The Panther was actually a better crosser of soft ground than the standard Sherman. It also had a better slope climbing ability. it took a wide tracked sherman to equal the Panther in cross country mobility.

 

One more thing; doctrine drives procurement. Stupid American tank destroyer doctrine in WW II delayed the development and deployment of a better medium tank as a followon to the Sherman. Plus; bungled engineering in designing the original tank meant that the Sherman, itself, was a bit more difficult to product improve to even keep up with an antique like the PZKW IV, which proved to be a very product improvable industrial artifact..

 

Good enough is good enough, but wrong choices plus dead end line of engineering development =heavy casualties to make up for the wrong equipment used incorrectly.

 

Dig up the Australian Sentinel tank for a program that started off on the right track and showed the promise of being what the Sherman should have been.

 

Herald 

Thank you for your comments. These views are the conventional wisdom, but there is another side of all this that is less obvious.

 

When the Sherman was designed there were no operational German heavy tanks. Compared to the best German antitank vehicle--a Panzer III with 30mm of frontal armor and a 50mm L42 gun (the Panzer IV of the day was armed with a low-velocity howitzer)--the Sherman's 75mm L43 gun and 76mm armor were an overmatch solution as a medium tank. There was no imperative to develop a heavy tank, in fact, quite the opposite. Allied heavy tanks--French, British, and Soviet--had shown little effectiveness, and had been outmaneuvered by more nimble German tanks, isolated, and destroyed by airstrikes and artillery. The lesson seemed clear: heavy tanks were useless. Frankly, the collapse of the Wehrmacht despite the power of their heavy tanks would suggest that it was also completely correct. In no major operation of WWII was success dependent on the combat power of the tanks involved. In most cases, from the Madrid, through Paris to Moscow and Berlin, the loser was the side with the more powerful tanks. The only exceptions were cases where the defender had essentially no tanks of any effectiveness, such as Poland, Denmark, Norway, and Finnland.

 

Besides that, the US was playing catch up. The unfortunate fact is that the fastest that any tank in WWII was designed from the ground up was about a year and a half. The Tiger took at least this long to design, and could be said to have taken more like 3-4 years considering that "Panzer VI" tanks--not Tigers, but heavy tank development prototypes--were being tested as early as 1940. The only reason the US was able to come up with the Sherman so fast was that it

used as many off-the-shelf components as possible. The entire hull and chassis were drawn from the inter-war M2 tank which was armed with a 37mm gun. It took a while to develop a new turret to mount a 75mm gun so the M3 was built. When the M3 arrived in North Africa it was considerablly superior to the German armor available in most respects, and was a major contributor to the British success. It should be noted that the biggest advantage the M3 had

over the British tanks was not its anti-tank performance--German doctrine did not consider tanks to be primarily antitank weapons, and their armored thrusts generally avoided concentrations of enemy armor. At that time the main German anti-armor weapon was the 88mm Flak gun. The 75mm gun--on both the M3 and M4--was designed with indirect fire capability to help combat it.

 

There was simply no suggestion of a need for something heavier than the Sherman until late 1942 when limited numbers of Tigers began to appear on the Eastern Front, and these Tigers were less fearsome than one might imagine--more broke down on the way to battle than actually fought.  By this time the Allies had very good estimates of German tank production capacity, and it was clear that few Tigers could ever be produced. There was talk up upgrading the guns to 76mm

after American encounters with Tigers in 1943, but this was rejected by the commanders in the field, because the main antitank threat was still the 88mm Flak, and the 76mm gun was less effective at bombardment than the 75mm. Besides, combat experience had clearly shown that heavy tanks in limited numbers could generally be avoided and destroyed by aircraft and artillery, so there seemed little need to counter the Tiger directly. By 1943 Panthers began to show up on

the eastern front, but were hardly impressive, having a tendency to transform into pilboxes due to drivetrain problems, or even to catch fire without the need for enemy intervention.

 

Nevertheless the pattern seemed clear and development of more powerful tanks began, but by then it was too late for them to be finished before 1945. Unfortunately by 1944 production of the Panther had gotten up to speed and large numbers of Panthers were deployed in France, forming about half of German tank strength. The prototype medium tanks that eventually formed the basis for the M-26 were an improvement on the Sherman, but unlike the Sherman still suffered growing pains, and were no match for the Panther in a 1:1 fight anyway.

