【字幕龜速咕咕咕】【酋長聊坦克】酋長破除關於二戰美國裝甲部隊的謠言

One of the famous ones was General Patton. Were the Germans afraid of General Patton? And everybody says, yeah, you've got the movie, you've got A Bridge Too Far, you've got the Carlo Desta biography, the Germans are afraid of General Patton. Then Harry Eide goes into the German archives about two years ago and discovers that most of the German generals never heard of him. A big blow to the Patton ego. So, who am I and why should you care? Well, A, I'm an armor officer. This means nothing. It's one of the things I hate on internet forums. I'm an Abrams tanker, and I'm telling you that the Sherman, what is that going to do with the price of fish? He was in charge of army ground forces. His job was the training, organization and equipping of all US army ground forces that went overseas. He had a huge task in front of him. Gladion Barnes. So if McNair is the bad guy, Barnes is the mad scientist. He was the head of the R&D division of ordnance branch and he basically had his finger in the development of every piece of equipment that army ground forces used. Unfortunately, he was of the opinion that he knew better than the field forces what they needed. And although he was very creative and very pushy and he was able to get a lot of stuff developed, his opinions weren't necessarily correct. So that's your background. Myth number one, names of vehicles. Sherman, Hellcat, Wolverine, Jumbo, Honey, Priest and so on. Usually you will hear this said as the US army never named it the Sherman. Or the British came up with General Stewart. The non-British names are names that were attributed to the British but in fact were not. Wolverine is a very common one for the M10 tank destroyer. The British called it an M10. The Americans called it an M10. In early 1945, the British decided to come up with a name for it, Achilles. And that applies both to the 3-inch and the 17-pounder gun. People think it's just a 17-pounder. Nobody has a clue where the name started. Jackson. The British named it General Jackson. The British never used it. Why would they give it a name? Honey. The Stuart was such a brilliant tank to drive, the British called it a Honey. The American names. The Americans were the people who put General in front of their names. In late 1944, Ordnance Branch, General Barnes included, put out an order stating that the following names will be assigned to vehicles. There was one flick and it's lit in the 20s. But the other problem is that your average trooper, the GI, used Zippo's, not Ronson's. So we're not quite sure where that came from either. Myth 2. Tanks were infantry support weapons or exploitation weapons and not anti-tank. So you hear the one, you hear the other, you hear both. And this is again something close to the truth being taken out of context. The armoured division, its role was indeed exploitation. Once the hull was punched, the armoured division would go around marauding, killing whatever it found. Whatever it found could include tanks. The lines were to be punched by the infantry divisions. The infantry divisions had tank battalions assigned to them. So the role of those tank battalions was indeed infantry support. Now, if you're an infantryman, you're attacking forward and there's a German tank shooting at you, you will want something to destroy that tank. This is part of the infantry support role. And the 75mm was selected for the M3 medium because it was good at anti-tank work. This never changed. Now, US doctrine was not so stupid to think that just because we didn't want to fight enemy tanks, the enemy wouldn't bring any along. So I have a quote here from one of the field manuals. You can't read it, but I'll read it out for you. FM 1733 of 1942. Tank versus tank action. CFM 1710. Attacking tanks frequently encounter hostile tank units unexpectedly. At other times they may be required to attack hostile tanks deliberately. This is in the doctrine. This is the written manual. You're a tank, you kill tanks. Leave the tank destroyers to tank the destroyers. It's ridiculous. There's never a tank destroyer around when you need one anyway. Ok, so what about McNair? This is the first time we're going to talk about McNair. Frequently postulated that the reason that US tanks did not do well against other tanks is because AGF and the artillerymen, also divers, did not believe that tanks were best used to fight tanks. This is true. He did have some very specific opinions on the subject. He did not let his opinions overrule the advice of those beneath him. So although he very well may have written, it is a waste of a tank to fight a tank, he did not stop his subordinates who wanted anti-tank guns on the tanks from having those anti-tank guns. Actually in the case of Pershing, he overruled his own department. He didn't want the Pershing, but he said, look, the decisions made, we're going to support the troops in the field who want this tank. Secondly, he did not write doctrine. Doctrine for Armored Force was written by Armored Force. Doctrine for Tank Destroyer Branch was written by the tank destroyers down in Camp Hood, Texas. He came up with the concept of the tank destroyers as an anti-tank system, but that was it. He certainly never said anything that, at least that I can find in writing, saying that a tank should not be capable of fighting another tank. Let's move on to