T-34 reputation vs Sherman reputation

[PEP]

The problem of reputation among amateur historians and gamers is that it is generally founded on things like tactics, and this was a war (like most wars) won by logistics.

In this regard, the Sherman was superior to just about every model in the war, certainly far better than the German late war tank designs. In fact, as part of an industrial war fighting system, the Sherman was an unrivalled component.

Can't the same be said of the T34? Wasn't it incredibly cheap and easy to produce? The Sherman was a comfy and overall a well thought vehicle but lacked the punch and armor of the rustic T34 which on the other hand wasn't really user-friendly.

 

[Herbert West]

But on that level (the only that makes sense), the comparison is moot, as both the T34 and the Sherman are cheap throwaway things to whittle down the higher per unit combat value german tanks.

 

[Ming]

Can't the same be said of the T34? Wasn't it incredibly cheap and easy to produce? The Sherman was a comfy and overall well thought vehicle but lacked the punch and armor of the rustic T34 which on the other hand wasn't really user-friendly.

You're right of course.

The T34 had some logistical advantages over the M4, (mobility, combat resilience) while the M4 had advantages over it. (Reliability, Crew protection)
Which was better? Dunno. My point was only about how reputation is skewed by tactical performance, which wasn't a decider in the war the way logistics was.

 

[gagenater]

The key issue IMHO is that both the Sherman and the T34 were good enough that they were competitive. Could they be outclassed by the rare ocassional appearance of one of the German 'super' tanks? Sure. In general though they were both capable of meeting the enemy with a reasonable chance of success in any given engagement. The fact that you have to qualify which one was better by resorting to comparisons of their crew training, doctorinal usage, ease of repair, etc. is simply proof that tactically they both did what they were supposed to do. Once you have equipment at this level of adequacy, the most important factors are training, experience, logistics and support. All of which both the U.S. and the USSR excelled at in one way or another.

 

[PEP]

Amen to that. The Americans and the Russians both built a tank that could fit their needs perfectly, each of them with specific weaknesses that didn't mattered that much when looking at the big picture. A feat the Germans never really managed to pull off.

 

[Zebedee]

If we speak about reputation I guess there is a thing to have in mind. Western amateur historians had no access to first-hand information from the Soviet Union, so they mostly had to rely on american and german sources. The former would typically try to emphasize the valour of American soldiers by greatly exaggerating the difficulties they faced; thus the supposed weakness of the Sherman was brought up to "compensate" the overwhelming advantage in numbers the Americans had.
German sources on the other hand would try to justify their defeats; for this purpose exaggeration of the power of the T-34 comes handy.

And even if some amateur historian managed to get access to some Soviet sources all he would find there would be propaganda, "the soviet tanks are the best in the world", even 20, 30, 50 years after war's end.

That's a really good point. But you have to also extend the same idea to Western professional historians. The view of the Eastern Front is, even now, shaped to a great extent by the post-war recollections of German generals and the work they did for the US military post-war. There was a distrust of anything coming out from behind the Iron Curtain and, with the archives now once more exceptionally difficult to access, much of the 'new' work dates from that brief period when the archives were open and Western historians (and Russian) could get unhindered access. It'll be another decade or so before eg Glantz' work filters through into the work of other historians.

Saying that - the 'reputation' perhaps has been partly formed by experience on the Eastern Front. For the Soviets, the tanks of the western powers weren't particularly useful. They needed robust, almost simple, tanks which could cover the distances with minimal maintenance and with minimal logistics. By comparison to the T-34, all the western tanks fell short. But then the tanks of the western powers were built with different circumstances in mind. Add in the difficulties with both use (operational and tactical) that Britain and the US went through, as well as the understandable desire to highlight why losses happened and you get the Sherman not coming out of any comparison very well.

On the other hand, for all the criticisms, there were a handful of Soviet units equipped totally with Shermans by late war. So it clearly didn't perform quite so badly with sufficient logistical support. And on the western front, the Firefly variant of the Sherman demonstrated that whilst the original Sherman was undergunned, it could perform more than adequately against the later war German armour when that was rectified.

 

[Matt714]

Well, for instance, I read once that the Red Army lost 7500 T-34s in 1945 alone. and 14 000 in 1944.

21 000 tanks lost when you have the intiative, it's, uh, a lot.

Soviet commanders were known to be careless about casualties. Allied ones generally favoured a protracted methodological advance.

Besides most tank crews did not have a lot of training, and it's hard to pinpoint whether these tanks were lost to enemy fire or abandoned because of mechanical breakdown. It's actually more troublesome to tow and repair an existing tank than having a crew take command of one fresh from the assembly lines.

