- 21 hours ago
Seventy-one rounds of ammunition in open racks at shoulder height — surrounding the crew on all sides. Bare shells stacked along the walls, around the turret base, next to the assistant driver's elbow.
When a German round punched through, it was not the gasoline that caught fire first. Every tanker believed it was. The Army tested that assumption — and the result changed everything about how the Sherman was built.
The crew of five had roughly fifteen seconds. The commander could reach the turret roof in two and a half. The gunner needed five. The loader had no hatch of his own — he waited for the men above him to get out or die. The driver and assistant driver could not reach the turret at all. Their only exit was a hatch in the belly — half an inch of armor, barely big enough to squeeze through, underneath thirty-three tons of burning tank.
Crews went into combat with hatches strapped half-open. They accepted shrapnel for a faster way out. Some units drilled evacuation until it was automatic. Others received replacements who had never been inside a tank before.
The 3rd Armored Division started with 232 Shermans. In 231 days, 648 were completely destroyed.
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When a German round punched through, it was not the gasoline that caught fire first. Every tanker believed it was. The Army tested that assumption — and the result changed everything about how the Sherman was built.
The crew of five had roughly fifteen seconds. The commander could reach the turret roof in two and a half. The gunner needed five. The loader had no hatch of his own — he waited for the men above him to get out or die. The driver and assistant driver could not reach the turret at all. Their only exit was a hatch in the belly — half an inch of armor, barely big enough to squeeze through, underneath thirty-three tons of burning tank.
Crews went into combat with hatches strapped half-open. They accepted shrapnel for a faster way out. Some units drilled evacuation until it was automatic. Others received replacements who had never been inside a tank before.
The 3rd Armored Division started with 232 Shermans. In 231 days, 648 were completely destroyed.
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LearningTranscript
00:00Outside the town of Nennig, Germany, in January 1945, a Sherman tank took a direct hit from
00:05a Tiger.
00:06Gus Stavros was close enough to watch what happened next.
00:09The crew tried to get out.
00:11They came through the hatches burning.
00:13Stavros, a combat veteran by then, had seen men die before, but this was different.
00:18They were on fire from the waist down, clawing at the turret ring, trying to pull themselves
00:23free.
00:24One man made it to the ground and rolled in the snow.
00:27The others did not make it out at all.
00:28Stavros later described the scene during an oral history interview for the National Endowment
00:33for the Humanities.
00:34He kept it short.
00:36He said he had seen movies where people come out of a tank all aflame, and that he saw exactly
00:41that, in person, outside Nennig.
00:43To understand why this kept happening, why five men in an armored vehicle could burn alive
00:48in seconds, you have to understand what it was like inside the machine that was supposed
00:52to protect them.
00:53The M4 Sherman carried a crew of five.
00:56The driver sat in the left front of the hull, low behind a thick glacius plate, steering
01:01with two levers and watching the world through a narrow periscope slit.
01:05To his right sat the assistant driver, officially called the bow gunner, operating a .30 caliber
01:10machine gun aimed by tracer through his own periscope.
01:13He had almost no field of fire.
01:16This was the entry-level position.
01:18Most new replacements started here, learning the tank from the least important seat.
01:22Above and behind them, separated by the turret basket, sat the three-man turret crew.
01:27The gunner controlled the 75mm main gun and a coaxial machine gun, firing both with footswitches.
01:34His view was limited to what his gun sight showed him, a narrow, magnified circle of the battlefield.
01:40He could not see what was beside him or behind him.
01:42The loader worked to his left, pulling shells from racks and feeding the breach.
01:46On early models, the loader had no hatch of his own.
01:49He shared the commander's exit.
01:51The commander stood, or sat, at the top of the turret, directing the crew by intercom, calling
01:57targets for the gunner, routes for the driver, and coordinating with other tanks by radio.
02:02He was the only man who could transmit.
02:04To do his job properly, he needed his head and shoulders outside the hatch.
02:09This made him a target for everything from machine gun fire to shell fragments.
