Firefly
By David Hughes
January 2012

I am a devoted admirer of both the Panzer Grenadier series and its designers, so the following should be regarded as a very mild critique. British tanks and guns in the early stages of the war were indeed pitiful, better only than the piteous Italian tanks and correctly shown in both Afrika Korps and Desert Rats. But the improvement, initially of guns and then tanks, in the latter part of the war was dramatic. Unfortunately this is not always reflected in Beyond Normandy, where some values seem to be those used by the American Ordnance Department when trying to justify its inability to provide adequate tank guns.

Gun penetration figures are a statistician’s dream, so to simplify I have picked a range of 500 yards, typical for tank combat in the West. Much the same pattern holds true at longer ranges, except that the high-velocity guns increase their relative power. I deliberately used sources from Wikpedia (just select “Sherman Firefly” and then look at the references at the bottom) so that my data can easily be checked. At this range the best British tank gun, the 17-pounder, penetrated 140mm compared with 76mm for the American 75 in a standard Sherman. The "much-improved" 76mm (identical to the 3” in performance) for which American tankers were screaming could still only manage 109mm of penetration. To compare with the Germans: at 500 yards the 75/L48 gun of the Mk IV could penetrate 106mm, the 75/L70 of the Panther 138mm, while the 88/L56 of the Tiger I could punch through 120mm.

	The Firefly and its enormous cannon.

The clear conclusion is that the 17-pounder was virtually identical to the 75mm/L70 of the Panther, somewhat better in terms of penetration, but with a lower effective range due to the superior German optics. The Firefly version (a Sherman modified in Britain to carry a 17-pounder as its main armament) retained the other characteristics of the Sherman, save for the slower rate of fire common with heavy shells but, as Beyond Normandy already shows, its capability against soft targets was much poorer. This was due to two causes. The bow-gunner was removed to provide space for the big 17-pounder rounds and the high velocity of the gun caused problems. One gunner complained that when he fired at some Germans in a hedge-line using an instantaneous fuse, the round only exploded thirty yards beyond the hedge! I suspect that Panther gunners had the same problem. Amending the Firefly anti-tank ratings to 8-8 while retaining its poor armour rating, would allow Panzer Grenadier players to simulate with more realism the tank battles of Normandy where, when a Firefly faced a Panther or Tiger, victory usually went to the first to shoot. The fate of Wittman, poster-boy of the Waffen-SS panzertruppen, demonstrates this. In June his Tiger I shot up a Firefly from ambush, then went on to destroy a bunch of Cromwell tanks. In August an ambushing Firefly killed him while knocking out his entire platoon of Tigers. It seems that in Normandy a well-placed tank with an adequate gun had the edge over almost all attacking armour.

In all of this I am ignoring the improved ammunition that soon became available, such as the APDS round used from August 1944, which improved the 17-pounder penetration up to 208mm. Although the British were the first to use such rounds, the Germans quickly followed, maintaining the comparison between the guns. The United States also produced new rounds, in this case the HVAP, but, and why I do not know, only in relatively small quantities.

Another Firefly.

Finally, to answer the issue mentioned at the start – why “official” American sources claimed such exaggerated values for their guns, and downplayed comparable British equipment. In 1945 politicians could at last make public the complaints they had been receiving about American armour – why Shermans were destroyed at such a phenomenal rate and why British guns on an American tank were so much better than American guns. In response the Ordnance Corps carried out comparative trials, using every device possible to “prove” that their guns were better (one trick being to compare a brand new 76mm with a heavily used German 75mm taken from a damaged tank!). Their final product, the 90mm gun of the M26 tank and M36 tank-destroyer, was much larger, yet could still only achieve a miserly 120mm of penetration, considerably less than the smaller and much older 17-pounder. As it turned out future American main-battle tanks would rely on foreign designs for their guns, the British 105mm in the M60 series and the German 120mm in the Abrams.

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