As a tank platoon leader and later a oneyear tour in afghanistan. Nicholas moran is also a graduate of the u. S. Army and command and general staff college. Nick has been working as the San Francisco bays wargaming americas inhouse tanker and historian since 2012 and has the nickname of the chieftain. You might want to remember that. His first book on the development of Tank Destroyers is scheduled for release in the first half of 2018. Nick is known for written articles and reviews of tanks inside and out. Lots on youtube called inside the chieftains hatch, or this video cast on cspans American History tv. Ladies and gentlemen, nicholas moran. [ applause ] unfortunately, up as high up as it goes. Good evening okay, so, todays talk is on world war ii procurement or as the sherman is as it was. Its not a good title, but the best i could come up to when asked by rob, hey, can you give us a talk. Im going to do the obligatory shoutout first. Wargaming, world of tanks, are the people who paid for me to come out here. We are a commercial enterprise. If you are interested in tank games, world of tanks is great. It is not a realistic simulation. So on that i would like to thank you for inviting me out here, because ive seen some of the other speakers that have spoken here, and my god, there are some high end personnel. I dont have any letters after my name. I do not teach at a university. I work for an unrealistic video game. So id like to thank them for taking the gamble and bringing this guy out who has no history whatsoever to give you guys a talk. However, despite the disreputable background as far as the academics are concerned, i do promise you that everything is either sourced from the archives or is as accurate as i can make it. Im hoping this thing will actually come across. Well see. If cspan cant hear me, im sure theyll make a mention. So, the background. Initially i was asked to come here and do my myths of american armor talk, and i had to think about it, its on youtube. If you want to listen to it, go to youtube, google it, youll find it. In this i took some of the common conceptions about the m4 medium tank and basically said, look, these are the common conceptions and they are wrong. But because i had already given a talk, look, lets modify it a little bit and go instead of how good was the tank, well go with why is the tank the way it is. So thats the theory behind this. Now, i dont know your knowledge level. Again, some of the speakers ive heard you hear on the podcasts are very high end. But every now and then its good to just go back to some of the lower levels and make sure that the fundamentals are still good. So, audience participation question number one. The rifle is the m1. What was better out in service . Common service, than the m1 durant as a rifle . Pretty much nothing. You can make an argument maybe for the 44, but that wasnt as common. The m1 was probably the best piece of equipment of its type in the world and the u. S. Produced it. What was a better fighter than the mustang, better destroyer, better carrier than the essex, better artillery fuse than the vt . We had the best. All right. Landbased fighter. Or the noncombat stuff. No other country had the handy talky. The cckw, deuce and a half, higgins boat, some say it won the war, some people say the jeep won the war. The victory ship, putting these things out in two weeks flat. The record, i think, was six days in california. So you can go on and on. With a couple of exceptions, the other countries had their areas of expertise. We didnt touch the british with cryptog rfy and some of the raid ars and so on, british had us. Germans had a few advantages and so on and so forth, but as a general rule, anything that the u. S. Went to war with was the best in the world that was out there. What happened . How did we go from the best at pretty much everything to this . Im going to argue that actually we did not get it wrong. And that there were very specific decisions made in the u. S. As to why the m4 ended up the way that it was and over the course of the next hour or so, ive been asked to keep it to less than 60 minutes. I dont think ill make it, but ill try. Hopefully, you guys will get an understanding of the levels of thought that went into the design process. So, audience participation question number two. Hands up for the chicken. Who votes the chicken . Who votes the egg . All right. In 2006 the university of norwich concluded it was the egg. However, that finding was later reversed by the universities of sheffield and warwick in 2010 in a paper entitled structural control of crystal nuclei by an egg shell protein. Current scientific thought, therefore, suggests the answer to the chicken or egg question is the chicken. I bet you learned something this evening, my mission is complete. Now, why do i ask . Any guesses . Sir . Looking forward in history versus looking back in hindsight . Okay, so how would that apply to this talk . Most people are going by the information of the sherman by looking back and hearing what people are saying about it as opposed to looking at it as the moment its being designed. That is an excellent point. That is not the answer to this question, but it is actually a very good point, and i was mentioning earlier how i was talking about british Army Operations in northern ireland, which to an extent i lived through, but then did an assessment last year for the army and its very interesting the different perspective depending if youre involved in the matter or dealing with it after the fact objectively. Sir . Its a process. Which comes first, both developed at the same time, feedback loop to separate the one from the other. Youre getting there. Chicken and the egg at different times were the same thing. Its a continuous process with creation of the egg. But its actually the same thing. That is deep. That is very deep. Here are your chicken and here are your egg. On the left side is a symbol for Army Ground Forces. These