WWXI Weapons/Tanks by BistroD

WWIII is going to punt us all the way back to the stone age so that when WWXI rolls around we will be fighting as if it was WWI.

Fortino Mobile Tipo Pesante Ansaldo Magrini Mangiapan

 

The Ansaldo Magrini Mangiapan was designed in 1916 by major Magrini as a "mobile fort" and was one of Italy's first tank designs. It featured multiple sets of tracks to help it traverse the crater filled battlefields of no-man's land. To power these tracks there were four 200hp engines in the centre of the tank which then drove two electric motors at the front and back, propelling this massive 70t vehicle to an estimated 20 km/h. It also unusually for that era featured two rotating turrets equipped with 76mm (some sources state 75mm or 105mm) cannons, as well as having multiple machine guns fitted around the hull. The design was approved by the direzione generale del regio esercito but was cancelled soon after because of the high cost and feasibility of such a complex design. Instead interest moved to the Fiat 2000 and purchasing tanks from France and Britain.

Armoured Trains

At the outbreak of WWI, only one of the combatants had any appreciable investment in the concept of at the outbreak, and that was Russia. Its immense size and lack of quality roads made it even more dependent on rail-lines than any other belligerent power, and as such had constructed four examples (Or two. Or ten. Sources disagree). In the west, there was no pre-existing stock, but a few examples were hastily constructed by adding armor and weaponry to existing boxcars and locomotives. The Belgians had two examples in action, and the British Naval Division (an infantry unit of Royal Navy reservists and Marines unneeded for service at sea) created two as well which saw action outside Antwerp. The Germans followed suit on the Western Front with a few examples they used to protect against possible partisan attacks in Belgium, and a light armored train that ‘invaded’ Luxembourg in 1914, but the quick stagnation of the fighting saw no further advancement of the concept in the west.

The Eastern Front was a different matter though. As they already had some number of trains, composed of armored locomotive and a couple of armored cars carrying machine-guns or light artillery, and already having trains ready to go at the very start gave Russia a leg up. They almost immediately saw use both offensively and defensively. The Russians already had experience with armored trains, having deployed improvised examples against Japan in 1904 and during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. In one of the earliest actions of the war, an armored train was used to capture a bridge at Stanislav. In offensive roles, infantry cars would be stocked with troops to quickly dismount before the shock of the train’s sudden arrival wore off, but the war quickly ruined any track that crossed between the lines. There remained the occasional case where the changing movement of the fronts left intact rail line allowing for an attacking role, but more generally they were restricted to more defensive roles through 1915 and 1916.

The use of a train would be to have it stay behind the front, and if there was a report of an enemy attack, it would be switched to the appropriate track and choo-choo off there to provide firepower - usually two 76mm guns and numerous machine guns. They proved to be very effective in this role of mobile defensive platforms, and the Russian Army had built nearly a dozen more by the end of 1915, with at least 15 in service at that time, spread out between various fronts. Inspired by the success of the Russian’s trains, the Germans and the Austrians copied them, with the first Austro-Hungarian example, the Pz.Zug I, entering service in early 1915, and a German train close on its heel’s that fall.

The evolution of the trains between 1914 and 1917 was quite incredible. The Russian trains at the beginning of the war were comparatively crude affairs, essentially an armored locomotive with armored boxcars attached to protect the crew for the guns and machine guns, but within a few years sleek designs that evoked the image of a battleship on land, with turreted guns and absolutely bristling with machine guns. The Austrians followed in the footsteps of the Russians, imitating their opponent in design, and putting them into action against both the Russians and the Italians. The German High Command never put as much stock into the concept, so while a number were operating by the end of the conflict, they were mostly assembled on the local level, with a wide variation in workmanship, and never taking on the finished appearance of the Russian examples.

