Some later production A13 Cruiser Mk.IV tanks had their frontal armour increased to 30mm. plus some were equipped with 3 inch howitzers and designated as A13CS tanks. These only served in the North African theatre during 1940 to 1941, until being replaced by the A15 Crusader tanks. I've held and examined a 2 pounder HE shell, back in 1986. The 2 pounder HE shell is a long, cylindrical, serrated, blunt ended cast iron "stick" with a Hotchkiss Mk.XIV base mounted fuse. The shell is intended to strike the ground and skip into the air, before detonating and distributing fragments in all directions. The explosive filler was 1.89 pounds Lidite granules. The shells were mainly issued to anti-tank gun units, for use against enemy infantry. There was also the 1934 pattern APHE shell, of which 164,000 were made, before production was stopped. These failed to meet the new War Department specification that stipulated that 70% of hits on a vertical 25mm. thick test target, made of Vickers Vibrax RHA, should cleanly penetrate at a range of 500 yards. The 1934 pattern APHE shells achieved less than 30% in trials. These now useless shells were never issued for combat use, instead being used up for target practice, in the UK. I have an innert and unfired 2 pounder APHE shell here, on a shelf, complete with Hotchkiss Mk.XIV base mounted fuse.
Funny, I cannot find any source mentioning HE Shells for AT Gun Crews. All I know are reports that regret the lack of HE Shells for Anti Infantry use. The HE Shell for the 37mm AT Gun on German side was widely used and praised, but it seems that the British always struggled to integrate HE ammunition into their Tanks and AT Guns. It seems mostly because the Artillery Branch watched with eagles eyes that nobody except them was able to shoot HE Shells. Strange. By the way, I know that AT Gun Crews in North Africa used the Bofors 37mm for a while and also praised the available HE Shells for this gun (if i remember correctly they used confiscated Egyptian Guns as QF 37mm MK1)
The fact was that in the UK the army did very little tank engine development in the pre-war period. the engines available were relatively low power truck engines around 150-200 bhp. These would drive a 15 ton Cruiser tank at 25mph or a 25 ton Infantry tank at 15mph. The Nuffield A13 Cruiser used a US Liberty 340 bhp aero engine which worked well on the 15-16 ton A13 MkII. However in heavier tanks such as the 18ton A15 Crusader, the Liberty proved unreliable. Things did not improve until 1943 when the 600 bhp Rolls Royce Meteor was produced, mounted on Cromwell, A30 Challenger, Comet and the superb Centurion.
While I absolutely agree with you that engines, or rather lack of a really good tank engine until the RR Meteor was a major reason behind why tank design in the UK went the way it did, its hardly the armies fault. The British Army in the interwar years was very much the red headed stepchild of the military. It got VERY limited funding from the Government, and the Government and Treasury were more than willing to place strict, and in many cases absolutely ridiculous restrictions on equipment procurement. I point to the travesty of the Valentine Mk I as an example of Treasury and Government parsimony having a direct impact on British armoured vehicle development. About the ONLY saving grace of the Valentine Mk I was it was cheap, which was also the primary requirement stipulated by the Treasury.... Fact is the Army itself is not the organisation that 'develops' things like tank engines. So putting the blame on them is rather foolish. The RAF would not have had access to the excellent Rolls Royce Merlin if Rolls Royce had not seen fit to develop it in the first place, which it did because unlike for tanks, there were regular orders for ever more powerful aircraft engines. In the interwar years the British Army had to make do with what it could beg, borrow and blatantly steal, and that was not necessarily what it actually wanted. People forget that in the early to mid thirties Britain was arguably leading the way into active research into armoured warfare development. Indeed the first concepts of the idea of the Universal tank, which would eventually go on to become the centurion started to appear around that period. The problem was that the Government and Treasury were VERY unwilling to give the Army the kind of money required for them to properly develop their ideas, or to properly fund industrial research into adequate tank engines.... Which is why we ended up with the kind of crap we had for the first few years of the war!
Based on the video the only real problem, given it was an early design, with the tank was the lack of armor and the need for a more powerful engine to make up for the weight of thicker armor. Looking at it from a modern perspective it clearly needs sloped armor, a restart of the 2lb HE production line, and a larger turret ring for future upgunning. As for the weight the biggest restriction was the need to ship equipment from the UK to the fighting front. I don't know what the common capacity of British craines and portable bridges was when the tank was designed.
