British Armor Policy

[Mad Russian]

Thanks, had seen those but still don't understand why British alone set their tanks to fire only one type of ammo although maybe it was specialization into infantry and cruiser and support tanks. I learned that HE ammo was available to British crews in Africa but was not issued. No other army's did this with ammunition.

The British weren't alone. This was the dawn of mechanized warfare. Nobody knew back then that the way to go was to have a multipurpose gun on a tank.

When you go hunting elephants, assuming of course that you do hunt elephants, you use an elephant gun you don't use a multipurpose gun. You don't have an over and under, an elephant gun on top and a shotgun on the bottom in case you come across some quail while you are out on your elephant hunt.

The same thing applied to the British concept.

Look at it this way. If my tank is designed to kill other tanks then using a multipurpose gun does several things negatively.

1) It cuts back on the number of AP rounds I can carry for the primary purpose of the weapon.

2) The gun has to be able to fire the HE rounds. Which means that research and development have to go into HE rounds for the gun. Which all means that somebody has to take the time and effort to make an HE round for it.

3) Or another less capable multipurpose gun already in existance can be used.

When you see the evolution of tanks and their weaponry you see that #1 is a fact of life. A tank carries a variety of different types of rounds. That cuts down on the others.

We also see that the British were the only nation to go with the dedicated tank per mission type practice and that it didn't work out like they thought. For one thing, tanks ended up being more fragile than any of the participants thought they were going to be. They often didn't stay on the battlefield long enough to use up all the ammo they could carry so that wasn't as a big a factor as they thought it would be. Tanks broke down, were hit and disabled, etc.....

Several nations opted for the #3 solution. Many times a gun that was less capable in one area would be chosen for a specific purpose. A great example of this in the 70's is the smooth bore vs rifled tank cannon debate but it was all done through the 20's, 30's and 40's before that. The great attributes vs the draw backs of a particular gun and why it was chosen.

So, in hind sight it looked like the British practice was almost criminal neglect. At the time they could have been right and the rest of the world might have ended up doing the same thing. In one respect the British concept was right. But in the opposite direction.

The Americans tried to develop tank destroyers that were going to fight German tanks and the American tanks would roam around shooting up infantry. Something like 4 or 5 times the ammount of HE was fired by tanks compared to AP.(I cant remember the exact ratio at the moment)

So, the British concept of a single purpose weapon on an tank could have been that most tanks had HE firing weapons. The Germans were using this concept with the PzIV and StuG's. And finding it very successful. UNTIL the Allies starting putting so many tanks in the field with more and more armour on them that EVERYTHING the Germans had must be able to kill tanks.

The Soviets started the war, and kept the practice all the way through the war, that every single gun they accepted into the Red Army be equipped with both an HE and an AP round. That includes all of their artillery as well, not just tank guns. But everything. AT guns, tank guns and artillery guns. Not of course mortars.

But then the Red Army knew about tanks. When they were invaded in 1941 they had more tanks than the rest of the world combined. Yes, most of them were junk but they still had them. And they knew they were going to always have them in large numbers. They still do. The Soviets are arguably the most tank aware nation on the planet and always have been.

Good Hunting.

MR