 

[Beagá]

Amen to that. The Americans and the Russians both built a tank that could fit their needs perfectly, each of them with specific weaknesses that didn't mattered that much when looking at the big picture. A feat the Germans never really managed to pull off.

Wrong. As I said before don´t compare assymetrical situations and draw conclusions. If SU were alone the germans would have beaten them with the superior tanks they had. They kept producing T34 out of desperation, and only when desperation wasn´t a factor anymore, after Kursk, they finally started to upgrade their stuff to next generation ones. They didn´t build so many T-34 because they wanted.

Meanwhile considering the very well known fact the US considered a Tiger to require 5 Shermans to kill, and it becomes pretty obvious that in a symmetrical confrontation the US Shermans would be spanked. Why the US didn´t learn from all the lessons and build such a bad tank instead of a Panther equivalent? Maybe it was hubris, maybe it was the lack of expertise the germans had after so many years of war. Either way, the fact is that many crewmen wouldn´t have died if the US had a better tank, something everyone in the army thought.

 

[gagenater]

Wrong. As I said before don´t compare assymetrical situations and draw conclusions. If SU were alone the germans would have beaten them with the superior tanks they had. They kept producing T34 out of desperation, and only when desperation wasn´t a factor anymore, after Kursk, they finally started to upgrade their stuff to next generation ones. They didn´t build so many T-34 because they wanted.

Meanwhile considering the very well known fact the US considered a Tiger to require 5 Shermans to kill, and it becomes pretty obvious that in a symmetrical confrontation the US Shermans would be spanked. Why the US didn´t learn from all the lessons and build such a bad tank instead of a Panther equivalent? Maybe it was hubris, maybe it was the lack of expertise the germans had after so many years of war. Either way, the fact is that many crewmen wouldn´t have died if the US had a better tank, something everyone in the army thought.

The Sherman was sized the way it was so that the maximum number of them could be shipped on a standard ship. Eventually (almost when the war was over) the U.S. came out with the Pershing tank that was equal or superior to the Tiger or Sherman. Because it was much wider and lower it could only be shipped with about 1/4 of the space efficiency of Sherman tanks. However up until late 1943 or so, it seemed that loosing 5 shermans (and their crews) was a better bet than trying to ship over larger and heavier tanks. Sometimes casualties are literally less expensive than coming up with better equipment.

You have to remember that the doctorine of the allies was NOT to fight a Tiger tank with Sherman tanks. The doctorine of the allies was that if German tanks were seen, the air force and/or artillery would be called in. Once the area in question had been turned into a sea of mud, blood and steel, then the allied ground forces would advance to see if there had been any tanks around there or not. The times when Allied tanks were called upon to fight head to head with German tanks were unusual - more or less it only happened by mistake.

This is IMHO a big part of the reason why the allied and Russian tanks are viewed differently. For the allies, air power was the 'premier' group in the war. Bombers, ground attack, fighter pilots - all were given top billing in recruiting and news. It fit in with the technological focus of the allied nations, as well as with their home front propaganda. A focus on the air forces showed a clean precision war - where 'our' forces were attacking a nameless faceless enemy from the air. Naturally enough everything else got second billing. Even the naval heroics of the USN and RN got rolled into the exploits of aircraft carrier pilots and heroic torpedo bomber pilots.

For the USSR it was just the opposite. There was no naval war to speak of, and the air war was a vicious stalemate with no clear winners - if anything the USSR was loosing their air war for the most part. Their ground forces on the other hand were where the salvation of the nation was at the start of the war, and it's vengeance at the end was. In the earliest part of the war, some of the most significant delaying actions of the Red Army came thanks in part to the fact that they had a lot of heavy tanks - KV-1 and T-34's that the Germans had a genuinely hard time dealing with when they were manned by determined well trained crews. There were some truely herioc actions by these forces at a time when nothing else was working out well. Later on in the war the USSR purposely utilized their armored forces as the spearhead of their assults on the 3rd Reich in part to try and protect their infantry forces, and in part to make up for weaknesses in other areas of their armed forces. They out blitzkrieged the blitzriegers mainly by extremely agressive actions by heavily massed tank forces. This wound up creating a lot of casualties, but inevitably there were some spectacular successes too.

Both as a reflection of reality, as good propaganda for the allies and as good propaganda for the home front the USSR played up the actions of their tank forces in the same way the allies played up the actions of their air forces.

 

[Aardvark Bellay]

...and probably because of the T-34s at the soviet war memorial in Berlin city center.

 

[PEP]

Wrong. As I said before don´t compare assymetrical situations and draw conclusions.

I didn't. In fact I kept saying the situation was indeed very different.