@@billballbuster7186 It also reduces internal volume in the vehicle, which means you have less room in which to put everything else required, like armament, fuel, crew, ammunition etc. People forget that there is actually a downside to sloped armour as well as an advantage. Reduction of internal volume, especially given the limited power of the engines available at the time was a major issue.
Thanks a lot. I'm really interested in the early to mid british tanks. I was always confused about british Tank doctrine ( I Tanks without Hull MG and without the capability to shot HE but a AT Gun, Cruiser Tanks with Hull MG, mostly with the same AT Gun, but some with a howitzer...but mostly only Smoke Shells...???). I don't think that the tank chassis per se were bad, but the conept was uttlery confuse. The the running gear of A9 and A10 Cruisers, while describt as not reliable, was performing rather well with the later Valentine tank... Iz is such a mess to go thru all these models and to understand why some stayed in service while others disappeared. The A10 for example. In Greek they counted as unreliable...but they were praised in North Africa...
Regarding the A10s, they were unreliable in Greece because they were deployed there after already being worn out by the early African campaign, and spare parts were in a really short supply by that point.
@TanksEncyclopediaYT Yep, but it is stunning that this fact was ignored in so many publication. I mean the British Forces knew that they used out worn tanks, but it seems this fact wasn't mentioned, only in later Literatur. If I see Videomaterial of early British tanks, they always seem to run pretty smoothly. The turning of the A13 is just astonishing if you compare it to the German Panzer 3 and 4 movement, which always looks so clumsy. I still believe that the biggest setback of the early British tanks was the missing HE Shell and that they weren't optimized for mass production, nothing else. Even a 2pdr HE Shell, as weak as it may be, is better than no HE at all.
The British army had no modern combined arms doctrine and even late in the war had a really hard time employing their armor correctly. Their armored divisions were poorly organized. Their tank thinking really was a mess - if it makes no sense to you, you're on to something. They did eventually sort out the hardware design with the excellent Centurion in 1945.
The Vickers A9 and A10 were cancelled after short production runs because the Nuffield A13 was a much better tank for the money. The tank designations were British, the Cruiser being the Medium tank and the Infantry was the Heavy tank. They did not have the engines to make Infantry tanks faster. The A9 and A10 were ok on the flat desert, but worked poorly in the Greek mountains. None of the British suspension systems were bad but the "Slow Motion" type used on the A9.A10 and Valentine was best at under 20 mph.
@@executivedirector7467 When late in the war did they have a hard time 'employing their armor correctly'? Please dont't mention Goodwood otherwise I'll conclude you don't know what you're talking about.
The BEF has always been a favourite to research as my Grandad was in the BEF. Always wondering about how he got his 'European star' we thought he was involved in D day but no, he was in Italy... So after he passed and I went through all his diarys, I found the proof although not much information, 1939 - 1940 BEF, he was still in France 'AFTER' Dunkirk when the fighting was still going on. It's so sad he never spoke of this, so, much information has been lost. They were all brave men, we shall never see there like ever again.
Yes, the A13 worked very well but only around 640 were built 1940-41. Its successor the A15 Crusader should have been great, but Nuffield re-designed the Liberty engine to give a lower profile and ruined the reliability.
They all suffered from being sent into service as soon as they were developed rather than having an extensive debugging as well as shortages of some hard to fabricate components, all the variants from 1939-1943 were essentially continued development from the same 1939 prototype entering service as soon as an improvements had been made. MkIV a 30mm uparmoured version did very well in North Africa against German and Italian tanks. MkV was further uparmoured to 40mm protection but had poor ventilation and so wasnt suitable for North Africa, it was deployed for domestic defence and training. The Mk VI had 40-50mm armour and some had their 2pdr increased to a 6pdr, it was considered better than the American Stuart but best employed in a flanking role with heavier armed Sherman and Grants as the punch. The Germans when encountering the Cruisers tended to retreat behind prepared anti-tank defences that the cruisers couldn't counter as they were weaker tank on tank. The Cruiser Mk VI, AKA the Crusader would go on to serve very successfully as the chassis for British AA tanks through the end of the war though and were considered superior to the numerous German AA Tank designs, and the Polish army used them very effectively as Anti-infantry vehicles. The Mk VII-VIII models entering service in 1943/44 were derived from a new branch of the Cruiser design started in 1940 and would include the very successful Cromwell and Comets which remained in service until 1955 and 1958 respectively.
The Christie suspension wasn’t the problem with the Cruiser tanks. It was better than the British designed suspensions for high speed tanks. The problems they had were the paper thin armor, tiny gun that was useless against anti-tank guns, poor build quality, and poor armored tactics.
