WI: American Tank Doctrine isn't Totally Misguided

[iddt3]

In OTL America drew mostly the wrong lessons in tank design in the run up to WWII, the whole TD/Infantry Support split was unproductive, then when the Sherman's did decently in North Africa, the US decided to stay the course rather than to continue upgrading, and as a result was behind in tank design (Compare the Sherman 76 to the Panther or the T-34/85).

What if America hadn't wiffed it? If they went for an all purpose, upgradeable medium from the start and didn't assume that current success meant future success? What sorts of tanks might they have built, and what impact would that have had on the war?

 

[Hrvatskiwi]

I can't really contribute to this in terms of why, but I will say that I always found it strange that the Americans so under-utilised tanks. After all, you'd think that tanks would be an excellent weapon in a likely front like Northern Mexico, with large open spaces.

On the other hand though, tank use in Central America and the Caribbean wouldn't be much more than infantry support. Maybe thats why? Maybe US military equipment had Central American filibustering in mind? Still doesn't explain why they didn't upgrade during WWII though.

 

[deathscompanion1]

I think it was because of their way of making war.

Does it work?
If Yes build seven metric shit tons of it and use against the enemy.

The Sherman did the job and was backed up by masses of artillery and air power it could also be mass produced and they were used to transporting it around and meeting its needs Why overcomplicate things with a brand new tank when it does what they need and they aren't quite aware of how outclassed it is?

 

[ChaosNDiscord]

This should be good. I'm waiting for all the techno speak to begin. I remember some good sherman/anti-sherman arguments in here. Those are always fun reading.

Personally though, here's the thing: The tanks had to be transported across an ocean and so you had logistical limitations in size and weight. Also, the Sherman was a pretty good performer, pretty reliable, and could be produced in overwhelming numbers.

The Germans kept fiddling with their designs (they really had no choice, they couldn't outproduce) and so you had a real clusterf*** in terms of parts and standardization which led to less units being available at any given time. The American philosophy was more of you may build a tank as tough as two of ours, but we can build 10 for every 1 you make.

 

[Deleted member 1487]

It fit US doctrine: throw as much firepower at a problem until its solved. Basically since the US CW the lesson had been getting the most material to the front was what won and WW1 confirmed that; the Sherman was easy to transport, was reliable, and able to be made in huge numbers. The only issue would be to get the 76mm cannon fitted sooner, but that took combat experience that the US lacked until it was too late to get it in service any quicker.

 

[Aelita]

It fit US doctrine: throw as much firepower at a problem until its solved. Basically since the US CW the lesson had been getting the most material to the front was what won and WW1 confirmed that; the Sherman was easy to transport, was reliable, and able to be made in huge numbers. The only issue would be to get the 76mm cannon fitted sooner, but that took combat experience that the US lacked until it was too late to get it in service any quicker.

Besides, the 75mm armed Shermans were still quite effective weapon systems when they made their operational debut. There was just a long time between the end of major tank engagements in North Africa and the Italian campaign, let alone the Normandy invasion.

 

[juanml82]

The Americans and the Soviets decided that quantity had a quality of its own. That doesn't mean they didn't develop very good weapon systems - they did. But they've also settled to quantity at times. The B-24 is another example of that.

 

[iddt3]

This should be good. I'm waiting for all the techno speak to begin. I remember some good sherman/anti-sherman arguments in here. Those are always fun reading.

Personally though, here's the thing: The tanks had to be transported across an ocean and so you had logistical limitations in size and weight. Also, the Sherman was a pretty good performer, pretty reliable, and could be produced in overwhelming numbers.

The Germans kept fiddling with their designs (they really had no choice, they couldn't outproduce) and so you had a real clusterf*** in terms of parts and standardization which led to less units being available at any given time. The American philosophy was more of you may build a tank as tough as two of ours, but we can build 10 for every 1 you make.

The Russians were even more constrained in terms of needing to produce their tanks in numbers but their designs were better. The Americans didn't need to "fiddle" But they did need to be planning the next two generations of tanks. If they had been on top of things we should have seen a 76mm Sherman in 1943 and something along the lines of the Pershing (hopefully with an upgraded engine) in 1944.

 

[Cryhavoc101]

This should be good. I'm waiting for all the techno speak to begin. I remember some good sherman/anti-sherman arguments in here. Those are always fun reading.

