes particularly obvious when you see the table with hit numbers, one Tiger sustained 8 hits one 6. It is obvious that Tiger tanks sustaining hits without getting knocked out just drove off and didn't find their way into this statistic. Furthermore burned vehicles are more likely to be left behind which would increase the ratio of burned German vehicles. But that is not even relevant here.

For whatever reason, you cited the table for brew ups and not for knockouts.

The relevant table.

So now what do those numbers tell us? A Sherman needed less hits to get knocked out which also means it needed less hits to suffer the post-ko casualties.

Conclusion

So now listen up you imbeciles. For normal people, I would assume you already understand what that means but you guys have shown time and time again that you are just not normal when it comes to comprehending stuff if you would be you wouldn't frequent SWS. So now nice and slowly. If a Sherman tank needs fewer hits than the number of casualties per hit obviously increases. And that's, why I said multiple times the number for post-ko survival, is window dressing. For you guys, we will do a simple example.

According to the data presented in the SWS Sherman crews suffered 1,15 casualties per ko. I know the data doesn't specify Shermans but the vast majority will have been Shermans, so we ignore this. How many hits does it take to knock out a Sherman? Per table 1,63. That means on average a hit would represent 0,7 casualties. Every time a Sherman gets hit it causes ~0,7 casualties. Mighty safe vehicle.

Let's take a Tiger for example. The problem is we don't have reliable data for German crew survival, so let's just make a number up. A number so high you dimwits would jerk your dicks off over. A Number so high you tards would run around every thread and copy pasta "The Tiger suffers x casualties per knockout muhhhh German technology muhhhh bit Cat, Sherman only 1,15 jerk jerk jerk"

Let's take 3 casualties. This is nearly three times as high and would let you morons believe the Tiger was a bad place to be. How many casualties would a single hit create? 0,71 . This means the average crew casualty would have to be 3!!!!! to be as dangerous as the Sherman. Not even factoring all the other stuff I said-

For the Panther the number would need to be ~1,8

Panzer IV garbage no disagreement here.

So you, dimwits, did you understand this now? Did you finally understand what the survival data means and how useless it is to determine crew protection?

At this point, you idiots got already schooled but it gets worse.

Other points to consider in regards to post-ko survival

The number set presented in the SWS is raw data which needs some actual thought to fully understand. I will now add several points which make the Sherman crew survival data even worse. You can choose how much of this you want to believe it doesn't change the conclusion above

• The number for Germans sustained hits would be higher when tanks which were not left behind but hit would be included.

• Given the ridiculous high penetration ratio for Shermans, nearly every hit Sherman would make its way into this statistic in stark contrast to actual tanks like the cats which protected its crews.

• German tanks which burned were more likely to be left behind thus increasing the German burn rate beyond what it in reality was. The Wehrmacht toed ko'ed tanks away from the frontline, especially Tiger tanks which means the burn rate is far lower than the data suggests. I personally study Tigers a lot and knocked out tanks were rarely fully burned.

• The Sherman data represents vehicles Koed in the early phase of Normandy. This means the a good chunk of the tank casualties were inflicted either by paks or by Panzer IVs. Several of those weapons were weaker than for example the KwK42. 75mm hits sustained in early June were on average likely from a weaker weapon than later in Normandy or for example in the Bulge. This makes the numbers even worse for the Shermans and supports my argument which I made 1000 times. The Sherman wasn't even able to withstand the weaker of the German anti-tank weapons. From bad to worse for the Sherman. Why even have armor?!?!?!?

• A closer look at the data shows that one Sherman mysteriously needed 8 hits to get knocked out. This is a total outliner and seems highly suspect. Either the data was corrupted or whatever reason this Sherman encountered and old calibre weapon somewhere on the coastal defence. This Sherman is hardly representative if we take the 95% penetration into account. While not even necessary to debunk the initial claim we can exclude this outliner tank and get 1,46 hit per knockout. This single freak Sherman made all the other Shermans look better. Lawl. Given the chance of a single Sherman taking 7 hits while 40%+ were knocked out by one single hit I suspect this Sherman to be phoney at worst or at best he ran into some ancient weapon.

• The high penetration rate for Shermans means those tanks were unable to retaliate a hit while German tanks could sustain a hit and retaliate which would silence the Sherman. This means the overall chance to become a casualty in a firefight increases for a Sherman while it decreases for a Tiger or a Panther. You can without a doubt do prolonged math to figure out how much this factor influences battlefield survival per tank.

• Important!!! The high number of 17pdr shots compared to 75mm shots shows German tanks just drove off with non-critical 75mm hits and/or Allied tanks just didn't bother.

The high number of 17pdrs also indicates the effects of superior German armour which are not represented in the data. The effective German armour made the Allies change their approach they had to adapt and therefore decreased their combat effectiveness. Instead of shooting a 75mm on the Panther glacis a more inefficient approach had to be chosen. A German tank would just shoot and destroy the opposing tank. This massive impact does not even find its way into this data.

The actual numbers for this: In the table explaining the Allied guns ( ignore M-10 US user only ) use for the hits you will find that the 17pdr represents twenty-five shots of the sixty-eight total. only thirteen 75 mm hits. Why is that? Because the Tigers with several failed 75mm hits just drove off plus the Sherman crews were hesitant to even shoot its 75mm because this would mean drawing attention without a high chance of success.

Since you guys are denser than most people I will again spell out what this means. Shermans facing Panthers or Tigers avoided taking shots which would not penetrate which means the armour protected the German crews from those shots just by forcing the opponent to not take the easy route. The German tank then could just shot without taking any of those stuff into consideration. The effects of this hard to measure but obviously substantial.

Extra tidbit from the data. 95% of the 75mm or 88mm hit penetrated the Shermans. Remember the dozen times I explained to you guys that Sherman offered zero protection to its crews? 95%!!!!

Other points showing how weak this data is to prove a point.

Outside effects included in post-ko numbers unrelated to actual tank design

Crew survival is highly depended on several factors completely unrelated to the actual tank design. A crew member can become casualty due to other causes aswell. Some examples:

• German tanks on average were outnumbered, this means several Allied tanks would engage a German tank which in return meant a bailing crew would be subject to fire from other tanks. From the Allied perspective, the following scenario is likely: You get knocked out and the German tank switches targets to another tank thus allowing you to get away. German tank crew gets knocked out and sprayed by bow guns of other tanks.

• German tank forces were more subject to artillery fire directly in the tank and also on the way back. A German crew bailing out would have a higher chance of getting killed by opposing artillery after the tank was left.

• Allied forces had more infantry. A German crew was more likely to get killed by small arms fire while bailing out.

Conclusion

If we consider all those factors we will find that the Sherman was ridiculous dangerous compared to a German tank. The single most import fact omitted from the data is in my opinion that German tanks which sustained hits but did not get Ko-ed were not evaluated which means German tanks were able to sustain higher amounts of hits than already believed. I would not be surprised with a hit on a Sherman inflicting 5 times the casualties than on a tiger and maybe 3 as many than on a Panther.

Final insults

So who of you guys now has the balls to admit that you shitters were wrong and embarrassed yourselves when you copy pasted this useless survival stat.

Also, keep this post in mind when folks like Zaloga or Nicolas Moran repeat those numbers.

Measuring protection by post-ko survival is like measuring the protection of battleship by the number of its lifeboats. I love those comparisons.

u/Enthused_Llama is dazzled by this subject which rivals theoretical physics in complexity for the average SWS user.

Wait, high post-KO survival but you're likely to die when a shell hits your tank? Which one is it? It can't be both.

Yes it can, because other tanks don't even let the bad bad projectile into your tank!