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The period covered by this book saw the US Army go from being one of the minor players in armoured warfare to being the senior partner in the Western Front and the biggest producer of armoured vehicles of the Second World War.
This book is written by Steven J. Zaloga, who has produced a large number of books on individual tank types and particular tank-vs-tank duals. This is the first of two volumes looking at US tanks, and covers the two World Wars and the interwar period.
The big advantage over the individual books is that Zaloga is able to bring the stories of the different tanks and tank destroyers together into a single coherent story.
One major strength of this book is that the author looks at a wider range of the influences on tank design than is often the case. The most striking addition is a better use of the contemporary views of the end users of these vehicles than is often the case. While we often read about the sudden desire for more powerful guns after the first major battles against Panthers in Normandy, here we also see the results of earlier conferences and meetings with the US armoured forces. We thus see how in April 1944 US tank commanders based in Britain showed little interest in the new 76mm armoured version of the Sherman, and instead objected to its worse HE shell and having to deal with a second type of ammo. Once the realities of combat in Normandy became clear the 76mm gun was suddenly in great demand, as was the new HVAP shell. However while the good performance of this shell is often mentioned, this book is the first time I’ve read that there were so few of them available that most tanks only receieved one round per month!
The most depressing element of this book is the way in which an obsession with various self imposed doctrines ended up making the US armoured forces far less effective than they could have been in 1944-45. The worst example of this comes with the tank destroyer battalions. The basic concept of the tank destroyer – a fast, relatively lightly armoured, heavily armed tracked vehicle designed to take on massed German tank formations – had its flaws, but the way in which it was implemented made things worse. In 1943 the US Army was largely equipped with self propelled tank destroyers armed with 3in guns, and was in a position to quickly develop a more heavily armed tank destroyer that would have been very useful in 1944. Instead General McNair, commander of US Ground Forces, insisted on converted half of the tank destroyer battalions from self propelled to towed anti tank guns, making them far less mobile and less effective (at the battle of Mortain in 1944 this was proved, when the self propelled battalions destroyed more enemy tanks and suffered lower losses than the towed battalions). At the same time General Bruce from the Tank Destroyer command was obsessed with speed instead of firepower, so the new M18 Hellcat was armed with a 76mm gun that was similar in firepower to the 3in gun, carried in a smaller turret in a vehicle with less armour. As a result the new M18 was unable to take on the German Panther in a direct fight.
We see a similar problem with tank design, where development of new vehicles was largely led by demands from the end users. The problem with this was that by the time the US forces fighting in Normandy in 1944 decided they actually wanted heavy tanks it was far too late to develop them. This wasn’t helped by a fairly widespread view that the Sherman was the best tank in service that might have been valid in 1942, but certainly wasn’t by the summer of 1944.
On the plus side there was a clear desire to improve the Sherman. As a result the Sherman of 1945 was a significantly more effective tank than the Sherman of 1942, something that isn’t always realised. We see changes to the way ammo was stored, moving it from vulnerable racks in the sponsons to liquid protected storage in the floor, the replacement of the short barrelled 75mm gun with a longer barrelled 76m gun that was significantly better against enemy tanks (although not as effective as the similar calibre British 17-pounder or German 75mm KwK 42). We also see the development of a limited number of specialist versions, the most important being the dozer tank, which had an M1 dozer installed on a standard M4 Sherman, making a very useful vehicle.
The combat sections make it clear that although all of these technical issues were significant, the most important part of any tank was its crew. By the end of 1944 the Germans had lost most of their experienced tank crews, and the replacements had been rushed into combat. As a result the US Army’s armoured units proved to be superior to the Panzer divisions in the last major tank battles in the west, and in particular the Battle of the Bulge, where the greater experience of the US tank crews made up for the technical disadvantages of their equipment. By 1945 the tank-vs-tank comparisons become irrelevant, with the bulk of the remaining German tanks rushed to the Eastern Front – on 10 April 1945 the Germans only had 96 operational Panthers on the Western Front, facing several thousand Shermans!
The Pacific theatre is looked at separately, as tank warfare there was very different to that in the west. Once the initial shock of the Japanese attack was over and the US was able to start moving significant numbers of troops to the area Japan was always on the back foot in armoured warfare. Although the Japanese did develop some impressive tanks during the Second World War, most of them were kept in Japan to defend the Home Islands. As a result the majority of Japanese tanks faced in the field were the entirely outclassed Type 95 Ha-Go light tank or the 57mm armed Type 97 Chi-Ha. This allowed the Allies to use tanks in the Far East that were obsolete against the Germans – this was the only place where the M2 Medium Tank saw combat, and saw the M3 Medium and a range of US light tanks remain useful vehicles for much longer. US tanks played a major part in many Pacific battles, although rarely in tank-vs-tank battles. Instead we see them used as infantry support weapons, to destroy Japanese bunkers or as mobile artillery. This theatre also saw the use of one unique weapon – the Amtank, an armoured version of the LVT Amtrac, or amphibious tractors.
This is an excellent study of US armoured warfare in this period, doing a very good job of merging the technical and combat histories, and in particular the views of the troops on the ground.
Chapters
1 – US Tanks of World War I
2 – US Tanks in the Interwar Years
3 – US Tanks in World War II
4 – US Tanks in the Pacific Theater
Author: Steven J. Zaloga
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 272
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2024