On September 19, 1944, near the village of Arracourt in the Lorraine region of eastern France, a German Panzer brigade equipped with Panthers, among the best tanks of the war, attacked an American force it outnumbered. The Panther’s gun could destroy a Sherman from well beyond the range at which the Sherman could reply. On paper, it was not a fair fight. By the end of the day, the German brigade had lost most of its tanks, and the Americans had lost a handful.
Over the following two weeks, in battles almost nobody remembers, one American armored division helped destroy more than two hundred German tanks and assault guns. The tank that did most of the work was the Sherman, the same machine that has spent eighty years being called a death trap. The Sherman’s reputation did not come from nothing. The M4 was the main American medium tank of the war, first seeing combat with the British Eighth Army at El Alamein in October 1942.
More than forty-nine thousand were built in a dozen variants, fighting in North Africa, Italy, the Pacific, and Northwest Europe, and supplied not only to American forces but to the British, Free French, and Soviets under Lend-Lease. The design philosophy behind it explains everything that followed. The United States would fight this war at the end of very long supply lines across two oceans. A tank that could not be shipped in huge numbers, moved by rail, driven for hundreds of miles, and repaired with standard parts was useless no matter how powerful.
So the Sherman was built to be reliable, easy to produce, easy to maintain, small and light enough to ship in quantity, and good enough to fight. Not the best possible tank, but the best possible tank that could be built by the thousand and delivered across the world. When it appeared in 1942, the Sherman was a match for most German tanks then in service. The problem was what came next.
Germany introduced the Panther, a forty-five-ton medium tank designed in response to the Soviet T-34, with thick, sloped frontal armor and a long, high-velocity 75mm gun that could punch through a Sherman’s front from far beyond the range at which the Sherman could reply. The Tiger, a heavy tank of around fifty-seven tons, carried the feared 88mm gun. Against the front armor of either, the Sherman’s standard 75mm gun was close to useless at normal combat range. A Sherman crew that met a Panther head-on in the open at long range was in serious trouble.
But the legend skips an important qualification. The Panther and Tiger were never the majority of German armor. The most common German tank in the field was the Panzer IV, a design the Sherman could fight on roughly equal terms. The nightmare matchups were real but far less common than the stories suggest.
And when Allied armor landed in Normandy in June 1944, the fighting in the hedgerows was a shock. American tank losses in the first month ran about three times higher than planners had expected, as Shermans were knocked out from concealment. And when a Sherman was penetrated, it had a tendency to catch fire. That tendency is the root of the legend.
British crews supposedly nicknamed the Sherman the Ronson after a cigarette lighter, and the Germans supposedly called it the Tommy Cooker. The fires were real, but the reason was misunderstood for decades. The Sherman did not burn because it ran on petrol, the explanation people usually reach for. It burned because of its ammunition.
The main gun rounds were stored in the hull and turret, and when a penetrating hit struck that ammunition, the propellant caught fire. American and British studies concluded that the large majority of Sherman fires started in the ammunition, not the fuel. Every tank of the era that stored ammunition the same way had the same problem. The Panther, for all its armor, also burned when penetrated, for the same reason, and it too ran on petrol.
Fuel was rarely the cause in either tank. The Americans identified the cause and fixed it. From 1944, new Shermans were built with wet stowage, bins in the hull floor surrounded by water and a chemical mix that smothered a fire before it could spread. The change cut the proportion of Shermans that burned when hit from roughly sixty or seventy percent to around ten to fifteen.
But the nickname had already stuck. The legend was cemented decades later by a former officer named Belton Cooper, who had served with the Third Armored Division as an ordnance officer, one of the men responsible for recovering and repairing knocked-out tanks. In 1998 he published a memoir, Death Traps, written from memory more than fifty years after the war. Cooper wrote that the Third Armored Division entered combat in Normandy with 232 Shermans and over the campaign in Europe had 648 completely destroyed and another 700 knocked out and repaired, a loss rate he put at 580 percent.
He offered it as proof that American tankers had been sent to die in an inferior machine. Cooper wrote from genuine grief and genuine experience. He had recovered the bodies of men he knew from tanks that had burned. But his job was wrecks.
Every Sherman he examined was by definition one that had been hit. He did not track how many were hit and kept fighting, how many German tanks his division destroyed in exchange, or how many of his own crews walked away alive. The high cumulative loss figure over ten months of combat also measures how many times the same tanks were repaired and returned, which is itself a point in the Sherman’s favor. The historian Steven Zaloga spent much of a later book answering Cooper point by point, and his case rested on three things: how many crews survived being knocked out, how reliable the tank was, and what the alternative actually cost.
When a Sherman was knocked out, American studies found that on average about one of its five crewmen was killed. The rest usually got out. The Sherman’s hatches were large and sprung to fly open fast, and the tank was relatively roomy inside, which meant a crew could get out in the few seconds they had. By the measure of how many men lived, the Sherman had among the best crew survival rates of any tank of the war.
Then take reliability, where the comparison turns all the way around. The Panther was mechanically fragile. Its final drive, the gear assembly that transmitted engine power to the tracks, was chronically weak, and many Panthers were lost not to enemy fire but to breakdowns, abandoned by their own crews. On the long retreats of 1944 and 1945, German roadsides were littered with intact, powerful tanks that had simply stopped.
The Sherman, by contrast, was one of the most reliable tanks of the war. In an army that had to ship its tanks across an ocean and then advance across a continent, that reliability was the whole game. A brilliant tank broken down by the roadside kills nothing. The design was tested in a foggy field in Lorraine in September 1944.
