Churchill Tanks

I believe some Churchills were produced by Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast.

H&W's main contribution to the Churchill (A22) story is much of the design (in association with Woolwich and the Tank board) and all of the prototype manufacture (four of slightly differing types if memory serves) relating to the original shelled area concept, the A20, which is nearly, but not quite a Churchill:



This next is apparently (according to David Fletcher, some websites disagree) the particular A20 prototype that was sent from Belfast to Vauxhall, and formed the initial testbed of the A22 Churchill project proper:




Harland built Matildas & Valentines (among others), though I'm not sure they did any further work on Churchill/A22.
It was certainly primarily a Vauxhall project. Best reference I have on manufacture doesn't have an index though!* So it's rather hard to double-check subcontractors etc.



* A pox on all sellers of expensive & otherwise excellent books sans-index!

 

I'm always somewhat uncomfortable with the perception of Churchill as a WW1 design too.
It appears to be based purely on an initial visual impression.

The 'Tracks over' design is indeed somewhat reminiscent of the machines that premiered at Flers, there is a hint of shape that rings a bell, but Churchill carried too many later innovations, particularly perhaps in the transmission, for it to be a fair comparison.

That tracks over sponsonless design was kind of critical in restricting further development of the thing (Top of Hull width restricted, so further turret ring expansion highly problematic; make it wider for Black Prince and steering problems are introduced by the old width/length conundrum, etc. etc.), but it doesn't really imply WW1 heritage.
For the ultimate and failed direction of WW1 concepts it's more appropriate to look towards The Old Gang; some of whose members, like Stern, caused fits and starts with the Churchill's development, but were eventually ignored, and some of whose members made great contributions; like Wilson, and his Epicyclic work.

 

I think Black Prince can quite fairly be seen as an evolutionary dead end in Tank design terms.

Not unlike the German interleaved wheels - how many modern vehicles have those?
The Black Prince stands on that complex suspension with all those small wheels, the tracks run around a box hull with no sponsons for the top deck, that limit the area available for turrets with larger guns. The family tree of that style of tank ends with Black Prince, and then the branches settle off into what we now see as the more conventional cranked torsion bars & BFGs.

It's not that the ideas applied weren't valid or understandable within their timeframe (this 'Super Churchill' project was as much an attempt at a Universal/MBT as it was at an Infantry Tank), merely that they fell by the wayside as 'the tank' continued along it's merry way of more mainstream evolution.
Black Prince was absolutely maxed out in terms of what that kind of arrangement could do in terms of automotive performance, Armour, Gun etc. - her trials confirmed that she was knackered when compared to other stronger designs coming through, so her evolutionary line died, and joined the corpses of other different approaches to overall Tank development scattered along the way.



The Cadmans are still listed as having a Black Prince Hulk... I wonder if it's in any state for restoration one day...

 

But we don't see Sherman Mk 500's today
Indeed, but we can trace the DNA of Sherman (or perhaps more accurately 'American Mediums'), onwards through contemporary relations like the M10, M18 etc., a long post WW2 life for the M4, & into M46, 47, 48 and various sub-marks until the very concept of the medium tank pretty much dies out, sometime in the 70s perhaps? Even M60, as a kind of medium/heavy hybrid could possibly be seen as the final link in that particular convention of armoured thinking for the US that still bears direct links in concept and execution to Sherman.
Thinking more of those US designs, the real Darwinian survivor (though on the light side of town), the strongest missing link, may even be M24/Chaffee, where the concept of a 'family' of vehicles was carried out from point one, and many of which's features carried on through evolutions of scale and technology. A very modern whole considering it's year of introduction.

The Black Prince carries major design and layout aspects that would be considered too unusual today. Neanderthal features that disappeared almost completely as the Centurion and the usage concepts around it became the 'standard' survivor.
Armour design naturally runs into dead ends and blind alleys, and it was one of them; like the Independent, the A39 Tortoise, the T28, the Sturmtiger etc. Naturally all were still 'Tanks', and so all had features that we recognise today, but as a whole, they were evolutionary dead ends in the armoured concept. Stillborns that never quite climbed out of the prototype and limited production bucket, because their usefulness was never proven in the face of other more significant developments, or was simply flawed from initial conception.

 

I completely agree that the Churchill gets a raw historiographic deal, I defend it where I can as I'm convinced not enough tank nerds 'get it'.

Having said that though, they didn't exactly do themselves, or the record, any favours during it's design process. Staggering who could walk in and derail the whole project. And as for building it with no proper prototype, and then issuing it with that famous list of faults for users to peruse... some of it beggars belief.

I think a lot of the perception problem is also people failing to properly appreciate the different marks and improvements, or the significance of the great rework scheme that finally began to deliver genuine value to a perfectly useful design.
Dieppe as a debut didn't exactly help either. But on that; I'm still reasonably sure that other contemporary designs could never have climbed that gravel beach and wall at all, despite the famous dismissive/surprised report the Germans issued on Churchills captured there that gets such wide coverage. (Sure I've got some German tests of their own vehicles in similar gravel/wall circumstances that didn't go well... somewhere... may be part of the same post-Dieppe report...)

 

I know we had a thread on The Churchill Project (to get Three more up & running), but can't find it...
So...
Bovington just gave a heads-up to the Project having a presence on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Churchill-Tank-Project/290122977796341

Very good.