02:14Statistically, the tank commander was the most likely crew member to die.
02:18The five of them lived, fought, slept, and ate within this space.
02:23They slept in a row alongside the hull under a waterproof tarp.
02:26In combat, they stayed inside for hours.
02:29Spent shell casings rolling on the floor served as makeshift urinals.
02:34Oil and grease soaked into uniforms and skin and never fully washed out.
02:38Every time the main gun fired, the breach kicked back, hot brass clanged across the compartment
02:44floor, and a cloud of toxic propellant smoke filled the turret.
02:48The crew breathed it in until the ventilator cleared it.
02:51If the ventilator was working.
02:53Constipation was almost universal.
02:55Illness spread easily.
02:57The intercom failed regularly.
02:59When it did, the commander shouted or kicked the driver's shoulders to signal direction changes.
03:05The noise from the 400-horsepower engine and the tracks on pavement or frozen ground made
03:11normal speech impossible.
03:12This was daily life.
03:14Five men sealed inside 33 tons of steel, dependent on each other for survival, unable to see most
03:21of what was trying to kill them.
03:22But the discomfort was not what Sherman crews feared most.
03:26What they feared was all around them.
03:2971 rounds of 75-millimeter ammunition packed into every available space inside the hull.
03:35And when a German shell punched through the armor, those rounds were the first thing to
03:39catch fire.
03:42After reports of frequent fires reached the United States from North Africa and Europe,
03:47the army decided to find out what was actually causing them.
03:50They ran two separate sets of trials.
03:52In the first, they took Sherman tanks, drained all the fuel and oil, but left a full loadout
03:58of ammunition inside.
03:59Then they fired anti-tank rounds into them.
04:0290% of the penetrations that reached the fighting compartment or turret caused a fire.
04:07In the second set of trials, they did the opposite.
04:09They removed all the ammunition, but left fuel and oil in place.
04:13They fired the same rounds into the same areas.
04:16The tanks did not burn.
04:18The conclusion was unambiguous.
04:20It was not the gasoline.
04:21It was the ammunition.
04:23This contradicted what most crews believed.
04:25The Sherman ran on a 400-horsepower gasoline engine, and tankers assumed that the fuel was
04:31what turned their vehicles into infernos.
04:33The Germans called the Sherman Tommy Cooker, a reference to British soldiers in a trench stove
04:38from the First World War.
04:39Polish crews called it the Burning Grave.
04:42The most famous nickname was Ronson, after the cigarette lighter, supposedly because it
04:47lit up the first time, every time.
04:49Though that particular slogan was almost certainly a post-war invention, the Ronson company did
04:54not begin using it until years after the war ended.
04:57The nickname may have spread through veteran circles long after the fighting stopped, but
05:01the real cause had nothing to do with fuel at all.
05:04It had everything to do with how the ammunition was stored.
05:07On early model Shermans, 75mm rounds were placed in unprotected racks throughout the fighting
05:12compartment.
05:13Shells sat in open bins along both sponsons, the bulging sections of the hull above the tracks.
05:19More rounds were stacked around the base of the turret, within arm's reach of the loader.
05:23Additional ammunition was stored on the floor and near the assistant driver.
05:27The layout was designed for fast access in combat.
05:30A good loader working with a good gunner could get off two or three aimed shots in rapid succession,
05:36a significant tactical advantage.
05:38But it meant that ammunition surrounded the crew on all sides.
05:41There was almost no place inside the tank where a penetrating round would not hit a shell
05:46or its propellant charge.
05:48When an armor-piercing round punched through the hull, the impact did not simply create a
05:53neat hole.
05:53It sent fragments of steel, spall, ricocheting through the interior at high velocity.
05:59If those fragments struck a propellant charge, the result was not a slow fire.
06:04It was an explosive event.
06:05The propellant detonated almost instantly, generating temperatures that ignited adjacent rounds in
06:11a chain reaction.
06:12The turret could be blown off the hull entirely, launched into the air by the force of the blast.
06:17In less catastrophic cases, the fire filled the fighting compartment within seconds.
