Get There First

Friday, October 24th, 2014

It took five or six Shermans to take out a single Tiger tank — or did it?

Examining 98 engagements in the Ardennes, Army researchers discovered something rather interesting.

The study concluded that the single most important factor in tank-versus-tank fighting was which side spotted the enemy first, engaged first and hit first. This gave the defender a distinct advantage, since the defending tanks were typically stationary in a well-chosen ambush position. …

The side that saw first and hit first usually had the advantage in the first critical minute … the overall record suggests that the Sherman was 3.6 times more effective than the Panther … popular myths that that Panthers enjoyed a 5-to-1 kill ratio against Shermans or that it took five Shermans to knock out a Panther have no basis in historical records. The outcome of tank-versus-tank fighting was more often determined by the tactical situation than the technical situation.

Since the Shermans were more numerous and mechanically reliable, they typically got to the key terrain first. They kept going whereas the Panthers and Tigers could only road march short distances from their transporters and railheads. Thus, in most engagements the Shermans could get set up because there were so many of them and they tended to run reliably.

If there was a hill to be grabbed, a road to be blocked, the Shermans would get there first. By contrast, the German tanks were mechanically fragile. For all their power they were on average, late to the party. Therefore, on a fluid battlefield the Shermans would almost always arrive first on the key terrain and bushwhack the panzers.

Comments

  1. Marc Pisco says:

    Fernandez writes “four Tigers died in the massacre”; the Wikipedia article he quotes says one Tiger and one Panzer IV. Careless.

  2. Isegoria says:

    The Wikipedia article is listing the claimed kills of one particular regiment. I don’t know where Fernandez got his four Tigers.

  3. Toddy Cat says:

    There’s no doubt that the Sherman got a bad rap; as no less an authority as George Patton pointed out, tank-on-tank comparisons don’t mean a whole lot, what matters is operational deployment and doctrine. There was a lot of “Wehrmacht-envy” in the 1970′s and 1980′s, spurred on by the like of Martin Van Crevald, and the sort of “what if Superman and Batman got in a fight?” type comparisons that Fernandez is criticizing are a function of this.

    However, it does look like Fernandez veered a bit too far the other way, however.

  4. Alrenous says:

    Lanchester’s square law, which I first saw referenced here, which I believe was linked from this blog: The power of a force like tanks scales with the square of the size of the force. If you manage to kill a couple before they can turn their guns on you, an even fight quickly turns to your advantage.

  5. Isegoria says:

    I have definitely mentioned Lanchester’s square law before, and I was quite surprised Fernandez did not mention it in his piece.

    It was L. C. Rees who mentioned the “Death from a Distance” thesis, in a comment on how Targeting Makes Us Human.

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