Quote:
Originally Posted by Adm.Lee
Are you sure it's the same 75mm? I figured it was the same 75mm statted from the Scorpion and/or AMX. The Sherman's 75mm was a low-velocity thing, designed by an artillery-experienced ordnance team. According to "Steel coffins", they wanted a barrel that could last 2,000 shots before wearing out, but experience showed that tanks didn't last that long.
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It wasn't the same 75 as the mounted on the sherman, just shared the same caliber. It officially was a 75mm, 65-caliber. A shorter version was marketed for a time by AIRES Corps as the AIRES 75...the great selling point was the auto loader. The Scorpion mounted a short-barrelled 76mm, but the Brits used HESH, HE, Smoke and Canister and ignored the AP round. The AMX-13 75mm gun was a near copy of the 75mm used on the Panther.
The Sherman short-barrelled 75mm was designed to meet then current Armored Corps doctrine which held that tanks were not to be used to destroy other tanks, that was the sole preserve of the tank destroyer corps. So when the Sherman went into combat from El Alemain forward, it found itself serously outgunned by the Mark IV, Panther, Tiger, King Tiger combo. It was only when the Sherman was upgunned to the 76mm that it had any chance of taking on the Germans...and even then, it was seriously outgunned.