British T34/75 - North Africa

[NARSES2]

Learnt something new today    I think Jakko's basically correct re Cruiser and Infantry tanks I've just never thought of Soviet and German designs in those terms. I think it's probably got something to do with way that British publications of the 60's/70's in particular (when I would have been reading books on armour) were derogatory about British WWII armour and played up everybody else's.  A peculiar British trait. 

[Old Wombat]

Learnt something new today    I think Jakko's basically correct re Cruiser and Infantry tanks I've just never thought of Soviet and German designs in those terms. I think it's probably got something to do with way that British publications of the 60's/70's in particular (when I would have been reading books on armour) were derogatory about British WWII armour and played up everybody else's.  A peculiar British trait. 

He is, it's just that the British actually spelled it out clearly, while others were more circumspect about it.

The British didn't have the luxury of having the time to re-tool for the 6pdr after the extreme losses of equipment at Dunkirk (Dunkerque) in the race to re-arm before the German invasion of Britain - Yes, they saved most of the troops of the BEF but left almost all of their equipment behind. That wasn't the only issue they had, either, they continued building rivetted tanks because they didn't have the time to stop producing rivetted tanks long enough to re-jig for building welded tanks (a technology they had but couldn't use because of the imperative to build with what they had). Jakko's example of the Centurion stands its ground here, too, showing what the British were capable of when they had the time to step back, analyse, re-tool, re-jig & do it right.

He's also right about the 2pdr still being effective through to early 1942. just look at the success of the Matilda II in the Western Desert against everything the Germans & Italians threw at them. It was only in the attack, when they were faced with 88s used in the anti-tank role, that the Matildas failed & the loss of too many of them allowed the DAK to punch through the British defences.

Similarly, much of the criticism of the Tiger tank comes from its mis-use trying to plug holes & stop breakthroughs piecemeal, rather than doing their actual role of breaking through en masse, with Panthers (& upgraded Pz.Kpfw. IVs) exploiting the breakthrough, while the Tigers went back for maintenance & overhauls before the next breakthrough assault.

[zenrat]

This is like being at school...


...only interesting.

I still won't remember any of it though.

 

[Steel Penguin]

 
yup  nice to have suspicions confirmed

Ty Jakko

[Jakko]

One thing I forgot to mention is that the ones hanging onto a gun too long were the Americans: their medium-velocity 75 mm was no longer competitive in 1944, but important parts of the US Army refused to see this until tankers in France started complaining. Steve Zaloga's book Armored Thunderbolt is a really good explanation of the hows and whys of this, the different combat lessons learned by the British and Soviets on one side and the Americans on the other, and the way it all played out in the end.

[Weaver]

All good stuff. A few random points:

1. The British also had a particularly disfunctional process for getting front-line feedback to tank designers' desks. It tended to get lost in the staff system somewhere and/or get filtered out in the requirement-defining process that was dominated by desk-bound officer in the UK, not actual tank-unit officers in the field.

2. The Britisah railway loading gauge was also a problem. It was narrower than several other countries' (penalty of being first...) and that restricted the size of tanks that could be shipped on British railways without some serious dismantling. This particularly affected turret-ring diameter, which in turn affects gun power because it sets the limit on how much recoil travel the gun can have, and thus how much force has to be absorbed by the hull.

3. There's a difference between Infantry Tanks, as conceived pre-war, and Breakthrough or Heavy Tanks. The original Infantry Tank concept was essentially a 'mobile pill-box' that helped the infantry make a breakthrough by advancing with them at walking pace and providing machine-gun and low-velocity HE fire. Later a requirement to protect them from tank counter-attack by means of an armour-piercing gun was added. Destroying strongpoints (including dug-in tanks) would be done by direct or indirect-fire artillery. The infantry Tank would need to be numerous, and therefore had to be relatively small and slow to save on money and manpower.