Personally though, here's the thing: The tanks had to be transported across an ocean and so you had logistical limitations in size and weight. Also, the Sherman was a pretty good performer, pretty reliable, and could be produced in overwhelming numbers.

The Germans kept fiddling with their designs (they really had no choice, they couldn't outproduce) and so you had a real clusterf*** in terms of parts and standardization which led to less units being available at any given time. The American philosophy was more of you may build a tank as tough as two of ours, but we can build 10 for every 1 you make.

This

Basically the Sherman was exactly what the battlefield needed in 1942/43 - a reliable fast easy to maintain tank with a good HE round and while it was outclassed in 1944 by the better of the German tanks, if there are no German tanks opposing you that's not going to matter

And why does everyone say that the T34 was the better tank?

Everywhere the T34/85 met the M4easy8 in combat it usually lost.

Compared to the Sherman it had Thinner armour (certainly penetrable by the 76mm), less reliable engine, cramped turret design, inferior optics and during the war was far more likely to kill / wound on average 4 out of 5 its crew if penetrated and knocked out.

Captured T34s in German service in Yugoslavia later in the war were repeatedly knocked out by 6 pounder (57mm) armed AEC Mk2 Armoured cars

Yes in hindsight the Pershing should have been available in numbers for D-day - but then the British were also driving ashore in hundreds of Shermans and the god awful Cromwell.

What bunch of traitorous Union Men inflicted that PoS on our lads with its criminally small hatches - the Comet was very good as was the Centurion but both were a good year to late

Well at least they had the Churchill

 

[iddt3]

This

Basically the Sherman was exactly what the battlefield needed in 1942/43 - a reliable fast easy to maintain tank with a good HE round and while it was outclassed in 1944 by the better of the German tanks, if there are no German tanks opposing you that's not going to matter

And why does everyone say that the T34 was the better tank?

Everywhere the T34/85 met the M4easy8 in combat it usually lost.

Compared to the Sherman it had Thinner armour (certainly penetrable by the 76mm), less reliable engine, cramped turret design, inferior optics and during the war was far more likely to kill / wound on average 4 out of 5 its crew if penetrated and knocked out.

Captured T34s in German service in Yugoslavia later in the war were repeatedly knocked out by 6 pounder (57mm) armed AEC Mk2 Armoured cars

Yes in hindsight the Pershing should have been available in numbers for D-day - but then the British were also driving ashore in hundreds of Shermans and the god awful Cromwell.

What bunch of traitorous Union Men inflicted that PoS on our lads with its criminally small hatches - the Comet was very good as was the Centurion but both were a good year to late

Well at least they had the Churchill

Given that, what if the Americans had given the Sherman a 105mm short barrel from the start? Or go with a lower profile, better sloped armor, ect. The Sherman did the job well enough certainly, but just as certainly, given America's huge industrial edge, a better tank could have been produced in quantity and sent less Americans home in boxes.

 

[Andre27]

Given that, what if the Americans had given the Sherman a 105mm short barrel from the start? Or go with a lower profile, better sloped armor, ect. The Sherman did the job well enough certainly, but just as certainly, given America's huge industrial edge, a better tank could have been produced in quantity and sent less Americans home in boxes.

A 105mm would be useful for infantry support, but if it's a short barrel then it would not necessarily be more suited against tanks. Combined with fewer shells in storage inside the tank it'd be a drawback.

The lower profile would have been nice, but the high profile was because of the only available reliable engine with enough power. This happened to be a fairly bulky aircraft engine.

Sloped armor is nice, but not a miracle cure either during ww2 considering the German long barrel 75mm and all versions of the 88mm could penetrate the Sherman's armor with ease.

 

[ObssesedNuker]

Everywhere the T34/85 met the M4easy8 in combat it usually lost.

This can easily be chalked up to the inexperience of the Arab and Korean armies using them. Not a whole lot of tradition in mechanized warfare there, you know? Russian-crewed T-34s would have been a whole 'nother ballgame.

That said, looking at the technicalities of it the T-34/85 vs the M4 Sherman are in precisely the same category as the T-34/85 vs Panzer Mark 4 or the M4 Sherman vs the Panzer Mark 4, it really comes down to who lands the first shot on the other most of the time.

