Im hoping this thing will come across. If cspan cant hear me, im sure they will make mention. The background. Initially i was asked to come and hear my midst of american armor talk. If you want to hear it go find it. I took some common conceptions. I said, look, these are the common conceptions and they are wrong. Because i had already given the talk, well modify it a little bit. Instead of how good is the tank. Thats the theory behind this. I dont know your knowledge level. Some of the speakers ive heard you here on the podcast are very high end. Every now and then its good to just go back to some of the low levels and make sure fundamentals are still good. Audience participation question number one. The rifle is the m1. What was better as a rifle . Pretty much nothing. You can make an argument but that wasnt as common. What was the better fighter than the mustang. A better carrier than the essex . We had the best. No other country had it. Some people say it won the war. Some say the jeep won the war. The other countries had their own area of expertise. As a general rule, anything that the u. S. Went to war with was the best in the world. It was out there. What happened . How did we go from the best at pretty much everything to this . Im going to argue that we did not get it wrong. There were very specific decisions made in the u. S. As to why the m4 ended up the way it was and over the course of the next hour or so, ive been asked to try to keep it to less than 60 minute, i dont think ill make it, but ill try. Hopefully youll get 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 . That finding was reversed in 2010. In paper entitled structural control of crystal nuclei by an egg shell protein. Current scientific thought indicates the answer to your chicken or egg question is the chicken. I bet youve learned something this evening. My mission is complete. Why do i ask . Any guesses . Sir . Okay. How would that apply to this talk . Most of the people are going by the information by looking back to what people are saying about it as opposed to looking at the moment its being done. That is an excellent point. Thats not the answer to this question, but it is a very good point. I was talking about british Army Operations in Northern Ireland to an extent i lived through. Its very interesting the different perspective involved in the matter or if youre dealing it after the fact objectively. Sir . Youre getting there. Thats deep. That is very deep. Here are your chicken and here are your egg. On the left side is symbol for army grand forces. These equipped the force. On the right hand side is the bomb of Ordinance Branch. Ordinance branch are the guys who developed the equipment. 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 . Okay. Who thinks that the Technology Drives what the doctrine does . A few more people. Believes he knows better than everybody else what the army needs. To quote him for those of you who cant read. Its not well understood that tactics are written around a weapon. Thus Field Operations do not generate ideas leading to new material and new piece of congresswomen must first be produced such as a machine gun before the tactics can be devised for the exploitation capability ies of the weapon. Its necessary for Ordinance Department to take a strong lead in the development of new equipment and get the help of those services in determining where its been best fit into battleField Operations. If you talk to ordinance, Technology Drives doctrine. Its kind of hard to argue the fact that well, how can you know how to use a machine gun if you didnt know that such a capability exists . However, this is what army grand forces thought. The bottom line here is that Army Ground Forces would draw up the specifications and then be submitted to ordinance and ordinance would then Design Equipment to match what army grand forces wanted the equipment to do. I have a picture up there. We have users saying theyre in charge and developers saying they are in charge opinion both have reasonable arguments. This is the process today. Im very glad im not involved in procurement. This is the army side of it. You start off with an operational needs statement. This came from the fields. The second brigade said we need vehicles. Then the engineers went and built them a vehicle with the canon. Such operational need statements did exist in world war ii. It was one that said we want a device that you can fit onto a tank than when its driving along and 15 miles an hour it will detect a mind field befoe it hits the mine. If you go back to the start before the u. S. Joined world war ii, you can see what Army Ground Forces said and it was terrible. The u. S. Was starting from scratch. The problem is to determine the kind of equipments that will be needed most and manufactured in the hundreds, thousands or millions in time to be of use. Thats a quote. Note in time to be of use. You cant hang around watsing for the Perfect Piece of equipment. In january of 1940 before the Army Industrial College the chief of ordinance estimated that the development of a major item and material 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. This time line generally matches with the twodevelopment of piecf equipment by anybody else. 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 talks with chrysler and together they build the detroit tank plant. Initially the army only wanted 350 m3s. The problem was that the russians and the british were in such demand for these tanks that they couldnt stop producing m3s to switch over to the m4, so they built about 6,500 of them. Something similar happened with the six pounder. The british six pounder was developed before world war ii, but after the fall of france they realized we could either not produce antitank guns or just build a two pounder. The british went with what they had ready to go. Soviets the same. T34 was supposed to be replaced with new suspension and so on and so forth. Didnt happen. Germans invaded, well go with what we have. So there were gradual improvements on the m3, stabilizers, heavy duty bogeys, so the army is getting experience with the cast hull tank. Of interest in terms of design, barnes was not in favor of keeping the 37 millimeter. He was happy enough to go with a turretless tank, but infantry who at the time was still in charge, demanded the 37 be retained. So thats why we still have a 37. So, the i said this was going to break in two different directions. Then you had the question of how do you stop these, because what was happening, of course, was not working. The idea of having antitank guns with the front line with the infantry was not working, and the solution was you had to cut these off for loss. Theres no way you could put enough antitank guns to stop a concentrated army attack. The solution was to have mobile rapid antitank guns to meet the enemy attack at the point of penetration and the idea was these will beat up all the tanks. Hence you have the Tank Destroyer branch. Purely defensive organization. If you look at the manuals, look at the doctrine, they were never to be used in the attack. And not everything was a Tank Destroyer if it was a toed antitank gun. That could be an antitank gun. I have a video on it, as well. If you google on my youtube channel, which explains the difference between an antitank gun and the Tank Destroyer. So this is the other problem that the u. S. Had. This was the thinking of antitank technology at the beginning of the war. Can you throw rifles and b. A. R. S into a tank track to stop it . This is my favorite photograph ive ever found in the archives. It is a declassified photograph of an antitank rock. Which failed to stop the tank, and you can see where the tank sheared the rock. You also add molotov cocktails, caliber 50s, the u. S. s antitank systems were a little lacking. Fortunately they eventually selected the 37 millimeter, kind of taken from the germans, not exactly, but they bought a couple to look at before they built the 37 and started to place these in construction in 1939, so a little bit late to the party. So now you have the question do you want these fast mobile antiTank Destroyers, do you want them to be towed guns or really, really fast . Yes, i know, thats a cromwell, but go with it. And the thinking was that these towed antitank guns would be very hard to spot, the master of the tank. Mcnair used the comparison of Coastal Artillery versus battleships, which apparently the u. S. Navy didnt believe in that either, because their battleships engaged Coastal Artillery, and the fact these are much, much cheaper than tanks. Im going to come back to this a couple of times, but money was a really big problem for the army procurement. Buy war bonds, do this, we need money to fight. So if you could make a cheap destroyer, thats better for the army than an expensive Tank Destroyer. In the end, bruce won out. All the Tank Destroyers will be mobile and self propelled. For the record, the chief of infantry said the best weapon to kill a tank is not a tank. This is back in 1940 or 41. So what i got here is a couple of examples of designs just for the light platoon of the Tank Destroyers. The light platoon was to be equipped with a 37millimeter. The heavy platoons would get the 75. So we have a t2, a t14, sorry, a t2e1, and a t8, designed to get a 37millimeter into the fight. These are also good motor carriages. T33, t22, t21, and an m3. Many different designs were tried out to fit the requirement, the doctrine requirement. Of we must have a selfpropelled antitank tank. So of interest, this Tank Destroyer was not approv