@ That was because the HE filler it could hold was so small as to make it almost useless. The gun was so high velocity it needed to have very thick shell walls to survive firing, which left little room for the explosive. This is the reason the US M3 75mm was liked and kept in use even as it became less effective against German tanks. Its lower velocity meant its HE shell was more effective against soft targets like AT guns and infantry than the ones from higher velocity but larger bore guns like the 76mm or British 17 Pounder. Soft targets were the most common things tanks fought after all.
In 5 years the evolution of tanks made the tanks used in 1940 to become outdated and unusable in front line engagements. Yet in the current conflict in Ukraine both sides have sometimes used tanks that were built not long after WW2. Nothing like a World War to accelerate technology at light speed. Although the technology has evolved today’s militaries are still using technology developed during WW2 like tanks, jets, rockets, shaped charges and machine guns still very similar to the mg42 and the list goes on.
well TBF the church had 8mm more frontal armor than a tiger 1. the problem is the brits were fantasizing cavalry charges of old but with tanks. but they forgot how well those worked against modern weapons when using horses. so they made tanks just as easy to kill as a horse. with the same results.
Uhuh.... Issue with that statement is the development of the Centurion, which was by far and away, under every metric you decide to use, the best tank to come out of WWII. You do NOT develop a tank that good accidentally. Especially not when you see the restrictions that plagued earlier British tank designs lifted for Centurion, like the width restriction that was meant to allow the tanks to be transported by the rail system, but was set low to account or some very old tunnels on said rail system. That width restriction was a major problem a it restricted the turret ring size, and its the size of the turret ring that largely determines the upper limit of the main gun mounted. The British started development of the Centurion in 1943, the first production models were running off the lines right at the end of the war, but design started over two years before that. So the British knew EXACTLY what type of tank they wanted, as a tank as good as the Centurion is NOT an accidental occurrence. Last time I looked 1943 is still during the war.... Also explain to me why in 1944, the British Army in France was the most heavily armoured of the Allied Nations. It had a higher proportion of Armoured Divisions in relation to Infantry Divisions than any other army of WWII. Arguably they actually went TOO far in that regard as one of the major issues they had late war was not lack of tanks, but shortages of infantry manpower....
the tank did what they wanted it to do. the problem isnt the tank. its the fact what they wanted it to do, turned out to not be a thing on the modern battlefield
@@executivedirector7467 well my thinking is this i imagine IF the war had been carried out the way they imagined it would, with these tanks making charges at speed and overwhelming the enemy, would they have been good at that? and they would have. the intent was to go up against people they thought would just have mortars and machine guns, they didnt understand the germans brought a combined arms team to warfare as it wasnt yet a thing.. anyway IF that sort of war had happened i think theyd have been ok as designed but thats my uneducated opinion. im no tactician or tank designer ( unless you count legos as a child)
I think only changes I'd make for the cruiser Mk III would be the addition of return rollers and sloping the sides of the front plate to enhance protection. But overall. Good lil cruiser tank
@@ripvanwinkle2002 better track tensioning during bumpy movement and it looks better. heck look at the comet. that used the suspension with return rollers
@@executivedirector7467 At the time of design the gun was actually fine. A two pounder was more or less within the standard range of main guns mounted to tanks for that period. A fact you conveniently overlook. You conveniently overlook the fact that the German Panzer III, which was the primary German battle tank of the same period (in theory), also only carried a 37mm gun. In fact you conveniently overlook a great deal. Which makes any opinion you express far from reliable as far as I am concerned.
![KSI - Dirty [Official Visualiser]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/VoDh1h1dPUE/mqdefault.jpg)
Some later production A13 Cruiser Mk.IV tanks had their frontal armour increased to 30mm. plus some were equipped with 3 inch howitzers and designated as A13CS tanks. These only served in the North African theatre during 1940 to 1941, until being replaced by the A15 Crusader tanks.
I've held and examined a 2 pounder HE shell, back in 1986.
The 2 pounder HE shell is a long, cylindrical, serrated, blunt ended cast iron "stick" with a Hotchkiss Mk.XIV base mounted fuse. The shell is intended to strike the ground and skip into the air, before detonating and distributing fragments in all directions. The explosive filler was 1.89 pounds Lidite granules. The shells were mainly issued to anti-tank gun units, for use against enemy infantry.