myth number three, tank destroyers. And I have a Wikipedia quote here. It says, US Army doctrine held that tanks did not fight other tanks but supported the infantry. Or tank destroyers destroyed tanks and tanks destroyed everything else. No. I suspect this is a case of people drawing the wrong conclusion from the name. It is a tank destroyer, ergo, bingo, it destroys tanks and that means that everything else... It doesn't say it has to be exclusive. Tank destroyers are the best thing at destroying tanks. That doesn't mean to say nobody else can. OK, so, I've already showed on the tank manual that the tankers thought that they should be capable of fighting tanks. Did the tank destroyer branch think that tanks should be capable of fighting tanks? And to that we go to FM 18-5. So here's a couple of things about tank destroyer doctrine. Firstly, it is purely defensive. The tank destroyer was something... If the Germans attack, then the tank destroyers intercept. So written in the FM, it is italicized. Tank destroyers ambush hostile tanks but do not charge or chase them. Which is fine if you're defending. What if you're attacking? You can't do it. Tank destroyers were held in reserve. Even in the offense, tank destroyers were held in reserve. So that meant if you met a tank when you're attacking, anything but a tank destroyer is supposed to kill that tank that you meet. It could be infantry, it could be artillery, it could be airplanes, anything else. It could be another tank. Later on, when you're attached to a tank division, the tank destroyer manual states, Since the armored division can meet strong armored attacks with effective organic weapons, tank destroyers may execute secondary missions instead. What are the organic weapons that a tank division has? Tanks! So even the tank destroyers thought that tanks should fight tanks. Okay, let's go on to the next one. Pershing could have come earlier. You're going to hear this one. If they had made the right decisions, Pershing could have been the main American tank at D-Day. Maybe it could, but would it have been a good idea? So I'm going to get one thing out of the way first. Belton Cooper's book, Death Traps, makes the claim that the reason we did not have Pershing was because General Patton did not like it. There's a couple of problems here. Firstly, Death Traps is a great book. I highly recommend it. Assess everything you read. It is not a historical work. It is a memoir. Where he got the idea that Patton had any influence in tank development, nobody knows. Suffice to say, not true. No matter how many times you hear it elsewhere, because it's a commonly seen book and it gets cited a lot. Okay, so that deals with that. Let's move on to McNair. Okay, so you'll also hear McNair didn't want Pershing because it was a tank-killing tank. Well, no, I've already discussed that. He did not let his opinions stop tank development. What he did do was he actually authorized experimental development, just not production. Now, why? So if you can see this or not, what do these vehicles have in common? One of them is a 3-inch gun motor carriage M5, a tank destroyer. One is the medium tank M7. One is the M4 Sherman with the 76mm in a quick-fix turret. And the last is the medium tank T-23, all from 4243 era. So what are your guesses? What do they all have in common? They were prototypes. What else? They were all approved for service. They were ordered in the thousands. The M7, they built a factory in Indiana purely for the M7. Then after all these orders were placed, they realized that the tank sucked. And they didn't make them. And this was a complete waste of money, man hours and resources. Army ground forces was not going to put anything into production unless they knew it bloody well worked. So here's a teaching point. July 1943. Somebody near the front, what am I looking at? A Panther. What's special about these Panthers? They're broken down. The Panther was pressed into service very quickly before they knew if it worked. Some figures. 204 Panthers were sent to Kursk. Six destroyed themselves just getting to the fight. By 9th of July, 28 Panthers were lost, including those six. By the 10th of July, so it's about a week in, of the 204 Panthers, 81 non-combat damaged Panthers were into repair shops. With a reliability rate like that, you can understand perhaps why the US Army didn't want to have that kind of tank leading its charge across France. So was McNair right to not approve Pershing to go overseas? Well, this is a scan of a document dated December 44, 29th of December. It is a report of the heavy tank T-26E1, which is a developmental version of the Pershing of that time. It says, The armored board concludes that the heavy tank T-26E1 as tested is unsatisfactory because of the many defects which are listed in appendix D, which you can get out from. This is December 44. They've already been through Normandy and France. They knew that there were issues with the Shermans dealing with German tanks. The Battle of the Bulge was in full swing and here's the armored board going, This tank sucks. We don't want it. Zebra was a... Zebra was a test case. General Barnes, who said, If we can get this tank into the field, the troops will love it and I will be vindicated and we'll build thousands of these things, pushed and pushed and pushed for about a year and a half to get the T-20 series