![]() Easy to build and an excellent fighting platform, it proved to be a war-winner for the Allies. ![]() Today-more than seven decades after the end of the greatest war in military history to date-the debate continues: was the American-designed-and-built Sherman M4 medium tank a colossal blunder, a wonder weapon-or both?Īccording to author Philip Trewhitt in his 1999 work-Armored Fighting Vehicles-“The Medium Tank M4 Sherman used the same basic hull and suspension as the M3, but mounted the main armament on the gun turret rather than the hull. That having been said, it was also a cruel irony of fate and history that the outgunned and lighter armored Shermans nevertheless defeated the retreating Nazis by their sheer weight of numbers. ![]() M4 sherman commander hatch free#By the time of the Allied cross-Channel Normandy invasion of June 6, 1944, the American-built Sherman medium tank was admittedly inferior to its German opponents, yet still won the war in Northwestern Europe by numbers, not qualityĪs a young boy growing up in the United States in the mid-1950s, I-like thousands of others-enjoyed building and rebuilding the olive-drab, plastic M4 Sherman tank model made by the Revell Model Company of that era, and I can still fondly recall most of its details.īut for the Allied tankers and infantryman of the American, British, Canadian, and Free French armies battling German Panther and Tiger panzer tanks in Normandy in the summer months of 1944, the Sherman’s failures were glaringly evident as their own shells pounced off the hulls of the Nazi armor, and all the more so as they were themselves destroyed at a far greater range by their opposite numbers. ![]()
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