06:22The army tried CO2 fire extinguishers.
06:25They proved useless.
06:26The chemical reaction in a propellant fire was too fast and too hot for carbon dioxide
06:31to suppress.
06:32Only large quantities of water could fight it, and there was no water system inside a Sherman.
06:37This was the core of the problem.
06:38The Sherman was not uniquely flammable among tanks of its era.
06:42The German Panther burned 63% of the time after penetration.
06:46The Tiger burned 80% of the time, though from a tiny sample of only five tanks examined.
06:51A British study of the Normandy campaign found that 56% of Shermans knocked out in combat
06:57burned.
06:58An American survey put the figure at 65%.
07:01The numbers were bad, but they were not dramatically worse than the competition.
07:05What made the Sherman's reputation worse was the speed and violence of ammunition fires
07:09compared to engine fires, which gave crews far less warning and far less time.
07:14That time, or rather the lack of it, was what separated survival from death.
07:19When a Sherman's ammunition cooked off, the crew had roughly 15 seconds.
07:24Some positions had a way out, others did not, and the difference came down to a few feet
07:29of metal, a hatch that opened the right direction, and whether the man ahead of you was still
07:34alive or blocking the exit.
07:38British researchers ran timed experiments on Sherman and Cromwell crews to measure how
07:43fast each man could get out.
07:44The commander, starting from his open hatch, could reach a standing position on the turret
07:50roof in two and a half seconds.
07:52The gunner, climbing past the commander's seat and through the same hatch, took five seconds.
07:57These were control tests.
07:59No fire, no smoke, no incoming rounds, no wounded men in the way.
08:04In combat, the numbers meant almost nothing.
08:07The problem started with the turret basket.
08:10On early Sherman's, a mesh screen encircled the turret ring, separating the three turret
08:15crewmen from the two hull crewmen below.
08:18The basket was designed to protect arms and legs from being caught by the rotating turret,
08:23but it also created a wall.
08:25When the ammunition detonated and the turret filled with fire, the driver and assistant driver
08:30could not climb up into the turret to reach the commander's hatch.
08:33They had to go down, through a single escape hatch in the belly of the hull, behind the
08:37driver's seat, cut into a half-inch thick plate of armor.
08:41The belly hatch was not designed for speed.
08:43It was small, awkward to reach, and often blocked by equipment stored on the floor.
08:48A man had to drop through it, land on the ground beneath 33 tons of tank, and crawl out without
08:54being seen by whoever had just fired on them.
08:56If the tank was on fire, the clock was already running.
09:00If the driver was wounded, he blocked the assistant driver's only way out.
09:04If the turret had been hit, and the basket was jammed or deformed by the impact, the turret
09:09crew had no path to the belly hatch either.
09:12The loader on early model Sherman's had no hatch of his own.
09:15He had to wait for the commander or gunner to clear their exits before he could climb out.
09:20In a propellant fire, which was not a slowly building blaze but an instantaneous explosive
09:25event, waiting even three or four seconds could mean the difference between second-degree
09:30burns and death.
09:32Crews adapted.
09:34Many tankers went into battle with their hatches unlatched, held in a partially open position
09:38by leather straps tied from inside.
09:41The hatches clapped loudly on the march and let shrapnel into the tank, but the crews accepted
09:45the trade.
09:46An open hatch meant one fewer obstacle between them and survival.
09:49Some units drilled evacuation until it was automatic.
09:53Others received almost no training at all.
09:56The statistics reflected the difference between a tank that burned and one that did not.
10:00Across the U.S. First Army, the average Sherman that was knocked out but did not catch fire
10:05cost its crew 0.78 casualties, killed and wounded combined.
10:10A Sherman that burned cost 1.28.
10:12The fire nearly doubled the human price.
10:14One case recorded by British researchers near the Rhine in 1945 illustrated the extreme.
10:20A Sherman was crossing a canal bridge when a 105mm shell from a Flak 38 struck its side.
