Ronsons

The_Warhawk: Hooookay, I'll step in now.   Chepicoro, the argument isn't that Ronson made lighters for the US Army. They quite obviously did, and no one is arguing that.   The argument is that the slogan "Lights up First time every time" never existed, and based on everyone's research here, no one has found that slogan being used ever. The closest approximation was from fifteen years before the M4 was a thing that even existed. For your average US Army soldier in 1941 (aged say 18-20) they would have been very young and for soldiers that enlisted/were drafted later in the war, they could very well have been even younger. While it's certainly possible that they could have remembered it, it's also not very likely.   Does this mean that no soldier or tanker ever called their tank a 'Ronson'? No, but the lack of period sources, and the actual lack of the slogan attributed to the nickname casts the 'fact' that Sherman tanks were called Ronsons during WW2 into doubt. There certainly were soldiers who called them Ronson's post-war, again, no one is arguing that. The question is was it a nickname during the war. So far, no one has found record of that being a nickname applied by soldier to the Medium Tank M4 during World War II. Heck, I've personally poured over thousands of pages of US Army documents specifically relating armor. While I've found reports complaining that the tank caught fire when it, not one says anything about "The problem is to the point where my crews have started calling them 'Ronsons'."   Now were fires in Shermans an issue? Yes, early on they were, Feel free to read about it here, as our tame Tank Historian (and my boss) weighed in on the matter: http://worldoftanks.com/en/news/21/The_Cheiftains_Hatch_Ronsons/   The subsequent forum conversation (which is accessible through Bob on that article) extensively delves into trying to find evidence of the 'Ronson' nickname among US Army Tankers. The verdict is that if it was a nickname, it certainly wasn't common. (Again we can't really prove that no soldier ever called a Sherman a Ronson, but that's really beside the point).   And that really, is that.