MH waded somewhat out of their depth when moving beyond AWD & Armoured cars, didn't they. (Though even with ACs, there was no shortage of issues.). It's sort of interesting. They're one of the companies I cannot get my head around the structure of, and despite being all over war production for assorted nations, nothing armoured ever seems to quite come together in the way other firms managed. Feels like they never concentrated the right engineering ability & expertise, though you also begin to cynically suspect an amount of 'yeah, we can do that' for government contracts. The problem is, I don't think I've ever seen a book properly dedicated to their activities. This is good. Particularly the 'Ten Years Before Pearl Harbor' pamphlet. Marmon-Herrington in World War Two
The funny thing is that the M22 Locust was OK. Sure, you can quarrel with the whole design concept and the thing was of course too lightly armed and armored to deal with anything more powerful than itself, but it did fulfill the straitened parameters of the requirement. The M22 was also mechanically sound, and even David Fletcher seems to have some grudging respect for it (see his tank chat) and it was at least better than the Tetrarch. The 3 and 4-man M-H tanks were never intended to fulfill a US Army requirement but for an export market which was desperate for anything. I suspect M-H may have assigned their second team of engineers to the export tanks and kept their best guys working on other stuff. Such things did happen sometimes in US armament companies during those years, it would be interesting to know the names and assignments of the M-H design people if those are still on file anywhere. The US arms industry had many impressive achievements to its credit during the war, but there were more mistakes and outright disasters than our national historical memory cares to admit. Quite a few of these seem to have occurred with weapons designed or primarily intended for foreign customers like Britain, the Dutch, etc, and the names of certain companies are conspicuous. The Brewster company was eventually taken over by the government because it was so inefficient, but not before it had produced two real duds in the Buffalo and the Bermuda. Harrington and Richardson made a lot of M1s but two of their in-house designs were flops, the Reising SMG and the .32 H&R Bobby revolver.
The Covenanter was basically OK, and the Valiant tested by the FVPE was a half-built prototype that had been languishing in a shed for a year and would in no way have been representative of any production models. I know I'm not getting into the spirit of this kind of thing by pointing this out, but "worst tank" myths are the most tedious of all tank myths.
