Sir John Valentine Carden survives.
- Thread starter allanpcameron
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Caught this almost as it was posted. Looks like there's more time to really work out the 'funnies'. I don't quite see the reason for an entire tank to be dedicated to an artillery observer's station though - once radios good enough to communicate with other formations are present, could the artillery observer not just fit into the occasional tank as a fourth crewman?
Artillery observers like to spread out maps, and they like to look at things and take ranges/bearings, and they like to do all of those things without too much shooting and excitement around them. Having a specialist vehicle lets them do those things and accompany the front-line formations, without being expected to use the tank's guns instead of their most deadly weapon (a radio).
On that subject, WW2 radios were not the small and quickly tunable versions we are familiar with today. The observers would also probably like to have a couple or three radios dedicated for their use (one for their battery, another for their regiment, most likely), along with a couple of suitably house-trained signallers to take care of all that. No comms, no bombs, after all. All of that means a dedicated vehicle is probably a very good idea.
Another reason for using an tank is to blend in. Aka don 't give the enemy an obvious target.
With the HQ Tanks, to get over the extra antenna they simply put the same amount on all the gun tanks, normally the hq tank would run three radios, sqn, regimental and brigade (dependant on situation) gun tank would only run one, the sqn net and an internal harness for the crew (plus the external phone on the rear) so all tanks would have three antennas.
This is subject to memory haze having last seen the set up over 20 years back whilst completing a control signallers course at Bovington
This is subject to memory haze having last seen the set up over 20 years back whilst completing a control signallers course at Bovington
Last edited:
At last, an update on tank development!
The posts about how the war is going on have been great, but this is the content that I've been interested in.
Looking forward to more.
Ramp-Rat
Monthly Donor
Allanpchameron, I hope that you enjoy your time on holiday, and that unlike here which seams to have given up on the thought of summer, the weather is fine for you.
So having spent time on debating various issues, that while tangential to this TL, we now have a post on a matter that is central to the main premise of the TL, the development of armour. IOTL Percy Holbart, was a man who thanks to his ability to get up the nose of numerous lesser people, people who were far better connected than he was. And were able to play the Army Game with skill, and really objected to having their fun, I didn’t join the cavalry to get my hands dirty playing with smelly engines, I joined to play Polo, don’t you know, spoilt. And really didn’t like having their incompetence shown off to all and sundry, did manage to have him sidelined. With him dismissed from post, returned to the UK, dismissed from the Army, and ending up for a time in the Home Guard. Whether he would have been one of the greatest armoured commanders of history we will never know, he did not get to command an armoured force in combat in the field. Yes he was the commander of the the largest armoured devision in the British Army the 79th. It wasn’t a normal devision, and never fought as an armoured devision, it just lent out parts of itself to other formations, as needed.
Right before we get into my opinions as to what the situation vis a vis, having Percy where he is now and what it might mean in the context of the TL. Let us look at some of the background to the development of armoured forces, in OTL, and Britain’s peculiar input into the field of specialist armour. Britain in the nineteen forties was an industrial power house, and the world’s second largest producer of motor vehicles. Unlike the other major developed nations, while it had as had they suffered during the Great Depression, it had come out of the depression by 1933, and enjoyed a period of unprecedented growth. Yes the old heavy industry, coal, steel, shipbuilding, etc, and the textile industry, which was mostly in the north of Britain, had been very hard hit. But the new industry, both light and semi heavy, motor vehicles, electrical’s, chemical, furniture, house building, etc, had enjoyed a boom time, but predominantly in the south. The reason for the establishment of the green space around Britains major cities, particularly London was the boom in house building during the thirties, especially Metroland. Britain was also a far wealthier nation than it appeared to be, forget all those pictures and books about how grim the depression was, and look instead to the number of cinemas, dance halls and new roads that were built. And then remember a lot of the wealth of the nation wasn’t produced in the dark satanic mills of the midlands or the north, but in cramped dusty offices in the City of London.
