Ready for El Alamein: ideal British tanks

What a find. I like the fact that it still has the UK WD number on the side

God bless the external mantlet.

I have never understood why, on finding the war's worst **** up of designing a turret and a gun which don't match, they didn't work up an external mantlet to fit the Vickers HV 75mm onto the Cavalier/Centaur/Cromwell/Churchill type turrets.

AEC managed to fit Sherman 75mm guns onto AEC turrets for Staghounds sold to Sudan.

The Sherman 75mm gun should fit at most places the 6pdr would fit?

Seems like just refitting current tanks with external mantlets that could house bigger guns might be the go-to solution. Probably wouldn't work in some older tanks, but you could at least get more 6-pounders and 75mm guns out on the field.

tomo pauk said:

The Sherman 75mm gun should fit at most places the 6pdr would fit?

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Only if you fixed the Sherman mantlet to the outside of the front. Most Sherman mantlets came with a Sherman tank attached.

The British solution, and to simplify ammunition supply, was to enlarge the ROF 6 Pounder barrel to take the French 75mm based US 75mm round. I suspect the French/USA 75mm is too long in the breech to fit the existing 6 Pounder internal mantlet. The gun performance was the same either way with reduced armour penetration over the 6 Pounder.

Of course, you're right about the 75mm gun in UK service.

Seeing the Matilda with a decent gun, one might picture himself the Churchill in Soviet use, armed with their 57mm - the Tiger-hunting Winnie...

Something I've always been curious about, but never found anything looking for it: What was the performance of the 6 pounders bored out to accept 75mm? How did they rate versus the 75mm M2/M3?

Here is an interesting tool that might bring out the answer:

WWII Gun vrs Armour Calculator

MacArther said:

Something I've always been curious about, but never found anything looking for it: What was the performance of the 6 pounders bored out to accept 75mm? How did they rate versus the 75mm M2/M3?

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According to wikipedia the 75mm M3 and the Royal Ordnance 75mm have velocities of 2030 fps compared to 2050 fps for AP ammo. The British 75mm barrel was 2,850 mm long and the M3 barrel was 3,000 mm long so to all intents and purposes identical. The Royal Ordnance barrel looks slimmer though so might be lighter but often had a muzzle weight or muzzle break so there might not have been much in it.

edit: A bit more googling on the Royal Ordnance 75mm says the mv was 610 m/s which is 2000 fps though this might be for a used as against brand new gun.

MacArther said:

Something I've always been curious about, but never found anything looking for it: What was the performance of the 6 pounders bored out to accept 75mm? How did they rate versus the 75mm M2/M3?

Click to expand...

They are both firing literally the same round out of a barrel of virtually the same length so there was no real difference.

Reference external mantlets: they do mean that the weight of the weapon is pushed further forward so can easily overbalance the turret and require some form of counter weight at the rear which further stresses the turret rotation and turret ring bearings.

I'll bet that 76.2mm Matilda had a damn crowded turret. They went to a Cavalier Turret to get the quite compact 6 Pounder onto a Matilda II in the UK so the UK could have fitted a 75mm into the Matilda II.

German troops surrender to the crew of a Stuart tank near Frendj, 6 May 1943.



A captured German Tiger I tank, 6 May 1943.



Troops with captured German Nebelwerfer rocket launchers, 7 May 1943.

Rhodesian troops of the 60th King's Royal Rifles in a Bedford MWD 15cwt truck in the Western Desert



Sappers of the Highland Division defusing German "S" mines. These contain 260 pieces of shrapnel and go off under slight pressure.

Seeing the Tiger knocked out - can not see any damage?
I was wondering how many were captured in good condition in Libya?
There is one in the tank museum in Bovington. I think a Churchill fired a round that ricocheted off the lower part of the 88 barrell and stuck in between the turret and body - immobilizing the turret. The crew bailed out and the tank was captured and given a close scrutiny to see if any weaknesses could be found.

There were no Tigers in Libya, the 1st ones in Africa were deployed in late 1942 in Tunisia.

You are of course correct Tommo Pauk, my bad.
Now I have my geography correct, were there other Tigers captured intact?
If so, what happened to them?

Maybe it ran out of gas.

That is a real possibility - there are no obvious signs of battle damage.
I thought that the German Panzer troops usually destroyed any vehicle that they had to abandon - unless they were pretty certain that they could recover the vehicle.

According to the tiger website, it belonged to the schwere Panzer-Abteilung 504. One tiger is recorded as having been destroyed that day, destroyed by the crew. The tank either broke down, and could not move, or far more likely simply ran out of fuel.

However, I consider this to be still a loss to enemy (alied) action, and most probably attributable to air power. The Tiger was a formidable opponent, and seldom lost to direct action. However many were lost to breakdowns, abandoned by crew, or ran out of fuel. The losses to fuel shortages were often due to the long term effects of air interdiction, and the breakdowns, well we dont actually know how many, but again shortages of spares at the front due to allied air activity and mechanical defects due to near misses and the like has to be considered a high probablity for such losses.

The worst day in Tunisia was in March, from memory, where 7 were lost in one day, 3 due to fires started by by near misses from aircraft carrying (I presume) incendiary loadouts.

Tigers acquired a fearsome reputation during and after the war. As one website reports....."Soon the sight of even one Tiger entering battle caused the blood in Allied troops to run cold. The Tiger's high-velocity 88 mm main gun could outshoot anything they had, and armor piercing shells bounced off the Tiger's thick armor – even from ranges as close as 50 meters. In an attack against Allied positions in the Medjerda river valley of northwest Tunisia not long after, s.Pz.-Abt. 501 reported that "fleeing enemy columns and tanks were observed as soon as the Tigers appeared."

Over time, the fearsome and intimidating reputation of the Tiger grew to mythic proportions. Maj. Christopher W. Wilbeck noted in his study of German heavy tank battalions that whenever a German tank appeared, regardless of type, "Among the Allied armies, units continually reported that Tiger tanks were in their sector or that they had destroyed Tiger tanks."

Though destroying a Tiger was high-risk bordering on suicide early in the war, disabling one was not. The Allies' most successful anti-Tiger tactic in Tunisia was a retrograde maneuver, laying anti-tank mines guarded by antitank guns. When a Tiger was immobilized by a mine, antitank guns could take it under fire, or artillery fire was called in. Later in France, tactical air – fighter-bombers using rockets and bombs – proved the most effective countermeasure.

In March 1943 s.Pz.-Abt. 501 was succeeded by s.Pz.-Abt. 504. During the two months it operated in Tunisia before the surrender of all Axis troops in Tunisia, s.Pz.-Abt. 504 destroyed more than 150 enemy tanks and had a kill ratio of 18.8 enemy tanks for every Tiger lost".

I am not surprised that the Tiger had quite a high kill ratio - especially in Tunisia.
They had plenty of targets, and were usually very well handled by experienced crews.
Against them, in some cases were either light tanks or M3's with inexperienced crews.
They also had the advantage of being in well prepared dug in defensive positions.
This means any attack is usually funneled by mines or terrain into the killing field.
The attacker knows they are going to take high losses in such cases.

British Long Range Desert Group- LRDG- patrol group leaving Siwa oasis, 25 May 1942



LRDG 30-cwt Chevrolet trucks