Tanks by Richard Ogorkiewicz

Author:Richard Ogorkiewicz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Tanks: 100 Years of Evoluton
ISBN: 9781472813060
Publisher: Osprey Publishing Ltd

Britain

When the Second World War came to an end, the British Army, like the US Army, reduced its armoured forces to a single armoured division but stationed it in Germany where the threat of Soviet aggression was greatest. Moreover, it continued with little interruption the development of tanks initiated in the closing stages of the war.

However, the ideas underlying the development of British tanks were changing, moving away from the unrealistic and harmful division into infantry and cruiser tanks towards the concept of a single type of battle tank. The most important protagonist of this concept was General, later Field Marshal, B. Montgomery who, according to his principal critic on this issue General G. Martel, came to favour it as early as 1943 on the basis of his observations of the successful advance across North Africa by the Eighth Army, which he commanded.51 Montgomery subsequently outlined his views on the single type of what he called a ‘capital tank’ in a lecture given in London in 1945 and when he became Chief of the Imperial General Staff development of such a tank became official policy.52

The changes were not, of course, immediately or generally accepted. Just before the end of the hostilities, War Office studies still saw the need for separate infantry and cruiser tanks, and as late as 1950 generals Fuller as well as Martel were writing letters to The Times in support of two types of tanks with different functions. The General Staff also needed time to come to terms with the concept of a ‘dual purpose’ tank gun, agonizing over how tanks should be divided between those armed with what were primarily anti-tank weapons and others intended principally to fire high explosive ammunition – as if high-velocity tank guns could not fire high-explosive shells as well as armour-piercing projectiles.53

The actual development of a single type of tank started, oddly enough, in 1944 with the design of the A.45, a 55-tonne infantry support tank that was to complement the A.41 Centurion, which was originally regarded as a cruiser tank. A.45 was never built, but it was transformed in 1946 into a ‘universal tank’, which, apart from its basic role of a gun tank, was to be readily adaptable to or could be modified to perform a variety of specialized roles inspired for most part by the special purpose tanks of the 79th Armoured Division created for the 1944 landings in Normandy. A prototype of the basic FV 201 gun tank began to be tested in 1948, but the idea of incorporating in it a wide variety of specialist features proved impracticable and they were, in any case, superfluous so far as its main function was concerned. In consequence, the concept of a multi-functional ‘universal tank’ was abandoned in 1949.54

What was left was the basic FV 201. It was to be armed with the newly developed 83.8mm 20-pounder, but this quickly came to be considered insufficiently powerful to defeat the IS-3 and other heavy tanks that were expected to be fielded by the Soviet Army.

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