NEW VANGUARD • 141
DAVID FLETCHER | ILLUSTRATED BY TONY BRYAN |
Anyone who studies tank history is, in the end, bound to conclude that the most important feature of any tank is its gun. True, there are other factors. If you’re a member of the crew, then protection comes high on the list. Those who conduct battles would favour excellent mobility, while others will be heard demanding greater reliability, improved communications, or longer range. All of these things are important. But when it comes down to it, the gun is what it is all about, and that gun, in the majority of cases, is required to be particularly good at destroying other tanks.
There are reasons why British tank armament failed to keep pace in the early years of World War II. Some of them are justifiable, but the majority are not. In summer 1940, following the dramatic events culminating in the fall of France, MajGen Vyvyan Pope told the War Office that the next generation of tanks would need more powerful guns. The trouble was that the next generation of tanks, particularly the Crusader, had already been designed around the existing 2-pounder gun (see New Vanguard 14: Crusader and Covenanter Cruiser Tanks 1939–45), and nobody seems to have considered making arrangements for improving things if and when a new gun became available.
31 August 1944: a Firefly of Guards Armoured Division crossing the railway at Beaurains. A good deal of foliage, held in place by a net, has been draped over the hull with similar applications over the turret and gun. Spare track links appear on the front of the hull and sides of the turret, but most obvious of all is the Prong device at the front, a variation on Sgt Culin’s inspired design. All are suggestive of service in the Bocage country.
Lulworth was undoubtedly the spiritual home of the Firefly, and this VC sports the cannon insignia of the Royal Armoured Corps Gunnery School. It is an early conversion, fitted with brackets for the Houseboat disguise. Note also the patch of armour used to seal off the redundant hull machine gun aperture.
That had to wait until a further generation of tanks, typified by the Cromwell, appeared (see New Vanguard 104: Cromwell Cruiser Tank 1942–50), but this took so long to happen that the tank was already out of date when it entered service, and once again, the designers had failed to build in the ability to improve, should a better weapon appear. Of course, the Cromwell was a special case. Its introduction had been delayed by the need to replace tanks lost in France, and the same was true of its gun, the 57mm 6-pounder. British practice, since the advent of the 2-pounder, was to design a gun to fit a field carriage, and once that was in production, to alter the gun to suit a tank mounting.
Yet production of the 6-pounder was in arrears while the Army’s lost stock of 2-pounder anti-tank guns was replaced. As a result, although the new cruiser tank, the Cromwell, was designed to take the 6-pounder, by the time it was considered fit for service, the priority had changed. The dedicated anti-tank gun was out of favour for tanks, and in any case, with regular ammunition, the 6-pounder was effectively out of date. Thus, no Cromwell tank ever actually went into action with the 6-pounder, which for other reasons, was something of a pity.
The Ministry of Information film A Date with a Tank, released in 1944, offered a dramatic portrayal of the design and construction of the first batch of 17-pounder anti-tank guns against a deadline to have some of them in the field before the rumoured German heavy tank, the Pz Kpfw VI Tiger, put in an appearance. There was an element of truth in this, although the timescale was shortened for dramatic effect.
Thinking in the Royal Artillery was far ahead of those responsible for designing British tanks. This is illustrated by the fact that the very first requirement for an anti-tank gun of about a 3-in. calibre, firing a projectile weighing about 17lb, was being considered as early as 21 November 1940. That was a year before the first 6-pounder anti-tank gun – the weapon it was due to supersede – entered production.