The key difference with the later Breakthrough Tank concept was that it incorporated that direct-fire artillery into the tank itself, having a MUCH bigger 'anti-everything' gun which also, by default, could do the anti-tank role as well. This meant that the breakthrough tank would be big, expensive, and relatively scarce, so it needed heavy armour to protect the valuable asset as much as possible.

4. The principal difficulty with the 2-pounder (40mm) and the 6-pounder (57mm) was that they had HE rounds that were either judged too small for infantry support fire and/or were simply not available. The move to 75mm+ medium-high velocity guns was as much about getting bigger HE rounds into every tank as it was about penetrating more armour. The anti-armour performance of the 6-pounder was actually equal or better to that of many 75mm guns. The eventual move to 'Universal Tanks' or MBTs was basically prompted by the experience that the concept of having specialized anti-tank tanks in just the right place to fight tanks, while having specialized infantry support tanks in just the right place to support infantry, at the right time, in the right numbers, was unrealistic in the real world. "No plan survives contact with the enemy", as the saying goes, and real tanks repeatedly found themselves called on to support infantry they just happened to be near or fight tanks that just happened to counter-attack near them, with whatever they had at hand and in the moment.

[Jakko]

1. The British also had a particularly disfunctional process for getting front-line feedback to tank designers' desks. It tended to get lost in the staff system somewhere and/or get filtered out in the requirement-defining process that was dominated by desk-bound officer in the UK, not actual tank-unit officers in the field.

Which is a little similar to the problem the Americans faced in getting better tanks in the field in 1944, though theirs was compounded by the tank designers on the one hand seeing there was a need but the bureaucracy denying it, and on the other, the tank designers getting lost in their own good-looking ideas at times.

2. The Britisah railway loading gauge was also a problem. It was narrower than several other countries' (penalty of being first...)

There's a Dutch expression for this: remmende voorsprong, "retarding head start". That is to say, if you're first to do something, you will likely end up stuck with the first version forever while others who come in only later will have improved versions. This was formulated by someone who found that the UK still had gas streetlights when the rest of the developed world was already using electric lights, and realised this was because the UK had invested so much in gas infrastructure that ripping it all up for electric lights wasn't desirable, while much of the rest of the world largely skipped gas streetlights and went straight to electric once that worked well enough.

3. There's a difference between Infantry Tanks, as conceived pre-war, and Breakthrough or Heavy Tanks. The original Infantry Tank concept was essentially a 'mobile pill-box' that helped the infantry make a breakthrough by advancing with them at walking pace and providing machine-gun and low-velocity HE fire.

True, and this is why the Pz.Kpfw. IV had a short, 75 mm gun: for good HE fire in support of the infantry. IMHO, the breakthrough tank is an outgrowth/refinement of this concept.

real tanks repeatedly found themselves called on to support infantry they just happened to be near or fight tanks that just happened to counter-attack near them, with whatever they had at hand and in the moment.

As the Americans found out even more with their flawed tank destroyer concept.

[PR19_Kit]

Of course hindsight is the world's ONLY exact science.................. 

[Old Wombat]

Of course hindsight is the world's ONLY exact science.................. 

Sometimes ... Maybe.

[Jakko]

Of course hindsight is the world's ONLY exact science.................. 

If only the people practicing it could agree on the conclusions to be drawn

[andrewj]

Whilst everyone is busy disparaging the British tank designs , as a flip side of this thread , the Russians actually liked the Valentine tanks supplied under lend-lease , in fact they were the only western tank that they asked for more of.

Andrew

[Rheged]

I understand that the Soviet army liked the Valentine because it was small, well armoured and reliable (even in very low temperatures)and the 6 pdr  was reckoned to be a decent A/Tk  gun. USSR received over 3,000 of them.

[Rick Lowe]

The Churchill was only just narrow enough to be shipped by rail - though they had to remove the side mounted air cleaners first...

The Russians liked it too, for the armour... not so much the main guns...