British Close supprt tanks.

[David W]

Fellows.

I would be very grateful if anyone could share any insight into the use of H.E in any of the British close supprt tanks, be they Cruisers or Matildas. They usually used the howitzer to fire smoke, but I am especially interested in their use of H.E Vs Infantry or guns.

Thanks.

[phylo_roadking]

David, from what little I've ever read, the actual intention of the CS tanks were to fire smoke, as although nearly all British types had smoke candles for self concealment, they had no way of projecting smoke.

The Cruiser MkII CS had a weapon that I've seen described as a "3.7-in Mortar (Howitzer) OQF MK I" which could "only fire smoke"...now, whether thats an actual practical limit of the hardware...or of the MANUAL, I'm not sure LOL i.e. It "did" only fire smoke is different from "it could only fire smoke". Only 30 MkII CS' were built and usually assigned by the Squadron HQ of a regiment to allow the gun tanks to manouver under smoke.

Certainly for the MkIIICS Cruiser, the manual-specified load was 40 smoke shells. The numbers of CS tanks are quite small, only for example 118 and 283 respectively of the Matilda III/IV CS types.

However - by the time the Crusader CS variant arrived...its new "3in Howitzer" definitely fired both smoke and HE.

So it looks as if the British entered the war with CS tanks designed only to fire smoke, with "mortars (howitzer)" that only fired smoke shells, then moved slowly to a vehicle that carried mixed ammo and was capable of firing both in a new smaller-bore weapon...finally returning to the full 3.7in-bore howitzer in the 1944 Centaur...NOW as a "bunker buster" rather than just a smoke layer.

[Gerry Chester]

Hi David,

Laying smoke was not the primary purpose of a CS tank. Both the Valentine and Matilda using machine guns for purpose, the former until the 6-pdr guns, with HE capacity came along. The Churchill, in which I served, proved to the most effective - the deployment of CS Marks, mounting either one or two 3 in howitzers, quickly dwindled as the battle tank Marks with their HE/AP 6-pdr, 75mm and 95mm guns took over the task.

Cheers, Gerry

[David W]

Laying smoke was not the primary purpose of a CS tank

So what was the howitzer used for then?

[Gerry Chester]

Laying smoke was not the primary purpose of a CS tank

So what was the howitzer used for then?[/quote]

Hi David,

Mainly throwing heavy HE ammo. The CS of my regiment the North Irish Horse most times carried 90/10 ratio HE to Smoke. On one occasion, ''Bushmills' (a Mark II CS tank) in her last action, supporting a river crossing in Italy, was loaded with a full inventory of smoke which was completely spent.

Here's a photo of her, with a weary crew, taken shortly after the action. An interesting note, she was one of the only six (all NIH) to have a cupola from a Panzer Mark III attached.

http://www.northirishhorse.net/tanks/Bushmills.jpg

Gerry

[phylo_roadking]

Gerry, by CS are you referring to Churchill CS tanks in your unit...or were older CS types still in service with Churchill-equiped units at that time? Looks like your personal experience starts coming in at the end of the paper time line, would that be right - late '42 onwards?

looks as if the British entered the war with CS tanks designed only to fire smoke, with "mortars (howitzer)" that only fired smoke shells, then moved slowly to a vehicle that carried mixed ammo and was capable of firing both in a new smaller-bore weapon

[Gerry Chester]

Gerry, by CS are you referring to Churchill CS tanks in your unit...or were older CS types still in service with Churchill-equiped units at that time? Looks like your personal experience starts coming in at the end of the paper time line, would that be right - late '42 onwards?

Other than at the brief engagements at Dieppe and with KIngforce, the NIH was the first Churchill unit to go into action and was so for longer than any other Churchill unit. We arrived in Africa in January 1943. Units that stayed in the UK may have retained their CS tanks, however, apart from Dieppe they were only deployed in Africa and Italy.

looks as if the British entered the war with CS tanks designed only to fire smoke, with "mortars (howitzer)" that only fired smoke shells, then moved slowly to a vehicle that carried mixed ammo and was capable of firing both in a new smaller-bore weapon

I am not aware that this be so. During 1941, while trainingg at 57th Training Regiment RTR at Warminster, none of the impressive tank inventory was a smoke only one.
Perhaps it may have been so between the wars but I do not know.

