There is that tank mission on the new battlefield game where the narration says that some times Tiger pilots run out of ammo and had to retreat while facing Shermans.
Imagine a Tiger ace trying to fight a Pershing? The tiger legendary status would be broken.
... Are you really using a mass market video game notorious for its arcade style approach to combat and whose every launch sees legions of people complaining about historical accuracy or lack thereof to illustrate your understanding of WW2 tanks and their effectiveness? You need to read an actual book or get some citations from something other than a video game for children.
The actual historical record is that the American Sherman tanks generally beat their Tiger opponents in almost every engagement. By contrast ironically the first time a Tiger ran into the Pershing at Cologne in 1945, the Pershing
lost. Admittedly due to the Pershing being caught in terrible circumstances and surprised, but still an amusing anecdote. The Americans didn't need Pershings to beat Tigers and that "legendary status" was due to propaganda and Allied conflation of
anything with a Tiger or an 88mm gun, and not the actual performance and impact of the Tigers against the Allies.
I find the logistics and shipping objections laughable.
Its the USA in WW2 FFS!
If they decided to build 5000 M6s and send heavy tank units to Europe then they'd make it happen. Have a liitle faith people.
Sure you could, but what's the point? The M6 was a worse tank than the Sherman, since it was taller - and the Sherman was already quite tall - the frontal armor was peppered with weaknesses and was probably worse than the Sherman's anyway, since the frontal armor at 82.5mm @ 35 degrees from vertical is only slightly better in in nominal armor values than late model Shermans which had 64mm @ 47 degrees from vertical, so 100.71mm vs. 93.84 - and that's before the greater tendency of shells to ricochet from the Sherman's armor due to the way WW2 arlor piercing ammunition works is taken into account. Gasoline tanks high in the hull so if it does get penetrated, it is going to burn a lot more than the Sherman, and the side armor is painfully weak for a heavy tank - 44mm, which means any German anti-tank gun, even 37mms, are going to slice right through. That's to be expected on a medium tank, but on a heavy tank that weighs
twice the Sherman's weight it is simply sad.
More men needed to man it, far worse strategic mobility since there are going to be a lot more bridges and railroads that don't accept it due to the increased size, not even mentioning the fact that you'd have to have much more expensive landing vessels. In shipping you can get away with just shipping 1 heavy tank instead of 2 medium tanks, and sure that means you've slashed your tank force by half all other things being equal, but if you're on a landing craft you simply cannot use the smaller landing craft since it will just fall through the bottom. The British built high quality landing craft for the Churchill but they were apparently expensive enough to compete in construction resources with escort vessels. And despite brushing aside concerns about production resources, the fact is that the Western Allies had a major bottleneck for landing capacity and Overlord's late date was greatly in reason of the need to accumulate enough landing craft. Plus worse operational range even if all of this is taken aside, and far higher gasoline consumption, so things like the American blitz across France are going to be far slower, and their logistics crisis in late 1944 worse.
And of course, the M6 was armed with the same gun as the Shermans were late-war, the 76mm, so the armament isn't any better - it just also has a useless 37mm cannon, and an additional M2 Browning machine gun. The isn't anything that the M6 does significantly better than the M4, and when you take into account the much bigger size and weight and all the other problems, I'd say that just in pure combat performance, and nothing to do with industrial concerns and production, it is worse than the Sherman. So in the end you're paying far more for a worse tank, and you have much fewer tanks at the front, so your tank units continue to suffer casualties at the same rate as before, but there are a lot fewer of them so casualties among infantry deprived of tanks to support them is going to be much higher (especially since 75mm armored Sherman tanks are straight up
better at this than the M6 heavy tank since the 75mm gun has a superior HE round), and you have fewer divisions and less ability to mass tanks so overall combat effectiveness is massively reduced. There were some M6 tanks that were tested with 90mm guns, but then Sherman tanks were tested for the 90mm too with that starting as early as late 1942, and they could fit it on, so if you really want to get a 90mm armed tank into battle, just have the Sherman 90mm program happen.
All in all a truly horrible idea and it is a good thing Americans stuck to their Shermans. A better heavy tank
might be justifiable although even then the Sherman is probably better, the M6 heavy tank is simply put a joke and monstrosity and it is a damn good thing it never saw combat.
