So I managed to get myself a copy of "Death Traps" used at my bookstore, a mistake? probably. But surprisingly the book's analysis on the Sherman hasn't come up yet on this subreddit and I figured a deconstruction was in order. Oh boy though, the first chapter hasn't even come up yet and already the author comes of as a vainglorious and idiotic asshole who knows nothing (oh boy, so much ignorance) on how even his own fucking military works. The man spouts out nothing but self serving nonsense. But as I promised, here we go.

Forward:

Nothing here, just Stephen Ambrose talking about how much important shit Cooper saw and saying how important he was to the book "Citizen Soldiers", which even when I read it as a young teen seemed highly exaggerated in its accounts, it also stands as the first time I noticed the author was blatantly wrong in his identification of various photos.

Preface

"Although there have been a number of great books written on the American Army's Campaign in Western Europe during Wold War II, most military historians have failed completely to understand the enormous impact on American armored troops of having to fight superior German Tanks"

Pretty sure Zaloga covered this in detail, but by all means, feel free to use your fountain of biased secondhand experience to talk about the vehicle's combat performance

The M4 Sherman was decidedly inferior to the superior German tanks.

"inferior to the superior" truly this comes from the sharp mind of a military expert.

My function was to travel with the Combat Command during the day and assist in the coordinating the recovering evacuation and maintenance of damaged combat equipment. When the Combat Command stopped at night, it would prepare a 360. Why a 360? Because during the attack, a breakthrough would put them behind enemy lines with little to no infantry support.

Translation: "I know I never saw the combat that would've made my analysis of this vehicle personal and therefore important/relevant but I was super important and almost did, I was basically a complete badass, the Germans totally could've attacked me at any time, but didn't. They must've been either afraid or aware of the immense propaganda value of this shit sandwitch I like to call a "memoir".

The third Armored Division entered combat in Normandy with 232 M4 Sherman tanks. During the European Campaign, the Division had some 648 Sherman tanks destroyed in combat and we had another 700 knocked out, repaired and put back into operation. This was a loss rate of 580 percent.

Okay, so time to math this motherfucker, according to the Chieftan, .6 men were killed and .88 wounded every time a Sherman was destroyed, for Cooper's benefit (because he fucking needs it) let's assume the "knocked out" tanks are the same way.

That's 808 Killed and 1100 casualties out of 7090 total men in those tanks. (The official Wikipedia article lists 1800 killed and 6900 wounded in the division but that includes dismounts and armored Infantry which leads me to personally believe my math was actually high)

Once again the Chieftain has covered this better than I have, but the average casualty ratio of a US Infantry division was something like 175% or more (the 1st ID got above 200%), using only riflemen it's closer to 7-800% casualties. So yeah, totally the Sherman's fault here and not just the fact that war fucking sucked.

But he won't stop there, at least not until he gives himself a pat on the back!

"The only way for a unit to survive these staggering losses and extreme wear and tear was because of the superior maintenance and supply system."

"It was only through the superhuman effort of these maintenance people plus an extremely efficient ordnance supply system that enabled the division to survive under extremely adverse conditions

"Well done me! I could've solo'd the Germans myself if I really felt like it."

We not only did maintenance, repair, and replacement of the shot up tanks, but we actually became involved in the training of new tank crews.

"I was so knowledgeable on tanks I could use my secondhand knowledge of their operation and no tactical experience to tell the crews how to fight"

...it was necessary for the maintenance companies to operate in extremely far forward positions with the combat commands. These maintenence companies were responsible for their own security...

Each maintenance company had three 57mm antitank guns for its own protection.

Holy shit he doesn't get off from his fucking "I almost could've maybe have seen combat so many times that it basically means I killed all the Germans" tangent, the context reenforces a bit, but I really neither want to type up, nor force you to read all of the book, the story gets less 'throw out random accounts and stories' later in the book, but rest assured the self congrats never stops.

Introduction

Yes, a preface, forward and introduction

all personal memoirs of the war are written from the author's perspective. As my perspective was a relatively limited one, I feel this should be explained in the beginning.

./thread

For a brief moment Belton approaches something in the realm of humble, sadly this is not to last. Nor is his acknowledgement of having a limited field of view.

In preparing combat loss reports day after day, I became intimately familiar with the weaknesses and inadequacy of our main battle tank, the M4 sherman. I also learned about the weapons and tactics the Germans used to knock out our tanks.

"I seeing things get broken I learned things break" also, wow, good job implying you know how the Germans fight given, so far, I see no indicator that you even saw a German.

Oh and then he takes another opportunity to jerk off to his nearly badass career. When describing how reports were delivered.

The area between the combat command columns and the division trains was known as the "void" and travelling through the void was called "running the gauntlet". During the day, an armored division combat command would bypass many enemy units, Since the American infantry units following the combat command would sometimes not come forward for a day or more, there were probably no friendly units between the combat command and the division rear. It was logical to assume any units we met on the road at night would probably be German.

Amidst the sea of hypotheticals and probablys one has to wonder if there was a German within 20 miles of Cooper, my opinion stands to reason that given there is no chapter specifically about the german that almost could've killed him the answer is almost certainly no, but I'll revise this statement if said German ever shows up.

At the end of his introduction he almost once again provides a level of self awareness.

Conversations with other soldiers immediately after an operation, discounting the fact that most soldiers tend to exaggerate, provided a lot of interesting information.

But then completely misses it.

By combining information from many conversations with other soldiers who had diverse viewpoints with my own observations, I could obtain a fairly good picture of what was actually happening.

Shame on you Mr. Cooper, shame on you!

Acknowledgements

Did you think he was done? shame on you, this is Belton Cooper! he won't stop introducing himself until you have acknowledged how instrumental and badass he was. Though there's nothing really interesting in this section save for pointing out that he wasn't even willing to write this trash himself and made his poor secretary do it.

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Up next in this rollercoaster of a book! Chapter 1!