Hallelujah !Byron Angel wrote:lwd wrote:No it was the lack of demand from the army in the field not the R&D organization.Byron Angel wrote: ..... What inspired the British to undertake their 17-pdr program? My "reading between the lines" of the history suggests a case of bureaucratic inertia and arrogance on the part of departments much too far away and disconnected from the actual battle front - similar to the US torpedo debacle. My opinion, of course.
From Hunnicut - "By the Fall of 1943, the Armored Board had concluded that only the Sherman could be available in sufficient quantity in time for the Normandy invasion. They then requested that 90mm guns be installed in 1000 M4A3s. Ordnance did not concur, contending that the heavier weapon badly overlaoded the Sherman and that the proper solution was the early production of the new T20 series with the 90mm gun. The Armored Board request was rejected by the Army Ground Forces on the grounds that the destruction of enemy tanks was a job for the artillery and the tank destroyers. It was felt that the provision of such a powerful gun would encourage tank versus tank battles thus diverting tanks from their role as a maneuvering element and weapon of exploitation."
Byron
We've remembered that in the case of the anti-tank gun , someone has to trundle the thing about ( usually the poor bloody infantry ) . You should have heard what they had to say about the 32pounder later again ! or the germans about the "Scheuentor" ( = barn door ) 88mm .
And in the case of the tank , that its primary job is NOT to fight other tanks , but to bust through defensive lines and go ripping about behind the enemy lines in the offensive , and to act as a mobile pill-box in the defensive . And in both situations to do it in concert with the conventional infantry and artillery forces .
One subquestion no-one has addressed is why , given that we were first in the field , and spent a lot of time producing and testing different designs between the wars , and that our gunmaking is good , why were British tanks such consistent dogs ?
I can only think of (some of) the Matilda models early on , and the Cromwell much later as being like anything reasonable , and that had a small gun and bad armour inclination and only came out at the end of the war .
Even the postwar Centurion had a poorly inclined cast turret , it seems that only now with the Chieftan/Challengers have we got something to compare with contemporaries .
Nearly all the tanks we sent to Russia never appear to have been used , the only thing they liked about the Valentine was its engine . Same with the hundreds of Hurricane fighters , might as well have tipped them off the pier in Birkenhead .