By almost every technical measure, Germany built better tanks. The Tiger 1 carried 100 mm of frontal armor and an 88 mm gun that could knock out a Sherman at ranges where the Sherman couldn’t reliably return the favor. The Panther outclassed anything it regularly faced in firepower and protection. German engineering in armored vehicles was, by the standards of the war, exceptional, and the men who climbed inside American tanks [music] knew it. And yet Germany lost the armored war. Not narrowly,

comprehensively. By 1945, American armor had pushed from the beaches of Normandy to the Rine, crossed it, and was rolling through the industrial heart of the Reich. The Germans who wrote postwar analyses of why they lost almost always came back to the same uncomfortable admission. Their tanks were better, and it didn’t matter enough. What the Americans had built kept replacing itself. When a vehicle was outclassed, a better one was already in production. When a tank was destroyed, the recovery crews went out

after it. Tactical failures became afteraction reports became doctrine changes on a timeline German procurement cycles couldn’t touch. These are the 10 American tanks and armored vehicles that made Germany pay for every mile. Number 10, the M4 Sherman. The Sherman’s reputation has been argued over for 80 years. Crews complained about the armor, the gun, and the way early models burned when penetrated. German tankers learned to keep firing at a disabled Sherman until it caught fire, producing an

impression of routine catastrophe the casualty statistics don’t fully support. The Sherman was the most consequential tank of the Western Allied War effort. Present in every theater, adaptable to virtually every role, produced in numbers no German factory could approach. 49,324 Shermans were built between 1942 and 1946 at plants run by Ford, Fisher Body, Chrysler, Press Steel Car, and the Lima Locomotive Works among others. The British received thousands under Len lease. The Soviet Union received

thousands more. Free French forces fought with them. The Sherman first went into combat at Lamagne in October 1942 and it was still fighting when the gun stopped in May 1945. By the time German Panzer commanders encountered the Sherman in any engagement, they were almost always looking at more than they could deal with. The Germans were often right about the hardware. They were catastrophically wrong about the arithmetic. Number nine, the Sherman DD. Germany spent years fortifying the Atlantic coastline.

Concrete bunkers, interlocking fields of fire, obstacles on the beaches, 88 mm guns positioned to cover every approach from the sea. The one thing German defensive planners did not fully account for was the possibility that Allied tanks might simply swim ashore. The duplex drive Sherman, the DD, added a collapsible canvas flotation screen to a standard Sherman hull and connected two rear propellers to the tank’s engine. With the screen raised, the tank floated. At four knots, it could make its way from a landing craft to the

beach under its own power, drop the screen as it grounded, and be fighting within seconds of touching land. On Utah Beach on June 6th, 1944, 28 of 32 DD Shermans launched successfully made it ashore and began providing direct fire support for the infantry. At Omaha, the seas were rougher and the launch distances longer, and 27 of the 29 tanks launched by the 741st tank battalion sank. A catastrophe whose consequences for the men on that beach are still visible in the casualty figures. But the concept was sound and on beaches

where conditions allowed it to work, the DD provided exactly what it had been designed for. Tanks on the sand ahead of the infantry before any German defender could have expected them to be there. Number eight, the M4 A3E2 Sherman Jumbo. Only 254 were built. That was enough. The M4 A3E2 came out of a straightforward problem. American armored columns in Europe needed a vehicle that could absorb the first shot at a road junction or prepared defense without losing a crew. The solution was to take a standard M4 A3 hull and weld

an additional 38 mm of rolled armor plate onto its glacus and sides, producing a frontal thickness that matched the Tiger 1’s and a 6-in cast turret that could shrug off most of what the Vermacht had to offer from the front. The jumbo topped out at 22 mph, slower than a standard Sherman, and its extra weight stressed the suspension. None of that mattered to the men behind it. Issued to the first, third, and 9th armies in late 1944, the Jumbo was placed at the head of every column that had one. It drew fire. It absorbed it.

