9th June 1938
Colonel Campbell Clarke had replaced Major General Lewis as Director of Artillery a couple of months ago. One argument they'd had all the time they had worked together was the need for something larger to replace the two and three pounder anti-tank weapons. Clarke, while accepting than the larger HV3pdr was a good weapon against existing tanks, had always been worried about an enemy building well-protected infantry tanks that would really need something larger to stop. The two and three pound production lines were working steadily, so when he was appointed in charge, he'd contacted Vickers about the 6pdr he'd been waiting to build. His own department was heavily loaded with work, and he knew that Vickers had put a modified, lower-velocity version of a 6-pdr into their new infantry tank. He had asked them to see what would need to be done to basically replicate the performance of the HV3pdr in a 6pdr gun.
The report he'd just received was actually much more favourable than he'd been expecting. While the 6/18 pdr Vickers was producing had a much reduced muzzle velocity to the 3pdr, that had been a deliberate decision as it was intended to toss a large HE shell as a close-support weapon. The naval gun it had been modified from was a more capable, although heavier, weapon. The Vickers team had suggested that the take the best features from the naval 6pdr and the HV3pdr, to make a new high velocity 6pdr. This should be rather lighter than the naval gun - it was originally quite an old design, and they could do better now. That would make the gun somewhat lighter while emulating the HV3pdr performance, which would be useful for the anti-tank role. They estimated that if they could get a similar mv, the 6pdr should penetrate around 80-90mm of armour at 1,000 yards. This would be good enough to handle their own infantry tanks. As a lot of the basic work had already been done on the two existing guns, they estimated they could have a prototype available for testing early next year.
They pointed out that as they had designed the turret rings of their cruiser and infantry tanks to be the same 60" (to simplify mass production), and the infantry tank could handle the 6/18 pdr, it should be quite practical to fit the new 6pdr in either tank as required. As the existing gun used modified 18pdr shells, a new set of shells would need to be designed, but they could start out by upsizing the HV3pdr rounds. It would take longer to get the gun working in the anti-tank role, as a new carriage would have to be designed and tested, but they felt fitting it as a tank gun should be simpler.
August 1938 Summer Exercises Planning
Vivian Pope looked around at the RTC officers.
"Well, Gentlemen. The plans for this years' exercise.
General Brooke nodded. "I'd like to start with going through what we have available. There has been a lot of new kit arriving this year, and we want to try and get as much as possible into the exercises to see how it goes." He looked down at his papers.
"First, the First Armoured Brigade. While we haven't got everything in place yet, this will be the first equipped formation of our new Armoured Division. Including training, we have 160 of the new A10* available, as well as 30 of the new Birch gun. So we will be using 100 of the A10* to equip the 1st and 2nd RTR. We're adding a few extra to simulate some of the specialist vehicles we've been thinking about - for example, four tanks to the engineers to see if the heavy vehicle they've been asking for works, and some for the commanders. We've borrowed some of the Birch guns allocated to training for the duration, so we'll have the full complement of 24. We also have the heavy artillery that would be part of the division, moved by Dragon as before. The tanks have been showing well in training, and so far they are looking reasonably reliable - certainly they aren't breaking nearly as much as the old mediums! We have received a set of experimental tracks to try out - apparently they think they will be more durable than our existing ones - so we'll be putting them on one of the tank companies to see if they are right. We do have a shortage of spare engines - the factory still isn't up to full production, so they've been putting them in tanks as their first priority - but we'll just have to live without any.
Now, the Infantry. We have about 60 of the new Lloyd Carrier in our hands, but we've only had time to train about half the crews. So we'll be using a mix of them and the old Dragons we've used before, that will show us that, hopefully, the new vehicle is a lot better. They are fully up to strength in support weapons, so with a few little fixes we basically have our full-strength Brigade. The main thing we're missing is a mobile AA detachment - we have some ideas about that, but that won't happen this year.
We have the 9th Queens and the 10th Hussars as our Cavalry detachment. This is actually a bit more than we are thinking of, they would normally be the two regiments for the division, but we are going to see if we can live with one regiment per Brigade or if we should add more. Some of the paper exercises suggested three cavalry regiments for the division, but we'd like to try things out properly. We have just enough of the new Dingo's to allocate 20 to each regiment, but the heavy cars aren't ready yet. We have got five of the new Daimler from the factory, so we are giving some crews a very quick training and we'll be trying them out. It may well be too soon, but we'll see how they do. The other half of the regiments will be the Vickers MkVID, they are going out to Egypt afterwards, but we've borrowed them for the summer.
The one other tank we want to see in action is the A11. We've got 30 now, and they'd normally be with training, but we're going to use 16 both to support the Brigades offensive action, and then let them play with the Infantry in a defensive role. We've got 8 spares to cover breakdowns so we can try both roles."
Pope smiled. "Thank you, that's very comprehensive. If it all comes together, you're going to give the infantry a headache stopping you!"
"Well, Sir, that is our job, after all!" A ripple of laughter went around the room. ""But, more seriously, we do expect that with the new kit and all the work we've been doing on tactics over the year that we are going to win. After which, we'll be working both on improving our performance and helping the infantry get better at stopping us. The Germans seem to be building a rather large armoured force, and we can't be everywhere at once, our men need to be able to cope against tanks as well as knowing how to work with them."
"I see you haven't planned a tank on tank action?"
"Not as such, Sir, although we might end up with one when we face the infantry tanks. We really need a larger tank force, I hope in the spring we'll be able to face two Armoured Brigades off against each other, that will be interesting. But what we have planned is seeing how we do in counterattacking an infantry force that's broken through."
"And what about the observing team the French are sending?"
"Well, except for some stuff which is still secret, I'm going to let them see as much as they want. I want to get their opinions - they have a lot of tanks, but we feel ours are better, and allow us more tactical options. Hopefully we can both get something out of letting them see us in action. They are sending over a Colonel DeGaulle as an armour expert - he runs their 507th Tank Regiment, which seems to be used to try a lot of tactics and experiments. From what I've heard, he's good but the French consider a lot of his views controversial, so I suppose we'll have to see."