In the meantime, just to confuse the issue, British tank and gun designers had been led away from the true path by unfortunate experience and heretical foreign practice. The experience was Gen Erwin Rommel’s habit of intermingling tanks and anti-tank guns, and the latter, being small and inconspicuous, were difficult targets for a gun that only fired a small calibre round of solid shot. The heresy, which came as a package with successive American medium tank designs, was the belief that tanks should be a form of mobile artillery to support the infantry first and secondly, an anti-tank gun, since that role, according to American doctrine, was reserved for something that looked like a tank but wasn’t a tank, known optimistically as a Tank Destroyer. Thus an American tank gun of this period was a dual-purpose weapon capable of firing both high explosive and armour-piercing ammunition. It was pounced upon with delight by British tank crews as an antidote to Rommel’s anti-tank gun menace, and for a while at least, something that could match German armour in a tank-versus-tank fight. Yet the Germans were soon ahead of the game once more. In summer 1942, they introduced an improved version of the Panzer IV with a long, high-velocity anti-tank gun that opened up fighting ranges even more and placed the British at a disadvantage yet again. It is probably worth remarking at this stage that German schemes to up-gun their existing tanks not only did so without affecting the tank’s general performance, but they also involved improvements in armour protection.
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1. SHERMAN VC FIREFLY, 21ST ARMOURED REGIMENT, 4TH CANADIAN ARMOURED BRIGADE, 4TH CANADIAN ARMOURED DIVISION, NOVEMBER 1944 |
The idea that adding surplus track links to your tank could improve the armour protection seems to be universal. It could be found applied to British tanks in Gaza in 1917 and on Challenger tanks in the Gulf in 1991; but it reached a high point in World War II, most particularly among Canadian armoured regiments who in effect covered their Shermans with whatever type of track they could find. A British officer who studied the phenomenon at the time pronounced it totally ineffective. All it did, in his view, was to increase the weight of the tank to an unacceptable level. However, he also recognized that it was a symptom of the crews’ lack of confidence in the armour of their tanks. Indeed, he said, crews had firm beliefs in how these track links should be arranged and attached. Some believed that the tracks should be fixed with the outer surface outwards; others insisted that the inner surface should face outwards so that incoming rounds might be deflected by raised portions. Then there were those who welded the tracks to the hull, while others recommended that they should hang loose and absorb some of the impact. Whatever the system, the tracks added a fair amount of weight to a tank that was already overloaded, but they seem to have survived. Markings, of course, were totally obscured. | |
Under the Canadian system armoured regiments were simply numbered, but all had fine traditional titles; 21st Armoured Regiment was the prosaic alternative for the Governor General’s Foot Guards. In October and November 1944 they were in action east of Bruges, up to the Scheldt estuary. | |
2. SHERMAN IC FIREFLY WITH TULIP ROCKETS, C SQUADRON, 1ST COLDSTREAM GUARDS, GUARDS ARMOURED DIVISION, NEAR BREMEN, 12 APRIL 1945 | |
During the fighting in the Rhineland, over the winter of 1944–45, 1st Battalion The Coldstream Guards acquired some rockets and launching rails normally fitted beneath the wings of Hawker Typhoon fighters for use in the ground attack role. Not having enough to equip the entire regiment, the regimental fitters were told to fit them to the tanks of C Squadron, Fireflies and regular Shermans alike. | |
It was a peculiar thing to do. The rockets with their 60lb warhead were devastating enough but, even when fired from a diving aircraft, were not renowned for their precision or accuracy. Launched from a tank, which had to halt in order to fire, they were wildly inaccurate but most spectacular. In our drawing one of C Squadron’s Fireflies has just fired a Tulip, as the rockets were called, and awaits the result. The rockets were suspended from launching rails on either side of the turret, aimed using the tank commander’s sighting vane and then fired electrically. With no other velocity behind it the rocket first dips, then picks up speed and races away in the general direction of the target. There is no evidence that a rocket was ever fired at a German AFV, which it probably would not have hit in any case – if it had the results might have been quite impressive. | |
The missiles were usually used against manned road blocks or woods where enemy troops might be hiding and the effect was salutary. Road blocks were simply blown away, while anyone who thought they were safe in a wood invariably changed their minds and surrendered after they had experienced a rocket or two from the receiving end. Whether the attachments were ever worth the trouble of fitting, the risks of carrying them is another matter altogether. |