overseas. Army ground forces replied in March 44, These tanks have not been tested by a service board. It is not known whether they are fightable or fit to be put into combat. This headquarters does not view with favor the idea of making any combat zone a test agency. That's what they used to write back in the 40s. Even the private soldier had a way with words you don't get today. Suffice to say, Zebra was finally a compromise. We'll test out a couple overseas as well as at home. Not a popular move but it was something that Barnes achieved. This you're probably just going to have to get online. It is a timeline of events and what concept, the proposal was May 43. The first one actually showed up for testing in February of 44. And D-Day by this point is only four months away. 2,500 of them were ordered in January 45. What is important is that an initial production of 250 for development was requested in January of 44. Before the first one even showed up for testing, Zebra, the first 20 tanks off the production line that went to Germany, they did go to Germany, they were built in January 45. Out of that 250, there is no way that a reliable Pershing could have been built sooner than January of 45. So if you hear anybody saying you could have had an earlier tank, not happening. Or at least if you did, you could have gotten a Pershing. The engineering branch said we don't want it, it's too heavy, it can't cross any of our bridges. And indeed when they crossed Remagen, only the M4s could cross, the Pershings were left behind. The transportation corps didn't want it because it was too wide for the railroads. And when you got to Korea, so many of them broke down and there was a ton of spare parts that the army did not need anymore. All right, myth 5. Sherman said low velocity 75 due to HE capability or doctrine. So the way this one goes, the Americans liked the 75 because it had a higher HE charge. Again, there is a little bit of truth to this. The 75 was doing sterling service against Panzer 3s and Panzer 4s in North Africa. But the US Army always assumed that they might need something bigger. So this is an early 76mm M4 Sherman. What year do you think this photo was taken? Earlier. 42. When was the first time anybody met a Tiger? OK. Again, another timeline. I'll just go back. So the Sherman was selected as a new tank in September 41. Also in September 41, before the first Sherman had been built, they started the program to install an anti-tank gun. It was going to be the 3-inch. The 3-inch anti-tank gun was just too damn heavy. It would not work in the Sherman. So they nixed it for a while. In spring of 42, they developed the 76mm as seen on the Hellcat. It's a much lighter gun. You could put it into a Sherman. Fantastic. So they put the 76 and the ordnance says, Yes, it works mechanically. It works. We approve it. It will be type classified. We'll build a thousand of them and send them to North Africa for the invasion. Armored Board says, Hang on a second. We haven't tested this yet. And they put a hold on it. Armored Board tests the 76mm Sherman and rejects it in April 43. Fortunately, in March of 43, our mad scientist, General Barnes, got the idea of putting the T-23 turret onto the M4 chassis and that started the E6 program which gave us the 76. It was approved for production in August of 43. I should actually point out that in July of 43 was when Panther first showed up anywhere and that was in Eastern Europe. Plans were finalized in May of 43 and all 75mm production would stop in January of 45. And you look at it and it says this type, this factory will turn over to 76 in this month, this factory will turn over and so on. They had always wanted the M4 to have a high-velocity cannon. Doctrine like anti-tank or anti-infantry had nothing to do with it. They wanted a hole puncher. By May of 44, there were about 276mm Shermans that the Panthers did not want them. They didn't see any purpose in changing their logistical requirements, new training. The 75mm tanks that they had were killing Panthers, they were killing Tigers in Italy. What was the problem? So they left them behind. Although even in October of 44, Six Armored said we have no 76mm Shermans, we don't want them. So on a similar level, Firefly Sherman was best Sherman experimented here. No. So Ordnance Branch, the mad scientists, did a lot of experimenting with foreign equipment. Not necessarily so that they would build it locally, but to see what sort of technology or ideas were useful and could be used in American production. So in early 44, they bring a 17 pounder from overseas and they put it up against their own new anti-tank gun, which is the 90mm-1, which makes sense. And it was also very suitable for the Americans because they were already making 90mm tubes and ammunition. They didn't have to set a production line for 70 pounders and so on. The catch was that was in the towed anti-tank gun mode, not inside a tank. After the invasion in Normandy, people started realizing, hang on a second, the 75 isn't doing what it should because the 70 pounder shot up with a 76. And the conclusion from the first test was that none of these can reliably punch through the front of a Panther. Oops. They develop HVAP, the high-velocity armor-piercing round. They fly a couple over. More tests at Issigny. The 17 pounder could punch through a Panther at about 500 