I'm just curious over one point.
We can agree, I think, that generally amateur historians states that the T-34 was an excellent model while the Sherman M4 was a clunker.
While (relative) mechanical reliability and ease of production are of course important values, it's quite puzzling that the Sherman M4 have such a dreary reputation considering that it lost around 4500 units in WW2, while T-34s losses were around 48 000.
Because most amateurs are badly misinformed; quite a lot of the posting here in fact just keep repeating the same bad myths from the same bad surces.
The Sherman's bad reputation was a relatively recent invention, stemming largely from Belton Cooper's (ghost written by Stephen Ambrose) "Death Traps". It's largely from him that the "five Shermans to kill a Panther/Tiger" nonsense started; which became a favorite meme by German fanboy sites despite the fact that they didn't have any actual evidence to support it.
The problem is that Cooper was never a frontline combat officer and Ambrose frankly sucks as a historian and to his dying days still thought the Panther had an 88mm gun; and never realized that the US Army encountered the Tiger I a grand total of only three times during the entire ETO - and of those three engagements only one might have involved a Sherman at all.
Sure, there were complaints about its combat performance in June 1944 particularly among the US Army, but what's significant is that the US Army hadn't even encountered a single Tiger or Panther in Normandy at this point. Most of the complaints instead stemmed from the fact that most Sherman tankers landed in June were highly inexperienced and a bit panicky; constantly reporting Tigers and Panthers when the Germans only had a handful of Stugs and captured French Somouas. By the end of the month most of these panicky officers had learned their lessons or were replaced, and the first encounter between the Panther and Sherman was an unmitigated disaster for the Panthers who suffered 25% losses. Wrecks recovered from the defeat allowed the US Army to test the Panther around July 9 near Isigny, which confirmed that more than 75% of the Panther's surface area could be penetrated by the Sherman's gun.
Indeed, I recently got my hands on a report which detailed every single US Army Sherman vs Panther engagements in ETO, and the results are pretty shocking. In total, 30 engagements were fought, involving approximately 200 Shermans in total against 150 Panthers; averaging 6 Shermans and 5 Panthers per engagement. In total, a mere 20 Shermans were destroyed in these 30 engagements, compared to the loss of 72 (!) Panthers. So the old wive's tale that it took five Shermans to kill a Panther is now definitively and thoroughly debunked and in fact reality was a total 180: It in fact took three to four Panthers to kill a single Sherman. The only vehicle the Panther could manage 5:1 kill rates on were M8 greyhounds or M5 Stuarts.
In short, the Sherman wasn't merely decent. It was unquestionably good. It was in fact so good that, contrary to many accounts, the Soviets actually absolutely adored their Shermans and assigned them exclusively to Guards Tank Divisions. Their evaluation (c/o Walter's Dunn's "The Soviet Economy and the Red Army") declared that the Sherman was fully capable of engaging the Panther on even terms; something that was derided when Dunn published his translations of Soviet records in the 90s, but now seems to be nothing short of the truth given we now have a compilation of the actual results of every single Sherman vs Panther battle fought by the US Army in ETO.
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As for the T-34, the problem with the 48,000 loss figure is that it implies the Soviet Union was left with less than 20,000 tanks by the end of the war; which is contrary to Western analyst estimates that they had over 40,000. Indeed, the oft-quoted loss figures would have left the Soviet Army with nearly as many T-70 tanks still in service as T-34s.
Recent studies however have shown that the issue primarily rests with differences in record-keeping. Soviet "losses" include all operational losses - the majority of which are recovered and repaired, whereas German losses are typically only permanent losses. This is why Soviet loss figures in fact sometimes exceed the number of tanks they started out with.
Hence, the 48,000 losses are extremely overstated, likely counting the same vehicle multiple times. It is in fact particularly important to remember that the T-34 wasn't a particularly common tank in the Red Army until 1943, because in 1942 the Soviets concentrated on the T-70 and T-60; and production standards were known to drop dramatically due to the massive economic dislocation of Barbarossa.
Still, it also bears remembering that the T-34 was not considered an ideal design even by the Soviets (who preferred the Sherman over their T-34s!), who saw it as a stopgap tank for a better design. They got stuck with it however because Barbarossa kept them from producing the newer, better designs they wanted. Indeed, that the T-54 came out in 1946 and was a much more capable tank for a weight addition of only 5 tons should demonstrate how advanced Soviet tank engineering actually was.
