British Tank Development.

Not that I'm committing myself to reading it, but it will be interesting to see if he toes or transgresses the party line - I believe he's ex-RTks...

 

Just finished it. Rather good. More about the production problems rather than design ones.

Stop prevaricating Adam!

 

The publisher's blurb certainly doesn't encourage me to believe that it is going to waver from the party line.

 

Can a former member of the Royal Armoured Corps recognise that the primary cause of the failures experienced by the Royal Armoured Corps.was in fact the Royal Armoured Corps?

 

Dick Taylor is a great guy, ex 3RTR, and only retired relatively recently after a number of high profile Staff postings - Ebola crisis, South Sudan, Afghanistan, to name but a few. He is also Official Historian for the Royal Armoured Corps (I think that's the correct title)and lives close to the Centre of the Universe aka Bovington.

 

Hi,

Do you mean from a doctrine, a design or an operational usage perspective? Or perhaps, given the financial constraints and strategic direction the British Army was given in the inter-war years are we all being a bit harsh on the less than optimum decisions made in this area by the British Army during that period and through into the Second World War?

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, after all! As we are all finding out again!

Regards

Tom

 

Well, let's not be too harsh on the tank designers and tank production firms either, eh?

 

Friend of mine who keeps his head below the parapet, but helps others (suggest that he publish and he goes into a very bad mood; he has helped edit collections unattributedly) - and has one of the best private libraries of WW2 literature I have ever seen - described "Death By Design" as "junk"

 

...and one persons junk is someone else's antique...

 

Sure, try telling my wife that!

 

Such a thread could be interesting, especially as I am developing my views and would enjoy a discussion.

 

I vote for moving this to another thread. One of the reasons why I didn't respond to Tom's comment in detail is I didn't want to turn this into an AHF-type thread where we spend 20 pages debating the relative merits of the 2 pounder. This is a book thread, not a tank thread.

I think there are two basic schools of thought. There's the pro-RAC thesis (they weren't bad workmen, it was their tools), and the RAC-sceptical antithesis (they really were bad workmen, and it wasn't their tools). There's probably a synthesis to be reached somewhere in there, but if the pro-RAC camp are going to be so insistent that there really was no problem with the RAC and all their woes were due to their equipment (i.e. it was everybody's fault but the RAC themselves), then nowadays they are going to get some pretty substantial pushback.

My layman's take is that most people perceive the German Army versus the British Army as being akin to Manchester United versus Liverpool. But in the first half of the war it was more akin to Manchester United versus Doncaster Rovers. And the British blaming their tanks for losing to the Germans was like Doncaster Rovers blaming their boots for losing to Manchester United. The gulf in quality between the two sides was too great for equipment to be the deciding factor.

 

.Interesting analogy, especially as most of the fervent supporters of the Wehrmacht come from outside Germany and most of Manchester United's supporters......

 

So happy to see my catchphrase from the Wavell Room book review catching on

I think the temporal factor is key here. Early in the war the 2-pdr was good enough, and the RAC just weren't up to competing with the Germans, even if they brought what they thought was their A-game. Mid-war the 2-pdr was not good enough anymore, but... something-something beggars/choosers... and the 6-pdr arriving helped a bit, while previously junior officers advanced to command posts, no doubt helped by the ruthlessness of Montgomery opening up positions. Late war they had the tools and the competent commanders and meted out punishment.

All the best

Andreas

 

There is the third option: the RTC (it's unfair to drag the cavalry into the brawl) decided how they wanted to fight and, by and large, got what they wanted to fight in. Poor workmen who chose poor tools, if you prefer.

A cynic might argue that infantry tanks matured quicker/earlier precisely because the RTC fantasy faction had no interest in them.

 

Haven’t read Dick Taylor’s book, but will now try and do so. Looking something else up recently, I came across this IWM offering, which if abridged, has some interesting and seemingly objective assertions:
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/brit...d-effective-tanks-during-the-second-world-war
“The Centurion would have been a game changer,” as it says, but “from the very start, the T-34 achieved that crucial balance between armour, firepower and mobility that eluded British tank designers for so long ..” stands out. Perhaps that is because from its very start its concept was perhaps geared towards one focussed particular intent?