After the breakout from Normandy, Patton’s Third Army raced across France, and at its spearhead was the Fourth Armored Division under Major General John Wood. By September, the Third Army had outrun its own fuel, and the Germans were given time to organize a counterattack on the approaches to the German border. Lorraine was not good tank country for an attacker who relied on range. It was a land of low hills, small woods, river valleys, and villages, and in autumn it was wet, muddy, and often shrouded in morning fog.
The German plan was to hit the flank of Patton’s advance. The force assembled was the Fifth Panzer Army under General Hasso von Manteuffel, including newly formed Panzer brigades equipped with Panthers. They looked formidable on paper, but they had been thrown together quickly. Their crews were often inexperienced, and the brigades lacked proper reconnaissance units.
A tank crew is not made in a week, and the veteran German tank crews of 1941 and 1942 were mostly gone by late 1944. The men in these new Panthers had the better machine and far less idea how to fight it. Facing them was Combat Command A of the Fourth Armored Division, built around the 37th Tank Battalion, commanded by a lieutenant colonel named Creighton Abrams, after whom the army’s main battle tank would later be named. The Americans were outnumbered in tanks, but they had advantages the paper comparison does not show.
American reconnaissance had a rough idea of what was coming, and the defenders chose concealed firing positions. Fog took away the Panther’s great advantage. Its gun could kill at a mile and a half, but only if the crew could see a mile and a half. In fog, engagements happened at a few hundred meters, and at that range the Sherman’s gun could punch through a Panther’s flank as easily as the other way around.
American crews were drilled to acquire a target and fire fast, and the Sherman’s turret traversed quickly, faster than the Panther’s. In a close-range meeting engagement, the tank that fired first usually won. Advancing blind without scouts, the Panzer brigades drove straight into American positions they could not see, presenting their thinner side armor to Shermans and tank destroyers waiting in ambush. The first clash came on September 18, when the 111th Panzer Brigade struck near Lunéville and the Americans beat the attack back, destroying around two dozen German tanks and assault guns.
On September 19, the 113th Panzer Brigade advanced toward Arracourt with more tanks than the Americans facing it. It attacked alone because a second brigade meant to support it had arrived too late. What followed was a confused morning of scattered actions fought at ranges where a crew might see a dark shape loom out of the mist and have seconds to decide whether it was friend or enemy and to fire. In one action, a company under Captain Kenneth Lamison took up a concealed position, and when German tanks appeared, the Shermans fired first, destroying five German tanks before the first Panther even returned fire.
American M18 Hellcat tank destroyers, lightly armored but the fastest tracked armored vehicle of the war, knocked out Panthers and pulled back before the Germans could fix their position. By one account, the tank destroyers alone were credited with destroying nineteen German tanks that day while losing three Hellcats. When the fog lifted, P-47 Thunderbolt fighter bombers arrived and hunted German armor from above, credited over the course of the fighting with destroying or badly damaging dozens of German tanks. By the end of the day, the 113th Panzer Brigade had lost dozens of tanks, most of them Panthers, for a small fraction of that on the American side.
The fighting continued in fits and starts until the end of September. The Germans attacked again on the 20th, the 22nd, and the 25th, feeding in the 111th Panzer Brigade and later elements of two Panzer divisions. Each time the pattern repeated. Across the month in the Arracourt area, the Fifth Panzer Army lost well over two hundred tanks and assault guns destroyed or badly damaged, by one accounting 118 Panthers, 101 Panzer IVs, and 122 tank destroyers and assault guns.
Combat Command A of the Fourth Armored Division, which had borne the brunt, lost around twenty-five tanks and seven tank destroyers. A single American combat command, a force smaller than a division, had helped shatter the better part of a Panzer army’s armored strength in one region in one month. It was one of the most lopsided armored victories of the war on the Western Front, won by the tank that gets called a death trap against the tank that gets called one of the best of the war. The Sherman did not win by being a better tank than the Panther.
In a fair fight at long range on clear ground, the Panther would usually win. The Sherman won because it was part of a system: reliable tanks that could be everywhere they were needed because they did not break down, crews trained to shoot first and survive being hit, tank destroyers to ambush, artillery on call, fighter bombers overhead the moment the weather cleared, and enough of everything to absorb losses and keep going. The Panther was a superb instrument used inside a force that had run short of fuel, short of training, short of scouts, and short of tanks. Manteuffel’s Panzer brigades had been Germany’s attempt to rebuild armored strength in the west after the disaster of Normandy, and they were sent into battle before they were ready.
The Sherman was not built to win the duel. It was built to win the war, and the difference is exactly what the field near Arracourt demonstrated. The eventual American answer to the heavier German tanks, the 76mm gun and new ammunition, was reaching the front in the autumn of 1944, and later the M26 Pershing arrived too late and in too few numbers to change the fighting. By then the war was being won by the tank the army already had, in the hands of crews who had learned how to use it.
The Fourth Armored Division went on from Lorraine to become one of the most decorated American divisions of the war. Three months after Arracourt, in the snow of the Battle of the Bulge, it was Patton’s Fourth Armored that broke through to relieve the surrounded town of Bastogne. Creighton Abrams, who commanded the 37th Tank Battalion in the fog at Arracourt, rose to become a four-star general and Army chief of staff, and the M1 Abrams main battle tank is named for him. The men who believed the Sherman was a death trap were not fools, and they were not lying.
A man who has pulled his friends from a burning tank does not need a historian to tell him what he saw. The point is that the experience of the wreck is not the same as the record of the war. A legend built only from the wrecks leaves out the field at Arracourt, the crews who bailed out and fought again, and the reason the side with the worst tank kept winning. There is a last irony in the two machines’ afterlives.
The Sherman was simple, sturdy, and built in such numbers that it kept serving in armies around the world for decades after 1945, and a number are still running today in museums and private collections. Working Panthers can be counted on one hand. The tank built to be good enough outlasted the tank built to be the best.