Britain had come out of the First World War, the Great War as it was called at the time, determined not to do that again. It’s army was at the end of the Great War, probably the best equipped, integrated, and supplied in the world. While in British eyes it had made a fantastic sacrifice to achieve its ends, both in men and wealth, this is a myth. Other than the United States, who only joined for the last quarter, Britain and the British Empire suffered the lowest casualties of all the major combatants. While all the other major combatants, again excluding America were financially crippled by the war, Britain was just strapped for cash right now old bean. But thanks to a combination of factors, the British collectively decided that being involved in a major war in Europe, just wasn’t for them. So the British Army went back to the being what it had been prior to the Great War, a superb colonial police force, entirely professional, and what money was available was spent on the Royal Navy, and later on the RAF. Yes a lot of experiments were done by the home army on the cheap, but the army establishment tried to suppress both the results and discussion about them. Add to that the British Army isn’t what people think, and thanks to the regimental system, not one army, thus much of the army went to sleep for twenty years. If you have a big brain and were not socially connected, you went to the Shop, Woolwich Academy, and became a Royal Engineer, Gunner, and some of the skilled auxiliary Corps, signals, transport, ordnance, etc. If you were oh so socially connected, bright but not brilliant, or slightly dim but with a good pedigree and some money behind you, you went to Sandhurst, to become an infantry officer, remember the British Army was principally an infantry force designed for colonial policing, or for the rich but dim the Calvary.
Now let us look at the four principal armoured powers during WWII, the Soviet Union, Germany, the United States and Britain. The Soviet Union was a very young country both in off itself, having been formed in 1918, with a very difficult birth, and industrially, only having industrialised in the late twenties early thirties, with a lot of foreign help, especially from Britain and America. It’s tanks were by the standards of the other three, crude, simple, built in modern factories by a primitive work force, who could at best do the thing they had been taught to well. There armoured philosophy despite some interesting experiments and thinking that had taken place in the thirties, simple, keep throwing tanks and men, under a crude massive artillery barrage, at the task, until you win. Take two simple problems that the Soviet tank corps had, and their solution to them. The infantry needed on occasion to talk to the guys inside the tank, you can bang on the tank with something like a large spanner, British WWI solution, and attract the guys insiders attention. Or you can, as the British ITTL are about to do, attach a phone to the back of the tank connected to its IC system, which enables the infantry to both attract the tank commanders attention, and talk with him, while both remain under some cover. The Soviet solution, stick a button on the back of the tank, that rings a bell inside, then the commander can open his hatch and talk to the infantry, at some risk, crude, simple but reasonable effective. The Soviet tanks need infantry to keep pace with them and provide them with support during the attack. The Germans and Americans developed half tracks to carry their infantry into action along side their tanks. The German half tracks were complex difficult to build, costly, and always in short supply, not forgetting that they didn’t have the fuel they needed for them. The American half track was simple, easy to build, relatively cheap and they had thousands of them and the fuel to fuel them. The British used a mix of American half tracks, and their own fully tracked infantry carrier, the most produced armoured vehicle of history. The Soviets welded handles on their tanks for their tank rider and infantry, who were predominantly equipped with SMG’s, to hold onto while riding the tanks into battle. Yes the losses of infantry were horrific, but there were always more infantry tank riders to replace those lost in combat. There was no history of clever individuals coming up with a brilliant cunning idea and getting it implemented in the Soviet Union, that was a good way to get you a bullet in the back of the head. So the Soviets didn’t develop specialist armour.
The Germans were then as they are now some of the finest engineers in the world, they produced some brilliant and innovative equipment. Sadly for them mostly never enough, and constrained by the madness that was the government and leadership. The Germans did come up with some brilliant innovations during the war, and were fantastic at adapting old and out of date foreign equipment, especially armour for their own use. But they failed to take into account the problems this would cause with their own already supply chain, and the provision of spares to keep this equipment working. In the long run, it’s no good having a fantastic self propelled artillery peace, built on an obsolete French tank with an obsolete Check gun, for which you have only a limited number of spare parts. You should have done the work and designed your SP gun to use only German produced parts from day one, as did the British and the Americans. The British and the Americans used the M3 tank and the Canadian version of it, to produce the M6 Priest and the M7 Sexton, which were fitted with their respective field guns, the American 105 and the British 25 pounder. This simplified the supply of ammunition, it was the same as the rest of the army was using, and made maintenance easy as there was already a supply chain of spares established. The other problem was that German innovation tended to be top down, and not bottom up, driven by a requirement to produce something required, decided from on high. The Germans tend to have a problem with cheap, nasty, and poorly produced. The German Panzerfaust was cheap nasty but well made, and they constantly developed it to be better, the British PIAT was equally cheap nasty and not as well made. It had only one advantage over the Panzerfaust, you could use it in an enclosed space, and the British only tried to make it cheaper during the war. Then soon after the war was over, scraped it and looked for something better. Germany didn’t produce the wealth of specialist armour that the British did, it wasn’t in their caricature and didn’t fit the philosophy of how to fight.
