Sherman Tank frustration & strategies?

[JayTownsend]

Sherman Tank frustration!

I have all types of Sherman tanks: M4, M4/76, M4/105, Crab, Firefly & Jumbo and in American, British, Soviet, Polish, Canadian, New Zealand colors to name a few. But with only a 3 armor protection factor, other than the Jumbo Sherman with a nice 6 factor, I lose them so easily in combat, that in some scenarios they can frustrate me. Sometimes I even let the infantry head to the front in front of my Sherman Tanks to take some of the heat off them against that heavy German armor. Other methods I use are to attack in mass with hordes of Sherman tanks and hope to activate first in the next turn. Crossfire Bonus modifier are nice as well and use of terrain to hide my movement but I would rather defend with Sherman Tanks then attack with them, unless they have some nice friendly tank destroyers alongside them. In the few scenarios with smoke or Iron Curtain scenarios with M26 Pershing tanks to assist, Sherman Tank causalities can be frustrating in victory points. It’s kind of like the Italians with the M13 tanks in later scenarios in 1942-43 or Japanese Type 95 tanks in any time period, as well as Germans tanks in 1941 taking on Soviet KV-1’s. If the scenario victory conditions are written well, most of the time this will not be a problem but sometimes there are those scenarios where those Sherman step losses can be just too much!

What strategies do you guys use with these kind of Sherman situations? How to take on German armor with Sherman Tanks?

[tanzerleader]

i guess shermans dropping like flies is historically accurate. id still rather one of them than a cromwell.
my armour experience is limited in pg but the first things that come to mind are the following:
1 - canny use of smoke (if applicable)
2 - keep moving if possible
3 - crossfire bonus and flanking attacks

[campsawyer]

Jay, you are hitting the right tactics. It is just that the Shermans are just not able to to take on the bigger German tanks. They are a match for the PzIVH's but the Tigers, Tiger II's and Panthers are just too much for them. One item that is lacking in PG is the historical effectiveness of there maneuverability. I just don't see this modeled well in PG. The same can be said for the early German tanks too. Germans PzIII's and PzIV's against a KV-1 are tough as well as the same against the French tanks. As with everything PG, maneuvering can keep the other side off balance and allow you to get some sort of shot on them, but it is quite hard to do this in some situations.

[vince hughes]

Jay,

Your use of infantry is also a requirement and something that was used in reality anyway.

[Matt W]

Jay, I can only second what others (and you) have said about the use of the Shermans. It was the vast numbers of them and their manueverability, rather than their ability to have a standup firefight that made them valuable. They weren't called "Ronsons" because they could withstand antitank fire...

[vince hughes]

Wait till Fred (Blackcloud) sees that you written that. He's a Shermophile and will defend them to his last breath (which it will be against a PzIVH - couldn't resist that Fred HEHE !).

I know lovers of them defend them, but practically every veteran I spoke to here in England never rated them against the German stuff.

In fact, further to that. In the Kursk accounts I've recently read, nearly all of them (and from people whom were actually there too) state that the Panthers were knocking out T34's at a kilometre or more (Tigers at 1600m which goes with their 8 range gun incidentally), and yet the T34 was having to get within 200-400m for even just a decent chance rather than certain chance of a kill on the enemy.

[campsawyer]

Wait till Fred (Blackcloud) sees that you written that. He's a Shermophile and will defend them to his last breath (which it will be against a PzIVH - couldn't resist that Fred HEHE !).

I know lovers of them defend them, but practically every veteran I spoke to here in England never rated them against the German stuff.

In fact, further to that. In the Kursk accounts I've recently read, nearly all of them (and from people whom were actually there too) state that the Panthers were knocking out T34's at a kilometre or more (Tigers at 1600m which goes with their 8 range gun incidentally), and yet the T34 was having to get within 200-400m for even just a decent chance rather than certain chance of a kill on the enemy.

