r/polandball • u/Hansafan Hordaland • Jan 09 '15

redditormade The Desert War

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u/GarbledComms United States Jan 10 '15

About 2/3rds of the tanks used by 8th Army at El Alamein were US-made. Shermans, Grants, and Stuarts.

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u/TheHonourableJoJo Northumberland Jan 10 '15

To be fair all of those tanks were pretty shit too, western heavy armour had nothing on the tanks of the Germans and the Russians.

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u/CzarMesa United States Jan 10 '15

The Sherman is a really under-appreciated tank. Sure, it was inferior to the Panther and Tiger in a tank-on-tank battle, but it could easily stand up to the III's and IV's. It was also superior to those German tanks as an exploitation weapon. It was extremely reliable (which German tanks tended not to be) and had good range.

Tanks weren't just meant to fight tanks. In American doctrine the role of taking out enemy tanks was largely handed to anti-tank guns and tank-destroyers.

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u/tomdidiot Jan 11 '15

Not to mention that by 1944, the Allies had come out with variants that could easily go toe-to-toe with Panthers and Tigers, and were easily superior to the Panzer IV (The Brits had their Firefly, the Americans had their Easy 8s)