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2013

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World War II

James Madison University

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The Wrong Track: Errors In American Tank Development In World War Ii, Jacob Fox May 2013

The Wrong Track: Errors In American Tank Development In World War Ii, Jacob Fox

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

American main battle tanks in the European Theater of World War II were technologically inferior to their German counterparts. Crews in the M4 Sherman tank thus suffered extreme casualties in the fight to liberate mainland Europe from Nazi Germany. This thesis contends that the U.S. Army had another tank available by the fall of 1944 that could have saved the lives of many American soldiers and might have also ended the war sooner than May 1945. The existing historiography fails to consider much of the records from the U.S. Army’s Ordnance Department about the development of this more advanced tank: …