Rants and Death Traps

Jwilson7020, on Oct 22 2014 - 14:03, said:   You are asking the wrong question.... How many lives would have been saved if we had a MIX of M4s and M26s. If the Tank Battalions under the Infantry Division MTOEs  (the tactical formations tasked with punching holes for the Armor to exploit) had M26s instead of M4s, would they not have been better equipped for the job?    "One can only speculate what might have happened if Patton's forces had had a smaller number of superior tanks. There would have been fewer engines to be supplied with fuel and fewer guns to be provided with ammunition [and I add fewer crewmen to feed] but there would have been greater fighting power and he [Patton] might have kept going. Would the war in Europe have ended in 1944 rather than in May 1945 and would the border between East and West -- soon to become the Iron Curtain -- have been drawn farther to the east, changing the course of postwar history?" [Kelly, Orr, King of the Killing Zone, p. 85]   Cooper also speculated that if the M26 had gone into full production in January of 1944, then at least enough of them may have been available by Jun/Jul 1944 to have made enough of a difference tactically to have seized the Ruhr River Valley and forestalled the Ardennes Counteroffensive, thus ending the war in the ETO by about six months.   But GEN McNair was against putting the M26 in production because of "rapid deploy-ability" (where have we heard that before?) issues: we could put five Shermans in the hold of a Liberty Ship versus one Pershing. They were ONLY looking at it as a sheer numbers (based on faulty intelligence that pegged German tank production at twice its actually number [Kelly, p. 84])