M26 Pershing

The M26 also saw service in the Korean War. When the war began in June 1950, the four American infantry divisions on occupation duty in Japan had no medium tanks at all, having only one active tank company equipped with M24 Chaffee light tanks each. When these divisions were sent to Korea at the end of June 1950, they soon found that the 75mm gun on the M24 could not penetrate the armor of North Korean T-34 tanks, which had no difficulty penetrating the M24's thin armor. In a Tokyo ordnance depot, three M26 Pershing tanks were found in poor condition; they were hastily rebuilt, but they had no fanbelts for their engines, so a substitute was used. These three M26s were formed into a provisional tank platoon commanded by Lieutenant Samuel Fowler and sent to Korea in mid-July; used to defend the town of Chinju, the tanks soon overheated when the substitute fan belts stretched and the cooling fans stopped working, and the only three American medium tanks in Korea were lost.[6] More medium tanks began arriving in Korea at the end of July 1950. Although no armored divisions were sent because the initial response from battlefield commanders was "Korea isn't good tank country", six Army infantry divisions and one Marine division were deployed. Each Army infantry division should have had one divisional tank battalion of 69 tanks, and each Army infantry regiment should have had a company of 22 tanks;[7] the Marine division had a tank battalion of 70 gun tanks and nine combination flamethrower-howitzer tanks, and each Marine infantry regiment had an antitank platoon with five tanks each. While tables of organization and equipment mandated that all tank platoon vehicles should be M26 Pershings, with howitzer tanks in company headquarters and light tanks in reconnaissance units only, some units had a shortfall that had to be filled with other tanks. The 70th Tank Battalion at Fort Knox Kentucky had pulled World War II memorial M26s off of pedestals and reconditioned them for use, but had to fill out two companies with M4A3s; the 72nd Tank Battalion at Fort Lewis Washington and the 73rd Tank Battalion at Fort Benning Georgia were fully equipped with M26s; the 89th Medium Tank Battalion was constituted in Japan with three companies of reconditioned M4A3s and one of M26s from various bases in the Pacific; due to the shortage of M26s, most regimental tank companies had M4A3 Shermans instead. Two battalions detached from the 2nd Armored Division at Fort Hood Texas, the 6th Medium and 64th Heavy Tank Battalions, were fully equipped with M46 Patton tanks. The 1st Marine Division at Camp Pendleton California had all M4A3 howitzer tanks, which were replaced with M26s just days before boarding ships for Korea. A total of 309 M26 Pershings were rushed to Korea in 1950.[8] The Pershing and its derivative M46 Patton were credited with almost half of the North Korean T-34s destroyed by US tanks, M26s 32 percent and M46s ten percent.[9] The 76mm gun armed M4A3 Sherman, whose anti-tank performance was improved thanks to availability of the HVAP shells, was responsible for most of the remainder. Being underpowered and unreliable in the mountainous Korean terrain, all M26s were withdrawn from Korea during 1951, and replaced with M4A3 Shermans and M46 Pattons.[10] The M45 howitzer tank variant was only used by the assault gun platoon of the 6th Medium Tank Battalion, and these six vehicles were withdrawn by January 1951.

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