In heavy artillery the Americans generally outgunned the Germans in quantity, but long-range gunnery wasn’t effective in the close quarters imposed by the hedgerows. The German 88-without doubt the best artillery piece of the war, in the opinion of every GI-was a high-velocity, flat-trajectory weapon that could fire armour-piercing shells down the lanes and roads or be elevated and fire airburst shells against bombers. The shell travelled faster than the speed of sound; one heard it explode before one heard it coming.
But the American .50-calibre machine gun, mounted on tanks, had no equal in penetrating power, and the American M-l Garand was the best all-purpose military rifle in the world. Overall, however, GIs in Normandy gladly would have traded weapons with the Germans. Especially the tankers. There was a barely suppressed fury among American tankers about the inferiority of the Sherman tank (32 tons) to the German Panther (43 tons) and the Tiger (56 tons). German tanks had heavier armour, too heavy for the Sherman’s 75-mm cannon to penetrate, while the Panther and Tiger, armed with 88s, easily penetrated the Sherman.
But one thing about the Shermans-there were a lot more of them than there were Panthers or Tigers. Quantity over quality and size was General Marshall’s deliberate choice. He wanted more and faster (and thus lighter) tanks, in accord with American doctrine, which held that tanks should exploit a breakthrough, not fight other tanks. By the end of 1944 German industry would produce 24,630 tanks, only a handful of them Tigers. The British would be at 24,843. The Americans would have turned out the staggering total of 88,410 tanks, mainly Shermans.
For all their shortcomings the Shermans were a triumph of American mass production techniques. They were wonderfully reliable, in sharp contrast to the Panthers and Tigers. And GIs were far more experienced in the workings of the internal combustion engine than their opposite numbers. The Americans were infinitely better at recovering damaged tanks and patching them up. The Germans had nothing like the American maintenance battalions.
Indeed, no army in the world had such a capability. Kids who had been working at gas stations and body shops two years earlier had brought their mechanical skills to Normandy, where they replaced damaged tank tracks, welded patches on the armour, repaired engines. Even the tanks beyond repair were dragged back to the maintenance depot and stripped for parts. The Germans just left theirs where they were.
The American maintenance crews worked as they did back in the States rebuilding damaged cars-that is, the men on the shop floor made their own decisions, got out their tools, and got after the job. One of their officers. Captain Belton Cooper, commented, “I began to realize something about the American Army I had never thought possible. Although it is highly regimented and bureaucratic under garrison conditions, when the Army gets in the field, it relaxes and the individual initiative comes forward and does what has to be done. This type of flexibility was one of the great strengths of the American Army in World War II.”
Besides numbers, the Shermans had other advantages. They used less than half the gasoline of the larger tanks. They were faster and more manoeuvrable, with double and more the range. A Sherman’s tracks lasted for 2,500 miles; the Panther’s and Tiger’s more like 500 miles. The Sherman’s turret turned much faster than the Panther’s or Tiger’s. The narrower track of the Sherman made it a much superior road vehicle. But the wider track of the Panther and Tiger made them more suited to soft terrain.
And so it went. For every advantage of the German heavy tanks, there was a disadvantage, as for the American medium tanks. The trouble in Normandy was that the German tanks were better designed for hedgerow fighting. If and when the battle ever became mobile, then the much despised Sherman could show its stuff.
NORMANDY HAD its wettest July in 40 years. One Marauder bomber unit, the 323rd Group, had seventeen straight missions scrubbed during the first two and a half weeks of July. Others fared little better.
There was nothing the Americans could do about the weather, but they could go after their problems in getting tanks into the hedgerow fighting. Experiments involved welding pipes or steel teeth onto the front of the Sherman tank. Lieutenant Charles Green, a tanker in the 29th Division, devised a bumper made from salvaged railroad tracks that Rommel had used as beach obstacles. It was incredibly strong and permitted the Shermans to bull their way through the thickest hedgerows. In the 2nd Armoured Division, Sergeant Curtis Culin, a cabdriver from Chicago, designed and supervised the construction of a hedgerow cutting device made from scrap iron pulled from a German roadblock. The blades gave the tank a resemblance to a rhinoceros, so Shermans equipped with Culin’s invention came to be known as rhino tanks.