Weapons that Changed the World

     Weapons are made in many shapes and sizes. In World War 2 the age of wooden ships and cannons firing iron balls changed. There was a birth of many new weapons:
-The tank
-The airplane
(There are more but I'll only talk to you about these for now)
     In this time I would like to show you how these weapons changed the war and the world.

                                               

     The tank above is called the M4 Sherman. This tank was our tank and is numbered with the top 10 tanks of WW2. This tank is a good  tank but it has some things that were critical during the war and were not good. The first thing was: It started on fire easily. When you are riding out to battle in this 67,000 LB. weapon you wanted it to be very reliable . When you have shells flying right at you, you wouldn't want your tank starting on fire when a shell hits your magazine. Most tanks would explode if a shell hit their magazine but they also had thick armor to shield it from the explosion, which brings me to my second point: the Sherman didn't have thick armor. When you are riding out to battle you don't want your armor to get pierced from strafing aircraft. The thing this tank did have was good fire power. If I had a choice, I would not ride in a Sherman. My choice would be the T-34 which I'll talk about next.   

The T-34 is wonderful tank because it didn't have anything the Sherman had except the exceptional gun power. It had slanted sides so that on-coming shells would bounce off. It had thick armor but not the so thick that it would slow it down this tank had a speed of 31 MPH yet it was the equal of the German Tiger 1, one of the best tanks of the war.  

     This big tank was a monster and struck fear in everyone besides for the T-34. This had 6- inch armor in the front and half that much in the back. It had amazing gun power and also the slanted sides. Some Sherman commanders refused to fight this tank because it was like committing suicide. One tactic they had was to sneak to the back of the tank and shoot there, where the armor is thinner, but sometime that didn't even work.

They made many different tanks for different purposes. Some were used as mine diggers,others were used for: flamethrowers, basic cannons, ramp carriers and some just carried machine guns. Now days, we have one tank for many different purpose. You can see how today's tanks are different even in the feats they can do. 

     Planes played a bigger part in the war then tanks. They were used to almost level Germany and Italy. Airplanes like these two (above) were used to strafe Germany and Italy with tons of bombs.The B-17 (plane on the left) was Britain's plane. It was very effective plane but could only drop 17,000-20,000 LB. of bombs to the B-24 Liberator's 20,000-25,000 LB. of bombs. The problem with the Liberator is that it crashed very easily. I personally would like to fly in the B-17.

   So you see the difference from a WW1 plane (down below) to the well armored WW2 plane but still they had their problems and weren't that reliable.