“Perhaps the most questionable element in American ground fighting power was the American tank,” he wrote. Russell Weigley* made a similar argument. How could American and British industries produce a host of superb aircraft, an astonishing variety of radar equipment, the proximity fuse, the DUKW, the jeep, yet still ask their armies to join battle against the Wehrmacht equipped with a range of tanks utterly inferior in armour and killing power? Great cinematic moments like these are spot on, aren’t they? The Sherman was the tank that won the war, right?Īccording to British historian Sir Max Hastings, “no single Allied failure had more important consequences on the European battlefield than the lack of tanks with adequate punch and protection.” The Sherman, he added, was one of the Allies’ “greatest failures.” THE SHERMAN TANK - who hasn’t cheered it in Hollywood epics like A Bridge Too Far, Band of Brothers, or The Pacific? Just when all hope seemed lost, a column of Shermans arrives in the nick of time to save embattled American soldiers. (Image source: WikiCommons) “The Battle of the Bulge exposed deficiencies in the M4 so glaringly obvious, what became known as the Sherman Tank Scandal would be splashed across front pages all over the Allied world.” But as a fighting machine, it was easily outclassed by most of the German tanks it went up against. The intercept helped set the stage for an Allied victory in the Pacific.The M4 Sherman is remembered as the tank that won World War Two. After intercepting the admiral and his escort of Zero fighters, Japanese naval morale was crushed, and Allied morale soared. It proved to be a turning point in the war. installations in Hawaii, sixteen P-38 pilots were dispatched to fly a five-leg, nearly 1,000 mile-long mission. And in 1943, when code breakers learned of a key inspection flight in the Pacific by Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of the attack on U. When a long-range battle-tested airplane was needed for the Allies’ first round-trip mission to Berlin, a modified P-38 was chosen. Destroyed entrenched pillboxes and shot down numerous fighters and bombers in all theaters of war. Its versatility and ruggedness were legendary. It also doubled as an intimidating long-range threat, capable of carrying a larger payload than early B-17s and boasting a range of 1,150 miles. Upon its official introduction in 1940, the P-38 was capable of climbing to 3,300 feet in a single minute and reaching 400 mph, 100 mph faster than any other fighter in the world. Hibbard and his then assistant, Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the twin-boomed P-38 was the most innovative plane of its day, combining speed with unheard-of advances: two supercharged engines and a potent mix of four 50-caliber machine guns and a 20-mm cannon. The P-38 had been given a new nickname: the “fork-tailed devil.”įirst conceived in 1937 by Lockheed chief engineer Hall L. officials realized the focus of the pilot’s madness. Within six months, as the P-38 showed its versatility in North Africa, a lone hysterical German pilot surrendered to soldiers at an Allied camp near Tunisia, pointing up to the sky and repeating one phrase- “der Gableschwanz Teufl”-over and over. The pilot, pumping 409 rounds per minute from its nose-mounted machine guns, dispatched the Condor in seconds, marking the first successful American engagement of a German aircraft during World War II. With its distinctive design, the P-38 was sleek but its twin tails gave the Lightning a radical new look. Its crew had never encountered anything quite like it before. The aircraft’s target, was a German Focke-Wulf Fw-200 Condor patrol bomber. True to its name, the P-38 was akin to a force of nature: fast, unforeseen, and immensely powerful. The pilot in a new American fighter, the P-38 Lightning, peeled down from the skies over Iceland on August14, 1942.
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