yards The problem was that you couldn't hit the broad side of a barn from inside with a sabot. Even the British Army said anything over 500 yards, forget it. As an experiment, the Americans took one firefly turret that fired 18 rounds at a 6x6 target at 1,000 yards and they couldn't hit it once. They gave up we'll save the ammo for armor penetration tests. That's the PVC round that the 17 pounder had. After the war, the armored board decided let's do a test. We'll take an M476, we'll take a firefly and we'll take a Pershing. Side-by-side test and we'll see which is best. And the main problem with the 17 pounder, there were several. Again, this test is all online on the Chiefman's Hatch sorry, other way around. He's like this, trying to aim. And if you remember, that 76mm in that small turret was rejected. The 17 pounder was a much bigger gun so you can imagine what the armored force thought of that when they saw it. But the end result was that the firefly conversion was considered to be the least desirable tank. So why does firefly have the reputation? Well, the answer is because the Americans had the 75. If you wanted to punch a hole in the front of a Panther, the only thing you had in the entire Northwest theater could do it really would be maybe the tank destroyers or a firefly. This doesn't mean the firefly was the best tank, it just means it was the best tank that they brought. But as far as tanks go, the 76E8 was the better. All right, and last thing is the assessment of how good these tank guns are. And you will see, for example, that against the front upper plate of a Panther, the 17 pounder Sable will punch through at 2,500 yards and the 76 HVAP at 950. The problem is that, remember, you can't hit anything at 1,000 yards, let alone 2,500. So a lot of modelers, a lot of war gamers will say, what does it matter? The other question is, what was the real world effect when you did hit? Let's say you had gun number one will punch through 190 millimeters. Gun number two will punch through 160 millimeters. And the toughest German tank had 150 millimeters. You're going to punch through unless you get a Jagdtiger, in which case, nobody's going to punch through. It took five Shermans to kill a cat. You're going to hear this a lot. The Panther was so tough that you need to have two guys here to surround and the other three will go around the side. The clip is actually from Fury, that Tiger attack scene. Personally, I think the 76s would have done better to just sit back and plink. They wouldn't punch through. If you have a gun range and the enemy has a 1,600-yard gun range, charge, preferably from the sun. Yeah, I'll work today. It's also to be pointed out that Tiger duels are very rare. Steve Zaloga did some hunting around. But in northwest Europe between D-Day and the fall of Germany in 1945, guess how many times American tankers met Tiger I's? Four. Too many. The answer is three. The first time the Shermans won, the second time the Pershing lost, and the third time the Tigers were getting loaded onto flat cars, so it wasn't really a fair fight. That's it. Everything is a Tiger. Here's the problem. You look at a Panzer IV with the blocky superstructure and the muscle break. You think it's a Tiger because it's what you're most afraid of. And when the thing is aiming at you, you aren't going to be sitting there taking copious detailed notes going, well, let's see. It's got a slightly rounder muscle break. No. So everything was a Tiger. Everything was reported as a Tiger. It never happened. So where does this myth come from? Well, in real-world performance, Arakor is a case in point. Germans attacked with about 260 vehicles. About 100 of them were Panthers. Then Colonel Abrams was defending with mainly 75mm tanks. The final score, the Americans lost about 20 Shermans and the Germans lost about 80 Panthers. How did this happen? Well, frankly, the Americans were better tankers. But they were able to maneuver correctly with all the supporting arms. This is the other thing people forget. It's not just Tank A versus Tank B. It's Tank A with artillery and infantry and air power or whatever else versus Tank B against infantry and artillery and air power. It doesn't work that simply. In fact, the only air support for the first day at Arakor was a bloke by the name of Bazooka Charlie who flew around in an L3 Cub that had six bazookas mounted under the wings. It was too cloudy for anything else. It's a weird gentleman. You should look him up. It's kind of like that British guy that went into battle wielding a claymore and a bow and arrow. I forget his name. He's the only combatant known to have killed an enemy with a bow and arrow in World War II. A very strange gentleman. He used to ride home on a train after the war. Just before he got off the train station he'd fling his briefcase out the train window. Somebody finally asked him, What are you doing? He said,Well, that's my backyard. I just didn't want to have to carry the bag bone. After the war, both the U.S. and U.K. militaries did some assessments. They would have a fight against a Sherman or a Panther was usually whoever fired first. Which has a couple of pieces of sense to it. Firstly, you are not going to open a firefight unless you are in a position of advantage to begin with. Secondly, once you do get the first shot off, you are usually calm and collected, and the