Alternative History Armoured Fighting Vehicles Part 3
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How did the Skink track aircraft? Was it just with an optical tracking package (i.e. iron sights)?
It was with iron sights. Engagements were purely visual and there was no radar.
Like all other armored-turret-based AA systems of WWII, the maximum rates of elevation and rotation were insufficient to track high speed fighter-bombers on flight trajectories that would pass close to the AA-system position.
Presumably the Skink would still find a role providing suppressive fire for infantry attacks during WW 2, much like the role performed by the ZSU-23-4 Shilkas in more recent conflicts. Come to think of it, I wonder how a few of these vehicles could have helped the UN forces during the human wave attacks in Korea 🤔.
I have finally gone to the French military archives at Vincennes this Saturday, with the results being well beyond any expectations. I only had time to read through one out of two boxes, so I will return later in December. While I finish preparing the pictures and wait for the written authorization to share it publicly, I can at least explain roughly what I found in words.
The box contained 4-5 folders. One was the manual for the 47mm SA 34 L/25 gun which was a naval gun used as a stopgap for D1s, basic B1 and D2. It contained both text and figures explaining how it worked. As I anticipated the AP round was an ancient 1890's naval APHE. The others folders are all more interesting:
-one was text and mostly blueprints of the Laffly heavy/powerful cavalry armored car, a 3-man 6x6 armored at 40mm at the front and sides and equipped with a 37mm SA 38 and a 7.5mm coax. It very much looks like a T17 Deerhound armored car but smaller with a more compact turret.
- another was about the ARL Tracteur C fortress/superheavy tank, including text, information and plans about the powerplant and neat blueprints of the primary turret.
- there was also some text and mostly plans of the FCM 2 and 3-man turrets designed for the Somua S40 in 1942 for the Vichy regime and the Axis. The biggest discovery I made is that the AA MG mount uses twin 7.5mm and can be retracted inside the cupola.
The bulk of the box was a folder containing simple spec sheets for tanks and wheeled vehicles designed for the French army up to 1938-39, inventories of equipment carried in the vehicles, status of orders or current AFV inventories, anticipated deliveries. The most interesting stuff by far is histories and reviews of most tank programs which provide a lot more context behind the technical or production problems of certain vehicles.
As far as alt/unbuilt AFV stuff goes:
- we now know of two other turrets that could be used on the G1 tanks. The ARL 1 and ARL 4, but armored to 60mm all around. The good thing is we actually know what they look like. The ARL 1 is the 3-man turret with a high velocity 47mm mle.34 casemate gun seen on ARL 37 S, while the ARL 4 was designed for an earlier version of the fortress tank and is a 2 or 3-man 75mm gun turret.
Finally, I now know more about what the 2nd batch of FCM 36 tanks would have involved:
Much like this AMX-38, the suspension would have been modified by removing the part of the mudguards (red part) which covered the sides of the upper run of the tracks, leaving it open with the armored side skirts covering only the suspension elements. This change would have allowed the tracks to be spaced further from the hull sides and to be widened, while the track link design would be improved. The resulting FCM 36 would have been far less prone to mud clogging the tracks and would have had even better ground pressure characteristics and would have been more mobile in soft terrain. So now we know what this would visually look like.
I was surprised to learn that this 2nd batch of FCMs was expected to be for a whopping 1000 tanks, and not just another 100 or 200 as previously said.
The box contained 4-5 folders. One was the manual for the 47mm SA 34 L/25 gun which was a naval gun used as a stopgap for D1s, basic B1 and D2. It contained both text and figures explaining how it worked. As I anticipated the AP round was an ancient 1890's naval APHE. The others folders are all more interesting:
-one was text and mostly blueprints of the Laffly heavy/powerful cavalry armored car, a 3-man 6x6 armored at 40mm at the front and sides and equipped with a 37mm SA 38 and a 7.5mm coax. It very much looks like a T17 Deerhound armored car but smaller with a more compact turret.
- another was about the ARL Tracteur C fortress/superheavy tank, including text, information and plans about the powerplant and neat blueprints of the primary turret.
- there was also some text and mostly plans of the FCM 2 and 3-man turrets designed for the Somua S40 in 1942 for the Vichy regime and the Axis. The biggest discovery I made is that the AA MG mount uses twin 7.5mm and can be retracted inside the cupola.
The bulk of the box was a folder containing simple spec sheets for tanks and wheeled vehicles designed for the French army up to 1938-39, inventories of equipment carried in the vehicles, status of orders or current AFV inventories, anticipated deliveries. The most interesting stuff by far is histories and reviews of most tank programs which provide a lot more context behind the technical or production problems of certain vehicles.
As far as alt/unbuilt AFV stuff goes:
- we now know of two other turrets that could be used on the G1 tanks. The ARL 1 and ARL 4, but armored to 60mm all around. The good thing is we actually know what they look like. The ARL 1 is the 3-man turret with a high velocity 47mm mle.34 casemate gun seen on ARL 37 S, while the ARL 4 was designed for an earlier version of the fortress tank and is a 2 or 3-man 75mm gun turret.