Vince, you lead right to a point I have about German tanks being a bit too strong. They can hit tanks at 1-1.5 km but that was single tanks. In PG the Panthers and Tigers have a good chance of knocking out a whole platoon at that range. Given a Panther at max range of 8 has a firepower of 7 vs static tanks, 6 for moving tanks (8, -1 range, -1 moving). With a Shermans armor of 3 and no terrain or other mods yields a +4/+3 modifier, giving the Panther a 50-60% chance of a single step kill and 35-40% chance of a full platoon kill. But if you look at the overall engagement ranges for armor it was still under 1km for both eastern and western fronts for the end of the war.

[Blackcloud6]

Sigh. ;-)

The Sherman should have an armor rating of 4. I've heard the game design decision was that it was a large target. Well, the Panther was larger but does not get a lowered rating for being so. It is hard to put the nuances of different vehicles in a platoon game that basically uses 0 to 6 for armor ratings, so I grudgingly accept it.

Go read Zaloga's Sherman vs. Panther. His main point as to why the many Shermans were killed in 1944 was that the Allies were attacking and attacker losses are always high.

Zaloga also brings out an important point, and he is not the only one, that German crew ability had declined and kept on doing so by 1944 that they could not effectively use their vehicles. This is not reflected in the game (But Panzer Leader it with reduced values for Wehrmacht vehicles)

All players in WWII had tanks that burned, almost all of them did when hit and penetrated. Shermans burned, Mk IVs burned, Panthers burned, T-34s burned, etc. One thing to remember is that gun/ammunition capability, for the most part, outperformed armor for most of the war.

Yes, actual Sherman crew members complain that German tanks were better, but I bet if you try to dig deeper, they can't really tell you why. But their experiences of seeing buddies die horribly would leave a lasting impression that it was likely the equipment and not poor tactics, crew ability or just the sad fact that in WWII, if you were hit, at the common tank ranges on the Western Front (400-800 meters), your tank was going to die regardless of what tank it was. However, the statistics show, that if you were drafted and went in the Army and went to combat, you were much much much more likely to die if you were an infantryman than a Sherman crew member. Always take anecdotes with a grain of salt. And BTW, that is what I considered Belton Cooper's book "Death Traps" to be (before somebody cites it as an authoritative source).

[JayTownsend]

I'll post it anyway, as its a good read:


REMEMBERING THE DEATH TRAPS
"Local resident Belton Cooper - a WWII tank expert"

An article from Birmingham Post-Herald (Alabama) on 3/8/2005
By Pam Jones

Promotional lead on Metro/State front page:

When Lt. Belton Cooper saw how the German Panzer tanks were destroying the U.S. Sherman tanks during World War II, he knew something had to be done. As a member of the Army's Third Armored Division, Cooper saw to it that the tanks were reinforced with steel, concrete or any other substance his repair squadron could get its hands on. Later, Cooper recalled the experience in a book, "Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II", published in 1998.

The article:

When Belton Cooper was a young boy growing up in Huntsville, he dreamed of building the world's first unsinkable battleship. The onset of World War II interrupted his naval architecture studies when he was commissioned an ordnance lieutenant in the Army's 3rd Armored Division.

Today, nearly 60 years after the war's conclusion, Cooper, 87, is considered the world's leading authority on the M4 Sherman tank, the workhorse of the American armored divisions, according to Martin Morgan, research historian at the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans.

Morgan recently interviewed Cooper, of Mountain Brook, for inclusion in the museum's collection of some 2,000 oral histories.

"Mr. Cooper is one of the people who show up on the radar" whenever World War II is mentioned, Morgan said. As the author of "Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II," Cooper has appeared in several of The History Channel programs on the war, including "Suicide Missions: Tank Crews of World War II," based primarily on his 1998 memoir.

"No one else out there is capable of filling us in on the information that he has," Morgan said.

Cooper's technical background allows him to explain why the battles between American tanks and their vastly superior German counterparts in northern Europe usually had an unhappy ending, he said.

Morgan expects Cooper's interview will be part of the museum's tank exhibit once its $150 million expansion is complete. The museum already owns a Sherman tank, and Morgan says he can envision Cooper's interview being part of that permanent exhibit.

On July 9,1944, Cooper's division went into combat 10 miles south of the Normandy beachhead. The Germans blocked out the first tank and severely damaged several others, including one in which the top of its turret was shot off and its gunner killed.

