Given our increasingly quite sensible Masonic Rule, & 'Something' happening in the UK in December; for those wishing a soothing retreat from Twatterers, proselytisers & other loonies, think I'll post a Tank a day until 'that thing' happens. (I say 'tank', but anything on tracks is always better to look at than 'The Thing'.) November 1st. The Pedrail Landship/Porton Tractor. Set a load of sailors to design a land vehicle, and you get this. Well done, Sailors. I'd much rather look at that than anyone kissing babies or pretending they give a tinker's cuss about me. ~A (Notes & queries naturally welcome. One machine a day, though.)
You'd better post something that's leaning to the left tomorrow - some idiot will pick you up on it. Oh...
It was designed by a soldier. Col Swinton - the man who started the British Army on the way to being the first ever force to dispense with horses. The original intention was to produce an APC that would get infantry across no mans land but later attempts were made to develop it into a flame thrower carrier. Swinton managed to get the Landships Committee to abandon huge wheels in favour of tracks
Well, Crompton was indeed a Squaddie, though the 'Admiralty' part of the committee always makes me smile. There is sometimes a gap between what Swinton says he did, and what he actually did.
It is a worry, Dave. Name that Vehicle slumbers at 3129 posts & 12-13 years. There is, apparently, a finite number of machines. 'Armour'. This is our thingy, not your thingy next year.
2. Fowler's 'Snaketrac'. 1920. Commercial failure. Steam Ball & socket tracks. Not a lot to do with military, though certainly an attempt to commercialise some WW1 thinking. Mostly though: a steam traction engine bolted onto 1920s off-road experimentation. Lovely. Might actually choose a tank tomorrow. Might not.
3. The Vickers Medium At last, an actual tank. Handsome. Grandad was a signaller at the Mechanised force trials when they were mooching about testing radio gear. Dunno what it is, but they're another one that just make me smile. Especially watching the Bov example clattering about. The post WW1 fog clears a little, and all sorts of odd ideas are put aside somewhat. Something that looks more like a tank as we know it starts to crystallise, if in a shape that no other nation really considered for long. It says 'Interwar British Army' to me, possibly more than anything else. In a recent opinion poll using a sample size of one respondent in Leicestershire, it was declared 'Just very pleasing'. Mmmm. Asbestos. Edit: Coincidentally, someone just posted a pic of some Bradleys on Twatter. I retract my 'no other nation' shape comment.
I always found the Vickers Medium pleasing aesthetically, and it was invaluable as a training vehicle. It's such a pity that it wasn't really battleworthy. Some more armor, a bit better gun, a few less rivets and some more welds, a more powerful engine, and they might have had something...
I'm a complete layman when it comes to tanks, but, aesthetically speaking, it's the ones with the low, squat profiles and a few rounded contours that look the business, not the ones that look half-Volvo. Those post-war designs, T-48s, T-54/55s: they look the most 'properly tank-like' to my untrained eye. I think this thing is a self-propelled gun, but it looks like something I might have dreamed up as a teenager with the superglue and paint-sets. This, I think: M50 Ontos - Wikipedia
I got confused when I first saw the index to the two Vickers Works albums and the first Vickers Medium photos were captioned as light tank. It was conceived as a light tank and then just renamed, I think in the spirit of the provision of proxies within the Experimental Mechanised and Armoured Forces. This is what led, for example, to the designation of Carden Loyd carriers as light tanks within these forces. They weren’t light tanks and weren’t thought of as light tanks, they were just standing in for them in Experimental formations when the right kit simply didn’t exist. (The Carden Loyd was never a tankette either, it was an MG carrier, designed to move a gun and crew and hang around under reasonable cover until they needed to move again). I’m currently looking into the much less well known Experimental Infantry Brigade of 1935 and 1936 and the same use of proxy equipment existed there. The formation was to introduce the fully Mechanised machine gun battalion, equipped with all the Brigade’s MMGs and anti tank weapons, the first Machine Gun carriers, which were the precursors to the Bren, scout, Cavalry and then Universal Carriers, the introduction of the Bren gun into rifle battalions, and by the increase in firepower generated to reduce the numbers in the rifle battalions. Any discussion about equipment in the inter war British Army has to take into account the background of Army budgets and priority in War Office spending on the Royal Navy to project power internationally. So the Vickers Medium has suffered from being described as a medium while not being designed as one. It was an important tank which served for 20 years or so and well beyond its natural shelf life. One of the big questions is why the army didn’t adopt its natural replacement, which was the commercially successful Vickers 6 tonner, which under licence became the Soviet T26, and could have been in service from the early 1930s. Among the reasons for this would be the previously mentioned budget restrictions; the nature of British Interwar Tank design mainly being of speculative commercial development by a single manufacturer; and as David Fletcher mentions in his Tank Chat on the Vickers Six Tonner, that the Army didn’t fancy the suspension system. You also need to consider what opposition the Medium would have been up against in a shooting war. It was a decent tank for its time, a very important tank for its role in the Experimental Mechanised and Armoured Forces, soldiered on long past its design life, and if nothing else would deserve to be remembered as the basis for the Birch Gun. So I think much of the criticism it draws is a little unfair; and like some others posting in this topic, I just like it. Having said all that I should maybe point out my all time favourite tank is the Covenanter.
4 The A33 Excelsior. Nobody seems to talk much about Cromwell's younger ugly sister. Perhaps the cross-bred relation of the first prototype to the M6 & dash of Churchill puts people off. Or maybe because it was inevitably going nowhere but obscurity. The Universal concept was firming up elsewhere. Still... Another sign of serious people doing more investigations into what tanks should be than they're often given credit for.