German anti-tank gunners who had learned that one well-placed round would stop a Sherman found that the same round glanced off the Jumbo’s front and that the Jumbo’s crew was already ranging in on their position. In the Herkin Forest at Baston’s perimeter on the drives toward Cologne and Rayagen, the Jumbo was the tank that went first and came back. Number seven, the M10 tank destroyer. The M10 had a flaw that was visible from a considerable distance. It had no roof on its turret. Five crewmen

operated in an open fighting compartment that left them exposed to everything above the tank line. Artillery fragments, small arms, grenades, winter. German tankers who encountered M10s from close range had options that the M10’s crew had deliberately traded away for speed, weight savings, and the ability to scan for targets without obstruction. The trade-off bought a 3-in high velocity gun on the proven M4 Sherman chassis, produced in quantities of about 6,400 between 1942 and 1943. It arrived in North Africa in 1943 where

it could penetrate the armor of any Axis tank in the theater and it followed the Allied advance through Sicily, Italy, and Normandy. By mid1944, the Panther and Tiger had outpaced the 3-in gun’s effectiveness against their frontal armor, and the M10 shifted into direct fire support for infantry, into indirect fire missions, into any role the situation required. While newer vehicles move forward to the tank killing work, the M36 Jackson replaced it. The M18 supplemented it. The American armored force kept moving. The

Germans, facing each new vehicle in sequence, never got a clean answer to any of them. Number six, the M36 Jackson. By the fall of 1944, American armored units in France had a problem they couldn’t ignore. The Panther and Tiger were absorbing 3-in and 76 mm rounds on the frontal arc and surviving. The M36 was the answer, or the closest thing to one that could reach the front in time. The M36 took the M10 A1 chassis and fitted a new turret carrying the 90mm M3 gun, the same caliber that would

arm the M26 Persing. Against Panthers and Tigers, the 90 mm was a fundamentally different proposition than the 3-in it replaced. It could defeat Tiger 1 frontal armor at combat ranges and gave crews credible shots at Panther mantlets, side armor, and turret faces that the earlier gun could not match. First committed to combat in October 1944, the M36 gave American tank destroyer battalions something they had been missing since Normandy, a gun that forced German crews to take cover rather than simply absorb the shot. A gunner

from the 814th Tank Destroyer Battalion claimed a Panther kill at 4,600 yd. The maximum range of the vehicle’s telescopic sight. That shot was an outlier. The fact that it was possible at all was not. Number five, the M18 Hellcat. Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Bruce, who organized the tank destroyer force, had looked at the Panthers and Tigers coming off German assembly lines and reached a conclusion that ran against everything conventional armor doctrine suggested. Don’t match them. Don’t try to out armor them or outgun

them at their own range. Find their flank, fire before the turret traverses, and be somewhere else before the crew can respond. The M18 was built around that answer. Built by Buick from a clean sheet design, not a Sherman conversion, not a stop gap, the M18 weighed about 20 tons, and was powered by a 9-cylinder, 350 horsepower radial aircraft engine. Its top speed was 55 mph on roads, making it the fastest tracked armored fighting vehicle of the Second World War. With only 13 millimeters of armor

on the front hull, it could not take a hit from any German tank gun and survive. That was the price of the speed. And Bruce’s crews understood the terms. With 257 produced between 1943 and 1944, M18 crews in Europe achieved a killto- loss ratio of 2.3 to1, the highest of any American armored fighting vehicle in the war. Hellcat battalions in France in the summer of 1944 used speed and flank positioning to run up kill totals against Panthers and Tigers that heavier, slower vehicles could not

replicate. Number four, the M3 Lee Grant. Before the Sherman, before the tank destroyer battalions, before any of the armor that eventually rolled into Germany, there was a crisis. Germany had defeated France in 6 weeks. British armor in North Africa was getting torn apart. America’s tank program had nothing ready for full-scale combat. The M4 was in development, but not in production. And in the summer of 1941, the British sent a mission to Washington with a single request. Give us something

