Re: Stevie Re: what about all the tanks from the uk and ussr or dont they count ?
".....The history of the British Cruiser Tank is perhaps suitable fodder for a Dad's Army reboot but one doesn't hold them up in polite tank conversation unless one is playing for laughs....." A common misconception. The British cruiser tanks at the start of the War were as good as the Panzer III and had a superior gun, and much better than the most numerous German tanks, the Panzer I and II. In the Western Desert, the British cruisers were always superior to the Italian tanks and only really outmatched when the Panzer III 'Specials' arrived in late 1941, by which time the Yanks already had the Grant in production for us. The Germans knew this, the majority of British cruisers destroyed in North Africa after late 1941 were due to German anti-tank guns, not the Panzers. The main problem with British tanks was the awful design committees that delayed the introduction if the 6pdr-armed tanks in the post-Dunkirk panic, otherwise we would have had the 6pdr-armed Cromwell in time and numbers for el Alamein, a tank that was a match for the Panzer IV 'Specials'. Continued fudging with designs like the TOGs tanks didn't help, nor did the silly restrictions on balanced and not geared elevating systems which meant British turrets effectively had less room for the gun. But the British cruiser designs matured into the Comet, a far better tank than the Sherman, and finally into the excellent Centurion, a tank which was so good it was later chosen over all American types by the Israelis.
The Sherman was probably the best all-rounder in the 1942-43 period but was starting to be outmatched thereafter, but the American designers shortsightedly sat on their hands in the belief the Sherman was good enough to win the War, leading to the delays in better designs like the M26 Pershing. One question often ignored is why the British didn't pursue the Canadian Ram tank design as this was better than the Grant and available with the 6pdr before the Sherman arrived.
".....the Sherman that sat so high it was hard to get hull down in fighting terrain...." Er, you must have missed the bit about the Panther being almost a foot taller than a Sherman. One good point of the Sherman design was that the turret was actually very small, even in the later 76mm variants, which meant that when it could get hull-down it exposed a smaller target than the Panther or Tiger.
"....I might mention the doctrinal idea common to all German WWII designs that the Commander should be a commander and not a loader or gunner....." That wasn't solely German doctrine, it was the same for the Brits and the Yanks. A lot of German tank doctrine was actually pinched from the work of the British, especially Fuller's mechanized division.
".....It was the shocked reaction to the BT-type tanks...." The BTs were simply Russian developments of the American Christie tank and the British Vickers Six-Tonner. The Christie was also the basis for the British cruiser tanks from the MkIII onwards. Part of the reason the T-34 got stuck with a two-man turret was because of the smaller turret ring caused by the width restriction forced by Christie's high-speed suspension design.
".....adding improvised armour like the popular sandbag/concrete/battlefield-junk glacis caused the tranny to fry out prematurely....." Hmmm, seeing as the Sherman had special variants with considerably heavier loads than sandbags and no record of such transmission failures I can find, I'd have to call that one a myth.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