Up to this point, armored trains had been been built in the image of any other train. The locomotive was attached to some number of cars which served various functions - infantry cars, artillery cars, command cars, AA cars etc. During World War I though was developed the rail-cruiser. Cruisers were single cars and capable of supplying their own power, giving them much greater speed and flexibility than a regular armored train. Both Russia and Austro-Hungary developed examples, ranging from the small trollies like the Motorkanonwagen to the impressive Russian railcruiser [Zaamurets] (later to become better known for serving with the armored train Orlik with the Czech Legion). Rail-cruisers could be attached to a larger train, but if needed, unhitched and sent off on their own. While incredibly useful in the defensive roles that they filled, even on the Eastern Front the relatively conventional fighting meant that armored trains weren’t used quite to their full potential. It would take the next big conflict to see them at their height of power.

The Russian Civil War

With the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and ensuing withdrawal from the war, the Russian Civil War gave the fleet of armored trains a new purpose. The vast expanses of the country made control of the rail lines absolutely vital, and both sides made use of armed and armored trains extensively. At the beginning of the war, most of the Imperial Army’s fleet had either been requisitioned by the Germans or else fallen into White Russian hands. The Red forces quickly put into action a building program, churning out not only the well developed and battle tested designs of the Tsarist regimes from the factories they controlled, but improvising a wide array of ingenious designs, perhaps the most interesting being to build an interior wall in a boxcar and fill the gap with concrete to create a protected infantry car (these semi-armored trains were known as blindirov). In all, well over 200 armored and blindirov trains of varying quality operated with the Reds during the Civil War, and another 80 or so with the Whites. While the Reds were able to build quality trains using Czarist designs, the Whites generally lacked access to the factories and their quality rarely equalled that of their opponents’.

With the front lines much more amorphous, a general lack of air support, and neither side willing to uproot miles of vital track that would prefer to fight for control over, the train could truly perform as an offensive weapon, serving as a spearhead of the attack, instead of the savior in the defense. Trains would travel with raiding teams “desantniy otryad” of infantry and cavalry. The infantry would ride in armored box-cars providing protection on the move, deploy out when stopped and vulnerable, and also allow the train to strike away from the tracks, with the infantry operating under protection of its artillery. The cavalry would travel as a screening force to protect the train from ambush - although in numerous engagements the trains proved they could hold their own against enemy cavalry formations, such as a veritable slaughter outside Tsaritsyn in 1918. Many trains would carry an observation balloon, primarily for artillery spotting but also to allow for more effective reconnaissance outside of the narrow corridor of rail track.

With 37,000 miles of rail, and generally poor quality roads, the importance of the armored train during the war can’t be understated, and personnel were almost exclusively to be drawn from party members and the most literate at that. Although how much this was done in practice is up in the air. Railroad men were impressed into the service due to their existing expertise, and at least one foreign observer described the crew of a train he traveled on as “a choice selection of human scum”. Whether they were the cream of the communist party or the scum of the earth, the crews were certainly capable of great deeds, and when used at their best, could take on all comers, perhaps best exemplified during the Civil War by Train No. 1 Rifle Regiment in Honor of Karl Marx, which sped into the town of Liski, catching the garrison by surprise and capturing the town and two idling White trains to boot! Describing the Soviet use of trains in 1920, a Polish officer noted that, “Armored trains are the most serious and terrible opponent. [...] Our infantry are powerless against them.” It isn’t much of an exaggeration to say they they were simply the best weapon of the war.

The Whites lacked the organization with their trains displayed by the Reds, and not just because they had few facilities for manufacturing. While this certainly meant that there was a lot of diversity in their fleet, the much more fractured force simply couldn’t develop a unified doctrine, although they certainly emulated the successes of the Reds when possible. In addition to the anti-Bolshevik Russian groups, both the British, French, and Americans operated lightly armored trains during their fruitless intervention of 1918-1920. And while the Whites generally were playing second fiddle to the Red in terms of effective train deployment, no one used them better than the Czech Legion as they fought their way east.

