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Armoured Fighting Vehicles PoDs

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Skinny87

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In the Name of the Martel, the Fuller and the Holy Hobart, I hereby declare this, the first AFV PoDs (RTR PzKW LOL) thread, to be officially open

So this here thread is for the discussion of any and all PoDs involving Armoured Fighting Vehicles - whether you're a dirty Normie centrist who just likes Tigers and Shermans, or a deviant like myself who likes discussing Hetzers and M103s - including tank development, armoured warfare theory development, personalities like the Holy Trinity above, and what the best tank is and why it's the Tetrarch

Now, I'd like to keep this fairly light and open to all comers - AH.com has a good AH AFV thread where you can discuss nuts and bolts and whether a Panzer III having a 76mm gun in 1939 would inevitably have led to Winston Churchill committing suicide in a bunker under Greenwich in 1947

Instead this will be a thread for things like 'What if Martel had somehow managed to push for Tankettes over everything else and by 1944 there were thousands of them over the battlefields' or 'What if the Soviets had pushed on with those airborne tanks that were just T-26s with Wings, Literal Wings That Glided In That's Mental' or even 'What the hell were the Royal Ordnance on when they thought up the Sherman Firefly?' so that it isn't just me and @The Red posting here

So I'll be posting various re-posts of my Tankie Times with Skinny87 stuff from AH.com and then move on to gathering interesting PoDs (no shut up there are some definitely no you have all the Osprey books). Let's start with the first Tankie Times I ever posed, because I know SLP has been waiting on tenterhooks for it:

Tankie Times with Skinny87 #1 - Horses and Mechanization

So I've been reading about tanks

No, wait, don't walk away just yet. This is actually interesting and directly relevant to politics

Crawa, that's not even a phone it's just your hand in the shape of a phone, Crawa please

So I just finished reading a history of the Mechanization of British Cavalry units in the inter-war period, in the same series (Wolverhampton Military Studies Series) that @Stateless has a chapter in an anthology

Anyway, despite being appallingly edited, the book does an excellent job in dispelling the Colonel Blimp myth that the Cavalry regiments didn't want to mechanise and lose their horses. There were some resisters, but the general view appears to have been that a) Mechanization Was The Future, b) Tanks and associated skills such as driving could provide future job opportunities, and c) horses aren't bullet-proof and it's horrible to see them gunned down

So most regiments mechanised, sometimes losing the odd officer or older NCO who couldn't bear to lose the horses, and any delays were usually due to budgetary issues meaning no vehicles to mechanise with, to the point where units were training with random civilian trucks and cars with "TankLol" painted on the sides

However (and here comes the politics bit, bear with me, the buffet isn't that interesting) there's no smoke without fire, and there was some public resistance to mechanization. However, it came from an unexpected source: Nationalists

In the 1930s there were two elite British cavalry regiments that together formed The Royals - the Royal Scots Greys and The 1st (Royal Dragoons). They were not earmarked for early mechanization but in 1937 the Greys Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Cyril Gaisford St. Lawrence (great name) began a mass campaign against mechanization due to a rumour the Greys would soon lose their beloved horses, going so far as to petition MPs and begin a press campaign. However, the basis of the anti-Mechanization campaign appears to have been less against tanks and far more against the perceived loss of prestige. Letters sent to the War Office and even Buckingham Palace(!) by supporters of St. Lawrence voiced their concerns that "the Scottish people" would not tolerate such a blow to their national prestige that would be caused by the Greys horses being lost.

This campaign went on for several months and gained support from numerous Caledonian Friends societies and senior Army officers concerned that losing horses would negatively affect recruitment to the Greys. The Commanding Officer of the 1st Cavalry Brigade, Brigadier Norrie, even went so far as to formally suggest a scheme where, in the event of war, the Greys horses could be dyed a darker colour than they were naturally to avoid attracting gunfire and artillery

Just to prove that nationalism and hide-bound attitudes know no national boundaries, the Commanding Officer of the 1st (Royal) Dragoons, the premier English cavalry regiment of the The Royals, undertook a similar anti-Mechanization campaign, going so far as to lobby the King for His Majesty's support in the matter.

Ultimately, both men and their supporters got their way; neither regiment in The Royals were mechanized until late 1941. However, any prestige that they gained from such a delay was more than outweighed by the organisational chaos that took place when both regiments had to quickly mechanize using whatever scraps of armour and wheeled transport the Army had then, and their lack of experience led to higher casualty rates in their early battles in the Middle East.
 