10:27The round traveled through the entire crew compartment and blew a jagged, foot-wide slab of armor
10:32out the opposite side as it exited.
10:34The tank caught fire instantly.
10:36The men inside were engulfed.
10:38Only the driver and the commander survived.
10:40Three men died in a space they could not leave fast enough.
10:43That was one tank, one crew.
10:46But there was a division that lost Shermans at a rate no one had planned for, and one
10:50officer whose entire job was to reach the wreckage, open the hatches and deal with what
10:55he found inside.
10:56If this story is keeping you here, a like and a subscription will make sure you see what
11:00comes next, because the numbers from the 3rd Armored Division are something else entirely.
11:07The 3rd Armored Division was one of only 2 heavy armored divisions in the United States Army.
11:12It landed in Normandy on June 24, 1944, with 232 M4 Shermans.
11:19Over the next 231 days of combat, from the hedgerows of France through Belgium into Germany,
11:26the division had 648 Shermans completely destroyed.
11:30Another 700 were knocked out, repaired, and sent back into action.
11:35That was a loss rate of 580% of the division's original strength.
11:40The math was simple and brutal.
11:43Every Sherman the division started with was destroyed almost 3 times over.
11:47The only reason the division kept fighting was that replacements arrived faster than tanks
11:52were lost.
11:53American factories, Ford, Fisher, Chrysler, Pullman, were producing Shermans at a rate the
12:00Germans could not match.
12:01Nearly 50,000 were built during the war.
12:04There was always another tank.
12:06There was not always another crew.
12:09The division's 16,000 soldiers suffered 2,540 killed, 7,331 wounded, 95 missing, and 139 captured.
12:22Trained tank crews were consumed faster than the replacement system could produce them.
12:27Men arrived from other branches.
12:29Some had never been inside a tank before reaching the front.
12:32The crew that had trained together for months, learning each other's rhythms, anticipating
12:37movements, building the trust that kept five men alive in a metal box, was replaced by strangers
12:43who did not know where the fire extinguisher was or how to find the belly hatch in the
12:47dark.
12:48Belton Cooper saw all of it.
12:50Cooper was 27 years old, an ordnance officer assigned to the 3rd Armored Division's maintenance
12:55battalion.
12:56He was an engineer by training.
12:58Two years at the Virginia Military Institute, two more at the University of Michigan studying
13:03marine architecture.
13:05His job was not to fight in tanks, it was to get them back after they had been destroyed.
13:10As one of three Ordnance Liaison Officers, Cooper carried the daily combat loss report from
13:16Combat Command B to the Division Maintenance Battalion.
13:19The report was too sensitive to transmit by radio, so Cooper drove it, alone, in a jeep,
13:25through what he called, the void.
13:28The void was the stretch of territory between the front lines and the supply trains, sometimes
13:33as wide as 50 miles.
13:35Allied armor advanced so fast that it bypassed pockets of German resistance.
13:40Cooper drove through those pockets every day.
13:43When he reached a knocked out Sherman, the work began.
13:46If the tank had brewed up, tanker slang for a catastrophic ammunition fire, the interior was
13:52destroyed.
13:53The white factory paint on the walls was burned black.
13:56The instruments were melted, and the crew, or what remained of them, was still inside.
14:01Cooper and his maintenance crews had to remove the remains, patch the holes in the armor, replace
14:06damaged components, and repaint the interior.
14:09Then the tank went back to the front with a new crew.
14:12Cooper later said that the restored white paint was important.
14:15Not for aesthetics, but because the new crew needed to believe the tank was clean.
14:20They needed to not see what had happened to the men before them.
14:24He did this for 231 days.
14:27He probably witnessed the destruction of more Sherman tanks and their crews than any other
14:32single person in the war.
14:3350 years later, at the age of 80, he sat down and wrote a book about it.
14:38He called it Death Traps.
14:40But what Cooper saw from the outside, the aftermath, was only part of the story.
14:45To understand why so many Shermans were lost, you had to look at what was firing at them,
14:50and from where.
14:51Because the Sherman's biggest problem was not always its armor.
