Could obsolete M3 Lees be converted into proto-IFVs?

The M3s were not like a low mileage used car. Any armoured vehicle of the time wears out fast unless you indulge in expensive maintenance and replacement parts. Much to the annoyance of the Americans the British found it easier to convert newly delivered M4s into Fireflies and specialist vehicles even though they had older ones already delivered.

By the time that used M3s might be used for improvised APCs the production lines had gone over to M4 production. It was a selling point for M3 production that the same chassis line could easily make M4s later.

You would have to use what you already have as AFVs going out of service. In an M3 the turret has to go as a huge space waster. The only place for a gun is in the sponson mount and that has to be one with a short breech or it too will be a space waster. Hence my earlier offering of 3" Cs gun or some pack howitzer. Poor weapons but ones that can put down some HE and smoke in support of the dismounted infantry.

IOTL we find that what was used was simply existing ones with the turret or artillery piece removed. This was easy, fast and used existing supplies. To expand it further you need to identify other obsolete AFVs to bulk out the OTL numbers. The M3 is an obvious one of these for M4 mounted divisions and Cavalier/Centaurs of Cromwell equipped ones. Even Crusaders (shorn of their turrets for heavy armoured cars). Recce units were taking turrets off Honeys as the armament was not worth the high profile so I can't see the point of keeping an M3 turret.

Unless we can find a POD well before M3 production ends then you will not get IFV designed M3s. Also we would need the POD to include extra production lines to maintain the OTL M4 production levels and that type of heavy engineering was fully tapped in the USA and Canada. I would suggest that an early IFV TL would only be economically possible with a wheeled chassis for which the Staghound gives us a model. Definitely not the complex 8 wheeled German jobbies.
 
Excellent points which I hadnt thought of. Also in the British Army M3s were being sent to the Far East by 1943 if all the M3s get used in conversions what does the 14th Army use in the 1944 campaigns. M4s only got to India late 44 iirc.

M3s were officially declared Obsolete in April 1944, after being in 'Limited Standard' status since April 1943.

Some versions rarely left CONUS, like the cast upper hull M3A1 used for training, or mostly to Soviet LL, like the all welded M3A3

ALCO was producing M3 chassis for the M7 Priest until 1944, and Pressed Steel Car Company made them right up to February 1945, converting from M3 components to M4 without stopping production.

Found this on re-manufacturing tanks

Ordnance was instructed to launch a supplementary program for tank “remanufacture.” http://tothosewhoserved.org/usa/ts/usatso02/chapter11.html
This new process – the complete overhaul of combat vehicles – was, in the summer of 1944, a natural solution to the problem of
how to increase the supply. During the preceding months, as one armored unit after another had been shipped overseas, the
tanks they had used during long months of arduous training were withdrawn and replaced by new vehicles, with the result that
large numbers of used tanks accumulated. Occasional criticism of the Army resulted when irate taxpayers saw these tanks standing
idle in storage and concluded that they represented waste of valuable war matériel. As early as the summer of 1943 General Campbell,
during a trip to the West Coast, had explored the possibility of contracting with industry to recondition these tanks. In October 1943
he formally recommended to ASF that a reconditioning program be authorized, including a balanced withdrawal of tanks from troops for
this purpose. It was not until June 1944, when the quantities of tanks left behind by troops going overseas had reached high levels, that
Ordnance was assigned the job of overhauling and modernizing them so they could be shipped overseas in new-tank condition.68

The process was to start with a thorough cleaning of each tank and partial disassembly, followed by an overhaul of its engine,
replacement of worn tracks, reconditioning the guns, adding improvements made since the original design, and giving the whole
vehicle a new coat of paint. The total cost of remanufacture was estimated to be about half that of building a new tank.

After teams of Ordnance technicians visited Army Ground Forces camps to select the tanks to be overhauled, the work began in
August and proceeded at the rate of six hundred medium tanks per month for the rest of the year. Light tanks, half-tracks,
gun motor carriages, and scout cars were also remanufactured, bringing the total for 1944 up to more than eleven thousand
combat vehicles. The bulk of the work was done at the Quad Cities Tank Arsenal, Evansville Ordnance Plant (converted from
production of small arms ammunition), and the Montreal plant of the American Locomotive Company.69


There was enough slack in thesystem that an APC could have been done using old chassis.
 
