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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.
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.