Pershing vs. Super Pershing

[Warren Peace]

Why is the Super Pershing cheaper in CM then the regular Pershing? Is this an error?

[Shadow 1st Hussars]

It has a low ROF

[Wilhammer]

SPs cannot carry passengers either.

[lcm1947]

Any body know why it had a lower ROF? If it came out after the regular Pershing I wonder why they slowed it down? Kind of stupid don't you think - on their part I mean. :confused:

[niles]

To youre question about ROF and why they slowed it down...The Super Pershing (and I dont know if CM models this ) but when the U.S. military ordered a larger Pershing, they still wanted it to be fast, so they reduced the size of the turret, thus reducing the room for the loader, there for it took more time to reload..Hope this helps

[Jarmo]

Was the Super version ever mass produced in significant amounts? Or the regular Pershing? Seems there was mostly (easy eight) Shermans in korea.

I can see how the decision makers might think they had enough weapons stuff after the WWII was over, so they might have jumped over a tank generation before starting to manufacture more.

[niles]

Actually Pershings were probably the least produced American tank to enter service, other than the Grant <===Crappy tank but I love the way it looks

[lcm1947]

Thanks for the info Niles and yeah the Grant was a cool looking. It was the first tank I ever modeled back in the old days. But back to the Pershing. Let me get this straight? The Super Pershing is actually larger then the regular Pershing, has a smaller turret and but is faster? I'm not where I can insert the game to look but I thought both had same speed? I'll check when I get home. I know both had same gun but it's just the turret that was reduced in size to lesson the overall weight of the tank for speed? I'd love to know what they were trying to gain by doing this. I can see the need for speed but not at the expense of weight. Didn't they learn anything from the German's?

[Chupacabra]

Yeah, they learned that heavy tanks don't go as fast as light tanks.

[Slapdragon]

The Super Pershing was a shop modified tank never mass produced that was like a dead end of Pershings for special conditions. It was designed to give Pershings better armor for expected street and fortress fighting - but Germany collapsed before it was needed, and Japan was never invaded.

The Pershing did serve with distinction in Korea, as did the E8 and M24. The first tanks to encounter the T34 in combat were M24s of the 24th Infantry Division as they fought a running battle against Maoist trained veteran North Korean tankers just released by China from their forces. The M24 was totally outclassed, but was credited with some amazing victiories, although many were eventually buried and used a pill boxes.

The E8 arrived with several tank battalions very soon after the loss of the South Korean capital, and worried planners since they felt the E8 could not possibly beat the T34s and SU100s and SU85s available to the North Koreans. All US tank battalions were scheduled to begin transition to the M46 Patton in thge next several years, but lack of funds kept the E8 and M26 in service. The E8 though proved to be superior to the T34 in Korea against the initial veteran Korean tankers (who had been fighting Koumintang for the past 10 years as an organized tank unit) loosing only 20 tanks during the pre Inchon phase of the war but destroying several Korean tank units.

The M26 was even more successful, but it was an updated M26 variant -- not related to the Super Pershing, that really turned out to be the ruler of the battlefield. The M46 Patton corrected the armor and engine issues of the M26, had the same gun on board, and it was easier to work in.

[Username]

The Super Pershing had a super long 90mm also. I believe its detailed in Death Traps.

The author (Belton?) was given the assignment of increasing the armor of the super pershing. He cut plate from panthers hulls and such. He rigged them on to give the pershing a head to head chance when it came across a King Tiger.

So the slow rate of fire is because of the longer gun. It was also very rare (2?) that were modified.

The regular pershing could have/should have been operational shortly after Dday. It should have been fielded like the tiger battalions were.

Lewis

[Slapdragon]

Lewis is correct that Pershings could have been operational after d-day, but they were more difficult to lift and used more gas, so it would have been give every battalion M4s and have lots of spares, or reducing the ability to equip the armies because of sealift issue (and the fact the Pershing did not fit neatly in some LSTs designed with the M4 in mind).

That said, There certainly could have been entire Pershing battalions by winter without hobbling M4 supplies and killing the gas and replacement system, but the Army Ground Forces was dead set against even upgraded M4A3 models, let alone a new model. The way you can see that the M26 could have come earlier is to look at the M24, which replaced the M5 gradually and is a product of a similar developmental need identified at a similar time.

The AGF was basically forced to take Pershings, and wanted them tested and trained on in the states for 12 months without gobbling up shipping space (which was not an issue witrh the M24, since it fit neatly in a parking space and list space allocated to an M4 and was not much bigger than an M5). They saw 1946 as the perfect time to make the change, and thought the war in Europe would be over.