are the guys that develop doctrine they equip the force. On the right hand side is the bomb of Ordinance Branch. Ordinance branch are the guys who developed the equipment. So the question is, should doctrine match the technology that is being created or should technology be geared towards meeting whatever the doctrine requires . So, heres your next question, audience participation question number three. Who thinks that doctrine drives the technological design . Who thinks that the Technology Drives what the doctrine does . Okay, few more people. Who doesnt care . Okay, so this is barnes. Ive referred to him as the mad scientist. He comes up with all these wonderful designs and pieces of equipment and he believes he knows better than everybody else what the army needs. And to quote him for those of you in back that cant read. It is not well understood that tactics are usually written around a weapon. First, Field Operations ordinarily do not generate ideas leading to new materiel for the and it must be produced, such as for example, a machine gun, before the tactics can be devised for the exploitative capabilities of the weapon. For these reasons its necessary for Ordnance Department to get the help of those services in determining where the weapon best fits into battleField Operations. So, if you talk to ordnance, Technology Drives doctrine, and its kind of hard to argue the fact, well, how can you know how to use a machine gun if you didnt know such a capability exists . However, this is what Army Ground Forces thought. The bottom line here is that Army Ground Forces will draw up the specifications and they would then be submitted to ordnance and ordnance would then Design Equipment to match what Army Ground Forces wanted the equipment to do. And the quote is from the written history of Army Ground Forces. I have a picture up there, granted in 1940 Ground Forces didnt exist as an entity, but well leave that aside. If youre curious, just to be clear, users saying they are in charge, developers saying they are in charge. Both have actually reasonable arguments. If youre curious, this is the process today. And i have had to learn this as part of my majors course and i am very glad im not involved in procurement. This is the armys side of it. If you can understand this, youre a better man than i, but the bottom line is, in todays military it is driven by the operational needs, not by the technology. So you start off with an operational needs statement, such as for example the strikers now being fueled in europe. This came from the field. Second brigade said we need vehicles with a cannon capable of engaging and the engineers went and built them a vehicle with a cannon and got fielded. Such statements did exist in world war ii. For example, one i saw said we want a device we can fit on to a tank so when its driving along at least 15 miles an hour it will detect a minefield before it hits a mine. We havent really gotten to that today, but these requests were being fielded from the field to ordnance and a lot of times ordnance did develop materiel. Which met the requirements of the force. Again, i digress. The bottom line is ordinance thought they were in the lead, agf thought they were. So if you go back to the start before the u. S. Joined world war ii you could see what Army Ground Forces said the equipment of the army was, and it was terrible. Basically, the u. S. Was starting from scratch. So reduced to its simplest terms, the problem is to determine the kinds of equipment which will be needed most and could be manufactured in the required hundreds, thousands, or millions in time to be of use. And, again, thats a quote from agf. Note in time to be of use. You have a water fight, cant be waiting around for the Perfect Piece of equipment. In january of 1940, in a lecture before the army industrial college, the then chief of ordinance estimated that the development of a major item of materiel required a minimum of three years from requirement to fielding. Now, in war they cut that down to usually one and a half to two years. Sometimes even as little as one. And this timeline generally matches with the development of any piece of equipment developed by anybody else. The british, the germans, the russians, about one and a half to two years. Yes, audience participation question number four. In one word each, what are the two biggest problems facing the United States as it prepared to fight world war ii . Logistics . Production . Production, logistics. Shipping . Shipping. Time . You guys are very close, bouncing around the right idea. Isolation . Bingo. The two problems are called atlantic and pacific. There we go. Anything which is being built to fight is going to be fighting many thousands of miles away and a couple of oceans from your nearest factory. It has to get there, and when it is there, it must also be sustained. This means as few parks break as possible in order to reduce to need to ship spares over, the need to ship the spares, and all those consumables like pol, pet role, oil, lubricants across the ocean. Not unlike the germans, who could if they had to do a complete refurb, they could ship it back to the factory, or so could the soviets if they had a need to. We could not. Anything we sent over was there to fight until it was either discarded or destroyed. So major repair in the u. S. Is not an option. And you have to think about the entire chain from the factory floor to the battlefield. Heres an example of one of the problems. In 1948 there were 12,122 flat cars in the United States which could carry a persian tank. In may of 48 they had an exercise and wanted a battalion, from ft. Knox to ft. Campbell, the other end of kentucky. It took 40 days to collect all the flat cars. That was in 48. If you go back to 42, how many flat cars were capable of carrying a 45 to 50ton tank and Everything Else that had to be carried to get to the ship . And then when you got to the shipyard, you have liberty ships that weve