Gerry

[phylo_roadking]

Gerry - what types did you train in at Warminster??? That may have made a difference too.

I've come across a few more references to all this since I posted my main post above, and NB it's possible my original definitions and conditions may ONLY apply to "Cruiser"-equiped units. CS tanks in units equiped with "I" tanks may indeed have had an ammo mix...until the later 6pdr-equiped "I"'s were able to shoot both HE and AP - and of course the "I"'s would have had more emphasis on using HE for supporting infantry, as per your experience

Unfortunately I haven't come across any more manual content on this subject since, to see what support from CS' was intended by the powers-that-be for both "Cruiser" and "I" tanks, and whether the two CS-support roles differed in the minds of the manual writers.

[David W]

So what was the howitzer used for then?

Hi David,

Mainly throwing heavy HE ammo. [/quote]

This is the crux of my question. Because that simply doesn't seem to have been the case with the early (pre '42) I & cruiser C/S tanks.

(Perhaps I should have specified "early" in my original question.)

[phylo_roadking]

David - there's another way at coming at this...and that's possibly from studying the use of smoke by the British Army during the war, the how and the why. AFAIK noone has done that in one location - yet. Certainly, the Army ended up putting FAR more emphasis on smoke during the war in North Africa than they expected, so much so that on at least TWO occasions there were serious worries at government level about the supply of raw latex for smoke mortar rounds. One of these occasions led directly to the decision to withdraw the Northover Projector from Home Guard AT service...because whereas its replacement the Blacker Bombard used an inert concrete projectile for training - nationally the Home Guard was using a HUGE amount of latex/white phosporous smoke rounds for the Northover projector in training, and the Army wanted the production of THESE smoke rounds stopped sharpish so that the supplies of raw latex could go to building up their fast-dwindling stocks of smoke mortar rounds.

[Gerry Chester]

Hi David,

The 57th RTR at Warminster had all the tanks then available in 1941, but not one of the A10cs. Of the twenty built fourteen had been lost in France, and the other six were briefly deployed in the Western Desert.

"By 1931 the General Staff had decided that the work of the Experimental Mechanical Force showed that the army needed three kind of tanks: a medium tank, armed with machine-gun and a small anti-tank gun, to destroy enemy anti-tank guns by fire and shock action; a light tank armed with machine-guns to perform reconnaissance missions and to co-operate with the mediums to destroy enemy anti-tank guns; and a close support tank, armed with a gun capable of firing HE and smoke shells to provide close fire-support for tank attacks."
Liddell Hart MSS 15/8/81, General Staff Modern Formations (1931).

Based on this recommendation in 1938 an order were placed for the one-hundred A10s and twenty A10cs, An odd decision as:
"The Kirke Committee had shown the need to provide tanks to work with the infantry, and in 1934 the Army Council agreed that every infantry division required a battalion of 'Infantry' tanks.
J.P.Harris, British Armour and Rearmament in the 1930s.

Orders were placed in 1938 for both the Valentine and Matilda. The former utilised the chassis, suspension, engine and transmission of the A10. Although termed as 'Infantry Tanks" their basic role, having a low speed of about 15 mph, essentially was to give close support to the infantry which, if successful, allowed the faster Cruisers to exploit the victory.

Winston Churchill the following under the heading Tank Supply Policy:
"The idea of having a spear-point or battering ram of heavily armoured vehicles to break the enemy's front and make a hole through which the lighter vehicles can be pushed has a very high military significance."

Summing up, the decision to build a tank simply to throw smoke - without HE capability as recommended by the Experimental Mechanical Force - is one verging on the point of sheer stupidity.