now. The M3 Lee, called the Grant by the British, who insisted on a modified turret, was the response. Its primary armament, a 75 mm gun, was mounted in a sponsson on the right side of the hull rather than in a rotating turret, which limited its traverse to 15° and created tactical problems that became immediately apparent once it was in action. German tankers who faced the Grant at Gazala in May 1942 quickly learned to approach from the left. And yet the Grant kept British armor fighting in North Africa through 1942,

held the line while the Sherman reached the theater, and carried a gun that could engage German armor at distances the outclassed British cruiser tanks could not. It was not a good tank. It was the tank that was available. In a war that would eventually be settled by production and numbers, the M3 demonstrated at the worst possible moment that America could build something and get it overseas fast enough to matter. Number three, the M4 A3 E8. Easy8. American tank crews had been telling their commanders since Normandy that the

standard Sherman 75 mm gun was not adequate for the tanks Germany was fielding in quantity. By late 1944, enough afteraction reports had accumulated that denial was no longer possible. The M4 A3E8 was the production answer, a Sherman fitted with the horizontal velute spring suspension and armed with a high velocity 76 mm M1 gun. The 76 mm was not a frontal solution against the Panther’s sloped glacis, but it gave American crews credible shots at German sidearm, turret faces, and mantlets that the 75 mm could not match.

What it changed practically was the calculation a German tank commander had to make. A Panther could absorb a 75mm round and keep fighting. It could not reliably absorb a 76 mm round from the side and keep doing the same. That meant German armor had to be more careful about exposure, more conservative about flanks, and in a war where American numbers were already tilting the odds, conservative German armor was losing armor. Number two, American tank maintenance doctrine. A Tiger 1 required far more maintenance than a Sherman. Its

final drive was a known mechanical weakness that failed regularly under operational stress, and replacement parts were scarce, sometimes unavailable for weeks. A Tiger knocked out by a breakdown in Normandy might sit immobile for days while the rest of the unit kept moving. German armored formations in 1944 and 1945 consistently had large portions of their nominal strength unavailable because of mechanical failures, battle damage, and supply shortages. An American tank crew could pull a Ford GAAA engine from a Sherman in the field,

service it on the lowered engine deck, and return the tank to action in hours. Sherman parts were produced at the same industrial scale as the tank itself. Tank recovery vehicles, M32s built on the Sherman chassis, were organic to American armored units, designed to retrieve disabled tanks under fire and return them to maintenance. German tankers who knocked out a Sherman in the morning might face the same tank repaired and crude by afternoon. German tank commanders factored armor, firepower, and crew training into their

assessments of American armor. They had no category for what happened when the tank they killed came back. Number one, the M26 Persing. On the night of February 26th, 1945, a column of the Third Armored Division was pushing into the German town of Elldorf when a concealed Tiger hiding behind a building roughly 100 yardd away opened fire. The lead tank, a T-26E3 the crew had named Fireball, took three rounds. The first penetrated through the mantlet and killed both the gunner and the loader. The second hit the gun

barrel. The third glanced off the turret. Fireball was recovered, repaired, and back in action by March 7th. That same week, other Persings at Elldorf killed a Tiger and two Panzer 4s. Only 20 Persings were in the initial combat batch sent to Europe in January 1945, split between the 3rd and 9th [music] Armored Divisions. The delay was institutional. General Leslie McNair, commanding army ground forces, had blocked the Persing’s priority production for two years on the grounds that the Sherman was adequate for the

war America was fighting. He was wrong, and the men who drove Shermans into Panthers knew it. When the Persings finally arrived, armed with a 90mm gun that matched the Tiger’s firepower and wrapped in armor significantly better than anything the Sherman family offered, German tank commanders encountered for the first time, an American vehicle built for the fight they were actually in. 20 tanks. The war ended 3 months later. Germany had spent 4 years building armor nothing in the American inventory could reliably kill.

and the Persing arrived just in time to demonstrate that this was no longer true. The Vermach built for the war they were winning in 1940. The Americans built for the war that was actually in front of them, kept building until they had it right and then drove it through the Sig Freed line. If you come here for the history underneath the history, the weapons, the decisions, and the real reasons the war went the way it did, subscribe and turn on notifications. We’ll be back.