American engineers were as good as the Germans in design, and far ahead of them in production design, with the added advantage of nearly unlimited resources and space to develop their ideas in. You want a thousand tanks a month to a new design, we will build a completely new factory and have it in production within a year, no problem. Nor where the Americans as adverse to bottom up innovation, you only have to look at the invention of the Rhino plow post D-Day to cope with the Normandy Bocage. Reputed to have been invented by Curtis G Culin, it was rapidly taken up using scrap iron from the beach defences, before production was shipped across the channel to Britain. However the basic American system wasn’t set up to produce one offs or short runs, ten thousand identical units over the next year, again no problem. But ten specials ASAP, bodged together from a design done on the back of a fag packet, now that can be a problem. And the American military administration had its way of doing things, it tends towards a slightly more bureaucratic and formal method than the British, more in turn with American business practices. Unlike in Britain no way would a ship builder have lunch with the owner of a shipping company, and on just a nod and a handshake, without formal plans and contracts closely examined by both companies lawyers and accounts, build a ship. Yes in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbour, it is reputed that a government official sat in a room with a pile of contracts, and having shouted out what the contract was for, took the best offer from the gathered major industrialists. Americans did do cheap and nasty, but they tended to put a little more polish on the final product. Look at two war production SMG’S, the British Sten and the American M3 Grease Gun, the first the Sten was every bit as bad as it was reputed to be, cheap nasty and bloody dangerous to use. The M3 was on the other hand probably the best cheap SMG produced during the war, so while the British started working on a better SMG during the war, the Americans were happy to use the M3 right up until the nineties. Remember for the Americans. there is a a right way, a wrong way, but best of all, the American way. And they didn’t take to being told that’s not the way to do it, especially from some dam limey.
The British do have excellent engineers, among, the best in the world, however thanks to their Victorian attitude, they tended towards one bands, not used to working as part of a team..This was changing slowly, thanks to the importation of attitudes from Germany and America brought in to Britain, by international companies who set up shop in Britain during the inter war years, to get around Imperial Preference. Ford would have loved to produce all its cars in America, and just exported them throughout the world. But they found that very few people wanted their designs, which were optimised for American roads, and the various import duties designed to protect the various domestic and imperial markets, made their vehicles expensive. So they as did others set up shop in Britain, employed locals and trained them in the Ford way, then got them to produce designs optimised for the local market. And they found they had a small advantage, British designers were used to producing slightly different designs to suit the local market in various different colonies, what worked in Nigeria didn’t necessarily work as well in Kenya. Prior to WWII, Ford Dagenham was the largest Ford factory complex outside of America. When you combine the British flexibility in production, with a very bottom up attitude in the British military. Remember the British were used to their officers providing local solutions to local problems and adapting equipment to suit their needs. So IOTL the British determined to fight a highly mecergised war, took a so so tank the Churchill, and adapted it to do everything bar dance, float, and be a mine flail. The floating tank and the mine flail, were adapted from the American Sherman for a number of reasons. There was also the Centaur bulldozer built on the hull of the the less than successful Centaur Tank. The Churchill tank was in many ways ideal for the development of specialist armour, while its engine was weak, and its driver system not the best. Its old fashion design, suspension, thick armour and the side doors designed originally as emergency exits.
So we have ITTL, Percy Hobart, who passed out of Woolwich in 1904 as an Officer of Engineers, serving in India pre WWI, then in France and Mesopotamia during WWI, and India post war, before attending Staff college in Camberley, before committing what was in the eyes of many the cardinal sin of switching cap badges and transferring to the Royal Tank Corps. He was an instructor at the staff college in Quetta for a number of years, before holding various appointments including command of the first armoured brigade in Britain. Appointed Major General in command of the Western Desert Force, what was to become the famous Desert Rats, he managed to seriously get up a large number of noses. However he has as he was been dismissed from the Army, but this time he has been recalled and put in charge of an experimental unit in Chertsey, a roll that he is uniquely qualified for. Percy was a brilliant if at times undiplomatic man, who didn’t suffer fools gladly, and a superb trainer of men, as was his equally difficult brother-in-law, Montgomery. He will be surrounded by some of the various eccentric characters that helped to build Britains range of specialist armour, and every man with an off the wall idea, will soon know where and to whom to send it too.
