M4 Sherman

When France fell in June 1940, the United States had almost no modern armoured force — a handful of light tanks and a doctrine still catching up with mechanised war. The stopgap M3 Lee, its main gun mounted in the hull because no turret ring yet existed to carry it, bought time. What America needed was a medium tank with its gun in a fully traversing turret, and the Army’s Ordnance Department built exactly that: the M4, which the British named the Sherman after the Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman.

From the start the Sherman was shaped less by the search for the ultimate tank than by the demands of mass production and a war fought across oceans. It had to be reliable, simple to build in the thousands, easy to maintain, and light enough to cross the Atlantic in a ship’s hold and move inland by rail. Reliability and quantity over raw power: that bargain defined both the Sherman’s greatest strengths and its most painful weaknesses.

The tank that emerged was balanced and dependable — a 30-tonne medium with a 75 mm gun, adequate armour for 1942, and outstanding reliability. The 75 mm is often remembered as a weakness, but it was chosen for the job a tank spends most of its time doing: firing high-explosive at infantry, guns, buildings and bunkers, for which its shell was better than the German 88’s. Where German tanks broke down and were hard to recover, the Sherman ran and ran, and when it failed it was easy to fix.

American industry poured out close to 49,000 of them — more than any other Allied tank, and roughly the total of every German tank type combined. The same hull absorbed almost anything: petrol radials, a purpose-built multibank engine, twin diesels, the Ford GAA V-8. It became the basis for tank destroyers, recovery vehicles, rocket launchers, bridgelayers and the amphibious and mine-clearing specials that would storm the Normandy beaches. Few weapons in history were so numerous and so adaptable at once.

The Sherman’s dark reputation was for fire. Early tanks had a grim tendency to burn when penetrated, and crews and enemies gave it names to match — the British “Ronson,” after the lighter that “lights first time,” and the German “Tommykocher,” the Tommy-cooker. For years the fires were blamed on the petrol engine, but the real culprit was the ammunition: a fragment reaching the propellant charges in the stowage bins set the whole tank alight.

The fix was to move the ammunition low into the hull and surround the bins with a water-and-glycerine jacket that would douse a penetration before it could ignite — “wet stowage.” The effect was dramatic. A US Army study in 1945 found that 60 to 80 per cent of dry-stowage Shermans burned when penetrated, against just 10 to 15 per cent of the wet-stowage tanks — which, against everything the nickname implied, made the late Sherman one of the least flammable tanks of the war.

The one thing the Sherman could not do was kill a Panther or Tiger head-on, and the British answer was brutally direct: cram the enormous Ordnance QF 17-pounder anti-tank gun into a standard Sherman turret. The result was the Firefly, the deadliest Sherman of all. Its gun could punch through 233 mm of armour at 1,000 m with APDS ammunition — enough to destroy any German tank at the ranges it was met — and German gunners were ordered to shoot the Fireflies first, picking them out by their unmistakably long barrels. Only about 342 were ready for D-Day; some 2,100 were converted in all.

On 8 August 1944, during Operation Totalize south of Caen, a Firefly of the 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry knocked out three Tiger Is in a matter of minutes. Its gunner was a 20-year-old former shoe-factory worker, Trooper Joe Ekins, in his first tank action. One of the three Tigers is most widely credited as that of Michael Wittmann, the Waffen-SS ace who had wrecked a British column almost single-handedly at Villers-Bocage two months before — though the kill is disputed to this day. The most feared tank commander in Normandy had been stopped by the cheapest possible counter to him: an ordinary Sherman with a bigger gun.

For the invasion of France the Sherman was rebuilt into a menagerie of specialised machines — Major-General Percy Hobart’s “Funnies.” The strangest was the Duplex Drive, or DD: a Sherman wrapped in a collapsible canvas screen that let it float, driven through the water by propellers, meant to swim ashore in the first wave and meet the defenders with armour they did not expect.

In the calm off Utah Beach it worked. Off Omaha it was a catastrophe: the 741st Tank Battalion launched 29 DD tanks some 5,000 yards out into a heavy sea, and 27 of them foundered and sank, drowning many of their crews — only two swam ashore. Other Funnies saved lives all along the front: the Crab flail tank beat lanes through minefields with a spinning drum of chains, while Sherman dozers, fascine-carriers and bridgelayers opened the way inland.

No tank of the war was so widely used. The Sherman first fought in strength with the British at El Alamein in October 1942, where its reliability made an immediate impression, and from there it went everywhere the Western Allies did: up the length of Italy, across North-West Europe from the beaches to the Rhine, and across the Pacific, where its 75 mm was devastating against Japanese bunkers and the lighter Japanese tanks were little threat.

Lend-Lease put it into the hands of the British and Commonwealth, the Free French and the Soviets — a single dependable design that could be shipped, fuelled, supplied and repaired anywhere on earth. That was the Sherman’s real argument. Against a Tiger in the Normandy bocage a Sherman crew might well lose, but there was always another Sherman, it was always running, and it could be massed and replaced in a way Germany’s handful of heavy tanks never could. Used with artillery, aircraft and tank destroyers, it was war-winning.

The Sherman’s career did not end in 1945. It fought through Korea, and in the wars of the Middle East it had a long second life: Israel rebuilt worn Shermans into the “Super Sherman,” re-gunned with a French 75 mm and later a 105 mm, and sent them into battle against far more modern Soviet-built tanks into the 1970s. Others soldiered on in armies from South America to Asia for decades.

The M4 was never the best tank on any battlefield it entered. It was out-gunned and out-armoured by the German heavies from 1943 on, and its crews knew the cost intimately. But it was reliable where its enemies were fragile, plentiful where they were scarce, and buildable where they were not — and across a global industrial war those proved to be the qualities that counted. Close to 49,000 were made, and they served in dozens of armies for thirty years.

• R. P. Hunnicutt, Sherman: A History of the American Medium Tank (1978) — the definitive technical reference.
• Steven J. Zaloga, Armored Thunderbolt: The U.S. Army Sherman in World War II (Stackpole, 2008).
• Steven J. Zaloga, Sherman Medium Tank 1942–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).
• David Fletcher, The Universal Tank: British Armour in the Second World War (HMSO).