guy on the receiving end is having a significant emotional event. So his return shot is likely to be rushed and hurried If you want actual mathematics, the Americans estimated that a Sherman was an average 3.6 times more effective than a Panther. The British concluded that they wanted a 2.2 to 1 advantage. And bear in mind, usually 3 to 1 is considered good for an attack. So where did the myth come from? How many tanks would the American army send to deal with a machine gun nest? How about a World War I captured light tank? One. No,the answer is five. A platoon was five tanks. That is the smallest tactical unit on the battlefield. You don't go anywhere with one or two tanks. You go around as a platoon. So it doesn't matter what you are going up against. One Panther, well,let's bring up the five tanks. You are not going to say, oh,it's only a Stuka shot. Hey Joe,we don't need you and your buddy. We'll make this fair. The book says 3 to 1. And again, you come up against a platoon of enemy tanks. You bring a company of your tanks. An American tank company was about 17, 18 tanks. So you are still keeping a 5 to 1 ratio. Not because you need 5 to 1, but because, damn it, it's what you bring. All right. Myth number eight. The Sherman was a death trap. Surely that one can't be a myth, can it? That one is indeed on fire. But wait, there's more. OK. There are two tanks here. One is a Tiger. Which one has the thicker frontal armor? How many people say the Sherman? How many people say the Tiger? How many of you are wondering what's the catch with this apparently easy question? Well, here's your answer. The Sherman's got two inches. The Tiger's got four. OK.Nothing unexpected there. Let's look at it from another angle. 3.6 for the Sherman. 4 to 4.3 for the Tiger. Why? Sloping of armor. Let's say that the Sherman's armor, the two-inch version is sloped at about 60 degrees. The Tiger is nearly vertical. It's between 8 and 10. This means that the Sherman has almost as much frontal armor as the Tiger does. This is not bad. The difference was the gun. The Tiger's gun was much better than the Sherman's, and that's why it had the relative effectiveness. But not everything on the battlefield was a Tiger. Not every gun was an 88. The 50s, the 75s, they would bounce off a Sherman more often than not. So once you got hit, you then have to get out. How do you get out of a tank? So these are videos that I have online. I do online tank reviews. Again, look for Inside the Chieftain's Hatch on YouTube. And there's usually much mirth amongst the audience as I try to get in and out of these things. So the one on the top left is a T-34. To get out of a T-34, you have to unscrew the latch, kick it forward, screw it back into place, and then you climb out through the front. That's if you're the driver. There's no hatch at all except this tiny little thing on your feet, or you wait for somebody else to get out. The Comet, the cruisers, they, you have to kind of go in straight words, and it took me about two minutes to get into this thing. You get in straight, then you kind of scoot to the right, and it's terrible. The one on the bottom left is a Tiger I. Same thing. The hatch is here. The seat is here. So you kind of got to scoot in sideways. It's spring-loaded. So, oh my god, the tank is on fire. Open, out. A T-34, I mean, you were out of the tank before the T-34 drivers even got his hatch open. There's a T-34 right there. Look for it yourself. But they did burn, right? Sort of. If you shoot anything enough times, it'll burn. And a burning tank cannot be repaired. So just because the enemy has gotten out of the tank doesn't mean that the enemy cannot recover the tank later. So about, depending on the unit, 50 to 80% of Shermans were found burned on the battlefield. It's about 80% for a Panzer IV. The cause of the fire was usually the ammunition, not the petrol engine. And that was the same cause as on Panthers and T-34s and pretty much anything else. The saving grace is that American ammo was fairly slow for the actual conflagration. So combine that with the fact that you got a pretty easy hatch to get out, you can actually get out of the Sherman pretty quickly. And then you got the wet stowage tank, so they decided to put the ammunition in protected bins. The burn rate went down to about 5 or 10%. So what's the final effect? So these are figures from the Adjutant General's report, the final report on the war. According to the Army, 140,000 were killed. Actually 140,000. That's 18.5% of all riflemen overseas were killed. Now you'll hear the airplane guys going that the most dangerous job in World War II was to be a bomber crewman. To a point, yes. If you drill down, 4th ID had a 700% casualty rate in the rifle ranks. The entire division killed seven times over for infantrymen. Tankers, 16 enlisted tankers were sent overseas. 