(I wrote the Tetrarch article on En.Wiki by the way, as well as the Alecto SPG, the Harry Hopkins, the M22 Locust and the Hamilcar Glider)
 
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The cavalry's resistance to mechanization was very real in the U.S. Army, even if it wasn't for the British. For a while in the interwar years, there were mechanized cavalry units which consisted of trucks towing horse trailers (yes, really).
 
Death's Companion said:
What do you make of that rather courageous suggestion that the Germans should stop producing any AFV save for SPGs?
Click to expand...

Being brutally honest, it was probably the only chance that both Axis powers actually had to try and stem the flow of Allied AFVs, both in terms of sheer numbers and technological advancements. While Wehrmacht tank design was second to none during the war, mating excellent armour with innovative designs and tactics, by the time the obsession with the Tiger, King Tiger and Jagdpanther became a reality it was already too late - those tanks could stand up to literally anything on the battlefield, but they couldn't actually get to the battlefield, or instead broke down right afterwards. A lack of rare metals and then basic metals, poor fuel leading to contaminated petrol and diesel, and a supply chain that was ironically horrendously designed (there's an article about how the Tiger I and IIs were built which is ridiculous, they literally just dumped new parts onto shelves and built them hodgepodge as they got stuff) meant that these designs couldn't be built in enough numbers, or function well enough. For every King Tiger or Jagdpanther they could have built who knows how many SPGs like the Hetzer.

And even if the war had somehow gone on for a few more years and the Entwicklung program had come online and produced standardized AFVs, that would have produced a better ratio of SPGs to Tanks (allegedly anyway) so I think it was recognized in some quarters. SPGs are necessarily defensive-style vehicles and could have done well in later years, but by '42-43 you see the Hitler-influenced megomaniacal designs by Porsche and co that just went into ridiculous territory - what the hell the Maus was supposed to entire Red Army Tank Fleets is an open question - and SPGs weren't, well, sexy enough.

Interesrtingly the same could be said for the Italians. I have a Tankie Times to write on Italian Tank Development, why it led to Italian jokes (15 gears backwards, 1 forwards etc) and was generally inferior, but their Semovente SPGs were apparently quite good quality by the time of the Italian Surrender, and could have become something quite impressive if not for that.
 
Burton K Wheeler said:
The cavalry's resistance to mechanization was very real in the U.S. Army, even if it wasn't for the British. For a while in the interwar years, there were mechanized cavalry units which consisted of trucks towing horse trailers (yes, really).
Click to expand...

Yes, I've just picked up the New Vanguard book on Inter-War American designs, and the hints in there about the political controversies over mechanization and the Army/Cavalry/Marine doctrinal splits are fascinating - I genuinely didn't think there was anything interesting in US AFV design until the Tank Destroyer controversy

Also J Walter Christie was an absolutely tremendous figure and his influence (positive and negative, mostly the latter) on American tank development is an incredible story - the tales of his spitefulness around his precious tank designs, and what he did when he didn't get what he wanted, deserve a book to themselves
 
Skinny87 said:
Yes, I've just picked up the New Vanguard book on Inter-War American designs, and the hints in there about the political controversies over mechanization and the Army/Cavalry/Marine doctrinal splits are fascinating - I genuinely didn't think there was anything interesting in US AFV design until the Tank Destroyer controversy
Click to expand...

The history of the U.S. Army is the history of inter-branch rivalry. The only time I can think of where major reform happened without some absurd concession being made to get branches on board was the Unit of Action design process in the early 2000's.
 
Skinny87 said:
Being brutally honest, it was probably the only chance that both Axis powers actually had to try and stem the flow of Allied AFVs, both in terms of sheer numbers and technological advancements. While Wehrmacht tank design was second to none during the war, mating excellent armour with innovative designs and tactics, by the time the obsession with the Tiger, King Tiger and Jagdpanther became a reality it was already too late - those tanks could stand up to literally anything on the battlefield, but they couldn't actually get to the battlefield, or instead broke down right afterwards. A lack of rare metals and then basic metals, poor fuel leading to contaminated petrol and diesel, and a supply chain that was ironically horrendously designed (there's an article about how the Tiger I and IIs were built which is ridiculous, they literally just dumped new parts onto shelves and built them hodgepodge as they got stuff) meant that these designs couldn't be built in enough numbers, or function well enough. For every King Tiger or Jagdpanther they could have built who knows how many SPGs like the Hetzer.