 

The tank destroyer concept wasn't developed in a vacuum. Through 1943, the most visible demonstrations of successful armored doctrine were the German blitzkreigs. Due to this, American armored doctrine was based on the German model. Unfortunately, some aspects of that model would prove to be less than optimally efficient but no one would have guessed because no enemy faced by Germany was effective enough to demonstrate those weaknesses. Particularly regretable was the German division of force between tanks and tank destroying weapons. In hindsight it would become clear that this was a result of the simple inability of Germany to develop a tank powerful enough to take out enemy medium and heavy tanks before late 1942. As a result German armor was forced to avoid engaging powerful enemy tanks directly and instead use other weapons such as the 88mm Flak to destroy them. Unfortunately, using a weapon such as a heavy antiaircraft gun as an offensive antitank weapon required considerable skill. More than the relatively green US Army could count on being able to apply. A better option was needed, most importantly a more mobile one which would be able to easily take out German tanks but which was self propelled.

 

One particularly notable Allied weapon system was the T-34. It had excellent armor and a powerful gun, and was a devastating threat to German armor, despite some notable deficiencies such as the lack of a tank a dedicated gunner which would free the tank commander to maintain situational awareness of the battlefield, and radios in every tank to allow the commanders to share that situational awareness with their allies. Even so it was racking up impressive kill rations of about 5:1 against the comparatively weak early German tanks. American designers created a prototype vehicle on the same hull as the M-4, calling it the T-35. Like the T-34 it had a 76mm gun and thick armor that was well sloped all around. Visually the main difference was that the hull from the M-4 was taller and not as long, with a smaller engine that also limited its mobility compared to the T-34. However it did correct the most glaring weaknesses of the T-34, the lack of a true tank commander, and the need for more radios. Unfortunately it added a weakness of its own, the lack of a roof. The T-35 entered the war as the M-10. With the Tiger entering production in fall of 1942, engineers turned their attention to an improved tank destroyer, the M-36. This was to be truely a mobile American version of the feared "88", mounting an adapted version of the 90mm AA gun.

 

It would turn out that over-specialization was a weakness rather than a strength. Overly specialized weapons like tank destroyers and infantry support tanks turned out to be less effective than main battle tanks that could do everything. Specialized weapons had the weakness that on a fluid battlefield it was not always possible to apply the specialized weapon with the optimal capability to the combat situation at hand. Post war tanks from both sides of the Iron curtain took this into account, and in both cases were designed as main battle tanks. The difference between the design philosophies of the NATO countries and the Soviets was motivated by the differing definitions of what doing it all included, and differing opinions as to what was needed to make a tank effective. Western designs place a greater emphasis on crew ergonomics to maximize efficiency and on things like radios, fire control system, and stabilized turrets that provide benefits that are difficult to enumerate. Soviet designs were also based on an acceptance of higher casualty rates than western tanks, a pattern that was seen in WWII as well, where 5 Shermans were needed to take out a single Tiger, but it took 9 T-34s despite their heavier armor and more powerful main guns to accomplish the same task.

 

Unfortunately while the Soviets were willing to accept these losses, Americans were dismayed. I say unfortunately, because even though using the Sherman as our primary tank had extremely straightforward reasons as outlined above. Only the benefit of 20/20 hindsight would produced a different outcome. The most likely difference in outcome could have been using the M-10 as our primary tank, perhaps with the Sherman 105 as an infantry support tank. If our planners had been psychic they would have started designing the Pershing in 1941, but then if they had been psychic they could have started in 1939, and we probably could have hat M-46s by 1943... They weren't though. The American dismay over the losses of Shermans produced an urge to find a scapegoat, not so much an individual in most cases--though individuals have been pointed to as culprits--but more an organizational scapegoat. The result of this process has been the conventional wisdom that has developed surrounding the Sherman.

 

What it comes down to is that it is a lot easier to understand and blame "quantity vs. quality" or the tank destroyer doctrine, than to understand the history and development of armored warfare doctrine during WWII and the realities of armored vehicle development and production cycles, and the interaction of those production cycles between different combatant nations.