Or another way to dismount from a Lee IFV

The M31 Recovery Vehicle

id_tankrecovery_t2_700_04.jpg


Dummy gun, note: no side door, just a vision block on this late version chassis
 
If you want to consider new-built, wheeled APCs, start by looking at the American M3 White Scout Car and Armoured half-track. Both were based on truck chassis that were already in production. During August of 1944, the Canadian Army stripped all its units of spare White Scout Cars before starting to convert Kangaroos.
Next step in your search leads to the General Motors of Canada-designed CT15A Armoured Truck. It was based on the standard 15cwt truck chassis ... shared with the Otter Scout Car. CT15A could carry 6 infanteers with good cross-country mobility and low armoured protection. By the winter of 1945, GMC started building armoured ambulances with full-height armour on the sides. CT15A started with the advantage of front engine and a rear door ... now standard on APCs.
After VE Day, the Canadian Army donated hundreds of CT15As to the Dutch and Danish Armies who drove them until they wore out during the 1960s.
If production had continued post-1945, GMC might have added an extra rear axle to improve cargo capacity and mobility.
 
I realized I made a couple of mistakes on the Hummel IFV pic on post #94, the roof on the front and rear views are higher than the side view pic and also when scaling the pic, I made the mistake of using the dimensions of the Pz.-IV medium tank and not the Hummel's which despite being a variant of the Pz.IV was four feet longer, my bad. :eek:
I fixed the roof but not the scale, I also added a flamethrower and a separate fuel hauler as suggested by Wietze.

thinking that central flamethrower is way to big

just look at the small size of a the flameprojectpor on a churchil croc:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_Crocodile

churchill+f.jpg


the flamethrower itself could be fairly simple, almost like the fire extinguisher on top of this fire truck (only with some added protection against flames of course)
Barnstable_Airport_Engine_817.jpg


the location i had in mind was here:

flame location.JPG
 
There was a prototype 4x4 armoured vehicle produced by GM Canada in 2 versions one with leaf springs and the other with coils I cant find much info on it or a decent pic but it looks like a similar vehicle to some modern APCs.

CAPLAD
 
Basically, the armored version of the Dovunque 35 truck, correct?
688174589a.jpg
Yes I believe so. I've wondered how much better a tracked version might have been and I've tried to make a tracked version pic of it but had no luck, I might give it another shot.
 
thinking that central flamethrower is way to big

just look at the small size of a the flameprojectpor on a churchil croc:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_Crocodile

[

the flamethrower itself could be fairly simple, almost like the fire extinguisher on top of this fire truck (only with some added protection against flames of course)


the location i had in mind was here:
OK I took your suggestion and it does look more practical but I still feel like the front of the upper hull needs something, maybe a short barreled howitzer? The Germans did have a lot of surplus captured guns.

IFV-hummel ++.png
 
The Canadian C15TA armoured truck fills the bill. It just was not available until 1944. A similar armoured truck based on the AEC quad as was the AEC armoured car would do. The Dorchester is probably too big and vunersgle,with too long a wheel base for off road agility.
 
There was a prototype 4x4 armoured vehicle produced by GM Canada in 2 versions one with leaf springs and the other with coils I cant find much info on it or a decent pic but it looks like a similar vehicle to some modern APCs.

CAPLAD

.....................................................................

That Canadian armoured car prototype is detailed in "Secret Weapons of the Canadian Army."
The Indian Army bought a few thousand similarly-looking scout cars. Armoured Carrier, Indian Pattern were built on chassis supplied by General Motors of Canada and Ford Motors of Canada. Armoured hulls were built by TTA Locomotive Works (in India). Because they only had 4 seats, they were more like "fat Ferret" scout cars than APCs.

During the 1960s, a dozen different companies - in a dozen different countries - slid armoured superstructures onto popular truck chassis (Unimog, Ford, GMC, Humber, etc.) to product light, low-cost APCs and scout cars. Few of them were strong enough to withstand heavy machine gun bullets, but they drove millions of miles while performing various "police" duties like convoy-escort, suppressing riots, etc.

Few of the Unimog-based armoured vehicles had serious protection against land-mines, road-side bombs, Improvised Explosive Devices, because that sort of armour originated in Rhodesia and probably deserves its own separate thread.
 
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OK I took your suggestion and it does look more practical but I still feel like the front of the upper hull needs something, maybe a short barreled howitzer? The Germans did have a lot of surplus captured guns.

not really, this is an ifv/apc type vehicle. so it needs to be able to carry as much infantry as possible. add a gun, and you can forget about infantry.
a howitzer would indicate a fire support role, that would likely be another vehicle.
also the gun would interfere with the turret
 
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