14:55It was that the enemy saw it first.
14:59In Normandy, the threat did not come from where most people imagine.
15:03Post-war mythology placed a tiger tank at the center of every engagement.
15:07In reality, a British battlefield study conducted after the costly fighting around Cannes found
15:13that German tanks and anti-tank guns accounted for nearly 90% of all Shermans lost.
15:19But within that figure, concealed anti-tank guns, not tanks, did the majority of the killing.
15:25The bocage made it worse.
15:27The hedgerow country of northwestern France was a network of ancient field boundaries, thick
15:31earthen walls topped with dense vegetation, each one a natural fortification.
15:36A German 75mm anti-tank gun could sit behind a hedgerow, invisible at 200 yards, and wait.
15:43The Sherman had to come to it.
15:44And the Sherman was not hard to spot.
15:47It stood over 9 feet tall, nearly a foot higher than a Cromwell, significantly taller than
15:52a Panzer IV.
15:53Its profile was visible above hedgerows that concealed lower vehicles completely.
15:57After the breakout from the bocage, the situation changed but did not improve.
16:02In open country, American tank units engaging German defensive positions at longer ranges
16:07sometimes took 50% casualties before anyone in the column could identify where the fire
16:12was coming from.
16:13The average combat range for tank versus tank action on the western front was 800 to 900
16:19meters.
16:20At 500 yards, a British study found, the chances of a German gunner missing a Sherman were small.
16:25And once the first round was fired, the crew's survival probability halved every 6 seconds.
16:32The Sherman's own gun made the problem worse.
16:34American 75mm ammunition used a high-flash propellant that produced a visible burst when fired.
16:41German gunners could spot a Sherman's muzzle flash at considerable distance, even when the
16:45tank itself was partially concealed.
16:47The crew's first shot announced their position to every anti-tank weapon in range.
16:51The 88mm gun, mounted on the Tiger tank and on the Flak 36 and Flak 41 anti-aircraft guns
16:59repurposed for ground combat, could penetrate the Sherman's frontal armor at ranges well
17:04beyond what the Sherman's 75 could answer.
17:07The Panzerfaust, a cheap, disposable infantry weapon, could be fired by a single soldier from
17:13a ditch or a window at close range and punched through the Sherman's side armor with ease.
17:18A hollow-charge warhead did not need velocity.
17:21It needed only contact.
17:23The crews did not wait for engineers to save them.
17:26They improvised.
17:27Some units collected spare track links from damaged tanks and welded them to the hull and
17:32turret.
17:33Extra steel that might, in theory, trigger a shaped charge before it reached the armor underneath.
17:39The results were mixed.
17:40The additional weight strained the suspension and slowed the tank.
17:44And there was no clear evidence it reliably stopped anti-tank rounds.
17:48One improvisation actually worked.
17:50The 75mm gun carried a white phosphorus round originally designed as an artillery marker.
17:57Crews discovered that when the burning phosphorus struck a tiger or panther, it blinded their optics.
18:03The acrid smoke was sucked inside through ventilation openings, making it impossible for the German crew to breathe.
18:10In several documented cases, German crews abandoned functional tanks because they could not see or breathe.
18:17Five men in a Sherman with an inferior gun had found a way to defeat a superior tank.
18:22Not by penetrating its armor, but by making the air inside it unlivable.
18:27But improvisation could only go so far.
18:29The fundamental problem – ammunition stacked in unprotected racks – required an engineering
18:35solution.
18:36And by the time it arrived, the men who needed it most were already fighting in dry, stowage
18:41Shermans across France.
18:44The first attempt at a fix came fast.
18:47Engineers welded 1-inch thick applique armor plates onto the sponson sides, directly over the
18:52ammunition bins.
18:53The idea was simple – an extra layer of steel to stop fragments from reaching the shells.
18:58On late production cast hull tanks, the thicker armor was built into the casting itself.
19:03The modification was offered as a field kit to units already deployed, and eventually incorporated
19:08into production lines and overhaul facilities.