1,574 were killed, 3% versus 18.5% for the riflemen. If you want a death trap, carry an M1 Garand. Now there are a couple of caveats. One is that there were no officers in the armor section because all armor officers or infantry are artillery. The other caveat is that the dead, for tankers, includes people who weren't even in the tank at the time that they were killed. Usually between half and a third of all tank crewmen were doing something outside of the tank. Either sentry duties or maybe they got out of the tank and they were machine gunned as they were going home. How about a vehicle comparison? On the 26th of June and 30th of November 456 tanks dead, 129 killed, that's 0.28 dead per tank or 0.61 wounded. The British, they did an assessment of their own. They provided an interesting comparison because they had not only Shermans but they also had Cromwells, Comets and a few other things. They lost 106 Shermans, 63 KIA which was twice as much as the Americans. The British designed ones about the same. 0.56 per tank and the wounded was 1 per tank. So in a British unit you're more likely to be killed in a Sherman slightly but more likely to be wounded in a British tank. Now why is the British one substantially higher than the American one? Well the answer is the British didn't wear helmets. In the tank. Not a good long-term survival strategy. But either way you're no worse off in a Sherman. Now if you're in a T-34 I found figures for the Polish 4th Armoured Brigade they lost 1.8 people per tank. Right, myth number 9. Tactical air killed tanks. This is a personal favourite for places like this. So here's a question for you. What was the Western Allies most effective ground attack aircraft? Tornado? Thunderbolt, yeah, the Jug. Typhoon? None of the above. They're fighters. They weren't ground attack aircraft. They were fighters that were pressed into a ground attack role. They were not designed for the role and their performance suffered accordingly. These are ground attack aircraft. The IL-2 Shturmovik, which is that one there. The HS-129. They were designed for the role. It was an armored attack without any ground force involvement at all. A squadron of them swooped on some T-34s near Volgograd. Killed a quarter of them. The other interesting thing is that the Allied pilots didn't want to be ground attack aircraft. Quoting the British Air Ministry The assignment of fighter units to the fighter-bomber role struck a heavy blow to the self-esteem of those pilots first assigned such duties. That's where you get the most important thing in a war is the guy on the ground with a rifle. It's not a tank.It's not an airplane. It's a rifleman. Some of the Air Force guys never figure that one out. All right.So, some figures. Two significant events that the British had what they call the operational research groups. These were guys who went around after the battlefield and they counted kills and they tried to assign who killed what. The 7th of August was known as the day of the typhoons because there were just aircraft after aircraft coming in attacking the Germans. There were, what, 500 missions flown by tactical air on that day alone. At Berlin 17 tanks killed claimed damage. In actuality, they killed three and they damaged six. OK.We have one off. Let's look at Mortain. This is actually a comparison between the kill categories that the British and the Americans claimed. So, the Americans claimed they killed 69 tanks and the British claimed they actually killed eight. The Americans claimed that they probably killed eight and the British claimed they actually killed 35. So, obviously, the American pilots were a little bit more generous than the British were. Chances are. They claimed constructive crew loss abandonments. If the assessor did not know what caused the kill they gave it to the airplanes. So, they're claiming 150 kills almost between probable and actual. They killed 20. Tactical air did not have any significant practical effect against tanks. Another example. Battle of the Bulge. Aircraft claimed 64 tanks. The tactical air was useless. It absolutely was not. It could be critical. But in a different manner. It wasn't that it was good at killing tanks. You could kill the support structures. You could kill the truckers. And, most importantly, you had the morale effect. So, if you're the German guy you see airplane after airplane coming at you with rockets you didn't care if it didn't hit you. You were not having a good day. You didn't care if it hit you with rockets. And they would win. So, critical not in the way people think. OK. So, this brings us more or less to the Q&A portion. Just to conclude US Armed Forces is the victim of bad press. It is. So, I mean, of all the claims of disappointment and so on the only one that actually is important and holds water is that the Americans into Normandy. And, again, this is because they just didn't think they needed it. They were killing Panthers and Ferdinands and Tigers in Italy. The 75 was doing the job. It was not until you got to that very specific set of circumstances that was Normandy that the deficiency of the 76 and 75 really became available. And the other thing, again, it is a piece of a huge machine. The tank was designed by the army, not just the tank force, with the artillery, with the aircraft, with the infantry. And in that respect it performed flawlessly. It was very reliable. You could depend on it to get to wherever it was going and you knew what it could do when it got there except Normandy. So, the reputation for Sherman's inefficiency was so rare as to be basically irrelevant. So, you saw the entire U.S. lost, what, 1,400 tanks of all sorts in Western Europe. For something that blew up if a German looked at it sideways, they lost one-sixth as many tanks as, let's say, the Germans built Panthers. Shermans were not deaf. They were very, very good pieces of equipment.