re: #130 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

And the suspension on a Sherman could be removed and replaced in the field.

German tanks had three layers of overlapping road wheels, which gave great weight distribution but meant that you would have to take off up to five wheels to replace on the inside.

And the Sherman’s* bogie system was in part chosen by the designers with that in mind. It was pointed out in one of the videos by The Chieftain** that the US Army chose weapon systems in part with the expectation that it would be shipped thousands of miles away to be used. Therefore, ease of maintenance, reliability, etc. were important since if the tank was sitting in a depot to be fixed it wasn’t much better than it sitting back in the United States.

* - The Sherman’s predecessors actually. Torsion bar suspensions were going to replace that, but that was a different design series.

** - IIRC, he has a 45 minute video on a presentation he did about the various myths about the Sherman and why the US Army had the tank that it had in WW2.