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Untrue Historic “Facts” It’s Time to Erase

Khalid Elhassan September 8, 2020 35 min

Siege of Budapest - World War II — Red Army soldiers marching into a captured Budapest in 1945. Radio Free Europe

26. The Myth of the Defective Sherman

The M4 Sherman was America’s main tank of WWII, and the most widely used tank of the Western Allies. Shermans were mechanically reliable, easy to maintain, durable, easy and cheap to produce, and thus available in great numbers: about 50,000 were built during the war. They had a large turret and roomy interior, a good gun traverse rate and excellent stabilization system, and routinely managed to get off the first shot in tank-vs-tank confrontations.

On the downside, early Shermans were notorious for brewing up when hit because of inadequate fire prevention measures in ammunition storage – a problem that was remedied in later models. However, the problem with the early Sherman models led to a myth that persisted long after the war and into the present, that the Sherman was a terrible tank, more lethal to its own crews to the Germans. In reality, Shermans were some of the war’s safest tanks.

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.