19:10But there was doubt it made any real difference.
19:13A round powerful enough to penetrate the main hull armor was unlikely to be stopped by an additional
19:18inch of steel bolted over the same spot.
19:20The army knew the armor patches were not enough.
19:23The real problem was location.
19:25As long as ammunition sat in open racks at shoulder height throughout the fighting compartment,
19:30any penetration had a high chance of starting a fire.
19:32The shells had to move.
19:34The first step was removing the most dangerous rounds – the unarmored ready rack around the
19:39base of the turret, where shells were stacked within the loader's reach.
19:42These were the fastest to access, but also the most exposed.
19:46Engineers reduced the size of the floor ready rack and added armored doors.
19:50The turret screening – the mesh basket that had separated hull and turret crews – was
19:55removed as well, partly for safety and partly because it improved the crew's ability to
19:59reach the belly escape hatch.
20:01But the real transformation came with the shift to wet stowage.
20:04All main gun ammunition was relocated to the floor of the hull, directly beneath the turret.
20:09The rounds sat in steel racks surrounded by a double-walled jacket.
20:13The space between the two walls was filled with a mixture of water and glycol – an antifreeze
20:18compound that prevented the liquid from freezing in winter.
20:21The concept was tested in stages.
20:23The first design used a simple water-filled container around the ammunition rack.
20:28When testers fired an anti-tank round into it, hydraulic action from the impact tore the
20:33entire rack apart.
20:35The water transmitted the shockwave instead of absorbing it.
20:38Engineers redesigned the system using concentric cells – individual tubes nested inside
20:43outer tubes – with the water-glycol mixture filling the gap between them.
20:47A pocket of air was left at the top of each cell.
20:50This time, when a shell struck, only one cell ruptured.
20:54The liquid poured out over the damaged area, cooling the propellant before it could ignite.
20:58Out of 14 ammunition cells punctured by 37 and 75-millimeter rounds during testing, only
21:04two caught fire.
21:05The results in the field matched the laboratory.
21:08A 1945 U.S. Army study concluded that only 10 to 15 percent of wet stowage Shermans burned
21:15when penetrated.
21:16Dry stowage Shermans burned 60 to 80 percent of the time.
21:19The modification cut the fire rate by roughly a factor of five.
21:23It came at a cost.
21:25The water jackets added 900 pounds to the tank's weight.
21:28The ready rack – the ammunition the loader could reach without opening floor hatches – shrank
21:33to just six rounds.
21:34Total ammunition capacity actually increased to 150 rounds, but accessing them in combat
21:40was slower.
21:41The loader now had to open armored doors in the floor, pull shells from below, and work
21:46without the turret basket that had once given him a stable platform.
21:50The first wet stowage Shermans, M4A375W models, began reaching frontline units in late summer
21:57of 1944, followed by the M4A376W and the heavily armored M4A3E2 Jumbo.
22:06Many British Shermans never received the upgrade.
22:08Many American crews in Normandy fought the critical early months in dry stowage tanks.
22:13Stavros watched Sherman crews burn outside Nennig in January 1945.
22:18By then, wet stowage tanks existed, but not every unit had them.
22:22And not every crew that got one knew that the men who had fought in the same seat six
22:27months earlier had done so surrounded by unprotected ammunition at arm's length.
22:32On the other side of Europe, another army was fighting in Sherman's too, and their experience
22:37with the same tank was remarkably different.
22:42Dmitry Loza was born in 1922 in the Shevchenkovsky region of Kharkov Oblast to a Ukrainian peasant
22:49family.
22:50He entered the Soviet Army in 1940 and graduated from Saratov Armor School in 1942.
22:56His first tank was a British Matilda, delivered through Lend-Lease.
23:00His second was an American Sherman, the M4A2, powered not by the gasoline engine that American
23:07crews used, but by a pair of General Motors' six-cylinder diesel truck engines mounted side
23:12by side.
23:13Soviet tankers called it the Mcha, a phonetic shortening of its Russian designation, Mcha-tyria.
