In the works XII

We’ve been looking at some of the armored vehicles the Bundeswehr adopted as it began trying to replace it’s American equipment with kit more suited to it’s preferred style. But why was the Bundeswehr dissatisfied in the first place?

To start, we need to take a look at what happened to American tanks after the War. In the immediate post war era, the American public demanded complete demobilization now if not sooner and the Truman administration largely gave it to them. The Army and Marines were reduced from 95 divisions to 12 skeletal divisions more concerned with the occupation of Germany and Japan than anything else, the new Air Force went from 213 groups to 63, most of which were notional and the Navy lost 70% of it’s warships as well as the new United States class carriers that would be capable of supporting the new jet aircraft. The Bomb meant that the invasion of Japan was off and may have convinced Stalin not to make a try for the rest of Europe. That also meant that the newly independent US Air Force successfully convinced Congress and the Truman administration that large land armies were obsolete in the face of atomic weapons. In fact, the Air Force argued that all other arms were obsolete: no invading fleet could threaten the coast in the face of nuclear bombers, the Marine Corps was utterly redundant and the Army should be reduced to a rump force, presumably with lead lined uniforms and gas masks, that would occupy the glowing craters that would be all that remained of whatever enemy might threaten the US because the first and only resort should be the nuclear extermination of any enemy nation. If this sounds like interwar Douhetian strategic bombing theory carried to it’s insane conclusion, you are correct.

As you can imagine, the other services were not amused, although General Bradley led an Army faction in favor. The Admiral’s Revolt, in which senior Naval officers publicly opposed the Truman administration’s plans to bet everything on nuclear armed strategic bombers, deserves to be the subject of several well researched books, must be passed over for this blog post. To summarize a long and convoluted mess of intrigue, congressional hearings, treachery and bureaucratic infighting, the Navy lost badly. The Fleet and the Navy’s senior leadership were gutted, Truman, the Air Force and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson got most of what they wanted, but the Navy did at least preserve it’s independence and just enough conventional forces to rebuild from.

War plans for a possible conflict with the Soviet Union at this time were best described as depressing: it was assumed that nothing east of the Pyrenees and the Channel could be held, B-29s couldn’t reach very far into Soviet territory from any likely base, B-36s might be able to reach but couldn’t be escorted and had little hope of reaching their targets in the face of MiGs, and the notion of a naval blockade of the Eurasian continent was laughable. According the Truman adminstration planned to develop better bombs and bombers and more or less gave up on anything else.

Then two things happened: the Soviets tested their own atomic bomb, and the Korean War started. While the Soviets had no means of hitting the US with nukes and had none that could be used in 1950, Truman couldn’t have known that and promptly decided not to nuke Kim Il Sung’s invasion force. What followed would be farce if it weren’t for all the death and destruction. Truman ordered a blockade and was promptly informed that he’d cut the Navy to the point where that wasn’t possible, and anyway that wouldn’t affect the road and rail lines through China. Conventional strategic bombing proved ineffective against North Korea’s nonexistent economy but did demonstrate the vulnerability of heavy bombers to jet interceptors. Close air support proved insufficient, not least because the Air Force had gotten rid of everyone who’d gotten good at it as well as all the aircraft that were well suited to the purpose. The Army got thrown in and was repeatedly humiliated. What few anti-tank weapons the army retained couldn’t handle T-34-85s, the troops were barely trained, it quickly turned out that occupation duty in Japanese whorehouses didn’t prepare men to fight, and General Bradley’s purge of everyone who’d fought the Japanese from the Army meant that commanders were repeatedly surprised when Koreans inexplicably refused to fight like Germans.

The spectacle of 2.75” bazooka rounds failing to penetrate T-34s (there was no money to get the 3.5” Super Bazooka into service, and anyway who needed anti-tank rockets when the Air Force was going to nuke the tanks?) and M24 Chaffees trying to fight those T-34s head on led to the Tank Panic of the early 1950s.

