I have been reading a book by Belton Y. Cooper called “Death Traps -The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II”. In the book, he writes about a "Super Pershing M26A1E2 "tank ,which had extra armor added in Germany by the 3rd Armored Division, Company C. It had the 90mm T15E1 gun with a longer cartridge case, with which it fired a projectile that: penetrated through 4in of armor, a 5in final drive differental shaft, the fighting compartment, 4.5in crankshaft of the Maybach engine, 1in rear armor and was buried so deep in the ground they never found it. The tank it was fired against was a Jagdpanzer IV assult gun that had been knocked out.
Does anyone have or know where some photos of this beast might be found? It sounds like an interesting one of a kind build with scratch parts.
http://www.missionmodels.com/product.php?productid=16343&cat=0&page=1
http://www.3ad.com/history/news/super.pershing.1.htm
http://www.hsgalleries.com/gallery04/m26e3jw_1.htm
http://www.missing-lynx.com/gallery/usa/superpershing_szaloga.html
There are also a couple photos of these tanks in the Squadron M46 in Action book.
Mechtech: your best source of photos is the Hunnicutt book “Pershing” which shows several of the Super Pershing right after the end of hostilities. The photo in the Squadron Signal book is an interim configuration (according to Cooper) since the counterbalancing “batwing” armor had yet to been applied.
If you want to read about some of its actual combat, I recommend John Irwin’s “Another River, Another Town” He was the gunner for the Super Pershing for one of its crews. Among kills he accrued, he knocked out one Tiger II, one disabled Panther that was still operational and two “mediums” – probably Pz IVs.
I spend three years plus working on my model – and building up many many references about the actual tank. You can have a look here:
http://www.track-link.net/blogs/17
A resin conversion from Accurate Armour exists (altough if you follow my blog, you’ll see that tweaks are needed to really make it fully accurate).
By the way, its actual designation was T26E4 (which you’ll see is my FSM “handle”) – not M26A1E2. Feel free to contact me with any questions. roy.chow@aya.yale.edu
On the old TV series “Victory at Sea” they have some video of the Super Pershing making the shot that he talks about in the book. (Why it is in VoS I have no idea). I found the entire series at Wal-Mart the other day for under $6.00. It is some interesting viewing