To avoid more comments along the lines of 'what happened in here?', here is an explanation as to why all comments have been deleted so far.
There are 12 comments (not counting replies to those comments) in this thread at the present moment. Three of those comments were about why all comments were deleted. Two answers were based on personal anecdotes. One was an unrelated follow-up question. Two answers were irrelevant to the actual question, one answer misinterpreted was OP said and the remaining two answers consisted of a sentence saying "No, it was not true" without providing further context and an answer based 'on a quick Google search' that 'revealed stories'.
None of these comments were up to the standards and rules that you can read here.
Short answer. No.
Long answer. No, although there is a grain of truth to the claim. First off, I haven't been able to find a reputable source for the Fury trailer's claim. I don't expect Hollywood to cite their sources, but the fact the claim isn't immediately verifiable is a strike against the Fury claim.
I'm generally skeptical when I hear "X's life expectancy was only X days" claims. The film Rules of Engagement made a similar (and completely fabricated) claim about "the life expectancy for a second lieutenant dropped into a hot LZ in Vietnam in 1968." People in combat zones don't walk around with calenders trying to figure out who's dying when.
With that said, I don't want to denigrate the sacrifice of US Army soldiers. Armored combat in WWII had its dangers and many, many tankers lost their lives. They were blown apart, burnt, dismembered, machine-gunned, and shot by snipers. Here's an excerpt that captures the brutality of armored war. Oda Miller was a tanker in 32nd ACR in the 3rd Armored Division.
"....all of a sudden we received a direct hit to the turret. The shell hit the cupola ring and a flash of fire hit my periscope. The shell blew the tank commander's hatch open, took part of his head off, and then proceeded to blow off the anti-aircraft gun and mount. Bill Hey was killed instantly and he fell down on my back, covering me with blood."
And we do know that the US Army did suffer substantial crew losses. Belton Cooper, a US Army tanker, recalled that the high number of tanker casualties forced the Army to hastily retrain infantry replacements as tankers [1] However, this claim is as much an indictment of US Army personnel practices and miscalculation as it is an indicator of tank crew losses. Although Cooper's claim is probably true, this practice of retraining appears to have been an emergency measure in his unit, rather than common army-wide practice.
As bad as things were, Fury's claims don't square with the evidence. Again, despite a determined search, I haven’t been able to find evidence that supports the Fury claim.
It's difficult to nail down exact casualty numbers for US Army crews, but I've been able to find a few resources. From these, we can draw some conclusions.
Firstly, Fury is making a rather broad generalization when it refers to “crewmen.” Different crewmen suffered markedly different risks. Mines accounted for about 8% of British tanker casualties. Because they were lower to the ground (and thus closer to the mine blast), bow gunners and drivers suffered more mine-related losses[2] [3]. There’s also several cases of the driver/co-driver being killed or injured by frontal hits that left the turret crew relatively unharmed. About 10 percent of tanker casualties came from tank commanders and drivers being wounded/killed while their heads were exposed. These crewman had to spot targets and navigate, which forced them to expose their heads outside the tank and made them vulnerable to machine gun and sniper fire.
Secondly, we can look at first-hand accounts of tank combat. Miller's memoirs, as well as the writings of other American and British armored veterans of the ETO don't square with the "only 6 weeks" claim. Virtually every account mentions people being killed and wounded, but not with anything approaching the frequency of the Fury claim.
In fact, there’s numerous cases of tank crews making it from Normandy to VE Day without taking any casualties. For example, LTCOL Creighton Abrams and his crew saw frequent combat and made it through the war without a scratch. [4]
When tanks were penetrated (British sources estimated only about 50-60% of German hits actually penetrated Allied tanks), accounts suggest that only 1-2 crewmen would be killed or injured. [5] Anti-tank rounds tended to punch small holes through armor. Unless the vehicle exploded, caught fire, or suffered major spalling, only the crewman/crewmen closest to their point of impact would be killed/injured by a penetrating hit. For example, in the famous Cologne tank duel, the driver and co-driver were both killed by a frontal hit, while the turret crew were all able to escape (one injured, two unharmed). [6]
Thirdly, we can look at crew casualty figures. Given that the British used large numbers of US tanks like the Sherman and the Stuart, their figures should be roughly similar to US Army loss rates. A British study from 1945 examining British tank losses in the ETO reported that 37% of tank casualties were killed and 63% were wounded.[7] In other words, death was not guaranteed for tankers. Even if a soldier’s tank was hit, they had better than even odds of getting out alive.
And, if things were as bad as the Fury claim suggests, overall casualty numbers would be a great deal higher. Let’s consider the US Army’s 3rd Armored Division. At any given point, the division’s two Armored Regiments had about 460 tanks and about 2300 tankers. The division saw combat from June 1944 to May 1945. In that time, it took a total of 2,214 killed in action, the vast majority of whom were infantrymen, not tankers (each armored division had an attached armored infantry regiment, in this case, 36th Armored Infantry Regiment). [9] [10] In order for the Fury claim to be true, there would need to have been many, many more dead tankers.
So, in light of all this, what should we make of the Fury claim? Data, anecdotal evidence, and other scholarship suggests that US Army tanker loss rates were high, but never as high as the Fury claim.
[1] Belton Cooper, Death Traps, (1998)
[2] M. S. Owen-Smith, “Armoured Fighting Vehicle Casualties,” (1977)
[3] Steven Zaloga, US Army Tank Crewman 1941-45: European Theater of Operations (ETO) 1944-45, (2004)
[4] Zaloga, Tank Crewman
[5] Owen-Smith
[6] http://www.anicursor.com/colpicwar2.html
[7] Owen-Smith
[8] http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/services/dropoff/schilling/mil_org/milorgan_99.html
[9] http://3ad.com/history/wwll/names.died.htm
[10] http://www.3ad.com/history/wwll/stats.data.2.htm#anchor547728
I've never heard about the life expectancy of 6 weeks (even with a short google search). However, Shermans were very outmatched by the German tanks on the field of battle.
Shermans had fairly thin armor (76mm at the thickest compared to a Tiger with 180mm at the thickest with most around 100mm). A round from a German Tiger or Panther would cut right through a Sherman with little problem and then explode inside killing everyone.
In addition to weak armor, the Sherman also had a relatively weak main gun (a 75mm --- German Tigers had an 88mm main gun). If a Sherman attempted to fire on the front or side of a German Tiger or Panther, the round would bounce off most of the time. The way that Shermans worked to knock out a Tiger was that a couple would act as "bait" to keep the Tiger occupied in the front, while another would flank and hit the Tiger in the rear engine compartment. ----- One of the first things the Israelis did when they got some Shermans after the war was to replace the main gun.
My father commanded a Sherman medium with 105 Howitzer through Germany during WWII. He was in an HQ group (I don't know the groupings of armored infantry) and only ever fired his 105 at the enemy once and that was across a lake. So I'm guessing the life expectancy depended a lot on where you fought and who you fought under.