| 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 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.
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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