The M-4 Sherman was the workhorse medium tank of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps during World War II. It fought in every theater of operation—North Africa, the Pacific and Europe.

The Sherman was renown for its mechanical reliability, owing to its standardized parts and quality construction on the assembly line. It was roomy, easily repaired, easy to drive. It should have been the ideal tank.

But the Sherman was also a death trap.

Most tanks at the time ran on diesel, a safer and less flammable fuel than gasoline. The Sherman’s powerplant was a 400-horsepower gas engine that, combined with the ammo on board, could transform the tank into a Hellish inferno after taking a hit.

All it took was a German adversary like the awe-inspiring Tiger tank with its 88-millimeter gun. One round could punch through the Sherman’s comparatively thin armor. If they were lucky, the tank’s five crew might have seconds to escape before they burned alive.

Hence, the Sherman’s grim nickname—Ronson, like the cigarette lighter, because “it lights up the first time, every time.”

In the new film Fury, a single Tiger tank devastates a platoon of Shermans advancing across Germany. Gus Stavros, a World War II veteran who witnessed actual combat between a Sherman and a Tiger outside of the town of Nennig, Germany, said the reality of pitched battle between the two tanks was just as horrifying.

“If you’ve seen movies where the people come out of the tank all aflame—I saw that,” Stavros said during a video interview for a combat oral history sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“The German tank had an 88-[millimeter gun] and it just blew the General Sherman tank to pieces until there was nothing left but smoke and fire.”

The loss of both men and machines is hard to grasp. Simply put, in the heat of battle it was as dangerous inside of a Sherman tank as it was outside of one.

“The 3rd Armored Division entered combat in Normandy with 232 M-4 Sherman tanks,” writes Belton Cooper, author of the appropriately named Death Traps, a study of U.S. armored divisions and their battles in Europe during World War II.

“During the European Campaign, the Division had some 648 Sherman tanks completely destroyed in combat and had another 700 knocked out, repaired and put back into operation. This was a loss rate of 580 percent.”