How not to fight medium tanks with light tanks, September 1950. Courtesy of Wikipedia

The Pershing

The M26 Pershing’s very limited WWII service hadn’t proved anything, with the few Pershings in Europe seeing little combat and a detachment of Pershings sent to Okinawa not getting off the ships until the fighting was already over. Few Pershings were available in 1950 and didn’t reach the action for several months, at which point they proved themselves automotively underpowered, unreliable, operationally short ranged and ineffective in hilly or mountainous terrain. Unfortunately, “hilly or mountainous terrain“ describes most of Korea. Frantic efforts made the M46 Patton, an improved Pershing, available in small numbers by September of 1950, and eventually replaced all remaining M26s and some Shermans.

The M46 was really a less flawed Pershing, and no one was terribly happy with it. The realization that conventional warfare wasn’t over after all, that tanks were still important and that the US was losing drove the development and production of the M47 Patton. Rushed into production in mere months, from the production contract’s signing in December 1950, the second Patton tank looked good on paper. Armed with an improved 90mm gun, coincidence rangefinder and the last American bow machine gun, a sharply sloped glacis and needle nose turret that gave an effective thickness of up to 8”, the M47 not only didn’t live up to it’s paper promise, it didn’t even make it into the Korean War.

The M47 Patton

The contract went to American Locomotive Company, who’d gotten rid of their tank manufacturing equipment and know how as part of demobilization after the War. The turret control mechanism, shared with the M41, was too unreliable to risk in combat with no fix until April 1952. Then the workers launched a five month strike in October. By this time the panic was largely over, as Communist tanks were few and far between in Korea, which was just as well, because then it turned out the drive gears had defects because inferior steel was used in response to wartime shortages of the good stuff. Production ended in 1954, which not coincidentally marked American Locomotive closing it’s tank production division. By 1959 the US had gotten rid of the M47, flogging it off on allies around the world who also weren’t too happy with it.

The M47s combat record was also rather poor. It fared badly against T-54s and 55s in the Indo-Pakistani wars and Ethiopia, was hopeless against T-62s and 72s in the Iran-Iraq war, and did badly in Jordanian hands against Israel during the Six Day War.

A later model M47 with searchlight and muzzle brake

The Bundeswehr wasn’t terribly happy about getting stuck with such a troubled medium tank even before it’s dismal combat record began. With a top speed of 30mph it wasn’t slow by the standards of the day, but a 100 mile operational range was unacceptable to Wehrmacht veterans who had lost all too many tanks because they’d run out of fuel. The gun seemed reasonably powerful, at least until a captured T-54 drove onto the British Embassy in Budapest during the 1956 uprising, but the armor was unnecessarily heavy for light threats and grossly inadequate against the serious threats, like ATGMs and 100mm or larger HEAT rounds. Thus the Leopard 1, which we’ve discussed.

What would become the M41 Walker Bulldog began development immediately after the War. While Chaffee had been successful, it was obviously undergunned when it was introduced. Post war, the problem only became more serious and would require an entirely new design. For reasons we discussed above, funding and urgency were lacking until the Korean War began, despite the planned use of the light tank hull as the basis of an APC and anti-aircraft tank. Then the M41 was rushed into production with so many faults that it also didn’t see service in the Korean War, and all tanks produced had to be rebuilt to the M41A1 standard, which incorporated 4000 design changes. No, I didn’t add the wrong number of zeroes, that’s four thousand. In American service the M41 was disliked and generally unsuccessful. It was too tall to scout, yet too cramped for corn fed 6 foot tall Americans, too heavy to airdrop despite being intended for airborne service, and the 76mm gun was clearly inadequate.

The M41. Not as unfortunate as it’s namesake, but General Walton Walker’s death in a jeep accident is a pretty high bar

As we mentioned, the Germans didn’t like the M41 either. It wound up in foreign service, most infamously at the Bay of Pigs with the Brigadistas and with ARVN. The Brigadistas did pretty well, landing all their tanks in the face of Communist air superiority and spearheading successful attacks and knocking out many of Castro’s T-34-85s, at least until they ran out of fuel and ammunition. Then, of course, they were destroyed or captured along with the rest of the Brigadistas. Their record was more mixed in Viet Nam. While well liked by ARVN tank crews, who found the M41 spacious and comfortable, and effective when used for infantry support, when called upon to fight North Vietnamese T-54s and 55s the Bulldogs fared poorly. M41s continued in service in until the 1990s in NATO countries with a variety of upgrades, and a few remain in service in South America and the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam.

We’ll take a look at the M42 Duster and the wonderful world of Marders on Friday.