The Sherman’s triumph over German panzers was a tribute to the courage and tenacity of the crews and superiority of Allied maintenance and logistics. My father’s old outfit, the 3rd Armored Division, went ashore in France about two weeks after D-Day and plunged...

into combat. They entered the fight with 232 M-4 Shermans; over the next 11 months, the division lost over 700 in combat, yet more than 60% were repaired and returned to combat. The Germans were astonished; they knocked out Shermans by the dozen, yet there were even more to..

take their place. My father was NCO in charge of a tank retriever platoon; their job was to pull damaged tanks and other vehicles off the battlefield, help the mechanics repair them and get them back into service. BTW, one reason we wound up with the M-4 was interwar parsimony;