Shermans were a great success - US doctrine emphasized combined arms warfare
If by combined arms warfare you meant shell the sh*t out of a target, then bomb it, then fire some more cannons for good measure and then move in land units then yeah.
The only general who practiced mobile war was Patton. Allies did not use combined arms like the Germans did.
were NOT intended to attack alone and without air or Arty support.
They were also not intended to get murdered by enemy tanks, yet they did.
They did and got smashed yes
Yet they were a great success:))
if German armor was caught without Luftwaffe support and Allied airpower intervened, what happened?
Typically? German armor withdrew while murdering all ground based opposition, you needed up to thirty combat flights to destroy a tank with a plane, why do you think German armor was able to operate for weeks in Normandy under allied air dominance.
No, it means simply that they were caught in a predicament that they were not designed for.
So you're arguing that Sherman was not designed to be a tank?:) The Sherman was first employed in Africa where it was superior to most German armor (which at the time was even crappier) and it was sent there specifically to fulfill an anti-armor role, thats what it was created for.
The only US tank designed to specifically
Americans sent them to Africa as assault platforms superior to anything Germans had at the time, all US tanks were designed specifically to fight other tanks including Stuarts that had a 75mm main gun.
Why the constant comparisons to the T34? The T34 is/was an excellent tank but the issue is "was the Sherman a piece of crap". I'm telling you why it wasn't, not how it compares to the T34.
Both were medium tanks, both were produced as basic tanks of their armies and as medium tanks both were each others close equivalents. Sherman had weak armor and a weak main gun therefore it was not a good tank.
Your argument is that it was cheap so i brought in T-34 which was about 20% cheaper, the same class of tank and superior in terms of speed, range, armor and gun, just because a tank is cheap doesnt make it a good fighting machine, its characteristics do and thats where Sherman fails across the board.
The jeep was great, no?
There was a much greater demand on a jeep then on the Sherman, there were over 600k built, to give you an idea, you need only so many tanks but jeeps worked in resupply, reconnesaince,medium transport, towing, engineering, ambulance duties, logistics etc, there was no need to inflate the demand on them.
the Sherman was not shite
Because you think so? If a tank performes so very poorly in two basic fields, is flammable, easy to hit and is slow (Panzer IV was 9 kmph faster, T-34 was 15 kmph faster, the panther was 17 kmph faster).
So unless you can provide an argument for its good combat performance it was a very very bad tank, T-34 is a good example that you can make a cheap(er) tank thats much much better.