Thanks for the pics Andy!
Ahh! The Fury Sherman. I quite enjoyed the movie in spite of Brad Pitt, and have the dvd. I will watch it again this week.
In the movie the Sherman has a trap door which I thought was Hollywood bullshit, but it did indeed have a trapdoor according to my Google search just now.
Quora post :
Yes, there was an escape hatch in the floor of the Sherman. I talked to an old tanker who said that whenever they drove over a German trench, they would open the bottom hatch, drop a hand grenade into the trench, and close the hatch.
Other than that, the movie was not so realistic. Grenades go off much faster than portrayed in the movie so you don’t have much time to escape.
It depicts the German soldiers marching toward the tank. They take all day to get there, and keep on fighting into the night. They are shown carrying Panzerfausts, which were an inexpensive, single shot, recoilless anti-tank weapon with a range of up to 200 feet. In reality, if a troop of experienced German soldiers carrying Panzerfausts had come across a single disabled Sherman in the middle of the road, they would have made short work of it with minimal casualties. The Sherman crew would have known that, and got away from the tank as quickly as possible. The US built about 50,000 Shermans, so it wasn’t as if they couldn’t afford to lose a few.
I have read 'Tigers in the mud' by Otto Carius, a Tiger ace, a worthwhile read. He was a brilliant tactician and Tiger tank commander.
He fought the Russians on the Eastern front and eventually the Americans in the final days of the war whom he describes as being fearful and not as good as the Russians.
My thoughts are that the Americans were not keen to throw their lives away as they had after d-day as by that stage the war was almost over.
otto carius video:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3xj08j
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Topic: Andy H's Screenshots (Read 71167 times)