 

[CalBear]

The Sherman itself was an excellent platform, almost unbelievably versatile (something that is illustrated by the fact that it remained in service well into the 1980s). Even the tank doctrine of the U.S., and to a somewhat lesser extent, the UK, was not unreasonable. The Sherman also afforded good protection, it was at least as well protected as the T-34/76 and close to equal to the T-34/85there wan't a tank in the world at the time that could survive a hit from an 88mm AP shell

The mistake that the U.S. made was to keep the medium velocity 75mm gun as the default weapon throughout the war. The HV 76mm should have become the standard by mid 1943, with a crash project to provide a fully enclosed version of the M 36 TD turret for use on a Sherman variant.

 

[Carl Schwamberger]

The lower profile would have been nice, but the high profile was because of the only available reliable engine with enough power. This happened to be a fairly bulky aircraft engine.
....

It was not the engine, but the front drive sprockets. That required a driveshaft extending rear to front, which forced everything on the tank upwards 20 to 15 cm. The T20, T22, T23, T25, & T26 hulls were al designed for the same engine as used in the M4 Sherman, and the hull top surfaces of all those were substantially loser than the M4. The top of the turret of the t26 - M26 was a full ten cm lower than the common M4 turrets.

In the attached photo a M4 is in the center & a M26 on the left. The hull of the M26 was originally designed to accept the same engine the M4 used. Note the height difference of the front sprocket, which in the M4 came from the front mounted drive & drive shaft underneath.

 

[TFSmith121]

Procurement is not simple?

Basically, the US had been though two large war mobilizations in the industrial age: one fought entirely in North America and one fought in Europe. Considering both were from what amounted to standing starts, said mobilizations had yielded large field forces quickly in 1861-62 and 1917-18 that made the necessary impact on the battlefield, but a lot of the equipment was subsititute standard in both cases, and overseas transportation for the AEF was dependent (probably about 50 percent in 1918) on the Allies.

So there was a lot of mobilization and procurement planning in the interwar period (the Army Industrial College opened in 1924, for example) but planning was about as far as it got...

US mobilization for the Second World War really began in 1940, when the fall of France opened the spigots for procurement and Selective Service; considering the draft didn't begin until the beginning of 2QFY41, the short of war operations, defensive operations in the first six months of 1942, and the counteroffensives that began in the second half of 1942 are actually very impressive.

Also considering the US strategy to win the war with Germany was founded on the invasion/liberation of Western Europe beginning in the spring-summer of 1943, the designs that were in or ready to go into production in 1941-42 were it. Considering how good the M4 was, in an operational sense, it became the standard, and in 1942-43 it was the gold standard.

The US probably could have come up with something resembling a Tiger in 1942 (an M6 chassis with a 90 mm gun, presumably), but damn few of them would have been in service and in Europe in 1943...

And even with that, the US tankers, infantry, and artillery - equipped with M4/M10 family (along with field artillery and close air support) - was consistently able to deal with the worst (best?) the Germans were able to manage in terms of mobile warfare in Italy in 1943-45 and France in 1944-45; and the M26/M18/M36 were in the pipeline for 1945...

As it was, the US equipped 16 armored dvisions and the equivalent of two dozen separate armored brigades for service overseas in 1943-44, as well as contributing the mass of armor for the British, French, Canadians, Poles, South Africans, etc., plus a fair amount for the Soviets...and giving every US infantry division in the ETO and MTO the equivalent of a SP anti-tank battalion.

Considering the scale of what the US accomplished in 1940-45, and the baseline in place in 1939-40, the US mobilization was the most sucessful in history.

Best,

 

[Montanian]

The Soviet Tank designs benefited from listening to American tank designer Walter J. Christie in the 1930's whose ideas on made it a faster, smoother shooting platform while his designs were pretty much ignored despite many presentations to U.S. Army Ordnance (just like Hiram Maxim's machine guns, James Paris Lee's bolt action magazine rifles, John Browning's 1908 semi-automatic rifle, etc. were similarly ignored yet proved to be very successful, useful designs for other armies.)

So there's a very reasonable POD in the mid-1930's with different design ideas, putting Patton and Eisenhower back on their post World War I assignments with tank development instead of rotting in Hawaii and the Phillipines, and engaging Detroit or farm equipment/construction equipment mfrs like Allis Chalmers (where the tread comes from originally I think), Caterpillar, John Deere, International Harvester, J.I. Case, etc..