And even if the war had somehow gone on for a few more years and the Entwicklung program had come online and produced standardized AFVs, that would have produced a better ratio of SPGs to Tanks (allegedly anyway) so I think it was recognized in some quarters. SPGs are necessarily defensive-style vehicles and could have done well in later years, but by '42-43 you see the Hitler-influenced megomaniacal designs by Porsche and co that just went into ridiculous territory - what the hell the Maus was supposed to entire Red Army Tank Fleets is an open question - and SPGs weren't, well, sexy enough.

Interesrtingly the same could be said for the Italians. I have a Tankie Times to write on Italian Tank Development, why it led to Italian jokes (15 gears backwards, 1 forwards etc) and was generally inferior, but their Semovente SPGs were apparently quite good quality by the time of the Italian Surrender, and could have become something quite impressive if not for that.
Click to expand...


It would be a very interesting war though the Germans loved counter attacks and offensives way too much to ever go fully defensive and you can argue that it served them well even late war. So I suppose the logical compromise is a split between defensive Panzer forces made mostly out of SPGs and an offensive force kept around for major operations or as a reserve. Such a concentration might actually make the Tigers and Panthers and so on make a bit more sense. You're building high hundreds or low thousands of specifically designed heavy tanks for the sole purpose of fucking up someone's day in a big way at a crucial point. They need to be reasonably reliable over a short distance and otherwise just built to take and dish out punishment. Which the Tigers were...just what they could take was a lot less than got thrown at them.


I wonder if the Tiger II was the default version, simplified, sloped better and built with short periods of very intense combat in mind. More artisan than mass produced but not compromised by this.
 
Artaxerxes said:
One of the more enjoyable articles I've found on Hobart, mentioning how his ideas influenced the Germans doctrine of warfare.

http://ihr.org/jhr/v18/v18n1p-2_Constable.html

Probably swings a bit to far the other way in eulogising him but puts paid to the fixed superior German doctrine trees that blight the HoI games and the run up to war.
Click to expand...

Oh wow, nice find Arta

I hadn't realised quite how Fullerian Hobart was, the article shows he was very much of the 'all teeth, no tail' theory of armoured warfare which is interesting. Though I'm not quite sure on the articles confident assertion that 'mobile armoured columns are supplied by air', at least not how Hobart and Fuller envisioned it as
 
Skinny87 said:
Oh wow, nice find Arta

I hadn't realised quite how Fullerian Hobart was, the article shows he was very much of the 'all teeth, no tail' theory of armoured warfare which is interesting. Though I'm not quite sure on the articles confident assertion that 'mobile armoured columns are supplied by air', at least not how Hobart and Fuller envisioned it as
Click to expand...

The somewhat obvious solution is having a tail with a spike on the end.
 
Armoured Warfare PoD - The September 1919 Tank Budget

This is a deeply fascinating potential PoD that I came across while researching post-First World War tank development. I originally intended it to be the basis of a vignette, but as I've scoped it out the potential to butterfly away so much of tank design development, tank theory and strategy, and finally even the use of tanks, has me slightly bewildered. I intend to write my first timeline based on this, but sketching out all of the potential branches and their effects will take time I just don't have at the moment

Scenario

In September 1919, Austen Chamberlain as Chancellor of the Exchequer advised in a paper that the Treasury could in no way justify the new programme of tank development and building requested by the Royal Tank Corps, as each of the 75 Medium D tanks (Still entirely theoretical at this time) would each cost a minimum of £12,250! due to a major miscalculation with the contracts.

There was a war of words between Chamberlain and Winston Churchill as Minister of Munitions, that eventually led to Chamberlain backing down and sanctioning a reduced programme, which was reduced even further in scope and budget as years went on. However, it was enough to continue research and development and allow Britain to remain the leader in the field of armoured warfare until the late 1920s.

But WI: Churchill doesn't get his way, and tank development ceases altogether, the RTC either being disbanded entirely or amalgamated into the Army or RAF as required, using what vintage tanks remain and focusing on armoured car development? My initial guess is 'It's 1940 and the Battle of Arras sees 1918-vintage Mark VIII tanks versus Panzer IIs and it's catastrophic', but thinking further I do think there's a legitimate case to be made for Fuller, Martel et al getting funding back for the RTC in the mid-1930s once Rearmament begins, and due to a lack of time and British-led research, development is undertaken based on the Russian/German line of medium and heavy tanks that can be upgraded and provide both anti-tank and infantry support in one role, rather than the Light/Infantry split that OTL saw.

