Of the scores of old and new battle tanks on open-air display at the Israeli Armored Corps museum at Latrun, west of Jerusalem, only the M-4 Sherman gets a tall pedestal and flood-lamps to spotlight it by night.
The modified M-4 was Israel’s mainstay in the wars of 1948 and 1956 and was still in use in the wars of 1967 and 1973. So it gets official reverence, anyhow, even if some of its crews probably hated it as much or more than some American veterans of World War II who considered it outclassed by German armor.
But the tank that once graced the lawns of most National Guard armories across the U.S. (now replaced, for the most part, by M-48 Pattons) still has its defenders. Some of them recently unloaded on Death Traps, a new World War II memoir about the problems of maintaining the under-armored and under-gunned beasts. They were, of course, appropriately named for an American Civil War general who was also quite controversial.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