Cheers, Gerry

[phylo_roadking]

Orders were placed in 1938 for both the Valentine and Matilda. The former utilised the chassis, suspension, engine and transmission of the A10. Although termed as 'Infantry Tanks" their basic role, having a low speed of about 15 mph, essentially was to give close support to the infantry which, if successful, allowed the faster Cruisers to exploit the victory.

Winston Churchill the following under the heading Tank Supply Policy:
"The idea of having a spear-point or battering ram of heavily armoured vehicles to break the enemy's front and make a hole through which the lighter vehicles can be pushed has a very high military significance."

Problem was - they were still thinking in terms of a 1918-style breakthrough battle after a period of static warfare. The NEW form of armoured warfare hadn't yet made it's real appearance in Poland...

Summing up, the decision to build a tank simply to throw smoke - without HE capability as recommended by the Experimental Mechanical Force - is one verging on the point of sheer stupidity.

Almost as clever as buying all that HE ammo for 2pdrs and not issuing it LOL

[David W]

Summing up, the decision to build a tank simply to throw smoke - without HE capability as recommended by the Experimental Mechanical Force - is one verging on the point of sheer stupidity.

Oh I quite agree. But my experince (if you will) & it would seem that of at least Phylo as well, is that they seemed to end up being used more for firing smoke rounds than H.E. Which to me is idiotic & uexplainable.


I'm an admirer of Liddel Hart, but the following makes no sense at all.

a medium tank, armed with machine-gun and a small anti-tank gun, to destroy enemy anti-tank guns by fire and shock action;

A tank mounted anti tank gun is to destroy enemy tanks, not anti tank guns!. For that you need H.E. Not the solid shot of a 2Pdr. I suppose that when it was written, they thought that no anti tank gun would be capable of knocking out a tank at a range greater than that at which the tank would open fire upon the anti tank gun with it's machine gun(s). And that a M/G & solid shot would be sufficient to deter the crew of an enemy anti tank gun. Bizarre

[phylo_roadking]

Then again - there IS the question of the legendary "missing" 2pdr HE ....which would have filled in the gap - even if not much heavier than a pair of Mills' Bombs.

There's been a LOT of anecdotal stuff written about that for 60+ years, but only a few years back I read that there WAS 2pdr HE in the Canal Zone - @1.8 millions rounds of it stockpiled. It was just never issued...

And there the legendary debate on 2pdr HE rested again - except last year I read a pair of articles by a guy researching Matilda IIs in France in 1940 in Classic Military Vehicle magazine here in the UK...and at the end of one of the articles he threw in something that I hadn't read before - and like SO much, has simply been lost in the mists of time.

Yes, there was 2pdr HE...but the problem wasn't the ammo, it was how it was STORED in the Cruisers and I tanks of 1939-40-41. One round, either the AT or HE - can't remember which - was LONGER than the other, and because of that the same racking inside the tanks couldn't be used for BOTH types. Instead - there were pre-packed KITS of dismantled racks held in store that were supposed to be up at the front with the ammo; if an attack required HE...a tank crew would be expected to DISMANTLE the AT ammo racking, pass it out of the hull piece by piece...move the HE racking in, piece by piece, assemble it in the hull, then re-arm with HE. And thus it could be carried safely. BUT because of the design - you couldn't have, say, half HE and half AT - it was ALL one type or ALL the other!!!

Oh - and the changeover took TWELVE HOURS...

So VERY early in the war - I would assume after the first reports came in from Poland - it was decided that the HE wouldn't be issued, and of course neither would the HE racking kits, and so the whole legend of NO 2pdr HE ammunition was born...all it needed was a couple of memos and British armour doctrine - not necessarily GOOD doctrine - was settled for the next 3-4 years.

Maybe it's just me - but that makes a HUGE amount of sense. it's just...too damn' British to be anything else than correct, speaking as someone who's been a Civil Servant in a former life!

[David W]

Phylo.

I had read about the 2Pdr H.E ammunition storage problems before now too. Had you posted it somewhere else?

We have still not got any reports on the use of C/S tanks using H.E Vs Infantry or guns prior to 1942 though. And this at the core of my original question.