M26 Pershing

Through 1943–44 the US Army fought with the M4 Sherman, a reliable 30 t medium that was out-gunned and out-armoured by the German Panther and Tiger. The men in the field wanted a heavier tank with a bigger gun, and the industrial capacity to build one existed — what stood in the way was not engineering but doctrine.

The eventual answer was the M26 Pershing, named for General John J. Pershing. A genuinely new design rather than a Sherman derivative, it married a powerful 90 mm gun to thick, well-shaped armour and torsion-bar suspension. After much hesitation it was rushed to Europe at the very end of the war.

The Pershing's greatest enemy was not the Panther but American doctrine. Through 1943 the US Army's ground-forces command, under General Lesley McNair, held that tanks existed to exploit breakthroughs and support infantry, while killing enemy tanks was the job of dedicated, lightly-armoured tank destroyers. By that logic a heavy tank built around a big anti-tank gun answered a problem the Army insisted it did not have.

So the design spent years in committee. It emerged from the experimental T20–T26 series, a family of medium and heavy prototypes explored from 1942, and only after the shock of the Panther and Tiger in Normandy — and mounting complaints from the field about the Sherman’s helplessness against them — was the T26E3 finally standardised as the M26 and rushed into production. The tank the Army needed in 1944 would not reach the front until 1945.

The Pershing's main armament was the 90 mm M3 (L/53) gun — the same calibre as the German '88' family — able to defeat the frontal armour of a Panther at combat range and to threaten the Tiger. It was served by a five-man crew and backed by two .30-calibre machine guns and a roof-mounted .50-calibre M2.

Protection was a major advance over the Sherman: a 102 mm upper hull front and a cast turret front up to 114 mm, well sloped. The ~41.7 t tank was driven by a Ford GAF V8 of ~500 hp through torsion-bar suspension for a road speed near 40 km/h and a range of about 160 km — though the engine and transmission, carried over from the lighter Sherman programme, were somewhat underpowered for the heavier hull, a flaw not fully cured until the post-war M46.

Only about 20 Pershings reached Europe by February 1945, in the so-called “Zebra Mission,” and they saw action in the war’s final weeks. The most famous moment came at Cologne on 6 March 1945. A German Panther, dug in beside the cathedral, had just destroyed a Sherman, killing several of its crew, when a single Pershing of the 3rd Armored Division was brought up.

Manoeuvring into view, its gunner — Corporal Clarence Smoyer — fired three rounds of 90 mm in seconds and knocked out the Panther where it stood. The whole duel was captured on film by a US Army cameraman, Jim Bates, and the footage — one of the few clear tank-versus-tank engagements ever recorded — made the Cologne action one of the best-known tank duels of the war.

One Pershing in Europe was something more. The T26E4 “Super Pershing” carried the long 90 mm T15E1 — a gun in the class of the King Tiger’s 8.8 cm KwK 43, firing its shot at around 1,140 m/s — and the single combat example, issued to the 3rd Armored Division, was field-modified with extra armour cut from a captured Panther welded to hull and mantlet.

It fought in the war’s final weeks around Dessau, where its crew credited it with destroying a German heavy tank in April 1945. Only 25 T26E4s were built; the up-gunning path they explored led directly to the 90 mm and 105 mm guns of the postwar Patton series.

Beyond Cologne, Pershings fought at the Remagen bridgehead and in the closing drives into Germany. The encounters were few but instructive: a Pershing was knocked out by a Tiger I at Elsdorf, while elsewhere the 90 mm gun proved it could kill the heaviest German tanks. In the Pacific, a handful arrived in time for the fighting on Okinawa.

Production reached roughly 2,200 vehicles, but the Pershing came too late to influence the outcome of the Second World War. Its real importance lay in what followed: it became the foundation of America's post-war tank family, evolving through the M46 into the Patton series that would serve for decades and fight in Korea.

The M26 Pershing was the tank the US Army needed in 1944 but did not field until 1945 — a well-armed, well-protected heavy with a 90 mm gun fully capable of fighting Panthers and Tigers on equal terms. Its late arrival meant it fought only a handful of actions, the Cologne duel chief among them.

Yet its legacy outweighs its wartime record. By finally giving American crews a tank that could trade blows with the best German armour, and by fathering the long line of Patton tanks, the Pershing closed the Sherman era and opened the modern one. It stands as the bridge between the US armour of the Second World War and the Cold War that followed.

• Peter Chamberlain & Chris Ellis, British and American Tanks of World War Two (Arms & Armour Press).
• Steven J. Zaloga, M26/M46 Pershing Tank 1943–53 (Osprey, New Vanguard).
• R. P. Hunnicutt, Pershing: A History of the Medium Tank T20 Series (Feist Publications).
• Adam Makos, Spearhead: An American Tank Gunner, His Enemy, and a Collision of Lives in World War II (Ballantine) — the Cologne duel and Clarence Smoyer.