Interesting snippets from an interview of Steve Zaloga from: http://tankandafvnews.com/
[Who is he? – Steven Zaloga is an author and defense analyst known worldwide for his articles and publications on military technology. He has written over a hundred books on military technology and military history, including “Armored Thunderbolt: The US Army Sherman in World War II”, one of the most highly regarded histories of the Sherman Tank.]
Commenting on the worlds impression of the Sherman tanks, which evidently evolved from British writers in the 70’s :
“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.
And on the mightiness of Tiger Tanks:
German armor seems to get the lion’s share of attention when it comes to books published on World War II armor. How much do we actually know about German armor and the German Panzer forces?
We’ve got the hardware side down pretty well. Tom Jentz did a magnificent job covering the technical history of German tank development. But the operational side, we don’t know as well as people might think we do. In spite of all the stuff that’s been written about the German side, the stuff that’s out there is not very good. A lot of what’s out there on Tiger tanks is very one sided. There are some very good Russian websites that are pointing out all the errors in those Tiger histories, you know German accounts will say “Oh Tiger regiment such and such went this Russian tank unit and destroyed 57 vehicles.” And then the Russians go and look at the unit histories from the Russian side and find that the incident either didn’t occur at all or the German tank claims were grossly exaggerated. So we need much more balanced work done on that, we need better stuff on the German side on the operational side.
A book review of Armoured Champion written by Zaloga can also by found here:
http://tankandafvnews.com/2015/05/15/book-review-armored-champion-by-steven-zaloga/