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Started reading about British tanks during WWII and one of the main failings of the domestic models seems to of been a distinct lack of a high explosive shell. Now that appears to have been thanks to a combination of armoured doctrine saying that tanks are for mostly combating other tanks, the Royal Artillery being a bit arsey and operating on the assumption that any high explosive shells should be coming out of their guns, and some puzzling institutional slowness on developing new marks of equipment. All of which meant they had great shells against tanks, but against anti-tank guns and infantry where you need a good high explosive one they were kind of a bit buggered. So can someone confirm my initial reading of things? Thanks.
2-pounder (39mm) gun: More than enough against any enemy tanks it was likely to meet in the early stages of the war, against 88mm Flak guns horribly outranged roughly 5:1, whilst high explosive shell designed never put into production and would probably of been too small to really be effective anyway.
6-pounder (57mm) gun: Somewhat of an improvement, started out mainly as an anti-tank gun - and even then had a fair bit of useless delays - but provided decent service on tanks, able to penetrate enemy tanks of the time and finally a high explosive shell issued but not all that great as shell was too small, only outranged 10:1 by an 88mm gun.
75mm Medium Velocity (MV) gun: American, used on M3s as a hull mounted gun or M4s as the main turret gun, excellent high explosive shell - possibly best of the war for the Allies, medium rather than high velocity made it good for high explosive but not so great for anti-tank work due to lower velocity, still capable of taking out anything until the Tigers showed up though, outranged by an 88mm gun roughly 8:1.
17-pounder (76.2mm) / 77mm High Velocity (HV) gun: Now we're cook with gas, originally started as an anti-tank gun but converted to fit into tanks, originally developed to fire the 75mm shells at a higher velocity but changes meant regular 17-pounder and 77mm HV shells weren't interchangeable - hence the name, excellent anti-tank capability thanks to high velocity but also means less great with high explosive shells due to both high velocity and resultant shell design, high explosive shell issued at the beginning considered fairly rubbish, not fixed until Mk II version, outranged by an 88mm only 7.5:1 - whoo!
Now for the 17-pounder/77mm the high velocity meant that they had to build up and strengthen the walls of the high explosive shells leaving less space for the explosive itself, this being solved by taking the seemingly obvious step of simply reducing the charge in the MK II version so that it had a lower velocity and allowed thinner-walled shells. Unfortunately it didn't happen until 1944 or work through to units in combat until 1945. There was also the factor that the UK apparently used cheaper steel to make their shells so had a poorer charge/weight ration than compared to US ones. Does anyone know why the obvious solution of simply reducing the charge for the 77mm high explosive shell to make it lower velocity wasn't introduced much sooner? The whole story of British tank development seems to be one of missed opportunities and on the face of them rather puzzling delays, once I've finished a bit of reading probably going to start looking at how things could of possibly been nudged along with the fewest and smallest possible points of departure.