There was also the 1934 pattern APHE shell, of which 164,000 were made, before production was stopped. These failed to meet the new War Department specification that stipulated that 70% of hits on a vertical 25mm. thick test target, made of Vickers Vibrax RHA, should cleanly penetrate at a range of 500 yards. The 1934 pattern APHE shells achieved less than 30% in trials. These now useless shells were never issued for combat use, instead being used up for target practice, in the UK. I have an innert and unfired 2 pounder APHE shell here, on a shelf, complete with Hotchkiss Mk.XIV base mounted fuse.
Funny, I cannot find any source mentioning HE Shells for AT Gun Crews.
All I know are reports that regret the lack of HE Shells for Anti Infantry use.
The HE Shell for the 37mm AT Gun on German side was widely used and praised, but it seems that the British always struggled to integrate HE ammunition into their Tanks and AT Guns. It seems mostly because the Artillery Branch watched with eagles eyes that nobody except them was able to shoot HE Shells.
Strange.
By the way, I know that AT Gun Crews in North Africa used the Bofors 37mm for a while and also praised the available HE Shells for this gun (if i remember correctly they used confiscated Egyptian Guns as QF 37mm MK1)
@@papaaaaaaa2625 You're right. No HE shells were ever issued to tank units. This is why they got massacred by towed guns.
The fact was that in the UK the army did very little tank engine development in the pre-war period. the engines available were relatively low power truck engines around 150-200 bhp. These would drive a 15 ton Cruiser tank at 25mph or a 25 ton Infantry tank at 15mph. The Nuffield A13 Cruiser used a US Liberty 340 bhp aero engine which worked well on the 15-16 ton A13 MkII. However in heavier tanks such as the 18ton A15 Crusader, the Liberty proved unreliable. Things did not improve until 1943 when the 600 bhp Rolls Royce Meteor was produced, mounted on Cromwell, A30 Challenger, Comet and the superb Centurion.
While I absolutely agree with you that engines, or rather lack of a really good tank engine until the RR Meteor was a major reason behind why tank design in the UK went the way it did, its hardly the armies fault.
The British Army in the interwar years was very much the red headed stepchild of the military. It got VERY limited funding from the Government, and the Government and Treasury were more than willing to place strict, and in many cases absolutely ridiculous restrictions on equipment procurement. I point to the travesty of the Valentine Mk I as an example of Treasury and Government parsimony having a direct impact on British armoured vehicle development. About the ONLY saving grace of the Valentine Mk I was it was cheap, which was also the primary requirement stipulated by the Treasury....
Fact is the Army itself is not the organisation that 'develops' things like tank engines. So putting the blame on them is rather foolish. The RAF would not have had access to the excellent Rolls Royce Merlin if Rolls Royce had not seen fit to develop it in the first place, which it did because unlike for tanks, there were regular orders for ever more powerful aircraft engines.
In the interwar years the British Army had to make do with what it could beg, borrow and blatantly steal, and that was not necessarily what it actually wanted.
People forget that in the early to mid thirties Britain was arguably leading the way into active research into armoured warfare development. Indeed the first concepts of the idea of the Universal tank, which would eventually go on to become the centurion started to appear around that period. The problem was that the Government and Treasury were VERY unwilling to give the Army the kind of money required for them to properly develop their ideas, or to properly fund industrial research into adequate tank engines....
Which is why we ended up with the kind of crap we had for the first few years of the war!
Hell yeah, a new video!
New video!! Tank encyclopedia, could you do the tiger II H for Part I and P for Part II? I'd like to know about the tiger II
Based on the video the only real problem, given it was an early design, with the tank was the lack of armor and the need for a more powerful engine to make up for the weight of thicker armor. Looking at it from a modern perspective it clearly needs sloped armor, a restart of the 2lb HE production line, and a larger turret ring for future upgunning. As for the weight the biggest restriction was the need to ship equipment from the UK to the fighting front. I don't know what the common capacity of British craines and portable bridges was when the tank was designed.
Problems were: terrible engines, terrible gun (no HE) and terrible doctrine.
Slopped armour was heavier than stepped plate for a similar degree of protection. That is the reason the British were slow in adopting it.
@@billballbuster7186 It also reduces internal volume in the vehicle, which means you have less room in which to put everything else required, like armament, fuel, crew, ammunition etc.
People forget that there is actually a downside to sloped armour as well as an advantage. Reduction of internal volume, especially given the limited power of the engines available at the time was a major issue.
Thanks a lot. I'm really interested in the early to mid british tanks.
