An officer. He spent one year in iraq as a platoon leader and later a oneyear tour in afghanistan. Nicholas moran is also a graduate of the u. S. Army command and general staff college. Hes been working as San Francisco bays war gaming americas in the house tanker and historian since 2012 and has the nickname of the chiefton. 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 articles and reviews of tanks inside and out. Lots on youtube called inside the chief tans hatch. Or there is there is this video cast on spanns American History tv. Ladies and gentlemen, nicholas moran. [ applause ] thats about as high as it goes. Good evening oh, boy. Todays talk is whitey sherman as it was. Thats not a very good title but it was the best i could come up when i was asked, hey, will you give us a talk. So im going to do the obligatory shoutout. The people who paid for me to come out here. We already commercial enterprise. If youre interested in tank games, its great. Its not a realistic simulation. On that, i would like to thank the organization for inviting me. Ive seen some of the other speakers who have spoken here and theres some highend personnel. I do not have any letters after my name. I do not teach for a university. I work for an unrealistic video game. 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 from as far as the academics are concerned i do see that everything in here is either sourced from the archives or is as accurate as i could make it. Im hoping this thing will actually come across. Well see. If spann cant hear me im sure they will make mention. So the background. Initially i was asked to come and do my midst of america talk. Its on youtube. If you want to listen to it, google myths of American Army and youll find it. In this i took some of the common conceptions about the m4 tank and to an extent the pershing and said look these are the common perceptions and they are wrong. Since id already given the talk, well go with why is the tank the way it is . So thats the theory behind this. I dont know your knowledge level. Again, some of these speakers, ive heard you hear on the podcasts are very high earned, but every now and then its good to go back to the low levels and make sure that the fundamentals are still good. So audians participation question number one the rifle is the m1 durant. What was better out in service, Common Service as a rifle . Pretty much nothing. You can make an argument maybe but that wasnt as common. The m1 was probably the best piece of equipment of its type in the world to and the u. S. Produced it. What was a better fighter nan the mustang . A better destroyer than the gearing, a better carrier than the essex, a better artillery fuse. We have the best. [inaudible]. All right. Land based fighter. [inaudible]. Or the noncombat stuff. No other country had the handy talky, the cckw, deuce and a half. Hashtag enspoke won the war. Some say the tank won the war. The record i think was six days in california. So you can go on and on with a couple of exceptions. I mean the other countries had their own areas of expertise. We didnt touch the british with cryptography, the germans had a few advantages, so on and so forth. But as a gem 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 that at pretty much everything to th 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 youll 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 . Hmm. All right. In 2006, the university of norich concluded was the egg. However, that was reversed in 2010 in a paper called structural control of crystal nukely ie by an egg shell protein. Current scientific thought therefore indicates that the answer is the chicken. So i bet youve learned something. My mission is complete. Now, why do i ask . Any guesses . Sir. [inaudible]. Ok. So how would that apply to this talk . Most people are going by the information of the sherman by looking back to hearing what people are saying about it as opposed to looking at it at the moment. That is an excellent appointment. That is not the answer to this question. But it is actually a very good point. I was mentioning earlier how i was talking about british operations in Northern Ireland which to an extent i lived through but i did an assessment last year for the army and its interesting, the different perspective whether youre involved with the matter or dealing with it after the fact objectively. Sir . [ inaudible question ] youre getting there. The chicken and the egg. [ inaudible ] the same thing. Change this process from the creation of the egg to the chicken. 