Wonders may not EVER Cease!!

A diesel connected to a C3 in a truck?  Yeah, that doesn't sound too good.

We've had pretty good luck with Ford trucks, even better luck with Ford cars, with one exception.  I had an 86 T-Bird.  Loved that car.  Cheap, comfortable, reliable.  Couldn't kill it.  I sold it with over 200,000 on it because neither the AC or windows was working at the time.  Big mistake, as the replacement was a Monte Carlo POS edition that was nothing but trouble, should have fixed the Bird, I saw it on the road for most of the life I fought that damn Monte.   When I sold it, it still started with the flick of a wrist, used no oil, ran perfect.

Last 2 "farm trucks" have been GMC's.  They're OK.  I like the 2001 better than the 2009, we still have both.  The bumpers must've been made from GI beer cans, and not the modern aluminum ones.  They've rusted completely off, while a 92 Ford we still have is solid.  The tailgate cables have been replaced multiple times, some on recall, and I think they finally made 'em out of something that will last, because the last set have been on many years.  Whoever routed the brake lines should be fired for sure.  But they run good and are reliable enough.  A couple Taurus cars and a couple Sables were awesome.  

*edit* the T-Bird was not the "exception" I eluded to! haha

And very very safe.  My mom and niece were in one where they got hit very hard, Tboned hard right at the driver front tire/ driver door.  Hit so hard it buckled the opposite side of the car diagonally.  They both were fine.  Another one, a lady got offset -head on by the farm yard by a Suburban.  Her left arm was pretty mangled where the 'burb climbed the car, but she was good.  One helluva hit.

"The Ford GAA V8 was originally a V 12 developed from the Rolls Royce Merlin engine and Ford tried to sell it to the Navy but they didn't want it as they used Air Cooled Radials that were lighter."

This is not accurate, in that the GAA is not IN ANY WAY related in any design to the Rolls, other than it exists only because FORD originally intended an aluminium V12 to serve as an aircraft engine in similar context of the Merlin.  The GAA's donor V12 was an entirely Ford design, which was begotten in response to military demand for aircraft engines... Henry and Edsel's hopes were to manufacture it as a US replacement for Merlins and Allisons being installed in US aircraft, however, that niche was already well-filled.

Rolls-Royce's interest in licensing, was simply to get more Merlins into Britain so that their Hurricanes, Lancasters, Spitfires, and Mosquitos would have engines.  R-R's engine manufacturing was primarily done in Glasgow, Derby, and Manchester... and simply could NOT keep up with airframe demand.  Once DeHavilland Canada started building Mosquitos, and Victory Aircraft was manufacturing Lancasters in Toronto, the concept of having engines built in Detroit, and trucked over to Toronto, made a whole lot more sense than trying to ship engines from Glasgow to Toronto, or empty airframes to Britain.  Packard, however, was BUILDING 'American' Merlins... and like Henry, Packard had to basically REDESIGN the R-R engine, so that it could be effectively mass-produced under what R-R called "The American System"... using tolerances for quality control, and applying Quality Assurance to make certain they'd have a statisically proveable product.  (this is in contrast to the intricate hand-fitting 'craftwork' philosophy that was utilized 'over there').

Henry's bigger inclination with respect to aircraft engines, would be to attain an internal sourcing of power units for Willow Run...  rather than ship in radials manufactured by those who weren't in his food-chain.  Just so happened that the 'short' version (GAA) was accepted as a power unit option for the M4 chassis, which happened to also find a home in the M10A1 "Wolverine" tank destroyer.

The Continental R975-C1 was a Wright Cyclone radial, of aircraft lineage, and it WAS air-cooled, and like ANY engine, low cylinder pressures at idle prevent rings from seating, and with a few cylinders being inverted, they DO pass a bit more oil.  Hand-cranking before starting is SIMPLY to prevent forcing the engine over TDC with a cylinder being flooded with fuel or oil... and this is still a wise practice maintained as SOP in many circumstances today (the startup procedure on modern diesel-electric locomotives includes low-speed current-limited cranking with load sensing, just to detect a hydraulically-locked cylinder).  Later revisions of the R975 addressed many of these issues to excellent effect, as it was also utilized in the machine that replaced the often Ford built/GAA-powered M10 tank Destroyer-  the SIGNIFICANTLY FASTER Buick-built M18 Hellcat tank destroyer.

This is generally misleading.  Out of the 49,234 M4 Sherman Tanks built, FORD was responsible for only 1690.  Fisher Body (aka Fisher Tank Arsenal) built the other for a total of 6940 M4A3 Shermans,  making the M4A3 (GAA powered) effectively the LOWEST PRODUCTION QUANTITY of all M4 Shermans built.  42,294 came out with either the radial (in several flavors, gas and diesel) a twin diesel, or the 5-bank Chryser.  Hardly a case of 'saving the day'.

'Production of 3-4x times more tanks' can be much easier attributed to the fact that there were huge bomb craters in every major dam in the Ruhr valley, collapsed smokestacks in every KRUPP steel facility, an no electricity in Essen.  One can further attribute this to the fact that German tanks of the WW2 conflict were made in factories basically 'built-in-place' using the same hand-fitting concepts that Rolls-Royce used in building engines... not the 'interchangable tolerances/moving-assembly-line' manufacturing operations of the USA.  It's just an apples to bricks comparison.

