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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

24. Shermans Outclassed German Panzers When First Introduced

A Sherman with a 75mm gun in Kevelaer, Germany, 1945. ThoughtCo

The anti-M4 myth claims that Shermans were routinely outclassed by German panzers. However, when Shermans entered service in 1942, they outclassed the German tanks then in service: they were better armed and more heavily armored. The main German battle tank of the time was the Panzer III, and its standard antitank gun was 37mm, whose shells the Sherman shrugged off. When Panzer IIIs were upgunned to 50mm, they still had to get very close to inflict damage. In the meantime, the Sherman’s 75mm gun could kill anything the Germans fielded until the arrival of the Tiger.

Shermans got an unfair rap for being poor tanks, mainly because they did not perform well when fighting the heavier Tigers and Panthers that were introduced later in the war. However, Tigers and Panthers represented only a small fraction of German tanks and fighting other tanks represented only a small fraction of the Shermans’ workload – a fraction that the Shermans had never been intended to perform.

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.