Citizen Soldiers The U.S. Army From The Normandy Beaches To The Bulge To The Surrender
Of Germany June 7, 1944 To May 7, 1945
by Stephen Ambrose
Pg.63-64
"The Sherman was universally denounced by anyone who had to fight in one against
a Panther or Tiger. But one thing about the Shermans-there were a lot more of them
than there were Panthers or Tigers. Quantity over quality and size was General Marshall's
deliberate choice. He wanted more, faster (and thus lighter) tanks, in accord with American
doctrine, which held that tanks should exploit a breakthrough, not fight other tanks. Marshall's
first problem was that American tanks had to cross the Atlantic to get to the battle, and the
number one strategic shortage of the Allies was shipping. Experiment showed that you could
get two Shermans into the space required by one larger tank on an LST. Of course that
equation didn't work out if one Tiger could destroy four Shermans, which sometimes
happened. But not often, because there were so few Tigers compared to the number
of Shermans. By the end of 1944 German industry would produce 24,630 tanks, only a
handful of them Tigers. The British would be at 24,843. But the Americans would by
then have turned out the staggering total of 88,410 tanks, mainly Shermans. For all
their shortcomings, the Shermans were a triumph of American mass-production
techniques. First of all, they were wonderfully reliable, in sharp contrast to the Panthers
and Tigers. In addition, GIs were far more experienced in the workings of the internal
combustion engine than were their opposite numbers. The Americans were also
infinitely better at recovering damaged tanks and patching them up to go back into action;
the Germans had nothing like the American maintenance battalions."