I was always confused about british Tank doctrine ( I Tanks without Hull MG and without the capability to shot HE but a AT Gun, Cruiser Tanks with Hull MG, mostly with the same AT Gun, but some with a howitzer...but mostly only Smoke Shells...???).
I don't think that the tank chassis per se were bad, but the conept was uttlery confuse.
The the running gear of A9 and A10 Cruisers, while describt as not reliable, was performing rather well with the later Valentine tank...
Iz is such a mess to go thru all these models and to understand why some stayed in service while others disappeared.
The A10 for example. In Greek they counted as unreliable...but they were praised in North Africa...
Regarding the A10s, they were unreliable in Greece because they were deployed there after already being worn out by the early African campaign, and spare parts were in a really short supply by that point.
@TanksEncyclopediaYT Yep, but it is stunning that this fact was ignored in so many publication.
I mean the British Forces knew that they used out worn tanks, but it seems this fact wasn't mentioned, only in later Literatur.
If I see Videomaterial of early British tanks, they always seem to run pretty smoothly.
The turning of the A13 is just astonishing if you compare it to the German Panzer 3 and 4 movement, which always looks so clumsy.
I still believe that the biggest setback of the early British tanks was the missing HE Shell and that they weren't optimized for mass production, nothing else.
Even a 2pdr HE Shell, as weak as it may be, is better than no HE at all.
The British army had no modern combined arms doctrine and even late in the war had a really hard time employing their armor correctly. Their armored divisions were poorly organized. Their tank thinking really was a mess - if it makes no sense to you, you're on to something.
They did eventually sort out the hardware design with the excellent Centurion in 1945.
The Vickers A9 and A10 were cancelled after short production runs because the Nuffield A13 was a much better tank for the money. The tank designations were British, the Cruiser being the Medium tank and the Infantry was the Heavy tank. They did not have the engines to make Infantry tanks faster. The A9 and A10 were ok on the flat desert, but worked poorly in the Greek mountains. None of the British suspension systems were bad but the "Slow Motion" type used on the A9.A10 and Valentine was best at under 20 mph.
@@executivedirector7467 When late in the war did they have a hard time 'employing their armor correctly'? Please dont't mention Goodwood otherwise I'll conclude you don't know what you're talking about.
Well TY
Lequesne ( LEE -CANE)!
The BEF has always been a favourite to research as my Grandad was in the BEF. Always wondering about how he got his 'European star' we thought he was involved in D day but no, he was in Italy... So after he passed and I went through all his diarys, I found the proof although not much information, 1939 - 1940 BEF, he was still in France 'AFTER' Dunkirk when the fighting was still going on. It's so sad he never spoke of this, so, much information has been lost. They were all brave men, we shall never see there like ever again.
A13's were a major part of the initial defeat of the Italians in 40-41.
Yes, because Italian tanks were REALLY bad.
Yes, the A13 worked very well but only around 640 were built 1940-41. Its successor the A15 Crusader should have been great, but Nuffield re-designed the Liberty engine to give a lower profile and ruined the reliability.
The german captured and used ones, recived new german made tracks from Panzer II Ausf.D.
A great looking vehicle.
Did the quality get better or something? Edit: I was talking about the video quality
No
They all suffered from being sent into service as soon as they were developed rather than having an extensive debugging as well as shortages of some hard to fabricate components, all the variants from 1939-1943 were essentially continued development from the same 1939 prototype entering service as soon as an improvements had been made. MkIV a 30mm uparmoured version did very well in North Africa against German and Italian tanks. MkV was further uparmoured to 40mm protection but had poor ventilation and so wasnt suitable for North Africa, it was deployed for domestic defence and training. The Mk VI had 40-50mm armour and some had their 2pdr increased to a 6pdr, it was considered better than the American Stuart but best employed in a flanking role with heavier armed Sherman and Grants as the punch. The Germans when encountering the Cruisers tended to retreat behind prepared anti-tank defences that the cruisers couldn't counter as they were weaker tank on tank. The Cruiser Mk VI, AKA the Crusader would go on to serve very successfully as the chassis for British AA tanks through the end of the war though and were considered superior to the numerous German AA Tank designs, and the Polish army used them very effectively as Anti-infantry vehicles.
The Mk VII-VIII models entering service in 1943/44 were derived from a new branch of the Cruiser design started in 1940 and would include the very successful Cromwell and Comets which remained in service until 1955 and 1958 respectively.
The fastest reverse gear?
The Christie suspension wasn’t the problem with the Cruiser tanks. It was better than the British designed suspensions for high speed tanks. The problems they had were the paper thin armor, tiny gun that was useless against anti-tank guns, poor build quality, and poor armored tactics.