23:19Loza would fight in Mcha's from the fall of 1943 through August 1945.
23:25He commanded a tank battalion in the 233rd Tank Brigade of the 5th Guards Mechanized Corps.
23:31He had three Shermans destroyed under him during the war.
23:34He survived all three.
23:35His unit fought across Ukraine, into Romania, through Hungary, into Czechoslovakia, and
23:42finally to Vienna.
23:43After the German surrender, the brigade was shipped to Mongolia, crossed the Gobi Desert,
23:48and attacked the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria.
23:52Loza was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union for his leadership during the battle for
23:57Vienna.
23:57What makes Loza's account valuable is what he praised and what he criticized.
24:02He praised the Sherman's reliability above everything else.
24:06The Soviet 6th Guards Tank Army determined that their M4A2s lasted 2,000 to 2,500 kilometers
24:13before major overhaul, comparable to the T-34.
24:17But the Sherman required far less daily attention.
24:20It had an auxiliary power unit that kept the batteries charged without running the main engine.
24:25On the T-34, Cruz had to start the engine just to maintain battery charge, burning fuel and
24:31engine hours for no tactical purpose.
24:33Loza also praised the 76mm gun on later models and the quality of American optics.
24:39His criticisms were specific and practical.
24:42The Sherman sat too high.
24:44Its center of gravity made it prone to tipping on uneven terrain.
24:48The narrow tracks, designed for European roads, sank in the mud that defined the eastern front
24:54for months at a time.
24:56The T-34's wider tracks handled soft ground far better.
25:00Soviet crews learned to compensate.
25:02But the height remained a problem they could not fix.
25:06A tall tank is a visible tank.
25:08And a visible tank attracts fire.
25:11But on the question that defined the Sherman's reputation in the West, fire, Soviet crews had
25:17a different experience.
25:18The M4A2 ran on diesel, not gasoline.
25:22Diesel is harder to ignite than gasoline, and its vapor is less volatile.
25:27More importantly, the Soviets received many of the later production Shermans with wet ammunition
25:33stowage already installed.
25:35And Soviet logistics meant that crews often carried less spare ammunition than their American
25:41counterparts.
25:42Fewer rounds inside the hull meant less fuel for an ammunition fire.
25:47Loza noted that Soviet tankers appreciated one thing about the Sherman that their own T-34
25:52did not offer.
25:54It did not explode as violently when hit.
25:57The T-34 had a different problem entirely.
26:00Diesel fuel leaked from internal tanks and pooled on the floor of the fighting compartment.
26:06It soaked into the crew's uniforms during refueling and maintenance.
26:10When a T-34 caught fire, the fuel-saturated clothing ignited.
26:15And burning diesel caused deeper, more severe burns than burning gasoline.
26:20Gasoline burns its vapor first.
26:23The flame sits above the skin.
26:26Diesel burns directly on contact.
26:28Soviet tankers who escaped a burning T-34 often carried worse injuries than Americans who
26:34escaped a burning Sherman.
26:36A crew bailing out of a burning tank on the eastern front faced another problem their western
26:41counterparts did not.
26:42In open step, there was often no cover within running distance.
26:47Soviet accounts described crews taking shelter under their own burning vehicle, the only object
26:53large enough to hide behind while enemy fire swept the ground around them.
26:58Loza's memoir was not published until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
27:02For decades, official Soviet accounts minimized or ignored the role of Lend-Lease equipment.
27:08Only after 1991 could a Soviet veteran publicly praise an American tank.
27:14When he did, the picture he painted was not of a death trap.
27:18It was of a dependable machine that kept running when it mattered.
27:22But dependable did not mean safe.
27:24And the question remained, if the Sherman burned so often, if it was so easy to kill, why did
27:30more of its crew survive than almost any other tank of the war?
27:36The number should not have worked in the Sherman's favor.
27:39It burned more often than its defenders claim and was knocked out in enormous quantities.
27:43Yet when researchers compared crew fatality rates across the major tanks of the war, the
27:48Sherman came out ahead.