Something interesting to ponder on, as Vickers export of tank designs was only due to continued support from the government purchasing tanks from them and commissioning tenders. If Vickers don't find it profitable to export tanks like the 6-Tonner and other influential designs, it would have a huge impact on European tank design and planning - for example, the Russians purchased 6-Tonners and other Vickers tanks in the early 1920s that led to the T-26, BT series and eventually the T-34
 
Great idea of a thread mate.

Do you consider the T-34/85 to be purely a reaction to the big cats or the natual conclusion of the T-34's delayed development? I know the answer probably lies somewhere inbetween but, presuming it's largely the latter, what would have happened if T-34 development hadn't been halted by Barbarossa and we begin to see T-34/85s appearing around the time of the start of Fall Blau?
 
The Red said:
Great idea of a thread mate.

Do you consider the T-34/85 to be purely a reaction to the big cats or the natual conclusion of the T-34's delayed development? I know the answer probably lies somewhere inbetween but, presuming it's largely the latter, what would have happened if T-34 development hadn't been halted by Barbarossa and we begin to see T-34/85s appearing around the time of the start of Fall Blau?
Click to expand...

Probably not.

The T-34M/A-43 was going to be the replacement for the vanilla T-34 if Barbarossa hadn't stopped it, and I don't know how upgunned those could have been. The big cats didn't start appearing en masse until 1943, so I'd think they'd stick with the 76mm gun for logistics and familiarity's sake as long as they could.
 
The Red said:
Great idea of a thread mate.

Do you consider the T-34/85 to be purely a reaction to the big cats or the natual conclusion of the T-34's delayed development? I know the answer probably lies somewhere inbetween but, presuming it's largely the latter, what would have happened if T-34 development hadn't been halted by Barbarossa and we begin to see T-34/85s appearing around the time of the start of Fall Blau?
Click to expand...

I'll have to be honest and state I still don't know enough about Soviet armour development - it's why I got the T-26 and BT series Osprey titles recently, and have the T-34 on my shortlist to buy this year, so @Coiler seems to have a good answer here

I know much more about American, British, German, French and Italian tank development. Even Swiss tank development - where Swiss tank development is of course code for 'Buy whatever the Germans are building and change absolutely nothing, even in 1944, and then just wait a few inconvenient years until West Germany is selling'
 
This was my favourite Tankie Times to write up - I think Martel's ideas were radical enough that armoured warfare would have looked very different. Plus the idea of one-man tanks in battalion strength is very sort of Inter-warpunk (to abuse a phrase). Plus there's always good times to be had discussing JFC Fuller and just how absolutely Bursar he was, especially as Liddell Hart built him up to be 'The Tank Visionary and Father of Armoured Warfare' when he was actually a mid-level Tank Corps officer, and at least the former title could be given far more appropriately to Hobart

Tankie Times with Skinny87 #2 – The ‘Future’ of armoured warfare in the inter-war period

So the last time that I waffled on about armoured warfare, I briefly spoke about the role of the cavalry regiments in the British Army, and dispelling the myths around the ‘horse-bound cavalry’ and the alleged Colonel Blimp-like desire to stay with horses right up until the Second World War. It’s an interesting subject, but quite limited in scope once you realise it can be summed up as ‘they wanted tanks because horses aren’t bullet-proof, but the government didn’t produce enough tanks’.

However as I’ve done more reading, I tried to find something that might be at least slightly more relevant to British politics, and came across the interesting discussion about the future of armoured warfare, as discussed in Britain and elsewhere during the 1920s and 1930s,.Until the late 1920s, arguably even the early 1930s, Britain was at the forefront of the development of armoured warfare, both in practice and in theory. Much of this was due to the activities of Vickers (and later Vickers-Armstrong), who sold tanks commercially throughout the world, and were often the only thing actually keeping British tank design active and forward-thinking; although some incredibly interesting designs, such as the Vickers 6-Ton, the Medium Mark I and the A1E1 Independent were also developed, often with input from the Royal Ordnance Factory.

I briefly mentioned a few threads ago that there is the potential for PoD in September 1919 for all tank development to be cancelled by the post-war British government: Austen Chamberlain, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, fought a furious war of words with Winston Churchill over the budget for the future Royal Tank Corps and the massively-inflated budget for the Medium D tanks that would form the bulk of the British tank force after 1919. Churchill won, fortunately, although with a reduced budget, but that alone is a very interesting PoD – what would have happened to armoured warfare practice and theory if there had been no tank development for the interwar period, given the influence that Britain had over the nascent Reichswehr under Hans von Seeckt; and the purchasing of Vickers tanks by the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s?