If SU were alone the germans would have beaten them with the superior tanks they had. They kept producing T34 out of desperation, and only when desperation wasn´t a factor anymore, after Kursk, they finally started to upgrade their stuff to next generation ones. They didn´t build so many T-34 because they wanted.

A Bold statement! Especially since the T34 (and its later versions) was better than the PZ II, III and even IV which formed, together with the Stug III, the backbone of the German armored forces.

It's true the SU leadership wanted to replace the T34 before the war and kept producing it only because of the urgency of the situation but it turned out very well since only the late war German tanks (Panther and Tiger) were tactically (as in on the battlefield) superior to the T34. But the Germans never managed to build enough of those. Plus the Panthers and Tigers were delicate and fragile machine that needed tremendous amounts of fuel, fuel the Germans did not have, and were constantly falling apart because of mechanical problems.

So even without the US involvement in the war, I don't really see the German winning in the East considering the fact they irrevocably lost the initiative in 1943, before D Day and the Invasion of Sicily. Some (and I tend to agree) even say they lost the war in Front of Moscow in 1941

Meanwhile considering the very well known fact the US considered a Tiger to require 5 Shermans to kill, and it becomes pretty obvious that in a symmetrical confrontation the US Shermans would be spanked. Why the US didn´t learn from all the lessons and build such a bad tank instead of a Panther equivalent? Maybe it was hubris, maybe it was the lack of expertise the germans had after so many years of war. Either way, the fact is that many crewmen wouldn´t have died if the US had a better tank, something everyone in the army thought.

Maybe it was because Shermans were never supposed to fight Tigers and Panthers head on (eventhough the Firefly could do it) since, like gagenater and I pointed out, it was the part of the air force, the artillery and the tank destroyers like the M10. The Shermans weren't perfect but they were easy to build, easy to use, easy to repair and easy to ship across the Atlantic. Basically the Shermans were the tank the US needed at the time.

 

[Dark3lf]

Meanwhile considering the very well known fact the US considered a Tiger to require 5 Shermans to kill, and it becomes pretty obvious that in a symmetrical confrontation the US Shermans would be spanked. Why the US didn´t learn from all the lessons and build such a bad tank instead of a Panther equivalent? Maybe it was hubris, maybe it was the lack of expertise the germans had after so many years of war. Either way, the fact is that many crewmen wouldn´t have died if the US had a better tank, something everyone in the army thought.

AFAIK most of the tank lose is not result from tank vs tank engagement. I read somewhere less than 20% of tank casualty because of tank engagement. Other anti tank weapon is more effective and easier to produce.

 

[Beagá]

A Bold statement! Especially since the T34 (and its later versions) was better than the PZ II, III and even IV which formed, together with the Stug III, the backbone of the German armored forces.

It's true the SU leadership wanted to replace the T34 before the war and kept producing it only because of the urgency of the situation but it turned out very well since only the late war German tanks (Panther and Tiger) were tactically (as in on the battlefield) superior to the T34. But the Germans never managed to build enough of those. Plus the Panthers and Tigers were delicate and fragile machine that needed tremendous amounts of fuel, fuel the Germans did not have, and were constantly falling apart because of mechanical problems.

Maybe it was because Shermans were never supposed to fight Tigers and Panthers head on (eventhough the Firefly could do it) since, like gagenater and I pointed out, it was the part of the air force, the artillery and the tank destroyers like the M10. The Shermans weren't perfect but they were easy to build, easy to use, easy to repair and easy to ship across the Atlantic. Basically the Shermans were the tank the US needed at the time.

T 34 being mechanically reliable is a myth. It wasn´t. And the standard version was inferior to Panzer IV G in all aspects apart from front armor, and only because it was sloped. Its sucess came from numbers not quality, something that can be easily attested by the gigantic losses T-34 suffered. Yes Panther and Tiger were in inferior numbers, but that´s because they decided to keep so many chassis at the same time in production. While soviets kept it simple and abandoned the KV series and retained only T-34.

And the obvious reason why they used artillery, planes and had to do a emergency (yes, emergency) adaptation of the Sherman in the Firefly was, well, because the Sherman was discovered to be crap. So no it wasn´t what was needed, it´s what they had. Factories were all geared for its production, and by 1944, too late to build anything heavier and better in time. If I could go back in time I´d certainly say to begin a crash program in 1943 to build something better. Consdiering so much time was lost due to logistical problems, it would be certainly better to have fewer and better tanks than hordes of crap Shermans. Also air power is overestimated and most tank losses in both sides were from mechanical failures, tanks and AT guns.

