How fast was the sherman tank

Membership Events. Museum Temporarily Closed. Share this on. History of the Artifact. The Sherman was accepted into the U. Army in and most likely stayed in the United States to train new tank crews headed overseas. Out gunned and with mere 2. Taking things into their own hands and tired of being sent in with tanks that had patched-over holes from German Tigers, crews starting outfitting their Sherman in some very odd ways that were not standard issue.

Crews of the M4 started strapping pretty much anything to the fronts and sides of their tank to help lower the odds of a shell breaking the hull and becoming a very unwelcome guest[4].

Common things used were sand bags and logs, but some would even go so far as putting crumpled chicken wire on the front plate and then filling it in with cement. These men were quite desperate, which is understandable when you consider that they drove a tank that had to get within roughly meters of a Tiger to be effective. A Tiger could put a shell through the front plate head on of an M4 at 2, meters[2]. It would take a half dozen Shermans to take down a Tiger in a head-on confrontation.

A confrontation like this would probably put 4 of the M4s out of service or in need of repair if they could be fixed at all. In the movie, four M4 Shermans, led by tank commander Brad Pitt, are crossing a field when a Tiger ambushes them.

This scene is ripe with Hollywood inaccuracy except for the fact that the Tiger is able to drop three of the four Shermans in a single shot, before the one that happened to have Brad Pitt in it managed to flank the Tiger.

The M4 Sherman took five men to operate. There was a driver, located front left where the driver of a normal automotive would sit. Unable to see very much through his primitive viewport, the driver usually relied on the tank commander to give a more reliable description of the surrounding area. Located in the turret were the commander, gunner, and loader. The loader was tasked with loading the 75mm after every shot.

On average, the reload rate for a Sherman was 10 rounds a minute, at least when the loader was pulling the shells from the turret[3].

If he had to pull from the racks elsewhere, the reload rate dropped to rounds a minute[3]. This meant if the Sherman was put into a situation where there was prolonged firing the loading rate would drop, encouraging the gunner not to miss. The gunner sat in the center of the turret with the 75mm gun just off his left shoulder.

His job to hit the target was definitely not easy. Yet on they pushed. The last position, the tank commander, sat just beneath the top hatch to the turret. His duty was to coordinate his crew to function as a unit and to keep his crew alive, a difficult challenge. The tank commander would also call out targets for the gunner, instruct the driver, and communicate with other tanks[3,6]. Though frequently outgunned by their German counterparts, Shermans proved easier to maintain—often fixed on the battlefield.

No unit markings were discovered when previous coats of paint were removed from the tank. Because the tank was manufactured in , it is almost certain that it was deployed overseas during the war, although no battle damage was discovered.

When the Sherman tank arrived at the Museum in December , its engine was completely rusted and it was painted in a color appropriate to the Korean War era rather than World War II. Restoration work began in late October , when the tank received a running Ford GAA engine and a new paint job.