However, to me, another PoD that is just as interesting to explore is how armoured warfare theory might have changed in Britain during the interwar period, and butterflies from that. It can be difficult to trace the development of any new weapon and theory of war, but very broadly, in the interwar period three general trends can be seen in Britain. Firstly, there was the trend that eventually prevailed – an awkward mix of ‘Cruiser’ tanks that would break through enemy lines and also engage enemy tanks (depending entirely on which government board or committee was deciding the stats for that tank design), and ‘Infantry’ tanks that would be much slower, more heavily armoured, and support infantry movement towards objectives. Of the latter the most famous is the Matilda, which gave such a fright to the Germans during the Battle of France that during the Battle of Aarras, the one time that Matildas were able to engage German armour en-mass, they were able to shrug off the fire of Panzer Is and IIs and were only disrupted by the employment of 88mm anti-aircraft guns in an ad-hoc ground role.

But that didn’t necessarily have to be the way that British tank theory emerged. In the early 1920s, two other theories began emerging into contemporary discussions and even into such hallowed journals as that of the Royal United Services Institute. The first theory was put forward by Giffard Le Quesne Martel, one of the first Tank Corps officers, and a man who did a great deal of theorising about armoured warfare after 1918. In the late 1920s, he began to develop the idea that a future war with tanks would be devastating to the average infantryman, and that they needed to be protected at all costs. To survive they would need to be armoured, be highly mobile, and have some form of firepower. To that end he worked on a new class of armoured vehicle he called the tankette – small, fast and thinly-armoured vehicles that would fit a light machine-gun only. He envisioned that infantry battalions would use these vehicles en-masse in future warfare; the average size of a battalion would be reduced from 1,000 to 500, and each man (or pair of men, for economy’s sake) would use a tankette to get into battle, fighting their way forward to an objective and only dismounting once they reached an objective. These ideas were taken quite seriously by the War Office, but progress ended when Martell was unable to get his tankette design to function quite as well as he wanted; and there were major issues with the cost of the tankettes, as well as the practicality of maintaining and supplying 250-500 tankettes in even a minor engagement. However, the tankette did see some use in Italy and Japan, both in their colonial possessions, with the Italians in particular finding the tankette extremely useful in the invasion of Abyssinia, and the pacification of its North African holdings.

If Martell was concerned about the protection of the average British infantryman in a future warfare, then almost the exact opposite was true of his counterpart in the theory of armoured warfare, J.F.C. Fuller. A small library of books have been written about Fuller, and he was an amaxingly complex and controversial figure. Armoured warfare theorist and champion, occultist and early disciple of Aleister Crowley, as well as a leading figure in the British fascism movement, Fuller is almost impossible to pin down as one thing. However, in terms of his theories of armoured warfare, early on in his career Fuller became convinced that tanks, and only tanks, were the future of modern warfare.

In a number of books and articles, both academic and for populist magazines, Fuller declared that the age of the infantryman was now dead. Instead, he envisioned great ‘fleets’ of tanks that would be stationed at ‘land ports’ and which would sally out every time that war was declared. These tanks would generally be heavily armoured and fitted with naval-calibre guns, and would break through enemy trenches before inflicting chaos on communication lines, supply dumps and enemy headquarters. Although his general theory did advance somewhat, in that by the 1930s he was conceding that ‘scout’ tanks would be needed to advance ahead of the ‘battleship’ tanks, throughout the inter-war period he refused to even countenance the need for infantry, aircraft or even self-propelled artillery to support these ‘fleets’. A long-standing theory is that Fuller lost his chance to command the influential Experimental Mechanised Force in 1927 because of this myopic view.To Fuller, the tank was king of the battlefield, and even after the Second World War he stubbornly defended his theory of armoured warfare.

Both theories were lost to time, and if there can be said to be a ‘correct’ theory of armoured warfare, then it was the one practiced first by the Wehrmacht, and then the Red Army – developing a series of medium and light tanks that could be modified and upgraded as required (albeit with both sides making ill-fated forays into heavy and super-heavy tanks along the way). However, I believe it’s interesting to think of a Mumby-esque timeline where one or the other of these theories actually prevailed, either across the whole of Europe, or just in Britain.
 
I think there's something to be said for Churchill and Tanks in regards to a 'For Want Of A Nail' scenario

The only reason that tank development got going in Britain was because Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty got interested in the idea and sponsored the Landship Committee and defended it against political intrigue, and also funded it

Take Churchill out of the picture somehow and you get AFV development that goes into a deadend and dies off, really, as it did in Imperial Germany OTL as there was never a Churchill-analogue.

I might try and chart it out, actually
 
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