Turned out the Bulge shocked them awake, and the Pershing was jammed onto transports even though fewer dockside cranes could handle them, no tank transport had been developed for them, and cargo ship limitatiosn amde moving them akward. They were rushed forward, put into special units, and used for the last months of the European war.

[niles]

NO NO it wasn't faster, it had a smaller urrte so it could still be light and maintain its present speed, the smaller turret was to compinsate for the longer barrel.

-Niles

[JasonC]

On armor in Korea, I second some of the previous fellow's comments but disagree on several of the points he made. First, the NKs had no SU-85s or SU-100s. They had less than 100 SU-76s, open-topped SP guns not dedicated TDs. They had around 150 T-34/85s, counting all the replacements they received. The NK tankers were not veteran quality at all, and displayed extremely "greenness" in their first encounters with US forces - such as driving single file along roads past a battery positions one at a time, not locating targets while buttoned, getting well ahead of the infantry without cutting off withdrawl routes, etc.

Second, it is true the first US tanks they encountered where M-24 Chaffees, from the divisions first sent from Japan. The Chaffees scored a moderate number of kills and lost practically nothing to the NK tanks. They were however commonly cut off by the superior NK infantry infiltrating behind their positions and cutting their roads out, and many were abandoned by their crews in such cases, with the men escaping over the hills, between NK roadblocks.

Other early killers of NK armor included napalm from tac air, 105mm HEAT rounds, and once airlifted to the theater 3.5 inch bazookas (aka schrecks). US armor also rapidly reached the theater in strength, and by August the NKs were heavily outnumbered in armor terms and reduced to using platoon-sized penny packets to support infantry. Only the 24th infantry division's earlier fight faced NK armor superiority, as well as the ROKs of course (who started the war with around 20 M-8 Greyhounds and nothing heavier).

E8 Shermans with 76mm guns were indeed among the first medium tanks to reach the theater. But Pershings arrived at the same time and in about the same numbers. The problem the Pershing had in Korea was its mobility. The road net was extremely poor, and the fighting in the southeast was in hilly terrain, often muddy as well. The Pershing was underpowered for its weight and mechanically unreliable off-road in such conditions. There was no absolute lack of them. It was a question of getting them somewhere where they could do something.

The M46 Patton was the answer to the Pershing's problems. It was based on the Pershing, with the main change being a new engine that drastically improved horsepower to weight and thus off-road mobility. At the same time, the M41 Walker Bulldog was developed (1951), mating a 76mm gun with the M-24 chassis to create a sort of cross-breed Chaffee-Hellcat. Upengined Pershings and upgunned Chaffees, in other words. But until they were available, the Chaffee and Sherman had the mobility Korean conditions demanded, and the Chaffee's gun was only suitable for fighting infantry.

But there were very few clashes of armor at the Pusan perimeter. The NKs had lost ~2/3rds of their quite limited armor force by then, and could not make good the losses. By that point, daytime road movement was also impossible due to tac air. The largest concentrations of NK armor one reads about in the histories from that point on are ~5-10 AFVs supporting whole infantry battalions or regiments.

The T-34 scare was basically restricted to the month of July - and US forces were only in action for 3 weeks of it. During which tac air cut the NK armor in half, and the various ad hoc means - Chaffees, artillery HEAT, and the new zooks - cut it in half again. This was done in a dozen small actions where sometimes 3, sometimes 7, and on one or two occasions 15 or so T-34s were KO'ed. By August the NKs had ~50 AFVs and the US had several hundred in theater. NK armor was never a problem again.

Korea was fundamentally an infantryman's war, and "mountain" infantry at that. It was well conditioned men capable of moving off road through the hills at speed, that possessed the advantages of mobility and ability to envelope anything road-bound. Not tanks, or trucks.

The US learned this the hard way, first on the Pusan perimeter and again after Chinese intervention (they were even better at it that the NKs, doing more in mountains in the snow than the NKs had done in hills in the summer). Initially US troops lacked the physically conditioning to execute large-scale maneuevers off-road. The troops were tied to their vehicles.

It wasn't until March of 1951, 9 months into the war, that the US forces really got up in the hills and got over their dependence on roads. Once they did so, they were able to use their superior vehicle support for a different purpose - better logistics for artillery supply.

This difference and the learning curve associated with it had much more to do with early US problems in the war than the armor match-up, which was over as an issue within 3 weeks of US ground forces becoming engaged.

US forces had air supremacy in a few days and armor supremacy in a few weeks. But the infantry lesson - get off the roads and up into the hills, with continuous positions to prevent easy flank marches - took months to learn, and had to be learned all over again against the Chinese.

[Gyrene]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>3.5 inch bazookas (aka schrecks) <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Schrecks were German copies of American bazookas captured in Africa, and the 3.5 was a "schreckfied" version of the the old original bazooka.

Full circle.

Gyrene