Problems, the Churchill Tank of OTL doesn’t as yet exist, but Vauxhall are working on a prototype that in OTL, would eventually become the Churchill. However with Percy and others around, there is a good chance that the worst faults of the Churchill will be avoided. Primarily it’s weak power plant, given an engine producing 400 to 450 hp, instead of the 350 hp it was fitted with IOTL. Yes it would be nice to fit it with a Meteor producing 600 hp, but even that wouldn’t push it snail like top speed up by much, as it tracks and suspension weren’t designed for high speed. So the fantasy is that a combination of Percy’s brilliant engineering skills, a better Churchill tank, and the British ability to bodge together parts in unusual ways. Along with the various other mad men coming up with unusual solutions to various problems, how do you design the hydraulic system to deploy a scissor bridge from a tank. You don’t, as a Canadian engineer pointed out, far easier to use a bloody long screw, hence the Valentine scissor bridge layer of OTL. ITTL you may by mid 1943 have the equivalent of the 79th devision, fully equipped with specialist tanks, that have been fully tested and had the bugs worked out. With all the crews fully trained in using their kit, and the rest of the Army used to the kit and what it can and can not do.
RR.
So having spent time on debating various issues, that while tangential to this TL, we now have a post on a matter that is central to the main premise of the TL, the development of armour. IOTL Percy Holbart, was a man who thanks to his ability to get up the nose of numerous lesser people, people who were far better connected than he was. And were able to play the Army Game with skill, and really objected to having their fun, I didn’t join the cavalry to get my hands dirty playing with smelly engines, I joined to play Polo, don’t you know, spoilt. And really didn’t like having their incompetence shown off to all and sundry, did manage to have him sidelined. With him dismissed from post, returned to the UK, dismissed from the Army, and ending up for a time in the Home Guard. Whether he would have been one of the greatest armoured commanders of history we will never know, he did not get to command an armoured force in combat in the field. Yes he was the commander of the the largest armoured devision in the British Army the 79th. It wasn’t a normal devision, and never fought as an armoured devision, it just lent out parts of itself to other formations, as needed.
Right before we get into my opinions as to what the situation vis a vis, having Percy where he is now and what it might mean in the context of the TL. Let us look at some of the background to the development of armoured forces, in OTL, and Britain’s peculiar input into the field of specialist armour. Britain in the nineteen forties was an industrial power house, and the world’s second largest producer of motor vehicles. Unlike the other major developed nations, while it had as had they suffered during the Great Depression, it had come out of the depression by 1933, and enjoyed a period of unprecedented growth. Yes the old heavy industry, coal, steel, shipbuilding, etc, and the textile industry, which was mostly in the north of Britain, had been very hard hit. But the new industry, both light and semi heavy, motor vehicles, electrical’s, chemical, furniture, house building, etc, had enjoyed a boom time, but predominantly in the south. The reason for the establishment of the green space around Britains major cities, particularly London was the boom in house building during the thirties, especially Metroland. Britain was also a far wealthier nation than it appeared to be, forget all those pictures and books about how grim the depression was, and look instead to the number of cinemas, dance halls and new roads that were built. And then remember a lot of the wealth of the nation wasn’t produced in the dark satanic mills of the midlands or the north, but in cramped dusty offices in the City of London.
Britain had come out of the First World War, the Great War as it was called at the time, determined not to do that again. It’s army was at the end of the Great War, probably the best equipped, integrated, and supplied in the world. While in British eyes it had made a fantastic sacrifice to achieve its ends, both in men and wealth, this is a myth. Other than the United States, who only joined for the last quarter, Britain and the British Empire suffered the lowest casualties of all the major combatants. While all the other major combatants, again excluding America were financially crippled by the war, Britain was just strapped for cash right now old bean. But thanks to a combination of factors, the British collectively decided that being involved in a major war in Europe, just wasn’t for them. So the British Army went back to the being what it had been prior to the Great War, a superb colonial police force, entirely professional, and what money was available was spent on the Royal Navy, and later on the RAF. Yes a lot of experiments were done by the home army on the cheap, but the army establishment tried to suppress both the results and discussion about them. Add to that the British Army isn’t what people think, and thanks to the regimental system, not one army, thus much of the army went to sleep for twenty years. If you have a big brain and were not socially connected, you went to the Shop, Woolwich Academy, and became a Royal Engineer, Gunner, and some of the skilled auxiliary Corps, signals, transport, ordnance, etc. If you were oh so socially connected, bright but not brilliant, or slightly dim but with a good pedigree and some money behind you, you went to Sandhurst, to become an infantry officer, remember the British Army was principally an infantry force designed for colonial policing, or for the rich but dim the Calvary.
