Posted on Jun 29, 2010 12:45:02 PM PDT
Scholarly Reviewer says:
Robert Forczyk, your comments are largely dead on target, your research dovetailing heavily with my own. I am a former tanker (M-48A5s; M-60s; M-1A1), and have also crawled in and been in virtually every tank ever built. I've even worked on some of the old WW II types and assisted extensively with WW II reenactments.
With that said, while the Panther had an excellent gun, the gunnery technique was terrible. The hydraulic traverse, being slaved to the engine, meant that the driver had to coordinate with the gunner to maintain rpms to provide any modicum of consistency in traverse. Moreover, once the gunner tried to refine his traverse to track a moving target, he had to switch to the hand wheel as the hydraulic system would jerk terribly. I have tried tracking targets on a hand wheel.... forget it. It's even worse when the tank is on a cant (which is most of the time). The difficult points of Panther (and also Tiger) gunnery meant that the Sherman could hurl multiple rounds down range without receiving a return shot. This is born out not only by the After Action Reports, but even by the testimony of those tankers who denigrated the Sherman. One must remember that it is in the hearts of all soldiers to idolize the equipment of the enemy if it is in any way effective against their own. Forczyk mentions the action of 4 AD at Arracourt, but even the sluggish 2 AD operating at Puffendorf still battered the 9 PzD and the supporting Heavy Tiger Battalion, though they were on the attack and churning in the heavy mud. The Shermans of Col. Disney's TF1 shot off their entire basic load in an action that spanned over four hours. Sure many of our rounds bounced off German tanks... yet enough didn't. Moreover, many of the German rounds didn't even hit, for many of the Shermans continued to move to and fro on the gentle rise outside the town. This was a dumb head-to-head tank battle. Even when I was a young new tanker I knew better than to slug it out head-to-head with charging T-62s and T-64s. Such fighting is symmetric warfare, when one should be asymmetric in their approach.
In my research, the number one tank killer used by the Americans in the ETO was the Sherman, often the lowly 75mm version. The number one killer of U.S. armor was the 75mm/88mm PAKs, the Panzerfaust, and landmines. For the Allies, air power scored dismally against German armor, accounting for no more than 7% of combat kills. As a tank killer, fighter bombers were grossly inefficient as well, requiring a large number of sorties to achieve the few kills they got. Their strikes on the LOCs were very good, and thus accounted for many abandoned German tanks due to lack of supply. But these missions also cost the airmen dearly in losses (what the Allies called "armed reconnaissance" missions... hated by the pilots because of all the AAA they encountered). Fly boys love to exaggerate their claims (they did in the Gulf War 91 and in Kosovo) because they must justify their existence re the ground war.
There is no need for me to provide additional extensive comments about Cooper's book, as Forczyk's comments are pretty accurate. What riles me is when others make comments based on myth, secondary sources that created that myth (I love Forczyk's comment about Panzerblitz... very apropos), and the few veterans who, in attempting to gain a moment of fame and glory in their latter years, come up with a work of fiction and then pawn it off on us as "history." There was very little in the book regarding the 3 AD that I could substantiate from 3 AD After Action Reports, other than already repeated accounts or stories from other secondary sources.
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