27:49Overall, 24.6% of Sherman crewmen died when their tank was destroyed.
27:55For the T-34, both the 76 and 85mm versions, the figure was approximately 28%.
28:03On the T-34, the loader had a 39% chance of dying.
28:07The driver, 28%.
28:09Even the radio operator, sitting in the safest position, had a 10% chance.
28:13In the Sherman, the casualties were distributed more evenly, and more of the crew walked away.
28:19A 12-army group report, quoted by historian Stephen Zaloga, found that the average knocked-out
28:25Sherman cost one man killed and one man wounded.
28:28British battlefield studies from the fighting around Ken produced similar results, roughly
28:33one killed and two wounded per tank destroyed.
28:36After wet stowage arrived, that number dropped further, to one killed and one wounded.
28:41The Polish 1st Armored Division under General Stanislav Maciek fought through France, Belgium,
28:47and Germany, with mainly dry stowage Shermans and some Cromwells.
28:51The division lost tanks at a heavy rate, particularly during the Battle of Follets.
28:56But General Maciek noted something that surprised him.
28:59For every five tanks destroyed, approximately one full crew, five men, was killed.
29:04The losses were serious, but the division ended the war with a surplus of trained tank crews,
29:10relative to the number of tanks it had left.
29:12More men survived than machines.
29:14The reason was not armor.
29:16It was not firepower.
29:17It was hatches.
29:18The Sherman had more escape routes and larger openings than nearly any tank of its era.
29:23The commander's hatch was wide.
29:25The driver and assistant driver each had their own overhead hatches, big enough for a man wearing
29:30a full kit to pull himself through in seconds.
29:34The belly escape hatch gave the hull crew a way out even when the turret was on fire.
29:39Later models added a loader's hatch.
29:41Compare this to the T-34, where the radio operator had no personal hatch at all and had to wait
29:47his turn behind the driver.
29:48Or the KV heavy tanks with only two hatches for five or six crew members.
29:54Hatches that sometimes jammed from hull deformation after a hit.
29:57Or even the Panther, which gave every man his own exit but was so mechanically unreliable
30:03that crews often never reached the battlefield at all.
30:06The Sherman was not designed to be invulnerable.
30:09It was designed to be escaped.
30:11Belton Cooper did not see it that way.
30:13He saw the wreckage.
30:14He saw the interiors.
30:16He saw what was left of men who did not get out in time.
30:19For 50 years, he carried those images.
30:22In 1998, at the age of 80, he published Death Traps.
30:26The book became one of the most widely read World War II memoirs in America.
30:31Stephen Ambrose wrote the foreword.
30:33David Ayer used it as one of the inspirations for the film Fury.
30:37Historians later pointed out that Cooper wrote from memory, without consulting primary sources,
30:43and that his perspective, shaped by the maintenance battalion, not the turret, was narrow.
30:48Stephen Zaloga, who spoke with Cooper many times, said the book offered a limited view of
30:53American tank operations, but he did not call it worthless.
30:57Cooper had earned his perspective.
30:58He had scraped human remains out of more Shermans than any historian would ever study.
31:0449,324 Shermans were built between 1942 and 1946.
31:10They fought in North Africa, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, the Pacific, and the Eastern Front.
31:17They were driven by Americans, British, Canadians, Poles, French, Soviets, and a dozen other nations.
31:25After the war, they kept fighting.
31:28In Korea, in the Arab-Israeli wars, in South America, the last ones were not retired until the 1970s.
31:35The men who crewed them are almost all gone now.
31:38The ones who burned, and the ones who got out.
31:40The ones who climbed into a freshly repainted tank, and tried not to think about why the paint was fresh.
31:46The ones who learned to sleep with one hand on the hatch release.
31:49If their story meant something to you, hit the like button and subscribe, and tap the bell so you do
31:54not miss what comes next on this channel.
31:56Let us know in the comments where you are watching from, your country, your city.
32:00And if you had to choose, knowing everything you know now, would you have climbed into a Sherman?
32:06Drop your answer below.
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