S. Zaloga on "Fury" & current WW2 research

http://tankandafvnews.com/2015/01/27/zaloga_interview/

Below is a sample. There is much more at the link:

What did you think about the film “Fury” in terms of historical accuracy? Did it capture the look and feel of World War II tank combat?

I thought it was a very good film within the limits of what you can do in Hollywood. Some people get all spun up in claiming this bit is inaccurate or whatever, nitpicking some of the small details. My outlook is more from the broad picture, looking at it from the standpoint of a general audience, not a bunch of tank specialists. I thought it was very well done, I thought it was very authentic.

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Did US tankers suffer disproportionately in terms of casualties compared to their opponents or to other branches of service? There is a popular saying that it took five Sherman tanks to kill a Tiger that gets mentioned often in books and documentaries.

No, that whole business about five Shermans for every one German tank, I don’t really know where that comes from, that seems to be totally apocryphal. My suspicion of where it comes from is not the US use of the Sherman but probably from the British use of the Sherman. And I think that that issue has been misunderstood. The Brits took very heavy losses with their Sherman tanks in the Normandy fighting against German units, in the Caen sector in Summer of 1944. In a lot of early tank writing, we’re talking 1960’s and 1970’s, practically everything that was written about tanks, and written about US tanks were written by British authors. There weren’t a lot of US tank books out at the time. So a lot of the stuff that came out about the Sherman came out from the British side. And the British side did take disproportionate casualties in Normandy. And it’s largely for tactical reasons. I’m not going to get into it, it’s way too complicated to explain, but yes the British did suffer very high losses against the Germans for a variety of reasons. That was not the case on the US side.

What people don’t realize is that the US tank force didn’t really encounter very many German tanks in Normandy. The first month of the fighting was concentrated mostly up the Cotentin Peninsula during the drive by 7th Corps to Cherbourg. The Germans in Cotentin Peninsula had two tank battalions, both equipped with war booty French tanks, so basically very poor quality tanks. There wasn’t a lot of tank fighting. Then in the month of July the US pushing through the boscages country, finally resulting in operation Cobra, the big breakout operation by 2nd and 3rd armored divisions at the end of the month. The Bocage country wasn’t very good tank country either. The Germans did have a couple of tank divisions there, the Panzer Lehr Division, the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich. 2nd SS Panzer Das Reich didn’t see a lot of tank fighting simply because the terrain wasn’t suitable. Panzer Lehr did launch one major attack in the middle of July and got completely shot up by the US side. But in the case of both German Panzer divisions they didn’t see much fighting against US tank forces, they were fighting mostly against US infantry and tank destroyers and they took significant losses. And then in August of course the breakout operations, so US tanks are running like wild through Brittany, through France to Paris and there are scattered encounters with German tanks but on a very small scale.

The first time the US has a really big tank on tank encounter with German armor is Arracourt, the fighting in Lorraine in September of 1944. Fourth Armored Division is confronted by a few of the new German Panzer Brigades. And that’s a lopsided victory on the US side. Patton’s Third Army trounces the Panzer Brigades in Lorraine, largely because the US unit involved there, the Fourth Armored Division, by that stage was a well experienced, well trained unit and the new Panzer Brigade, even though they had lots of brand new shiny Panther tanks, were new units with varying experience and they performed very badly. And that remains one of the most intense series of tank battle the US Army fought in World War II where there were really significant numbers of tanks facing tanks in a relatively small area.