Victor Davis Hanson (43:49)
Since Russia had that, it's much harder to ignite. It doesn't have spark plugs like a gas engine, and the gas will start much quicker. And the other reason why the Americans preferred it and the British and the Germans, not the Russians, was that although you might get more miles per gallon of diesel, if you take a barrel of oil and you refine it, you get a lot more gas than you do diesel. So in a way, gasoline is cheaper because it's not so heavy and you can, you can get a lot more gallons per barrel of oil. But I wanted to say there, the way to evaluate relative tanks are not. Not. Not just go into a book and look at the dimensions and say, well, the Tiger has an 88 millimeter. The Sherman only had a little short 75 for so long, or the Panther 76.5 or whatever it is. Was a high caliber or. And look at the armor. You have to look at other things. How many were built? How many were built, how easy were they to maintain? And that's hours per running versus hours of maintenance. How long does it take to take a Panther transmission out versus a Sherman transmission? And then what type of theater were they in? So if you say, well, Victor, I saw the movie Fury with Brad Pitt, and those Shermans just went up like a Lonson Leiter when they saw a Tiger. Yes, but There were only 1600 tigers made. There were 50,000 Shermans. So what they didn't show you in the movie is that Shermans were going all over the Normandy and French landscape blowing apart machine gun nests. They were used against infantry. More importantly, if you wanted to ship a. It wasn't like you could run out of a Russian factory or a German factory, just run a tank out. They were right there. In the case of the Americans, you had to put it on a crane and put it on a ship, and anything over 35 tons is almost impossible. It's too hard to. So that was a limitation. Put it all together. If you look at each country, you could argue that the most tanks made were the T34 Russian. It had a great gun on it, 76 mil. It had a lot of armor. It was sloped. It had a Christie American suspension. It had a diesel engine, aluminum, but it had no radio. It was very uncomfortable for the crew. They were short. They only had four people in. The person who was the navigator also had to arm the thing. It was cramped. If you look at the craftsmanship. And they made 80,000 of them. But if you look at the craftsmanship of a Panther 6000 made a Tiger, 1600, a King Tiger. That's like an Abrams tank. Everybody's afraid of it, but there was only 600 of them. And then they can't go over certain bridges in Europe. They couldn't go. So what if you have a squad of six Tigers and you're going after some British or American tanks and they're sitting two miles away, and you can't get over the bridge because it's too heavy? So there's all these different considerations, but when you look at the German tanks were the most finely crafted. They had the best guns, they had the best armor, and they had really the worst maintenance problems. So that you were spending on a Tiger tank, maybe, or a Panther, Even an hour of maintenance for every two hours that it went. And then it was very hard to maintain them. There was a really wonderful guy named Jacques Littlefield. I know his brother Eddie, who's very nice guy. And he had a tank museum in the Pau Alco Hills. He passed away tragically, and the tanks had been moved to another location. But when I was writing my book on World War II, he called me up and I would go out there and speak to groups he had. He was a polymath. He knew everything about tanks. So I said, why does everybody berate the Sherman tank? I said, victor, come over here. And he had a Panther tank, a German Panther. They found it, I think, in a river in Poland or something. And he had three mechanics, and they just shook their head, said, oh, my gosh, this thing is so complex. And look at it. And they showed me the transmission, the engine. And then I went over there and looked at a Sherman. They had something called, I think, a Jumbo Sherman. And that was souped up 500 horsepower. It was one with a 75, 76 millimeter longer gun. And it could use sabot rounds, you know, the shape charges, heavy explosive, etc. And I said, well, how much? If you take the engine and the transmission out of this one, how much? He said, we can do it in 1/10 of time. It wasn't just because they were more familiar with the Mari. They were great mechanics. So you've got to consider all that. And when you consider all that and you look at the Sherman, it was as good as the Mark 4. And when it had an up, this last model was 76 millimeter. They were as good as a T34 in most cases. The Germans, we gave 2,000 of them to the Russians. They liked them. But the Sherman got a bad name because it came up every once in a while against a Tiger or Panther, which could blow them apart. And then the British came along and said, we have a seven. They didn't use millimeters. They called them pounds by the size of the round. We have a 17 pounder, 76 millimeter, meaning the shell was not this long, but, you know, full of powder and a reinforced barrel. So it was highly accurate. And it would blow up a Tiger tank or a Panther at a great distance. And they said, we will take this barrel and we'll give us your Sherman. We like your Sherman, and we'll put it in it. And they said, it's too big. It'll just. It'll blow up the turret. They said, no, no, we'll do it. So they put it in a Turret. They made 2,000 of them. So then they put a. They called them Fireflies. And so they would have six or seven Shermans and they would be going along and they would see German infantry and they'd blast the them, they'd machine gun them and then all of a sudden out of nowhere might come a Tiger or Panther and then they'd back off and the big Firefly would come through and it had a better gun actually than either the Panther 76 or even the 88 millimeter Tiger and it would blow them apart. And it was really, it was very hard for the crew in the turret because of the concussion of that powerful round.
