British Tank Development.

Discussion in 'Weapons, Technology & Equipment' started by von Poop, Feb 21, 2022.

  1. Chris C

    Chris C Canadian

    TTH and Andreas like this.
  2. Ewen Scott

    Ewen Scott Well-Known Member

    From my research, when looking at US production numbers v tanks in the field there is a time lag of about 5 months from factory door to front line.

    So in 1941 M3 Grant production started in Aug 1941 in 2 factories with just 10 vehicles. A third factory joined in Oct and monthly production figures rose as time went on. In Dec about 160 were produced. So Dec production couldn't be expected to arrive on the front line until around May 1942.

    In total 309 Grants were produced in 1941 of which 306 were shipped to the Middle East and 3 to Britain. The first units to receive them were 3 RTR & 5 RTR at the end of Jan 1942. It is that 5 month thing again!

    Plenty of information on the Grants over in the Sherman Minutia site.
    British M3, M3A2, M3A3 and M3A5 Grants

    Don't know how the M3 Stuart / Honey deliveries would stack up over that period.
     
  3. Andreas

    Andreas Working on two books

    I think that's conservative. They started getting Grants in numbers in the Middle East by February 1942, which would indicate a much shorter lag once you take transport times into account?

    By the end of 1941 they had 12, by 7 February 66 Grants. On 21 February ME reported 131 Grants in hand and 43 to arrive by 28 Feb. The first Grant got to the ME in November 1941.

    http://rommelsriposte.com/2014/02/2...eliveries-to-egypt-july-1941-to-january-1942/

    All the best

    Andreas
     
  4. idler

    idler GeneralList

    I'm happy to accept the evidence that 7 Armd Bde was intended for Malaya, but most of the rest is pre-war thinking that went out the window when we had more than enough to be going on with in the western hemisphere.
     
    Andreas likes this.
  5. idler

    idler GeneralList

    On the basis that the starting point is to RTFM, is there anything beyond the MTP 41s of 1940 and 1943, and perhaps the Field Service Regs, that's worth looking at?
     
    Andreas likes this.
  6. Don Juan

    Don Juan Well-Known Member

    Not sure about the Armoured Divisions, but there's a few for the Army Tank Brigades that are worth a snifter, i.e. MTP 8 (WO 231/137) and MTP 22 (WO 231/159 and WO 231/160).

    Edit: there's also ATI No.3 Handling of an Armoured Division (WO 231/283)

    MarkN, late of this parish, went through the MTP's and rated them as pretty good, but concluded that in the desert at least the armoured formations simply ignored them and did their own thing.
     
    Last edited: Jul 29, 2022
    Andreas and L. Allen like this.
  7. Andreas

    Andreas Working on two books

    There are ME-specific training documents that might help, as they address specific doctrinal and unit handling issues. They started to be issued in November 1941.

    All the best

    Andreas
     
  8. idler

    idler GeneralList

    The ME ones aren't an area I've looked at. You'd like think they'd have been rolled-up into MTP 41/1 1943 but that appears to be a bit of a throwback - 'fluid battle' even gets its own paragraph.

    I need to do a proper comparison of the 1943 and 1940 editions. At a superficial level, the latter strikes me as the better of the two. I can't help the feeling that it was written by the Army for the RAC to ignore.

    The 'tank' side is addressed by this one:

    Tank-Infantry Co-operation in the British Army, 1935-1949
     
    Chris C and JeremyC like this.
  9. JohnB

    JohnB Junior Member

    I think only the British armies in Europe were rich enough in tanks to afford to support infantry on a one squadron to one battalion basis. I believe the Australian forces in the SWPA managed more on a troop to a battalion level. Funnily enough when they did a comparison between the Grant/Lee, the Sherman and the Matilda for jungle fighting in 1945, the Australians preferred the Matilda!
    You're right that Percival intended to split his tank battalions, had he received any, between the forces in the north and south of Malaya.
     
    TTH likes this.
  10. Andreas

    Andreas Working on two books

    Look, if you're an RAC officer in Bovington 1940 and you've got a choice between reading an MTP or the latest issue of 'Hare and Hound', together with the newsletter of the Avonvale Hunt, it's not hard to know where to allocate your time, is it?

    All the best

    Andreas
     
    davidbfpo and JeremyC like this.
  11. JohnB

    JohnB Junior Member

    Other quoted figures for British tanks shipped to the Soviet Union in 1941 are 446 (along with 676 aircraft) probably the discrepancy being the number that left the UK compared to those that arrived in the Soviet Union.

    I think there should be as much scrutiny on how London moved its chess pieces around the world as there is on poor RAC Brigadiers in the desert, though perhaps not on this thread. :)
     
    Chris C likes this.
  12. Don Juan

    Don Juan Well-Known Member

    Home Forces started practicing tank-infantry co-operation in the summer of 1942, to the great surprise of the armoured regiments, who responded as though they had been asked to wear deely-boppers.
     
    TTH and Chris C like this.
  13. Tom OBrien

    Tom OBrien Senior Member

    Thought this snippet might help the discussion or inflame it: :D

    (a) During the afternoon of June 15th the 31 Fd Regt were in support of 4 Armd Bde during their attack on CAPUZZO.