Perhaps the most famed armored train of the war - if not period - was Orlik. Originally a Russian rail-cruiser named Zaamurets that was captured from the Bolshevik’s by the Czech Legion as they trekked east in their effort to leave Russia and join the fighting on the Western Front, Orlik Vuz cis. 1 (Vehicle One) became part of their armored train Orlik. The train helped the Czechoslovakians control a vast swathe of the Trans-Siberian Railroad from late 1918 through early 1920, until they finally were able to evacuate Russia via Vladivostok. Orlik ended up in White hands before finding its way into the hands of Chinese Warlords, and eventually the Kwantung Army, a puppet force of Japan, some time around 1931.

By the end of the Russian Civil War, the Soviets had a well established armored train doctrine, originally with light trains revolving around the raiding parties on the one hand (bronyepoyezd), and heavy trains more centered on providing heavier fire support (bronyobatoreyo). In both cases, they generally consisted of a armored locomotive in the center flanked by two gun cars, and control cars on each end. The variation was in the armament, the light train carrying 76.2mm pieces, and the heavy trains armed with between 100mm and 150mm (the heavy trains would be the least armored though, as it referred simply to the armament. A Heavy train was not meant to get close to the fighting, so was lightly armored compared to the light trains, which needed the protection. Confusing, I know!). Infantry cars could be added if needed, as well as a rail-cruiser. This was changed to three classes, of ‘A’ - the heaviest armored train, with 4x76.2mm guns; ‘V’ (or ‘C’) - 4x152mm or 203mm guns; and ‘B’ - 4x107mm or 4x122mm guns, in 1920. Type ‘M’ trains also existed, but more akin to railroad guns, mounting heavy naval artillery for coastal defense.

The Interwar Years

The years between the wars saw considerable use of armored trains, aside from the Russian Civil War that is, and few more so than the Poles, who fully embraced the concept and were running about 70 of them in the early 1920s. Their initial fleet was made up of examples captured either from the Austro-Hungarians and Germans at the end of World War I, or else from the Soviets during the Polish-Soviet War in 1919-1921, a conflict that saw numerous use of trains as raiding weapons, and even duels between Soviet and Polish trains! One of the greatest innovations of the Poles during the war was the use of flatbeds with Renault FTs placed on them, allowing the tank to fight from the train if needed, but able to dismount and range outside of the corridor of track if needed. Given the limitation on tank designs at the time, the speed and firepower offered by a train was simply unsurpassed at the time, and in regions where rail-lines went, there was no weapon a Polish or Soviet commander was happier to have at his disposal.

The other major utilization of armored trains in the period occurred in China. Plagued by warlords in the 1920s and the Japanese in the 1930s, and lacking major roads, the rail-lines were just as vital in the as in Russia, and consequently much of the fighting happened within a stone’s throw of them. The long travels of the Orlik, but it was hardly alone in traveling the rails of warlord-torn China in the 1920s. The defeat of the Whites saw many of them flee from Vladivostok into northern China, where they offered their equipment and services to Chinese warlords as mercenaries. In his efforts to bring down the warlords, Chiang Kai-Shek followed suit by paying the Soviet’s for their expertise in constructing armored trains for him and training men in their use. By the time the Warlords had been mostly suppressed in the late 1920s, the National Revolutionary Army was fielding 20 trains, and the Manchurian Army under Zhang Xueliang had another dozen to support them with. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 would turn most of the latter over to the invader’s Kwantung Army.

The Japanese would add a few new construction to their force, but their favored vehicle for patrolling the rail lines were armored trolleys, similar in function to the rail-cruiser, but essentially an armored car fitted with rail wheels. The Type 91 could have road and rail wheels switched, allowing it to function in either capacity and the Type 95 was a tracked vehicle with rail wheels that could be lowered from the hull onto the tracks.