Now let us look at the four principal armoured powers during WWII, the Soviet Union, Germany, the United States and Britain. The Soviet Union was a very young country both in off itself, having been formed in 1918, with a very difficult birth, and industrially, only having industrialised in the late twenties early thirties, with a lot of foreign help, especially from Britain and America. It’s tanks were by the standards of the other three, crude, simple, built in modern factories by a primitive work force, who could at best do the thing they had been taught to well. There armoured philosophy despite some interesting experiments and thinking that had taken place in the thirties, simple, keep throwing tanks and men, under a crude massive artillery barrage, at the task, until you win. Take two simple problems that the Soviet tank corps had, and their solution to them. The infantry needed on occasion to talk to the guys inside the tank, you can bang on the tank with something like a large spanner, British WWI solution, and attract the guys insiders attention. Or you can, as the British ITTL are about to do, attach a phone to the back of the tank connected to its IC system, which enables the infantry to both attract the tank commanders attention, and talk with him, while both remain under some cover. The Soviet solution, stick a button on the back of the tank, that rings a bell inside, then the commander can open his hatch and talk to the infantry, at some risk, crude, simple but reasonable effective. The Soviet tanks need infantry to keep pace with them and provide them with support during the attack. The Germans and Americans developed half tracks to carry their infantry into action along side their tanks. The German half tracks were complex difficult to build, costly, and always in short supply, not forgetting that they didn’t have the fuel they needed for them. The American half track was simple, easy to build, relatively cheap and they had thousands of them and the fuel to fuel them. The British used a mix of American half tracks, and their own fully tracked infantry carrier, the most produced armoured vehicle of history. The Soviets welded handles on their tanks for their tank rider and infantry, who were predominantly equipped with SMG’s, to hold onto while riding the tanks into battle. Yes the losses of infantry were horrific, but there were always more infantry tank riders to replace those lost in combat. There was no history of clever individuals coming up with a brilliant cunning idea and getting it implemented in the Soviet Union, that was a good way to get you a bullet in the back of the head. So the Soviets didn’t develop specialist armour.
The Germans were then as they are now some of the finest engineers in the world, they produced some brilliant and innovative equipment. Sadly for them mostly never enough, and constrained by the madness that was the government and leadership. The Germans did come up with some brilliant innovations during the war, and were fantastic at adapting old and out of date foreign equipment, especially armour for their own use. But they failed to take into account the problems this would cause with their own already supply chain, and the provision of spares to keep this equipment working. In the long run, it’s no good having a fantastic self propelled artillery peace, built on an obsolete French tank with an obsolete Check gun, for which you have only a limited number of spare parts. You should have done the work and designed your SP gun to use only German produced parts from day one, as did the British and the Americans. The British and the Americans used the M3 tank and the Canadian version of it, to produce the M6 Priest and the M7 Sexton, which were fitted with their respective field guns, the American 105 and the British 25 pounder. This simplified the supply of ammunition, it was the same as the rest of the army was using, and made maintenance easy as there was already a supply chain of spares established. The other problem was that German innovation tended to be top down, and not bottom up, driven by a requirement to produce something required, decided from on high. The Germans tend to have a problem with cheap, nasty, and poorly produced. The German Panzerfaust was cheap nasty but well made, and they constantly developed it to be better, the British PIAT was equally cheap nasty and not as well made. It had only one advantage over the Panzerfaust, you could use it in an enclosed space, and the British only tried to make it cheaper during the war. Then soon after the war was over, scraped it and looked for something better. Germany didn’t produce the wealth of specialist armour that the British did, it wasn’t in their caricature and didn’t fit the philosophy of how to fight.
