super pershing greatest tank battles gif

Their opinion was that tanks do not fight other tanks, that is the task of anti-tank guns and self-propelled guns and in order to fight the lightly armored targets and infantry, the 75mm gun of the Sherman medium tank is sufficient. Some generals, including the outstanding George Patton considered it pointlessly powerful. When they learned about the new German Tigers and Panthers, the designers increased the caliber of the gun and in the beginning of 1944, they released the new tank T26 with a 90mm gun and 102mm thick frontal armor for testing.Įven as the T26 development continued, people in the American command structure argued, whether the US Army actually needs such a tank.

After examining the holes that the 88mm gun of the German tank left in the Shermans and Stuarts and finding out about the practical effectiveness of such a gun, the Americans requested their command to give them a vehicle with similiar characteristics.Įver since 1942, the American tank designers worked on a line of prospective medium tanks T20, T22 and T23 with a 76mm gun. In December 1942, the Americans, who fought the Afrika Korps in Tunisia, first encountered the new German armored “beast” by the name of Tiger.

By the way, the article is partially based on Belton Cooper’s Death Traps, an infamous book, responsible for several of the nastiest American tank myths (“Shermans burned all the time”, “You needed 5 Shermans to kill one Panther”, “Sherman was a really bad tank” and others), so… I hope the author took this into account. Thought it might be a good idea to actually translate it. Russian server had this nice article about the Super Pershing tank and its development by a Russian historian Andrey Upanov. Author: Andrey Upanov, pictures provided by Pyotr Bityukov

Super pershing greatest tank battles gif