My Grandfather's brother was a tanker, and was the first notified when Grandpa was shot in Bastogne... he drove something like seven Shermans... he was one of the ones lucky enough to survive more than one.  No, they weren't a magically superior machine- the gun was weak, the armor was not stopping many Wermacht guns, particularly an infantry Panzerfaust.  What the Sherman WAS... was manufacturable, agile, and light enough to transport TO the theatre, and pass over soft ground, light bridges.  It did NOT set any example of what we'd identify as a 'main battle tank', and it wasn't intended to be.  Now, when the Brits went Bosephus and crammed their 17-pounder into the M4's skull sideways, it became a serious armor-killer.  When GI's salvaged Rommel's shore defense caltrops and turned them into hedgerow spades (aka "the Devil's Cowcatchers"), they broke the stalemate of the Normandy Lowland's 'meat grinder'.  (If you've ever walked down those roads in person, and considered what an allied infantry man faced, you know exactly how important that feature really is).  The tankers stripped ANY loose metal they could (particularly old track segments) from ANY destroyed machines (even Panzers) and hung it like a big steel 'kilt' around the Sherman, for extra armor... and THAT worked pretty well too, and that's what begat the 'composite' and 'reactive armor' techniques we have today.

The M4 Sherman was significantly better than the M3 Grant/Lee more serviceable and more reliable than the Wermacht's machines, but mostly, it was significantly more economically viable, because the basic rule of ground combat is, and will always be, that "He who arrives at the battlefield the Earliest, with the Most, will prevail in battle" (Hannibal Barca proved that)...  but "He who can produce the most, for the longest time, will win the war" (Henry Kaiser proved that).  A critical part of the battlefield logistics, is that SOME ASPECT of your battlefield needs can be met using 'indigenous resources'... meaning, you can find and exploit resources IN the combat arena, rather than rely on resources coming in from your rear.  The M4's most impressive capacity, was to easily shed it's transmission and driveline from one end, power unit from the other, and be able to either accept others' components, or DONATE to others, to turn a viable combat unit back into action. 

The German tanks were basically all hand-built- no two were identical, and they were basically all welded shut... so when one lost a transmission (and they were heavy, so they did), they were dead-in-the-water... a 'monument'.  They were built under a totally different philosophy, and most of the numerical significance were built PRIOR to the timeframe we (cooperatively) leveled the Ruhr valley.  But Hitler gets a lot of credit for the failure of Wermacht production... had there been someone more able (and less drug-induced) at the controls, they would have significantly more scientists and engineers in the factories, than in gas chambers...  They would have had interchangability and rapid service in mind, design for faster production, and they would have been capable of putting the Czech production at Skoda to use, rather than reduce it to human rubble.  He was just plain dumb, and we should all be thankful for that.

Blowing bridges is a basic defensive tactic... it is the denial of access by advancing troops... it, and other similar operations date back a thousand years (that's where we get the term 'burning bridges', as explosives weren't quite up-to-task in the Byzantine era).

During the allied advance east, every river (being a natural obstacle) offered opportunity to be a 'fall back' position for a counterattack, with the only detailed difference being that WW2's mechcanized character made ANY bridge crossing by tanks already somewhat of a challenge-  many of the bridges they'd included as examples, were centuries old, built of stone, and not concieved of 60+ ton loads.  [Frankly, I get the willies every time I walk or ride a bicycle across some of those...]

But you're spot-on about bridges.  A Sherman, and most every other allied machine during the early period after D-day, was basically less than 65,000lbs.  Any German tanks it came up against at that point, were either lighter in weight, lightly armored, and lightly gunned (and there were many) than the later 'heavy cats'.  From what I see, the primary advantage of the German tanks which allied M4's faced, was mostly due to substantially superior ballistics of the guns they mounted, and the fact that they used these guns, as well as towed antitank or multi-use (like the 8.8cm) being properly placed for complex ambush... aka 'kill boxes'.  The lesson here, is that only thing that beats having a properly prepared battlefield, is to keep the battlefield moving such that it cannot be 'set up'.  Kesselring set that example with his strategy in Italy, and Patton demonstrated how aggressive motion and erratic actions dissolved battlefield planning by virtue of havoc and confusion...   he was absolutely right about "$#it through a goose"...

re. shooting Shermans, A disabled tank that's been shut down and abandoned could be recovered, repaired and returned to action...

but if just ONE guy stays behind... a disabled tank is still dangerous, like a 'wounded, cornered animal'... and an M4 Sherman had an electric-over-hydraulic (rather than engine PTO-drive, or manually-cranked) turret slew and elevation will still operate even if the engine, transmission, tracks, bogies, etc, are all messed up.

One guy can stay behind, hiding in the dirt under the escape hatch, invisible to infantry... and waiting for the right moment.  With one AP round left in the chamber, and having already measured the distance and elevation, formulated the firing solution, but leaving the gun in a depressed and slewed condition, that one guy can quietly climb up, watch that spot through a periscope (that's been 'doctored' to look wrecked), and when a target stops on the proper spot, he runs the slew and elevation to the precalculated point, squeezes the trigger, and drops down under the belly, and crawls towards safety out-of-view.  It is essentially a very effective trap.

The antithesis to this 'trap', is for a German soldier (usually an elite SS) to put on a tattered infantry uniform, and lay down on or alongside the road with a couple of dead bodies, atop a Panzerfaust... and when an allied tank approached, sit up, shoulder-up, and knock out the tank with ease... and this is why the bow-gunner of a tank will constantly be aiming, and shooting at dead bodies along the path of travel.

It's like a game of chess... pawns, knights, rooks, and bishops work best, when worked together.

Then there's the M18 Hellcat TD... basically, tank-killing gun on a high-speed Christie suspension, powered by the same radial.  No significant armor, but that's why it'd go 55mph...