 

[Arilou]

T 34 being mechanically reliable is a myth. It wasn´t. And the standard version was inferior to Panzer IV G in all aspects apart from front armor, and only because it was sloped. Its sucess came from numbers not quality, something that can be easily attested by the gigantic losses T-34 suffered. Yes Panther and Tiger were in inferior numbers, but that´s because they decided to keep so many chassis at the same time in production. While soviets kept it simple and abandoned the KV series and retained only T-34.

And the obvious reason why they used artillery, planes and had to do a emergency (yes, emergency) adaptation of the Sherman in the Firefly was, well, because the Sherman was discovered to be crap. So no it wasn´t what was needed, it´s what they had. Factories were all geared for its production, and by 1944, too late to build anything heavier and better in time. If I could go back in time I´d certainly say to begin a crash program in 1943 to build something better. Consdiering so much time was lost due to logistical problems, it would be certainly better to have fewer and better tanks than hordes of crap Shermans. Also air power is overestimated and most tank losses in both sides were from mechanical failures, tanks and AT guns.

The point is, the americans were winning. They didn't really have to do anything impressive, they were crushing the germans under the sheer weight of their shells.

Or in other words, it doesen't matter if it takes five tanks to beat their one, if you have ten tanks for everyone they've got.

 

[gagenater]

T 34 being mechanically reliable is a myth. It wasn´t. And the standard version was inferior to Panzer IV G in all aspects apart from front armor, and only because it was sloped. Its sucess came from numbers not quality, something that can be easily attested by the gigantic losses T-34 suffered. Yes Panther and Tiger were in inferior numbers, but that´s because they decided to keep so many chassis at the same time in production. While soviets kept it simple and abandoned the KV series and retained only T-34.

Actually the KV was not abandoned - development on it continued and it was the chassis and suspension system of the KV series tanks that became the well regarded JS/IS series of heavy tanks later in the war. The PZ IV G was superior to the original T34. Too bad for the Germans that the original T34 had been replaced by the T34-85 by the time they got around to fielding the PZ IV G. The PZ IV G was a response to the soviet tank superiority. Some early versions of the T34 had serious reliability problems - as a result of their losses early in the war the T34 was brought into service before without sufficiently thorough testing with obvious results - engine failures and transmission failures being most obvious.

And the obvious reason why they used artillery, planes and had to do a emergency (yes, emergency) adaptation of the Sherman in the Firefly was, well, because the Sherman was discovered to be crap. So no it wasn´t what was needed, it´s what they had. Factories were all geared for its production, and by 1944, too late to build anything heavier and better in time. If I could go back in time I´d certainly say to begin a crash program in 1943 to build something better. Consdiering so much time was lost due to logistical problems, it would be certainly better to have fewer and better tanks than hordes of crap Shermans. Also air power is overestimated and most tank losses in both sides were from mechanical failures, tanks and AT guns.

Entirely right that air power didn't kill many tanks compared to those other sources. Furthermore it was a low efficiency use of the planes and the fuel needed to run them. But the allies had lots of planes and lots of fuel, so this wasn't a big factor. If you break it down into casualties by front, and by forces faced the allies caused a very disporportionate portion of their tank casualties as a result of air power and artillery. The reason why the overall totals were tilted in the direction of AT guns and other tanks is because these were the primary anti-tank weapons on the Eastern front - where the vast majority of the fighting took place. Furthermore the Germans caused the vast majority of their tank casualties with tanks and anti-tank guns. Yes, in hindsight the allies should have replaced the Sherman earlier than they actually did. However it wasn't a serious issue by they time they actually had to use it in Europe. The Germans had such a truely tiny number of their superior tanks that they just weren't a serious factor in the war as a whole by then.

 

[PEP]

T 34 being mechanically reliable is a myth. It wasn´t.

It was cheap, easy to produce and repair. That was enough.

And the standard version was inferior to Panzer IV G in all aspects apart from front armor, and only because it was sloped.

The T34 was much more mobile (better speed both on and off roads and better operational range) and the later version (T34-85) could easily stand its ground against a PzIV.

And the obvious reason why they used artillery, planes and had to do a emergency (yes, emergency) adaptation of the Sherman in the Firefly was, well, because the Sherman was discovered to be crap. So no it wasn´t what was needed, it´s what they had.

No one is saying the Sherman was a great tank from a tactical point of view. But its qualities (cheapness, reliability, etc.) allowed the Allies to deploys swarms of them which, with the support of artillery, planes and TDs, did a pretty good job for "shity" tanks. And one has to remember that comparing Sherman to Panthers and Tigers doesn't make sense since those Panzers always represented a minority of the German armored forces. Sherman weren't that bad against most German tanks.

