Tanks for the Memories

[Dieselpunk2000]

Most of the tracked vehicles that came out of Thunderbird 2's pod and in other Gerry Anderson programmes, used the engine sound effects from the Centurion tank

 

[ferrelhadley]

Most of the tracked vehicles that came out of Thunderbird 2's pod and in other Gerry Anderson programmes, used the engine sound effects from the Centurion tank

A variant of the Merlin engine. Derated and built by Rover. Rover traded the Rolls tank engine for its work on Whittles jet engine, Rolls Royce is now one of the largest manufacturer of jet engines in the world. Also by putting a real engine its tanks the British went from really really average tanks to being some of the best in the world during the late WWII early Cold War era.

 

[weltweit]

Apparently Rolls Royce, either them or BL, were going to provide a multi-fuel engine for post WWII British tanks, but for one reason or another the project did not succeed.

 

[A380]

 

[Idris2002]

Conqueror - the last Brit heavy tank, or so the interweb tells me.

 

[likesfish]

Heavy tanks sort of disappeared the centurion was the first british real main battle tank and nowadays the challenger is heavier than a heavy tank of old and is probably the last british MAin battle tank to be built a market for 300 isnt really going to be justifiable.

 

[ferrelhadley]

Conqueror was the only real heavy tank the British deployed in numbers.
The heavy tanks was a role rather than a weight. It was not meant to be fast or reliable, instead maximum armour and big gun on what the engine could bear for a few miles of punching open holes in the defences. It was not meant for "strategic mobility" to be able to move long distances on its own power. The medium tanks were supposed to have less armour but be faster and more reliable thus exploit the gaps created by the heavy. The arrival of engines that could carry 50 tonnes relatively fast over long distances (50 tonne would have been what bridges could bear) meant that the "medium" tanks were well armoured enough to do their own punching through. Centurion, M45 and T55 were the beginnings of this size and speed of tank. Centurion was just a couple of tonnes lighter than Tiger 1 so it could have been called a heavy but did not break down after 30 miles of road march.

 

[Idris2002]

Hey likesfish, was this the one you were thinking of?

(East German T-55s, apparently)

 

[Idris2002]

Conqueror was the only real heavy tank the British deployed in numbers.
The heavy tanks was a role rather than a weight. It was not meant to be fast or reliable, instead maximum armour and big gun on what the engine could bear for a few miles of punching open holes in the defences. It was not meant for "strategic mobility" to be able to move long distances on its own power. The medium tanks were supposed to have less armour but be faster and more reliable thus exploit the gaps created by the heavy. The arrival of engines that could carry 50 tonnes relatively fast over long distances (50 tonne would have been what bridges could bear) meant that the "medium" tanks were well armoured enough to do their own punching through. Centurion, M45 and T55 were the beginnings of this size and speed of tank. Centurion was just a couple of tonnes lighter than Tiger 1 so it could have been called a heavy.

Thanks for this, and thanks also for your earlier long post upthread. When tanks were first introduced, the thinking seems to have been that they would have been "land battleships", and that strategic assumptions derived from naval warfare could be transferred to the land. Now, I know De Gaulle was an early thinker on the unique role of tanks (and if he'd been listened to, France might not have fallen), but in general, how long did the independent concepts of tank warfare take to develop?

 

[spitfire]

Guderians memoires are essential reading. He covers a lot of the early development of mobile/tank warfare in that.

E2a: panzer leader

 

[likesfish]

Hey likesfish, was this the one you were thinking of?

(East German T-55s, apparently)

The feared Soviet amphib capability Nato spent much money tine effort and recoverying sunken tanks and fishing crews out of rivers before somebody twigged the vaser was too deep and too fast flowing with steep sides for even the most dedicated communist tank crew too cross via snorkal

 

[Idris2002]

The feared Soviet amphib capability Nato spent much money tine effort and recoverying sunken tanks and fishing crews out of rivers before somebody twigged the vaser was too deep and too fast flowing with steep sides for even the most dedicated communist tank crew too cross via snorkal

Maskirovka can take many forms, Comrade Fish.

 

[likesfish]

The building a causeway to allow a regiment to surge across a river was possibly taking it a bit too far

 

[ferrelhadley]

Now, I know De Gaulle was an early thinker on the unique role of tanks (and if he'd been listened to, France might not have fallen), but in general, how long did the independent concepts of tank warfare take to develop?

Soviets had it absolutely nailed in the late 30s. The Nazis invaded and they had the "heavy tank" and "medium tank" starting to come of the production lines as the KV1 and T34, they had a vision of not divisions manoeuvring on a battle field but army groups coordinating across entire theatres of operation. They were building tanks to fight and kill tanks before anyone else. There was a whole series of ideas of how to fight wars at differing levels
Deep operation - Wikipedia
Guedarian had the idea of using your armour to hit at one point, the Soviets wanted to hit you at multiple points and keep hitting you till you broke. That is 1943-1945 as it happened. But the kind of independent minded thrusting young officers coming up with this kind of plan were not the kind of people with long life expectancies in Stalin's world.