In Arthur Herman's book "Freedom's Forge" he attributes most of the design work, transmission, engines, and tooling to Walter Chrysler's automotive guys overseen by Ford & GM's former head of production Bill Knudsen, going from zero to a high volume tank factory in a year. The rapidity of design change over in more complex systems, aircraft and ships especially, suggest minor to major improvements in tanks could have been done and with the same altered methods like welding, stamping, forging, composites (plywood was already a big innovation), electronics, shooting optics, diesel engines from White Trucks or Mack Trucks, etc. that allowed all sorts of stuff that used to take 5-10 years to design, tool up for, prototype/debug, test, revise, produce to go from the drawing board to shipment in a year or two.

It's actually really strange how flawed and few American tanks were, despite a considerably worse and more inexplicable performance in tank development and production in World War I. Most of the greatly shrinking defense budget of the 1930's went to the Navy with a former UnderSecretary of the Navy as President (and still thinking of his distant relative Theodore's construction of the Great White Fleet in the 1890's that proved so decisive in the Spanish-American War.) So both developing costly tanks and then building enough of them even for the tiny U.S. Army in the 1930's was probably more of a misguided economy, figuring it took longer to develop good non-commissioned and junior officers than it did to build tanks, self-propelled artillery, half-tracks, etc.. But much faster development and deployment of considerably better tanks by the latter half of the war was certainly quite feasible, most thought that was happening thanks to careful censorship on actual battlefield problems.

 

[Matt Wiser]

The Sherman itself was an excellent platform, almost unbelievably versatile (something that is illustrated by the fact that it remained in service well into the 1980s). Even the tank doctrine of the U.S., and to a somewhat lesser extent, the UK, was not unreasonable. The Sherman also afforded good protection, it was at least as well protected as the T-34/76 and close to equal to the T-34/85there wan't a tank in the world at the time that could survive a hit from an 88mm AP shell

The mistake that the U.S. made was to keep the medium velocity 75mm gun as the default weapon throughout the war. The HV 76mm should have become the standard by mid 1943, with a crash project to provide a fully enclosed version of the M 36 TD turret for use on a Sherman variant.

I agree: and the one man to blame for that was LTGEN Leslie J. McNair, head of Army Ground Forces. He refused to listen to the warfighters and the reports coming from North Africa and Sicily, wouldn't listen to Eisenhower's requests for improved armor and a better gun on the Sherman, and it took Marshall to overrule him and order what became the M-26 Pershing into production. McNair was KIA during Operation COBRA, the Normandy Breakout, when B-17s dropped short and hit his Observation Point. His successor was much more willing to listen to reports from the field.

 

[iddt3]

The Sherman itself was an excellent platform, almost unbelievably versatile (something that is illustrated by the fact that it remained in service well into the 1980s). Even the tank doctrine of the U.S., and to a somewhat lesser extent, the UK, was not unreasonable. The Sherman also afforded good protection, it was at least as well protected as the T-34/76 and close to equal to the T-34/85there wan't a tank in the world at the time that could survive a hit from an 88mm AP shell

The mistake that the U.S. made was to keep the medium velocity 75mm gun as the default weapon throughout the war. The HV 76mm should have become the standard by mid 1943, with a crash project to provide a fully enclosed version of the M 36 TD turret for use on a Sherman variant.

Were the TD's worth it at all? If the US had gone to the 76 then the 90mm in a timely fashion there wouldn't have been any real need for TDs, a tank is far more flexible.
*edit* Weren't T-34s in service about as long? It strikes me that's less a testament to any overriding virtue than it being decently reliable, having a useful gun caliber, not too slow, and proof against small arms. Given the number made, any tank with broadly those qualifications you would expect to see in service somewhere.

 

[phx1138]

Seems to me the "quantity is quality" argument fails when you consider a better tank also built in large numbers means fewer lost means less production wastage (& so less shipping wastage) means shorter war...

Is that too obvious?

 

[Locke01]

I can't really contribute to this in terms of why, but I will say that I always found it strange that the Americans so under-utilised tanks. After all, you'd think that tanks would be an excellent weapon in a likely front like Northern Mexico, with large open spaces.

Tanks cost money, and the Army of the interwar period didn't have any money. Tanks were also new-fangled, overly complicated, highly unreliable gadgets which weren't invented In America anyhow, and what self-respected cavalryman wanted to be caught dead in one now that there was real soldiering to be done what with the the war being over and all? Besides, everyone knew that success in battle depended upon stout-hearted infantry-men advancing fearlessly into enemy fire. Sounds pretty simple to me.