Fun fact. the 2pdr actually had an HE shell designed for it.. inexplicably it was never produced.
@ That was because the HE filler it could hold was so small as to make it almost useless. The gun was so high velocity it needed to have very thick shell walls to survive firing, which left little room for the explosive. This is the reason the US M3 75mm was liked and kept in use even as it became less effective against German tanks. Its lower velocity meant its HE shell was more effective against soft targets like AT guns and infantry than the ones from higher velocity but larger bore guns like the 76mm or British 17 Pounder. Soft targets were the most common things tanks fought after all.
@@rvail136thousands were manufactured. 11,000 were in stock at the start of the war, but weren't issued. D
What images do u used? It looks like WoT...
1 minute ago! i love people!
In 5 years the evolution of tanks made the tanks used in 1940 to become outdated and unusable in front line engagements. Yet in the current conflict in Ukraine both sides have sometimes used tanks that were built not long after WW2. Nothing like a World War to accelerate technology at light speed. Although the technology has evolved today’s militaries are still using technology developed during WW2 like tanks, jets, rockets, shaped charges and machine guns still very similar to the mg42 and the list goes on.
😳 apparently the British only figured out they should prioritise armour AFTER WWII….😅
well TBF the church had 8mm more frontal armor than a tiger 1.
the problem is the brits were fantasizing cavalry charges of old but with tanks.
but they forgot how well those worked against modern weapons when using horses.
so they made tanks just as easy to kill as a horse.
with the same results.
Uhuh....
Issue with that statement is the development of the Centurion, which was by far and away, under every metric you decide to use, the best tank to come out of WWII.
You do NOT develop a tank that good accidentally. Especially not when you see the restrictions that plagued earlier British tank designs lifted for Centurion, like the width restriction that was meant to allow the tanks to be transported by the rail system, but was set low to account or some very old tunnels on said rail system. That width restriction was a major problem a it restricted the turret ring size, and its the size of the turret ring that largely determines the upper limit of the main gun mounted.
The British started development of the Centurion in 1943, the first production models were running off the lines right at the end of the war, but design started over two years before that.
So the British knew EXACTLY what type of tank they wanted, as a tank as good as the Centurion is NOT an accidental occurrence. Last time I looked 1943 is still during the war....
Also explain to me why in 1944, the British Army in France was the most heavily armoured of the Allied Nations. It had a higher proportion of Armoured Divisions in relation to Infantry Divisions than any other army of WWII. Arguably they actually went TOO far in that regard as one of the major issues they had late war was not lack of tanks, but shortages of infantry manpower....
Russians used this system with success.
the tank did what they wanted it to do. the problem isnt the tank.
its the fact what they wanted it to do, turned out to not be a thing on the modern battlefield
it was definitely both. Yes, their thinking was really, really bad. But their tanks were really bad also.
@@executivedirector7467 well my thinking is this
i imagine IF the war had been carried out the way they imagined it would, with these tanks making charges at speed and overwhelming the enemy, would they have been good at that? and they would have.
the intent was to go up against people they thought would just have mortars and machine guns, they didnt understand the germans brought a combined arms team to warfare as it wasnt yet a thing..
anyway IF that sort of war had happened i think theyd have been ok as designed but thats my uneducated opinion. im no tactician or tank designer ( unless you count legos as a child)
A tank that is easily penetrated by a 37mm AT gun is a tragedy.
I think only changes I'd make for the cruiser Mk III would be the addition of return rollers and sloping the sides of the front plate to enhance protection. But overall. Good lil cruiser tank
why would you waste time and resources mounting return rollers on a cristie suspension?
@@ripvanwinkle2002 better track tensioning during bumpy movement and it looks better. heck look at the comet. that used the suspension with return rollers
With the terrible gun and engine it wasnever going to be a good tank.
A bit more frontal armour, like the later 30mm and sloped would have been quite OK for the time.
@@executivedirector7467 At the time of design the gun was actually fine. A two pounder was more or less within the standard range of main guns mounted to tanks for that period. A fact you conveniently overlook.
You conveniently overlook the fact that the German Panzer III, which was the primary German battle tank of the same period (in theory), also only carried a 37mm gun.
In fact you conveniently overlook a great deal. Which makes any opinion you express far from reliable as far as I am concerned.
Why use images from a video game when there are enough images and footage of the real tanks?
There are very few clips of Cruiser IIIs and IVs. The editor included all we could find.