Finally, I now know more about what the 2nd batch of FCM 36 tanks would have involved:
Much like this AMX-38, the suspension would have been modified by removing the part of the mudguards (red part) which covered the sides of the upper run of the tracks, leaving it open with the armored side skirts covering only the suspension elements. This change would have allowed the tracks to be spaced further from the hull sides and to be widened, while the track link design would be improved. The resulting FCM 36 would have been far less prone to mud clogging the tracks and would have had even better ground pressure characteristics and would have been more mobile in soft terrain. So now we know what this would visually look like.
I was surprised to learn that this 2nd batch of FCMs was expected to be for a whopping 1000 tanks, and not just another 100 or 200 as previously said.
Interesting to see they could/had planned to fit a 75mm turret on the B1... now that would be one heck of a tank in 1940... assuming it also gets a proper radio.
Not a B1 by the way. The B40 was a bigger vehicle with some very significant technical differences, the magazine just shows a kinda B1 hull because we have no drawings of the B40. It's more like KV-1-sized. The closest relative is the ARL 37, and indeed B40 was mostly trying to replicate the heavy tank program but at a lower weight of 40 tons instead of 45. https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/arl-37/
The B1 also had a radio from the start as standard, and not a bad one.
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Ah right, my bad. I saw "Char B" and thought it was a B1. That makes more sense.
On the radio, I should have said "make sure everyone has a radio that works". Shortages were common, and the rushed training of many crews didn't help their maintenance...
The M19, using 40mm guns on a Chaffee chassis, was apparently effective against human waves in Korea IOTL. By analogy, one can assume a Skink would be useful in a similar role.
Question is, would there be any skinks left, or would an ineffective AA platform be first in line for scrapping after 1945?
If they'd be built in quantity, I'm sure some would still be around. But as an AAA weapon the 20mm fell rapidly out of favour in late war/immediatly after, due to the new aircraft being too fast and often too tough. But yeah, for Korea? I'm sure the UK/Canada would have loved to have even a handfull there, specially in the Imjin River.
The B1 family, at least through the ter iteration, had far too small a turret ring to fit a 75mm gun into a turret with any capability to be elevated and fired without the breech hitting the tank hull.
The B1 family of course already had a stubby 75mm gun...a low-angle mortar, really...in the hull. It might have been possible to replace that gun with a Mle 1897 75mm gun, with a relatively simple adaptation of the hull mount. Those guns of course were readily available, unlike all of the more modern French 75mm guns and especially the "high power" gun that was being considered for the G1R and that was part of the originally intended designs for the SAu 40 assault gun and the ARL v39 SP artillery piece.
With Brandt APDS ammo @ 900 meters/second muzzle velocity, a low tech, low cost Mle 1897 75mm gun installation would have provided good anti-armor capability by 1940 standards. It would have been able to penetrate any aspect of any then-fielded Axis AFV out to 1000 meters.
Repositioning of the radio operator/assistant gunner in the B1's hull would have been necessary, and it's not clear where the much longer 75mm ammo would have been stored. And, with the 75mm gun no longer being an infantry support weapon fired primarily at enemy strongpoints and instead becoming the AFV's primary fighting weapon, the driver also being responsible for aiming in the bis version would have been a problem from a combat workload perspective. It might have been necessary to convert any bis generation vehicles, with their precision, high-failure-rate Naeder lateral-hull-aiming transmission, to the ter aimable gun mount with its separate gunsight and gunner.
The few Skinks that were built, all were scrapped during WWII. None made it to the end of 1945. No Canadian front line units wanted it.
It used an ammo type that wasn't normally distributed to front line Canadian units. It had major functional shortcomings, i.e. the gunsight mount was wholly inadequate and self-loosened, the guns couldn't be belt fed and sixty round drums turned out to not fit, the recoil mechanism frequently hit and broke the elevating mechanism, the hydraulics leaked, and the guns regularly jammed when Canadian ammo was used so had to be demonstrated using British ammo, which had much tighter quality control. The hydraulics were much faster once running at full pressure, but were slow to get up to pressure from a stopped condition...but they didn't have a long enough time-between-failures to just keep the pumps running and the system pressurized. The aimer couldn't fully use the gunsight without having the hatch open and being exposed to strafing or fragments, which undercut the idea of armored protection for the gun system.
In short, then, the thing was crap.
So, is there another fast-firing AA tank that might fill the roll?
There's the T52, a Sherman variant with 40mm Bofors and .50-cal MGs. Unfortunately, that one suffered from very limited ammo capacity.
And the T85, a stretched Stuart chassis with quad 20mm.
In general, fully-enclosed AA tanks built on existing tank chassis don't seem to make much sense. The open-hull/turret vehicles that used a Chaffee chassis seemed to do well, though. Maybe the T85 would be the way to go.
USA did multiple SPAA vehicles on halftrack platforms, with 2x or 4x .50 M2HB, 37mm autocannon, or 40mm L/60 autocannon.
Tank platforms weren't considered necessary until the gun systems' weights got up to dual 40mm.
20mm was disfavored by US Army for logistics reasons...20mm wasn't a distributed ammo type in Europe. The Navy had it, so it could be used for naval-manned port AA defense. Otherwise, not so much.
Tank platforms weren't considered necessary until the gun systems' weights got up to dual 40mm.
20mm was disfavored by US Army for logistics reasons...20mm wasn't a distributed ammo type in Europe. The Navy had it, so it could be used for naval-manned port AA defense. Otherwise, not so much.
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