The Germans were the next best they grouped their tanks together and tried to use them to exploit the gap they made. But all their theory came to a dead end as they were beaten by much better generals. For all the tactical brilliance and great sweeping maneuvers of the early war, they had zero respect for intelligence and logistics branches. "We will come up with the battle plan and work the logistics out later". The Soviets were able to over whelm them at key battles by misdirecting their poor intelligence and getting their logistics numbers to work for them.

The British and Americans got their in the end, but they took a while to cotton on to the pace of the arms race underway. The M4 for example was a fantastic tank in 1942, but horribly undergunned in 44. So the Americans arrived in Normandy really struggling to fight Panthers. But if you build 50 000 Shermans, that papers over a lot of quality cracks. And the British squeezed a huge towed anti tank gun into some of its Shermans so arrived with about 1 in 4 their Shermans able to kill a Tiger 2 reliably and their main UK built tank, the Cromwell able to kill Panthers and bump along at 30mph. The US had put a high velocity gun of their own onto some of their Sherman's, then left them in the US so as not to cause supply problems with different shells. At Arrancourt when the US ran into large numbers of Panthers for the first time, the US really got on board with tanks are their to kill tanks and Patton finally ordered their high velocity equipped Shermans for his First Army and stopped messing around with the idea that artillery\tank destroyer branch is the main tank killing branch.



So Soviets by 38, the relearnt it by late 42.
The British kind of had it worked out by 43.
When the Germans ran into real tanks properly handled outside Moscow (the winter did not stop them, a better general did), they stopped seeing tanks as a kind of cavalry to exploit openings and speeded up the development of Marks V and VI Panther\Tiger. But they had a whole series of issues they never really mastered so post war really.
The Americans in late 44.

 

[Idris2002]

Really interesting, thank you!

 

[ferrelhadley]

Really interesting, thank you!

Its a lot of ideas and history squeezed into a few words so likely others will have different ideas about when various countries "got" the modern idea of a tank being primarily a tank killing machine.

 

[spitfire]

Great post again ferrel.

This prompted me to read up a bit on Basil Liddel hart. An interesting read.

B. H. Liddell Hart - Wikipedia

 

[weltweit]

The late Peter Ustinov recounted a story told him by a WWII German general on the Eastern Front. He said it was impossible to fight the Russians because they were completely unpredictable. On one occasion the Germans had good intelligence that the Russian tanks would attack at point A, so they (the Germans) assembled a suitable force to rebuff them. On the morning of the attack the Russian squadron found it did not have enough fuel to reach point A so they instead attacked at point B where the Germans were not expecting them and the Germans were routed.

 

[likesfish]

That was Bullshit the Russians had mastered the art of operational warfare and while the T34 was a bit agricultural it was heavily armed and armoured and reliable enough.
While the panther and the Tiger were unreliable bits of junk frankly

 

[kebabking]

One of the drivers of Soviet success relative to UK and US efforts was that they have a doctrine of reinforcing success, where as we reinforce failure.

Both doctrines involved throwing massive force at the enemy, but then diverge with the Soviets leaving any unit that got bogged down to its own devices and to its eventual destruction while diverting everything to back up those units who cracked through the enemy, where as the western Armies tended to do the opposite.

Both doctrines have upsides and downsides - the upside of the Soviet doctrines are obvious, but the downsides are that it often involved taking astonishingly high casualties, and also opened the successful units up to flanking/rear attacks by the most dangerous, proficient units which had managed to defeat the Soviet units which had been sent against them.

Logistics also plays a role - the Soviet view was that you pick a design that broadly works and you just build it, and keep building it. The Germans however would build a tank, then improve it a bit, build some more, improve it a bit more, build more etc.. as well as having umpteen different types of tank all going through the same process - the advantage went to the Soviets because whenever and wherever a T-34 broke down or was damaged, the crew could canabalise spares from any other T-34 they could find that had been abandoned because they were almost all pretty much identical. The German crew on the other hand had very little chance of being near another tank that was exactly the same (and therefore had the same parts as theirs) because of the sheer profusion of different variations of tanks on the battlefield, even within the same units.

 

[Idris2002]

"The German crew on the other hand had very little chance"

Ha ha.

 

[Idris2002]

Kurdish YPG tank:

 

[kebabking]

Kurdish YPG tank:

I think go outdoors sell a tent that looks like that...

 

[Idris2002]

I think go outdoors sell a tent that looks like that...

Do they sing opera at you until you buy it?

 

[Mumbles274]

Just dug out some old, really bad pics of an open day at bovington in the 80s.

My dad in what i think is a Chieftain, they were being used for the display. I think challenger 1 was the main tank of the army at that time though? My brother is showing us round, don't think he was driving tanks at this point but went on to

They had some sort of mock battle, lots of noise and nonsense!! My brother was on the enemy team and soon taken down from this firing position ( equipped with an SLR I believe?)

Tank!

Not a tank!

 

[Idris2002]

But could your bro's tank do this, Mumbles274?



Eh, such is life in Moscow.

 

[weltweit]

That is actually quite scary, that thing can move some !!

 

[Idris2002]

That is actually quite scary, that thing can move some !!

I for one welcome, etc., etc.

 

[Idris2002]

That is actually quite scary, that thing can move some !!

G-d help us if it evolves opposable thumbs.

 

[A380]

But could your bro's tank do this, Mumbles274?



Eh, such is life in Moscow.

There is cool and then there is drifting a T80 cool.