"I said that if the Germans could do that to our tanks, it was going to be awful. I was just devastated," Cooper recalls. "I said that somebody has got to report this to the American people and tell them how it really was."

It was at that moment the young engineer decided to write a book on his division's experience during the war. He kept copious notes on each of the hundreds of damaged tanks he and his maintenance men salvaged.

He also wrote down the often ingenious ways in which the soldiers adapted the tanks to make them more compatible with the German enemy.

"I had a little spiral notebook in which I would write the date, map coordinates and write the specs on damaged tanks, such as where it was hit, damages and if there were injuries," Cooper said., "Then I wrote a three-line description of every vehicle that was knocked out"

As a liaison officer with the 3rd Armored Division, Cooper was one of three lieutenants responsible for coordinating the night recovery, repair and evacuation of tanks damaged during daylight fighting.

It was apparent after the division's first encounter with the Germans that the Sherman tank that he and other American soldiers had been led to believe was the equivalent of Germany's armored vehicles was inferior in both design and firepower.

"Germans referred to our Sherman tanks as 'Ronsons' - named after a well-known cigarette lighter," said James Tent, chairman of the University of Alabama at Birmingham's history department.

"They were thin-skinned, poorly armed, and with their gasoline engines (as opposed to diesels) likely to explode when struck by enemy cannon fire."

Cooper and the other members of the tank maintenance crews realized changes would have to be made to the tanks if the American tanks and their crews were to survive the long march to Germany.

The war in western Europe was one of movement and if the armored divisions were going to move forward, the rule book on tank warfare would have to be thrown out and replaced with American ingenuity and flexibility, Morgan said.

"In that situation, having to use tanks that were borderline obsolete against tanks that were the best in World War II, it was lucky that cowboy mentality was part of our cultural heritage," he said.

As long as an American tank had not been completely burned up, Cooper and his men could repair it. The German army had no tank recovery program.

As the war progressed and the number of American tanks dropped to a dangerously low level, the maintenance men of the 3rd would repair many of the superior German tanks and send them into battle.

According to Cooper, many of the 3rd's maintenance crews had grown up on farms in the rural South and had experience working on tractors and other large equipment. Others often had backgrounds as industrial workers.

The men also looked for any material that would bolster the Sherman's insufficient armor plating.

"Everything they could put on that plate they would, they even tried to put chicken wire and concrete on as armor," Cooper says.

Cooper also wrote of the crews' more gruesome responsibilities, including removing the bodies of crews from shot-up tanks.

After the bodies were removed, the maintenance crews scrubbed the tank with disinfectant to remove the odor, repaired the artillery and painted the interior with white lead to cover the pock marks and to further cover the smell.

After the war ended, Cooper and the two other liaison lieutenants with the 3rd Armored Division wrote a lengthy report on their experiences with the American tanks and detailed numerous shortcomings.

"We lost 648 medium tanks. We had another 700 repaired and put back into action," Cooper said. "When you compare that to the original 232 we had when we landed at Normandy, I don't know of any other division or service that took that kind of loss."

By the time Germany surrendered in May 1945, American tank crews had taken such disproportionately heavy losses that the tanks were being manned by a third generation of replacements, according to Tent.

The Army switched from the Sherman tank to the superior Pershing. Cooper likes to think the report he and his two counterparts sent in had some influence in that decision.

After serving in the Army of Occupation, Cooper returned to the United States and finished his degree. He married, had three sons and began his career at U.S. Pipe. Eventually he bought the Birmingham-based Herman Williams Company and received patents on several of his industrial inventions. Cooper's book has sold between 70,000 and 90,000 copies and is still in print.

He is contemplating his second book, to be titled "Survival in Combat, through Spiritual Enlightenment," on his experiences with the spiritual side of combat.

Cooper's tank warfare book is available in paperback in area bookstores.

[JayTownsend]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4A3_Sherman

In later years the Sherman had more armor protection added and was up-gunned and used all the way into 1955 or later.

Sherman would continue to see combat effectively in many later conflicts, including the Korean War, Arab-Israeli Wars, and Indo-Pakistani Wars into the late 20th century, against the T-34 and sometimes much more modern Soviet tanks.