Tanks

Tanks, 1917, by William Orpen. A view looking up to the underside of two tanks. The tanks are cresting a low rise, their treads rearing up towards the grey sky.   © IWM (Art.IWM ART 3035)

September 15, 1916, began as a routine day for the German infantrymen in the forward trenches around Flers on the Somme—as routine as any day was likely to be after two and a half months of vicious, close-gripped fighting that bled divisions white and reduced battalions to the strength of companies. True, an occasional rumble of engines had been audible across the line. But the British had more trucks than the Kaiser’s army, and were more willing to risk them to bring up ammunition and carry back wounded. True, there had been occasional gossip of something new up Tommy’s sleeve: of armored “land cruisers” impervious to anything less than a six-inch shell. But rumors—Scheisshausparolen in Landser speak—were endemic on the Western Front. Then “a forest of guns opened up in a ceaseless, rolling thunder, the few remaining survivors . . . fight on until the British flood overwhelms them, consumes them, and passes on. . . . An extraordinary number of men. And there, between them, spewing death, unearthly monsters: the first British tanks.”

Improvised and poorly coordinated, the British attack soon collapsed in the usual welter of blood and confusion. But for the first time on the Western Front, certainly the first time on the Somme, the heaviest losses were suffered by the defenders. Reactions varied widely. Some men panicked; others fought to a finish. But the 14th Bavarian Infantry, for example, tallied more than 1,600 casualties. Almost half were “missing,” and most of them were prisoners. That was an unheard-of ratio in an army that still prided itself on its fighting spirit. But the 14th was one of the regiments hit on the head by the tanks.

Shock rolled uphill. “The enemy,” one staff officer recorded, “employed new engines of war, as cruel as effective. . . . It is necessary to take whatever methods are possible to counteract them.” From the Allied perspective, the impact of tanks on the Great War is generally recognized. The cottage industry among scholars of the British learning curve, with descriptions of proto-mechanized war pitted against accounts of a semi-mobile final offensive based on combined arms and improved communications, recognizes the centrality of armor for both interpretations. French accounts are structured by Marshal Philippe Petain’s judgment that, in the wake of the frontline mutinies of 1917, it was necessary to wait for “the Americans and the tanks.” Certainly it was the tanks, the light Renault FT-17s, that carried the exhausted French infantry forward in the months before the armistice. Erich Ludendorff, a general in a position to know, declared after the war that Germany had been defeated not by Marshal Foch but by “General Tank.”

Evolution of Tanks from 1918… Part II

The penchant for additional machine gun turrets was not confined to the British Army. The French 2C heavy tank already had a second machine gun turret at the rear of the hull and so did the 16 ton Grosstraktoren built secretly in Germany in 1929. The very first Japanese tank built in 1927 went further in having an additional machine gun turret at the front as well as the rear. The 19.5 ton Neubaufahrzeuge built in Germany in 1934 also had two machine gun turrets. But the provision of additional machine gun turrets was carried to an extreme in the A. 1 Independent heavy tank built in Britain in 1926 which had no fewer than four.

 The Vickers A1E1 in 1925

This aberration in tank design can be ascribed in part to the influence of naval ideas and the concept of the employment of tanks by themselves, which required them to ward off attacks from all quarters. In part it was also due to the contemporary tendency in Britain to overrate the effectiveness of machine guns and to ignore the need to arm tanks with guns of more than small calibre. This tendency was clearly demonstrated by the main armament of the 32 ton Independent which consisted only of a 47mm gun.

The other multi-turreted tanks, such as the Grosstraktoren and the Neubaufahrzeuge. did at least mount 75 mm guns in their main turrets. Multi-turreted tanks built in the Soviet Union were similarly armed with 76.2mm guns. They included the 17 ton T-2S first built in 1932. which had a machine gun turret on either side of the driver, like the British Sixteen-tonner. and the 45 ton T-32 and T-35, built in 1930 and 1933 respectively, which had five turrets like the Independent.