American engineers were as good as the Germans in design, and far ahead of them in production design, with the added advantage of nearly unlimited resources and space to develop their ideas in. You want a thousand tanks a month to a new design, we will build a completely new factory and have it in production within a year, no problem. Nor where the Americans as adverse to bottom up innovation, you only have to look at the invention of the Rhino plow post D-Day to cope with the Normandy Bocage. Reputed to have been invented by Curtis G Culin, it was rapidly taken up using scrap iron from the beach defences, before production was shipped across the channel to Britain. However the basic American system wasn’t set up to produce one offs or short runs, ten thousand identical units over the next year, again no problem. But ten specials ASAP, bodged together from a design done on the back of a fag packet, now that can be a problem. And the American military administration had its way of doing things, it tends towards a slightly more bureaucratic and formal method than the British, more in turn with American business practices. Unlike in Britain no way would a ship builder have lunch with the owner of a shipping company, and on just a nod and a handshake, without formal plans and contracts closely examined by both companies lawyers and accounts, build a ship. Yes in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbour, it is reputed that a government official sat in a room with a pile of contracts, and having shouted out what the contract was for, took the best offer from the gathered major industrialists. Americans did do cheap and nasty, but they tended to put a little more polish on the final product. Look at two war production SMG’S, the British Sten and the American M3 Grease Gun, the first the Sten was every bit as bad as it was reputed to be, cheap nasty and bloody dangerous to use. The M3 was on the other hand probably the best cheap SMG produced during the war, so while the British started working on a better SMG during the war, the Americans were happy to use the M3 right up until the nineties. Remember for the Americans. there is a a right way, a wrong way, but best of all, the American way. And they didn’t take to being told that’s not the way to do it, especially from some dam limey.
The British do have excellent engineers, among, the best in the world, however thanks to their Victorian attitude, they tended towards one bands, not used to working as part of a team..This was changing slowly, thanks to the importation of attitudes from Germany and America brought in to Britain, by international companies who set up shop in Britain during the inter war years, to get around Imperial Preference. Ford would have loved to produce all its cars in America, and just exported them throughout the world. But they found that very few people wanted their designs, which were optimised for American roads, and the various import duties designed to protect the various domestic and imperial markets, made their vehicles expensive. So they as did others set up shop in Britain, employed locals and trained them in the Ford way, then got them to produce designs optimised for the local market. And they found they had a small advantage, British designers were used to producing slightly different designs to suit the local market in various different colonies, what worked in Nigeria didn’t necessarily work as well in Kenya. Prior to WWII, Ford Dagenham was the largest Ford factory complex outside of America. When you combine the British flexibility in production, with a very bottom up attitude in the British military. Remember the British were used to their officers providing local solutions to local problems and adapting equipment to suit their needs. So IOTL the British determined to fight a highly mecergised war, took a so so tank the Churchill, and adapted it to do everything bar dance, float, and be a mine flail. The floating tank and the mine flail, were adapted from the American Sherman for a number of reasons. There was also the Centaur bulldozer built on the hull of the the less than successful Centaur Tank. The Churchill tank was in many ways ideal for the development of specialist armour, while its engine was weak, and its driver system not the best. Its old fashion design, suspension, thick armour and the side doors designed originally as emergency exits.
So we have ITTL, Percy Hobart, who passed out of Woolwich in 1904 as an Officer of Engineers, serving in India pre WWI, then in France and Mesopotamia during WWI, and India post war, before attending Staff college in Camberley, before committing what was in the eyes of many the cardinal sin of switching cap badges and transferring to the Royal Tank Corps. He was an instructor at the staff college in Quetta for a number of years, before holding various appointments including command of the first armoured brigade in Britain. Appointed Major General in command of the Western Desert Force, what was to become the famous Desert Rats, he managed to seriously get up a large number of noses. However he has as he was been dismissed from the Army, but this time he has been recalled and put in charge of an experimental unit in Chertsey, a roll that he is uniquely qualified for. Percy was a brilliant if at times undiplomatic man, who didn’t suffer fools gladly, and a superb trainer of men, as was his equally difficult brother-in-law, Montgomery. He will be surrounded by some of the various eccentric characters that helped to build Britains range of specialist armour, and every man with an off the wall idea, will soon know where and to whom to send it too.
Problems, the Churchill Tank of OTL doesn’t as yet exist, but Vauxhall are working on a prototype that in OTL, would eventually become the Churchill. However with Percy and others around, there is a good chance that the worst faults of the Churchill will be avoided. Primarily it’s weak power plant, given an engine producing 400 to 450 hp, instead of the 350 hp it was fitted with IOTL. Yes it would be nice to fit it with a Meteor producing 600 hp, but even that wouldn’t push it snail like top speed up by much, as it tracks and suspension weren’t designed for high speed. So the fantasy is that a combination of Percy’s brilliant engineering skills, a better Churchill tank, and the British ability to bodge together parts in unusual ways. Along with the various other mad men coming up with unusual solutions to various problems, how do you design the hydraulic system to deploy a scissor bridge from a tank. You don’t, as a Canadian engineer pointed out, far easier to use a bloody long screw, hence the Valentine scissor bridge layer of OTL. ITTL you may by mid 1943 have the equivalent of the 79th devision, fully equipped with specialist tanks, that have been fully tested and had the bugs worked out. With all the crews fully trained in using their kit, and the rest of the Army used to the kit and what it can and can not do.
