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Out of the Box Sherman

History
The M4 Sherman medium tank was the main armored vehicle of the allied forces in World War II. A total of 49,234 Sherman tanks were built in the United States and more than 55,000 were produced during the Second World War, a quantity equaled by only one other wartime tank, the Soviet T-34. Variants of the Sherman tank included flamethrower, rocket launcher, mine clearers, amphibious and tank dozer conversions.

Production began on December 11, 1941 of the welded hull M4 and the cast hull M4A1. Interestingly, the first assembly lines were established by British contract and the first two Sherman bore British Army numbers.

The subject of this article is the welded hulled, gasoline-powered, aircraft engined M4. This particular tank entered production with the Pressed Steel Car Company, a railroad manufacturer. More than 10 factories produced the different variants of the Sherman during the war, which allowed the tank and the armies that employed it to be successful in the battlefields of Italy and Western Europe.