    (b) Both Bty Comds went forward as F.O.Os. in I Tanks and gave valuable close support when the tanks were held up.

    Regars

    Tom
     
  14. JeremyC

    JeremyC Well-Known Member

    Are we talking about RTC/RTR units here - or the yeomanry? :D
     
    Andreas likes this.
  15. JeremyC

    JeremyC Well-Known Member

    Dammit - that's my book-buying budget for the month blown - again . . . ;)
     
    Chris C and Andreas like this.
  16. Don Juan

    Don Juan Well-Known Member

    My own research tends to suggest that the critical factor for success in WW2 was the degree to which tanks were combined with the other arms, especially the artillery and infantry. The winning side was invariably the side in which the various arms were most tightly integrated, and this pertained even if the side that had combined arms more effectively had obviously technically inferior tanks.

    It's a bit strange for an avid tank researcher like myself to conclude that my own subject matter is a load of old cobblers, but really it is. There was nothing special about the various models of tanks in terms of influencing the outcomes of battles, and the whole narrative around certain tank types (Shermans! Tigers!) being "decisive weapons" is a load of old nonsense. If there had been a lot more of the above example in the British Army during the early war period it would have proven much more efficacious in real terms than, for example, the earlier fitting of 6 pounder guns.
     
    L. Allen, JeremyC, Andreas and 7 others like this.
  17. Juha

    Juha Junior Member

    For decades I have said that equipped with PZ IIs, Pz 38(t)s, Pz IIIs and Pz IVs the Wehrmacht got to Warsaw, Paris, the gates of Moscow and Stalingrad, while with Panthers and Tigers it ended up in Berlin. The quality of the individual weapon systems is of course important and technically interesting, but you shouldn't focus too much on it. War is also a team activity and good cooperation between different arms is crucial.
     
    L. Allen, JeremyC, TTH and 4 others like this.
  18. idler

    idler GeneralList

    Are you implying that the Meccano Magazine-reading Tankies performed drastically better than cavalry in the armoured role? For the avoidance of doubt, I was thinking in terms of the RTC leadership of the RAC rather than its subalterns - the blunt end, not the sharp end.

    I'm still not convinced that the cavalry aren't a just convenient scapegoat for the RAC's tactical failings, like they were for their pre-war developmental ones.
     
    Last edited: Jul 31, 2022
    Andreas likes this.
  19. TTH

    TTH Senior Member

    I have been reading Michael Carver's book Tobruk from the old Pan British Battle series. It is less about Tobruk and much more about Crusader and Gazala. Coming from an intelligent RAC officer who was on the spot, Carver's analysis is very useful. He acknowledges that the I tanks were too slow, the Stuart too lacking in range, and the Crusader less reliable than it should have been. The best British tank available at Gazala was actually American, the Grant, which Carver says was equal to the best the Germans had at that time. Still, Carver does not blame British armored failure on the technical qualities of the tanks. He calls that view "a dangerous oversimplification" and also says that "in quality the two sides were evenly matched" because all the British tanks had virtues as well as vices (speed and manuever in the Crusader and the Stuart, armor in the Matilda, reliability in the Valentine, gunpower in the Grant). Given proper handling these tanks could and should have matched the German tanks. But as Carver says, "the true enemy of the British tank was the German anti-tank gun." Carver goes on to cite three artillery failures: the failure to handle anti-tank guns in the same aggressive tactical manner as the enemy, the scattering of the 25-pounders to fulfill the anti-tank role, and the failure to give 8th Army adequate medium guns and central artillery command to suppress enemy field and AT guns. He also criticizes the tendency towards dispersion and the consequent failure to concentrate force at the decisive point. Carver is reluctant to name names or criticize the Old Desert Hands (of whom he was one), but the dispersion habit began early and was not corrected. The danger of Axis air attack was commonly given as the reason for dispersion, but Carver does not accept that excuse. He also points to the inadequate communications setup, which meant that commanders wasted too much time tootling back and forth to meet personally while events made the decisions they finally reached obsolete. (Carver does not say so, but a common doctrine and a greater spirit of initiative might have helped compensate for the communications problem. Too many units simply sat and waited for orders while their neighbors were being destroyed.) The constant flux of new units, many of them from outside the UK, made for inadequate cohesion and for many misunderstandings. Carver also implies (he can't be too direct about his old RAC mates) that after heavy losses in Crusader many of the experienced armored units had grown overcautious. In general, Carver blames Gazala on "inherent deficiencies in organization, training and command." and he rates the Germans as definitely superior in all those categories and in their integration of all arms. One of the main roots of 8th Army's troubles was "the parochialism of the peacetime British Army between the wars in which cavalry, tanks, infantry, gunners, engineers and others saw little of each other." Since the different arms seldom trained together each developed its own ideas and practices in isolation, and even the battle experience of the early war years "tended to confirm existing prejudices." (I suspect this last phrase was another covert criticism of the RAC in particular.)
     
    L. Allen, JeremyC, JohnB and 7 others like this.
  20. Andreas

    Andreas Working on two books

    Not at all, it was more of a general comment. Although Lt. Col Yeo, the CO of 44 RTR would probably not have received the description 'rather pedestrian', had he been a cavalry man.

    Setting the Record Straight – The First Night Attack By Tanks

    All the best

    Andreas
     

Share This Page