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 who develop doctrine that equipped the force. On the righthand side is the bomb of the ordinanancordnance. Should we match the technology or should technology be geared toward whatever the doctrine requires . So heres your next question, audience participation question number 3 who thinks that doctrine drives the technological design . Ok. Who thinks that the Technology Drives what the does. Ok. Few more people. Who dont care. [inaudible]. So this issed thattian barns. Ive referred to him as the Mad Scientist of the army. He believes he knows better than anybody else what the army needs. To quote him for those of you in the back cant read. It is not well understood that tactics are written around a weapon. Thus, Field Operations ordinarily do not jen race ideas leading to new materiel. Mp gun must be developed before the exploitation of the weapon. For these reasons its necessary for Ordnance Department to take a strong lead in the development of new equipment and then to get the help of those services in determining where the weapon best fits into battleField Operations. So if you talked ordnance, Technology Drives doctrine and 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 about Army Ground Forces thought. The bottom line here is that Army Ground Forces would draw up the specifics and they would then be submitted to ordnance and order nabs would then Design Equipment to match what Army Ground Forces wanted the equipment to do. The quote is from the written history of Army Ground Forces. I have a picture up there. The Ground Forces existed as an entity but well leave that aside. If youre curious, just to be clear, we have the user saying theyre in charge, the developer is saying theyre in charge and both are reasonable arguments. This is the process today, if youre curious. I have had to learn this as parts of a majors course and im 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 that in todays military, it is driven by the operational needs, not by the technology. So you start off with lets say an operational needs statement such as a 30 millimeter strikers that are now being fielded in europe. This came from the field, the second brigade said we need a canon capable of engaging the mps. Then they built a weapon with a cannon. Such operational needs statements did occur. One wanted a device that you can fit on to a tank. When its driving at 15 miles an hour, it will detekt the mine field before it hits the mine. These requests were being fielded from the field to ordnance. Lot of times ordnance did develop materiel that met the failing objectives of the force. If we go back to the start, before the u. S. Joined world war ii you can see that Army Ground Forces said the army was and it was terrible. Basically the u. S. Was starting from scratch. Reduced to its simplest terms, the problem is to determine the kinds of equipment needed most and can 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 cant hang around waiting for the Perfect Piece of equipment. In january of 1940 in a lecture before the Army Industrial College he estimated that the development of a major item of materiel required a minimum of three years from requirement to fielding. Now, in the ex genesis of the war they cut that down to usually one and a half to two years. Sometimes as little as one. This matches with the development of any piece of equipment developed by anyone else, the british, the germans, the russians, about one and a half to two years. Yes. Audience participation question number 4 in one word each what are the two biggest problems facing the United States as it prepared to fight world war ii. [inaudible]. Production, logistics, shipping. You guys are very close. Youre bouncing around the right idea. [inaudible]. Bingo. [inaudible]. 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 factor. It has to get there and when it is there, it must also be sustained. So this means that you need to have as few parts break as possible in order to reduce need for spare parts to be shipped over. Youve got the consumables, like pol, petroleum, oil, lube cant across the ocean. Note also that unlike the germans, who could if they had to do a complete refush on the tank, they could ship it back to the factor, so could the soviets if they had need to. We do not. Anything we sent over, it was there to fight until it was discarded or destroyed. So repair for the u. S. Is not an option. You have to think about the entire chain from the factory floor to the battle field. Heres an example of one of the problems. In 1948, there were 12,122 flat cars in the United States which would carry a pershing tank. In may of 1948 they had an exercise. They wanted a battalion of they are r per shings. It took 40 days to collect the flat cars. That was in 1948. If you go back to 42, how many flat cars were capable of carrying a 45 to 50ton snank and Everything Else that had to be carried to get to the ship. Then when you got to the ship yard, you have liberty ships that with weve been building one every 10 days. What is the lifting capacity of a liberty ship koreacrane . Arguably, you probably could but could you get them in sufficient numbers to have an effect . So again, in the simplest world, what use is having the best equipment in the fworld you cant get it to the fight or if it gets to the fight, it breaks down. No use. You just wasted all that effort to get a tank overseas just to see it break down and sit in the 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 gem criteria for the development and approval of new equipment. The first is genuine battle need. It was reluctant to develop any equipment not considered essential to increase combat efficiency. It the ended to oppose the development of new equipment, which, perhaps desired, was not