British Tank Development.

And again, who in Britain in the pre-war period was arguing for 30 to 45 ton tanks with 80mm thick armour, armed with 75mm dual purpose guns, and with 600 hp engines, preferably diesel?

Nobody. The idea that the British were capable of imagining the ideal tank engine in 1936 is as unlikely as their ability to imagine the ideal tank.

 

I saw this today in Richard Overy's rather peculiar book "The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization, 1919-1939" and wondered if anyone had seen the full memorandum:

"In a memorandum sent to Baldwin by Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary, in June 1936 Colonel Henry Pownall, who worked with Hankey in the secretariat of the Committee of Imperial Defence observed that Britain had ‘everything in the world to lose’ from a second conflict and for emphasis added, ‘WE SIMPLY CANNOT AFFORD TO LOSE A MAJOR WAR.’"

He references: University Library, Cambridge, Baldwin papers, D.1, Maurice Hankey to Stanley Baldwin, 16 June 1936, encl., Col. H. Pownall, ‘The Role of the Army in a Major Continental War’, p.9.

Overy covers a vast range of subjects: economics, eugenics, psychology, politics, pacifism, etc, but doesn't reflect at all on the internal military debate or on the challenge between defending a world-wide empire and creating an army for a continental commitment.

Regards

Tom

 

I feel like maybe I should cry "uncle" here as I am only a layman but -

I believe the A9 and A10 had an engine only giving 150 hp. Regardless of its build quality, durability, or reliability, it wasn't powerful enough.

 

I think if the British were to preserve their empire for as long as possible, then they could not afford to fight another major war, let alone lose it.

I think militarily they were in quite a bind, and the fumbling approach to tank development reflected this. I'm far from convinced that they could have done much better than they did, which was meh OK, rather than badly. The far bigger problem was their conception of how to use the tanks.

 

I think this was recognised at the time though, as these were stop-gap models built in the low hundreds.

 

I think there is generally a tendency to look at what turned out to be the ideal tanks of WW2, such as the Sherman and T-34, and asking why the British before the war did not foresee similar designs. But I just don't think the Britsih foresaw a major land war with the degree of clarity that the Russians did. As I said before, what is interesting in British pre-war thinking about tanks is what is NOT there

 

Hm, I think I have put the cart before the horse, in actual fact. Harris says that when Sir Hugh Elles became Master General of Ordnance in the 1934, the General Staff had already issued a specification for an infantry tank. At that time they weren't looking at the A9, because it didn't exist yet. Apologies.

 

True, I suppose. If the designers had gone to industry and gotten the 300 hp Liberty instead of the 150 hp AEC engine they got, they would have realized they could deliver both (at least) a 30mm armour basis and a good turn of speed.

I have said this before but I was pretty impressed by Nicholas Moran's evaluation of the turret of the A10 - it was quite "fightable" to use the British term of the time.

 

That's my point. The German engines were rubbish. The US had reliable engines but they were excessively thirsty (insert clever line about 'amateurs/tactics professionals/logistics here). No idea about the French. Heard good things about the T34 engine, but again, not sure how correct this is.

So it's not clear to me that there was a better British engine to be had for 'more money'.

All the best

Andreas

 

"Better engines" is just part of the general BS narrative that pretends that the Germans had much better tanks, rather than having marginally better ones (maybe). The really critical factors were that the British had much worse armoured commanders, and an incomparably worse appreciation of combined arms.

 

One interesting aspect of the desert war is that although the British liked to insist that the Panzer III was a much better tank than its British equivalents, they weren't particularly keen to employ their captured Panzer III's in operations. The only use I know that they were put to was training the Poles. Of course, a Panzer III was no more likely to frontally knock out another Panzer III than any 2 pounder armed tank, and was as likely to conk out as a Crusader, so in practice they probably realised that the benefit was marginal. This is a case of actual behaviour not reflecting rhetoric.

On the other hand, the Germans were perfectly happy to re-use Valentines, Matildas and Crusaders in order to make up their numbers.

 

I think the Germans had a history of just grabbing stuff and re-utilising it that at that scale simply didn't exist in the British army. It's not a reflection on the utility of the vehicles per se.

All the best

Andreas

 

100% correct and even if i) the A16 had materialised and ii) been a useful piece of kit in reality as well as on the drawing board, that element would still not have changed one bit. The only difference would have been that each tank the British lost would have been more expensive, better armed and armoured.

All the best

Andreas

 

I may be misremembering things but if I recall the Russians didn't actively develop the T-34, it wasn't the tank they wanted. The designer had been commissioned to work on a BT series life extension program and of his own accord designed the T-34. I guess you can argue that the Russians had the foresight to take the offered design but if it had not been for the initiative of its creator the Russians would not have thought to even request such a vehicle prior to the war starting.

 

Well, if even the Russians were dependent on a single person being at the right place at the right time, it underlines how difficult it was to anticipate the ideal tank before the war began.

 

The design history appears quite well described here.

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edit...=1&dq=t-34+design+history&printsec=frontcover

Not really noting anything about free-lancing designers there. Regardless, the fact that the requirements for more advanced tanks started coming by 1937/38 based on experience in Spain seems to me to confirm that Don Juan's contention, namely that the Soviets conceptualised a very different war, is completely correct.

All the best

Andreas

 

Well, while you're there, he's also written similar titles on the Covenanter (which is excellent!), the A30 Challenger (which is fascinating) and the A34 Comet. Each of them a real window into the "thinking" behind British Army tank design and acquisition processes in 1937-1944.

 

If you cannot imagine the right way of fighting the tank, how can you imagine the right tank?

That's me being deep today.

All the best

Andreas

 

I do have a theory, but I've not had the chance to test it with documentation.

I'd advance the idea the main problem wasn't so much the tanks, or even the armoured commanders, but the Treasury. The BEF deployed without the 1st Armoured. I suspect that was kept back due to the cost of deploying a formation like that overseas. It was only deployed at about the same time as the German invasion, so had to make a road march to the front from the channel ports. That was never going to end well.
Equally, that means the British weren't doing combined arms. It was a lorried infantry army. I do wonder how the battle would have gone if the 1st Armoured had been deployed in 1939 with the rest of the BEF. Then they would have been in position on the flank of the German attack, fighting over terrain they knew with a well rested and repaired tanks and a decent logistics set up. Which is an opposite to the actual situation.

Of course it's only one division, where the French were meant to be supplying the lions share of the tanks, but even a small unit, if well handled, can alter the course of a war.

 

Careful: fully mechanised didn't mean lorries for all. Aside from the Motor Divisions, troop carrying vehicles were not organic to divisions, but lent to them by higher formations for specific moves.

Secondly, saying their position was on the flank of the panzers' penetration is a bit hindsighty. I don't think anyone was planning to let them put their head in a noose. Was 1 Armd Div not deployed with the BEF proper because there was no defensive role/doctrine for it to fulfil?