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A Prank Led to America’s First Nominated Female to Office, and Other Lesser Known American History Facts

Khalid Elhassan December 13, 2019 33 min

11. Shermans Performed Superbly in the Role For Which They Were Designed

Sherman on the road. National WW2 Museum

Shermans shone during the breakout from Normandy in 1944, and the ensuing rapid sweep through France and Belgium that only came to a halt at Germany’s border for lack of fuel. It was the kind of performance that only an armored force equipped with mechanically reliable and easily maintained Shermans could have pulled off.

Other countries’ armored forces would have been forced to halt because their tanks had broken down, long before they advanced as far as the Shermans had gone, before they were forced to halt – not because the American tanks broke down, but because they ran out of fuel.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.