The 75 or 76.2mm guns mounted in German and Russian multi-turreted tanks were what the tanks of the period should have been armed with in general. Although they were short-barrelled, they fired projectiles which were effective against the armour of the contemporary tanks. At the same time they were of sufficiently large calibre to fire high explosive shells that were effective against various other targets. In consequence, tanks armed with them became what they basically are, namely a mobile source of fire power effective against virtually all battlefield targets. As versatile tank weapons they differed fundamentally from the 93.4mm mortars mounted in the close support versions of the Vickers Medium and other British tanks which were specialised weapons, intended primarily to fire smoke shells and never provided with armour-piercing ammunition.

In the meantime another category of tanks had come to the fore. It consisted of light tanks larger and heavier than those of the Vickers Carden Loyd pattern and armed not only with machine guns but also with 37 to 47mm guns. Unlike the lighter tanks they were capable, therefore, of fighting other contemporary tanks and they were also generally more effective tactically because they had two-man turrets.

Although they were lighter than the contemporary medium tanks but because they were armed with guns of the same calibre as some of the latter, tanks of this kind could be regarded as 'light-medium' rather than light tanks.

The BT, a 'light-medium', which was built in large numbers in the Soviet Union, was the most successful. The BT owed its origin to the outcome of several years' work in the United States by J W Christie on fast tanks which could run on wheels as well as tracks, an idea explored in several different forms during the 1920s. The most notable outcome of this work was an experimental vehicle built by Christie in 1928 which attained what was then a record speed of 68 km/h. A small number of T3 and T4 tanks was built from its basis between 1931 and 1936 for the U. S. Army, which did not however develop them any further. But in 1930 Christie sold two chassis to the Soviet Union, where they served as the basis for the design of the BT, which began to be produced by the end of 1931.

Of the major features which the BT inherited from Christie, the ability to run on the road wheels after the removal of the tracks proved of little value. But the BT very successfully followed Christie's ideas in having large, independently sprung road wheels and a high power-to-weight ratio. In 1933 the Russians added to this a 45mm gun and the BT became what was probably the most effective tank of the mid-1930s.

Six years after the Russians adopted Christie's ideas the British Army took note of what they had achieved with the BT and decided to use his type of suspension for British tanks. In the meantime, the A. 6 Sixteen Tonner and the Mark III Medium derived from it had been abandoned as too expensive and an attempt to produce a cheap medium tank with three turrets, the A. 9, did not prove a success. The next tank to be designed, in 1934, the A. 10 was much more sensible as it dispensed with the additional machine gun turrets. What is more, its original, A. 10 E. 1 version introduced what was to become many years later the standard configuration of tanks, with only the driver at the front, a three-man turret in the centre and the engine and transmission compartment at the rear of the hull. This configuration was then combined with a Christie-type suspension to produce in 1938 a new tank, the A. 13.

The A. 13 was somewhat larger than the BT but it was superior to it in having a three-man turret and short-pitch tracks, instead of Christie's noisy long-pitch tracks with which the Russians persevered. It also dispensed with Christie's idea that tanks should be able to run on their road wheels without tracks as well as with them, which was rightly adjudged in Britain to be an unjustified complication. Otherwise the general characteristics of the two tanks were similar, which included their weight of 13.8 to 14 tons. Thus A. 13 had the makings of a highly mobile, light-medium tank that could be used effectively in a number of roles. Unfortunately it was not regarded as such but as a more specialised 'cruiser' tank intended to be used in the cavalry role to which British armoured formations were being confined.


What is more, those in charge of British tank development still hankered after multi-turreted tanks and in 1938 placed orders for the A. 14 and A. 16 'heavy cruisers'. Each of these, once again, had two additional machine gun turrets but neither mounted in its main turret a gun larger than that of the A. 13. Development of the A. 14 and A. 16 was mercifully abandoned in 1939 but the tank which followed the A. 13 cruisers, the A. 15 or Cruiser Tank Mark VI, Crusader, still had one additional machine gun turret and the same 40mm gun as the A. 13.