M4 Sherman vs Tiger

[McIvan]

Excerpt from William B. Folkestad. The View from the Turret: The 743rd Tank Battalion during World War II. Shippensburg, Pa.: Burd Street Press, 1996. vi + 146 pp. Notes and index. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57249-001-7:

"The inadequacies of the M4 Sherman tank--insufficient firepower, too high a silhouette, insufficient armor protection, gasoline engines, narrow tracks--are brought up time and again by the tankers of the 743rd. Of particular interest are the innovative means devised for offsetting the Sherman's shortcomings such as sandbagging the hull to make up for insufficient armor protection, and welding additional ammunition-ready racks in the turret to provide easy access to the additional ammunition needed to score a kill on German armor. Despite these innovations, the 743rd lost 96 M4 Shermans and suffered 141 killed, 22 missing, and 316 wounded. The total casualties, 479, represented the battalion at nearly full strength (p. 126). By comparison, the Third Armored Division lost 780 M4s and the equivalent of 583 tank crews (p. 127). As Folkestad so poignantly notes, "the price for technical inferiority was tremendous" (p. 127)."