been building once every ten days. What is the lifting capacity of a liberty ship crane . If you make these 60ton monsters, can you actually get it to the fight . Arguably, you probably could, but in sufficient numbers to make to have an effect . So, again, in the simplest words, what use is having the best equipment in the world if you cant get it to the fight, or if it breaks down . No use. Just wasted all that shipping and effort to get a tank overseas just to see it break down and sitting in a motor pool or wherever. So thats some of the basic problems. So lets get down to some of the nuts and bolts. So, again im going to quote Army Ground Forces. Agf established two general criteria for the development and approval of new equipment. First is genuine battle need. It was reluctant to initiate development of any equipment not considered essential to increase combat efficiency. It tended to oppose development of new equipment, which though perhaps desired by the men in the field, was not absolutely essential and might prove to simply be a luxury or excess baggage. This was a clear cut policy of general mcnair, one which he often emphasized. It was eventually adopted formally as War Department policy. So who determines battle need . Who determines what is an essential piece of equipment versus what is luxury equipment . So one school of thought said the theater commanders. The other school of thought said that the decision should be centralized in the u. S. Who thinks they went with theater commanders . Who thinks they went with centralized decision in the u. S. . You are all wrong. [ inaudible ] i see where youre going, but we will have so many personnel, we will have so many tanks, the actual nature of the tanks and improvements to them was not centralized. I shall explain. So the reasoning from the idea behind the guys who wanted to centralize the decision was that theater commanders might be too strongly influenced by the limiting local conditions of their own tactical situation to exercise proper overall judgment. Which seems a little bit distrusting in the reasoning of four star generals. They also believed recommendations were colored by the combat soldiers natural attachment to Reliable Equipment with which they were familiar. So basically they were worried that the troops in the field were very happy with what they had and would not request additional equipment. There is some evidence to support this. For example, witness 6 Armor Division in october of 44 who reported they received no 76 millimeter tanks and had no particular desire for any. The 75 had gotten all the way across france. Why rock the boat . What they had was working. Now, the War Department and to a large extent mcnair went with the former view. They did not produce and ship materiel overseas unless the end users were asking for it. So even if the guys in d. C. Thought this was a great tank and it should be shipped overseas, they asked the commanders in europe and north africa. If they said no, the equipment did not go overseas. So the second criteria, reliable performance in combat. This standard, sometimes referred to as battle worthiness, meant that the equipment having been proved capable of performing the function for which it was designed was sufficiently rugged and reliable to withstand the rigors of combat Service Without imposing excessive problems of maintenance. Excessive problems. The thing will break down. It will happen. And now there is perhaps a sub category, which i would call immediate capability. Army Ground Forces was willing to accept sub capable equipment if it was the case of that or nothing, but it still had to be reliable. Cases in point there will be your Tank Destroyers m3 or m10. So the situation of tanks. So what we have here is an m2 medium the u. S. Started the war with. As you can see, needs a fair bit of track tension here. The u. S. Had at the time what harry yadi has called the cult of the machine gun. The infantry were owning the tanks. The calvary had combat cars. Basically tanks, but anyway the infantry were quite interested in the tanks ability to deal with enemy infantry. As you can see how did i do that . Machine guns everywhere, deflectors on the back here that would shoot down into the trench you were walking past. The 37, that was an antitank gun and it was trained for antitank capability. Because somebody figured out if we have a tank, they might bring a tank and we have to be able to kill their tank. But the main weapon was the machine gun. And this tank was limited to 15 tons by policy because that was the average weight of an American Railroad bridge at the time. Or road bridge, im sorry. So, in 1939 the u. S. Conducted a series of tests to determine if machine guns or a 75millimeter round would be more effective at killing infantry. Survey says, 75 millimeter. Good to know. But what theyve done is added a 75 into the hull of an m2 medium. And it should start perhaps looking a bit familiar. Then this happened. This photograph taken, the germans very quickly overrun france. And a couple of lessons are taken by the u. S. From this. Firstly, a 37 millimeter is not going to cut it in the antitank role. Forget it, you need something bigger. Fortunately, they had already tested the 75 millimeter. Fantastic. The second problem, and this is where the lecture is going to take into a fork into two tracks and they created Tank Destroyers as a result. Were going to talk about not only why the sherman was designed the way it was, but also briefly about the tds. So, solution, build m3s. So take the m2, take the 75, add a new turn on it, couple more gadgets and gizmos and youve made an m3. Nothing in this tank is particularly new. Its always improving on something that they know already works and this is the sort of thinking which will dominate Army Development and procurement for the next while. They built detroit arsenal. If you dont know who he was, look him up, probably the most important man in the war. He tal