Posted: Aug 23, 2012 3:37 pm
Rome Existed wrote:The US though had a large industrial base so it's not like they'd be able to build 50k Shermans but only 800 heavies.
Had they been sufficiently prescient before the war to have designed a heavy tank that could have gone into production in 1941, they probably could have made tens of thousands of them. However, they weren't and it wasn't until 1943 that they'd got a practical design for a heavy tank in the T-26. This was stalled for the better part of a year because of doctrinal issues, but eventually went into production as the M26 Pershing, arriving in Europe in small numbers by the end of the war. Had they decided to go with it without hesitation, they could probably have had a few hundred by D-Day, rising to maybe a couple of thousand by the end of the war.
There simply wasn't a better US tank that could have been mass produced in the same numbers as the Sherman, so they were always going to make up the bulk of the armour.
The T-34 though was upgraded with a powerful gun, the Sherman never was.
Sgt Kelly has already answered this but, they stuck with the original 75mm gun on the bulk of Sherman tanks right until the end of the war for the simple fact that they were mostly fighting infantry. Only the relatively small number of units that were tasked with directly fighting German armour had the need for anything more powerful.