In April of 1945 the Germans have 90 tanks on all of the Western Front. All tanks, everything, Panthers, Panzer IV, Tigers. They had a handful of Tigers. They had 400 other armored vehicles, assault guns, Stug III and things like that. So they had 500 armored vehicles on the entire Western Front, from the North Sea all the way down to Bavaria and Southern Germany. At that point in time the United States had 11k tank and tank destroyers. One reason there is 11k US tanks and tank destroyers is because the US decided to concentrate on a tank that was extremely reliable and relatively economical to build. And I don’t think anyone would claim that the Sherman was the best tank from the perspective of the tank crew, it didn’t have the best armor, it didn’t have the best gun, but from commanders perspective it was an excellent weapon. There were just lots and lots of them, so they gave the commander a lot of battlefield power. That can’t be said for a lot of the better German tanks because they simply were too expensive to be built in large numbers and they weren’t reliable enough, you couldn’t count on them.

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