RR.
A very good analysis. However, I feel the geography of the conflict also needs mentioning America was not (despite the fears of a number of its citizens), really capable of being attacked in any force by its opponents. Britain was 22 miles from occupied France, and had been subjected to a sustained bombardment before the USA was even in the war. I think this probably contributed a sense of urgency to the British mindset, leading to a number of "we need this now, whether it works well or not" type decisions, which tend to produce lower-quality equipment. In effect, they'll accept an bit of equipment that will do the job most of the time, even if it's not the best.
Pretty much what was said above though on the subject of the Sten and the submachine gun that came around the same time the Lancaster, both were developed in the panic after the fall of france where they needed something right now and had no one who was experienced in both the desgin and development of a submachine gun. Indeed I believe they were both based on a confiscated German WW1 submachine gun from the Ethiopian boarder.
Add into this the rushed development after the fall of France where they were trying to replace all the kit they lost there as well as make up for short comings led to both the Sten and the Lancaster because it was a case of they needed them there and now and the Thompson was bloody expensive and old hat by that point.
Add into this the rushed development after the fall of France where they were trying to replace all the kit they lost there as well as make up for short comings led to both the Sten and the Lancaster because it was a case of they needed them there and now and the Thompson was bloody expensive and old hat by that point.
Ramp-Rat
Monthly Donor
Matt II, is perfectly correct, in that the major advantage that the Americans had over all the other principal industrial powers was space. The space between it and any of its enemies, so that it was virtually immune from attack, by land or air. There was a small danger of having some areas shelled from the sea, but only by a submarine, you weren’t going to sail a cruiser or battleship up to the coast and blast away. This meant that you could build your war production factories big, really big, and benefit from the savings that come from automation and economies of scale. They could also, provided you were far enough away from principally the East Coast, run your factory 24/7 under artificial light, without having to worry about blackout. Their rail shunting and goods yards, could work under floodlights at night. People in big inland cities could move about at night, in fully lit streets, shops could have fully lit windows. While trucks and trains could move at night with all their lights on. Americas new ship assembly yards, built to assemble Liberty Ships, could also work under floodlights. Britains ship yards, had to work at night with all the restrictions of the blackout. The Americans could and did build a massive factory to assemble their brand new super bomber, the B29, Britain had to make a virtue of their ability to disperse production, and build the Lancaster in identical parts in different factories, then assemble it. This did have one advantage, a badly damaged Lancaster, could be taken apart and used for spares for other Lancaster's, or the broken section taken out and a new section put in place. Another major advantage that the Americans had, was the skilled engineers who could design complex machine tools, and the machine tool industry, to make the tools. This did however cause problems, it was hard to stop production and make a change in the specification and produce a new model. This was a big problem especially in the aircraft industry, were the British could normally tinker with the line and introduce minor changes in specifications, only stopping the line for a completely new model. The Americans would just keep banging out what they were making. Then they would set up a separate facility to incorporate the changes, and then run the already completed aircraft through the facility and have the changes implemented. Germany over engineered, and tried for too long to maintain peace time standards. America came up with a design, which might not be perfect, then built millions of them to a high standard. Britain did when necessary build to a very high standard, but with more hand working at the bench by skilled workers. The Soviet Union were the ultimate believers in KISS, keep it simple stupid. And the best example of this is the tracks on the T34, tracks are held together by track pins. The Germans, British and Americans, all developed a clip/fastening, to prevent the track pin coming lose and the track separating. The Soviets didn’t bother, they just welded a block to the side of the tank, that thumped any pin that had come lose back in to place, as it parsed the block.
RR.
RR.
Yes it was, but the russians relized that a new tank would be gone after 6 to 8 weeks in combat, why bother with finish work etc..
They obviously didn't seem to realise the fact that a tanks should last long enough for a crew to train on it, or at least, that providing a few extra tanks to allow the crews to do at least basic training would really do wonders for their ability to actually fight in it.
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