A Wehrmacht veteran we knew in my group as 'Frank', once told us that if, as in his last battle before being captured, you did not have any tanks with you, or means to deal with it, then the Sherman was totally deadly. ANY tank was deadly.

Throughout the retreat from Normandy his unit had rarely ever had the means to deal with their pursuers. He professed that the demoralization of his unit was obvious in his eyes. They saw large numbers of tanks not only facing them in action, but even after knocking those out, more kept coming and coming and coming in subsequent actions, well beyond the capability of dealing with them.

He used to talk often about how they were told all the 'Tommy Tanks' were weak. The "Ami" tanks even weaker, badly armed and their crews green. The enemy artillery was hopeless, the enemy infantry were gutless etc. etc. But when faced with the reality of a horde of Shermans advancing on their position in his last action and his unit having no way left in which to deal with even one or two, let alone the whole lot .... the promises of how weak they were and how green the crews were, or how weak the armament was supposed to be, did not mean an awful lot!!!

He also told us how totally demoralizing it was, that when they actually did surrender. The American combat troops did not even bother to march them off, just sent his group back out into an open field where they had been entrenched and told them to wait there until someone came along to escort them to the prisoner of war camp. They were not even properly disarmed, but he said they then sat on the grass watching the massive American Sherman columns drive past, with troops, trucks, etc. and nobody even bothered to actually round his group up and take them to a POW camp for two days! Passing troops just ignored them. In the end they approached some troops stopped at the edge of the road and asked for food. Those troops called the MP's up and he was 'formally' taken prisoner.

By the end of the second day, when they were finally rounded up, he said it would not have mattered if they HAD found a way to fight back .... they were so utterly demoralized by the sheer mass of what was facing them and the contemptuous way in which this mass had ignored his unit, that all the fight was gone out of them anyway.

Frank (I think his real name was Franz) never served on the Eastern Front, so never saw the massed Russian attacks others told them about. He had only been in the Wehrmacht a year at the time of his capture (He was actually an Austrian) and was emphatic that the most common things he saw for dealing with enemy tanks were various SP guns and towed anti-tank guns. He saw a few German tanks here and there, but never actually saw one up close in his entire year of service. The largest number of tanks he ever saw in his life, up close, was the massive column that rolled past after he had surrendered.

He also said the first time he 'ever' saw some German tanks up close enough to touch, was when he visited Bovington Tank Museum in the UK. Admittedly he had served in an Infantry Division, not even mechanized.... but from the way most wargamers fight battles, you would think every German unit had tanks with it.

Also someone made some comments re the effect of air attacks in real damage terms. Frank again was a good example. He said they suffered almost no actual casualties from the continual air attacks. But the need to continually run for cover, day after day after day, wore them down and had everyone frightened.

He saw plenty of casualties from other units as they retreated along the roads from Normandy and although his unit had not and never did actually suffer many losses from this means, the mere fact of seeing all those casualties was enough to scare the daylights out of them when ever aircraft appeared. He agreed with some other sources, that 'Panic' was the main effect of ground strafing and that panic left them exhausted, confused and often totally disordered.

Another guy who's name I cannot now remember, was a survivor of the battle of Casino. In fact he is in one of the photographs of wounded paratroops shown in one of the early Osprey books. He was only 17 when captured but also said the only tanks he ever saw in any number, were some SP's during his combat service and a whole load of Allied tanks after his capture. He described these as 'Shermans'.

Over the years I've had the opportunity to talk to many veterans of the German army of WW2. Even today two elderly neighbors are such veterans. None of them has ever given me vivid descriptions of massed Tigers, Panthers etc. etc. A 'head count' of the number of German tanks manufactured, the fronts they were distributed among, the number of years across which those numbers were produced, etc. comments from veterans such as above and the battle strength in various actions, has left me firmly of the opinion that the number of German tanks wargamers expect to deploy in games, is totally unrealistic.

Les, one of the guys in our group here, sat down one time and did some research into comparative numbers. His final conclusion was that from 1944 onward, on the Eastern Front, for every Tiger I, that a player deployed on the tabletop, the opposing Russian player should have something like 80 tanks and SP guns at his disposal! He also concluded that on the Western Front, there were between 30 and 40 Shermans available at any one time, for every Panzer Mk IV!

Roll on those Shermans!. I'll accept 30 or 40 of them for each Mk IV any day.