In the end, I think we're not really arguing about the same thing. Of course the Germans had "better" tanks on the field, but those were complex and expensive as hell often falling apart because of mechanical failures. The Americans chose to build cheap tanks of average quality in great numbers instead of good but expensive tanks in limited numbers. They made them work together with infantry, artillery, TDs and planes and in the end they completely pounded the Germans once out of the bocage! Just look at what Patton achieved with his lousy Sherman.

Now let's look back on the German tanks of may 1940 : they were terrible when compared to many French tanks and couldn't even pierce the B1bis but the French army was still completely crushed by the combined action of the lousy tanks of the Panzerdivisionen and the Luftwaffe. In 1944, the Germans experienced the opposite situation : they had the "best" tanks but were defeated by the allied forces quickly once out of Normandy.

 

[chepaeff]

There was a distrust of anything coming out from behind the Iron Curtain and, with the archives now once more exceptionally difficult to access, much of the 'new' work dates from that brief period when the archives were open and Western historians (and Russian) could get unhindered access. It'll be another decade or so before eg Glantz' work filters through into the work of other historians.

The archives are actually much easier to access since 2007, not even comparable to what was before that.

 

[StephenT]

Out of those 48,000 T-34 losses, how many were actually destroyed by the Germans in battle, as opposed to simply being abandoned by their crews when they got surrounded, or ran out of fuel, or broke down? If you take those numbers out of consideration and only consider combat losses, I suspect the ratio to the Sherman would be a lot closer.

'Jane's Tanks of WW2' (an excellent book) has this to say about the T-34:
The introduction of the T-34/85 gave the Soviet Union what it needed, a tank with a lethal gun, good armour protection and excellent mobility. Reliability, although improved near the end of the war, remained a shortcoming, but the huge numbers produced meant that tanks could be replaced when the engines burned out or the transmissions failed.

In other words, the Sherman was designed to be easy to repair if it broke down. The Soviets simply said, "Hey-ho, this T-34 is broken, give me another one".

**********

Regarding the Sherman M4, one important fact to consider is that US armoured vehicle doctrine before they entered WW2 was rather special. They believed that the purpose of a tank was to support infantry attacks and spearhead offensives - not to fight enemy tanks. That was the job of specialised, dedicated 'tank destroyer' units using vehicles like the M10 Wolverine or M18 Hellcat - which were very fast but thinly armoured because they were supposed to be used from ambush.

As a result of this doctrine, the Sherman was deliberately designed with a gun that wasn't very good at armour-piercing, but could fire large quantities of high explosive shells against soft targets. The Army authorities, such as General McNair, were very pleased with this policy - until American tanks actually met German tanks in large-scale ground combat after D-Day, and they realised they'd made a horrible mistake. The Sherman Firefly was a British attempt at a stopgap emergency fix, which involved cutting a hole in the back of the turret (!) to make room for a much larger 17-pdr gun.

The British went on to design the Comet as a purpose-made medium tank designed to use the 17-pdr; the Americans, unable to find an effective replacement for the Sherman in time, instead prioritised production of the M26 Pershing heavy tank instead.

***********

As for the Germans, the statement that, say, the Panzer IV G was better than the original-version T-34 seems to be missing the point. The T-34 was designed before the war and entered service in 1940; the Panzer IV G was designed in 1942 - as a direct result of the Germans seeing the T-34 in action and thinking, "Crap, we need to come up with something to match that, quick!"

Of course the later design, made with all the benefits of hindsight, is going to be better than the revolutionary and ground-breaking original version. And so the reputation of the T-34 comes, I think, from the fact that it came first, and its combination of sloped armour, wide tracks, and powerful gun couldn't be matched at the time. The host of imitators that copied it aren't more famous even if some of them were technically better.

 

[chepaeff]

'Jane's Tanks of WW2' (an excellent book) has this to say about the T-34:
The introduction of the T-34/85 gave the Soviet Union what it needed, a tank with a lethal gun, good armour protection and excellent mobility. Reliability, although improved near the end of the war, remained a shortcoming, but the huge numbers produced meant that tanks could be replaced when the engines burned out or the transmissions failed.
In other words, the Sherman was designed to be easy to repair if it broke down. The Soviets simply said, "Hey-ho, this T-34 is broken, give me another one".

Now that's just silly. Reliability was greatly improved. In 1941 200 km march could become a serious blow to strength due to breakdowns, while later on T-34/85 if not destroyed could go as much as 2000-3000kms before it would send to factory for repairs.

 

[BaronNoir]

It's worth nothing that people had widely different definitions of ''reliable'' during WW2 than we would have today.

But the Tiger was extremely unreliable, even for 1944 standards.