absolutely essential and might prove to simply be a luxury or excess baggage. This was a clearcut policy of gem mcnair. It was eventually adopted as War Department policy. So who determines battle need . Who determines what is an essential piece of equipment versus what is a luxury equipment . So one school of thought said the Theater Commanders. The other school of thought said the decision should be centralized in the u. S. Who thinks they went with Theater Commanders . Who thinks they went with centralized in the u. S. You are all wrong. [ inaudible question ] i see where youre going on that. That was done centrally, yes, but once it was set up, we will have so many personnel, so many tanks. The actual nature to have those tanks with kbrooichlts to them was not centralized. I should explain. So the reasoning from the idea behind the guys who wanted to centralize decision was that Theater Commanders might be too strongly influenced by the limiting local conditions of their own practical situation which seems a little distrusting in the reasoning of four star generals. They also believed that Theater Command or recommendations were colored by the gas 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 Information or additional equipment. And there is some evidence to support this. For example, the Armored Division in october of 44 who reported they had received no tapgs and had no particular desire for any. The 75 had gotten all the way across france. Why rock the boat if what they had was working . The War Department and mcnair went with the former view. They did not produce and ship material 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 kai tear on, 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 it was rug ed to meet the rigors of war. The thing will break down. Forget it will happen. Now there is perhaps a subcountry which i would call immediate capability. Army Ground Forces was willing to accept subcapable equipment if it was the case of that or nothing. But it still had to be reliable. Cases in point, there will be your m 3 or m 10 Tank Destroyers. So the situation of tanks. So what we have is an m 2 medium that the u. S. Started the war with and it needs a fair bit of track attention. The u. S. Had what has been called the cult of the machine gun. The infantry were owning the tanks. The cavalry had combat cars. Them basically tanks. And they were interested in the tanks ability to deal with enemies. As you can see how did i do that . Machine guns everywhere, deflectors on the back. It would deflect and shoot down the trench that you were walking past. That was an antitank gun and it was trained for antitank capability. Somebody figured out if we have a tank, they might bring a tank and we have to be able to kill their tank. The main weapon was the machine gun. 15 tons by policy because that was the average weight of an american rr bridge at the time road bridge. Im sorry. In 1939 the u. S. Conducted a series of tests to determine if machine guns or a 75 millimeter round would be more effective. Survey says 75 millimeter. Good to know. But what theyve done is theyve added a 75 into the hull of an m 2 medium and it should start looking a bit familiar. Then this happened. That is photograph taken near sedon. 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. Forget it. You need something bigger. Fortunately theyd already tested the 75 millimeter. Fantastic. The second problem and this is where the lecture is going to take a fork into two tracks and they created Tank Destroyers as a result. Were going to talk about why the sherman was designed the way it was but also about the tds. Solution, build m 3s. You take the 7 a 5 and the m 2, add a new tour et on it and youve made an m 3 tank. Nothing is new on this tank. Its improving on something they know will work. This will dominate for the next while. They built arsenal. If you dont know knudson, look him up. He talked with chrysler and they built the army tank. Initially they only wanted 506. The problem was that the russians and the british were in such demand for these tapgs that they couldnt stop producing m 3s to switch to the m4. So they built about 6500 of them. Something similar happened with the six pounder. The british six appointed every was developed before world war ii but after the fall of france they realized, we can either not produce them while we tool up or we just build a two pounder. The british went with what they had ready to go. The soviets, the same. It happened the jer maps invaded, well go with what we have. There were gradual improvements in the form of new stabilizers, the chrysler multibank engine tank. Some came cast huls, so the army is getting experience with a cast hull tank. Of interest, bamps was not in favor of keeping the 37 millimeter on the turret. He was taken to go with a turret si. 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 pansers, because what was happening wasnt working. The idea of antitank guns was not working. And the solution, as i go past a couple of hidden slides, was you figure you had to cut these off for loss. There was no way you could put enough antitank guns to stop a concentrated bomber attack. The slulgs wa