Thread: Australia makes tanks .. real army tanks !

We made tanks here during WW2 , here is the story of how improvised engineering did it .

http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/rec...-vol5-ch14.pdf


Mike

It was interesting how the entire hull was cast out of steel, and that we were the first country to ever cast a tank hull...

Originally Posted by .RC.

It was interesting how the entire hull was cast out of steel, and that we were the first country to ever cast a tank hull...

Yes, and after some fiddling around with the elements alloyed into the steel, the steel , after testing, proved to be just and strong or better than the overseas armour plate .

The tank would have performed well in most respects in actual battle, its main drawback was its puny main armament, the 2 pounder gun . If anyone wishes to look at one, the Aust. war memorial , Canberra, has one in their collection . Mike

Yes but we are looking at it in hindsight... When you think of all the advances between 1930 and 1939, compared to 1939 to 1950, it is easy to see why they put such a small main gun on it...

They did not see the need for a much larger weapon... I am sure if they saw what the German 88mm tank gun could do they would have created a much different tank...

I have some photos somewhere of them testing the turret with two 25 pounders firing together.
I was at UNSW in the 70s and a student did a thesis on the cruiser tank.
There was 2 at the Melbourne military museum which where auctioned off a few years ago.
They also had a hull outside in the weather.
I wanted to buy a 40mm bofors to put in the front yard but the missus wasn't keen?
H.

Thanks for posting this interesting piece of history Mike, in many ways it parallels the story as told by Laurence Wackett who was a or perhaps the major driving force behind Australian aircraft production during the wartime period, and for a time after. His biography or perhaps autobiography (it must be 30 years since I read it) is a great read, and as I recall he triumphed in spite of the many obstacles in his path, and the lessons of the lack of capacity to build our own war equipment would seem to have been lost to our present political and social leaders and perhaps most important of all, the opinion leaders, who seem more occupied with having a choice of 300 car models, and perhaps a similar number of differing coffee blends at their disposal when they wander down the street to get the weekend papers to catch the goss on all the local cellebs.
Rob

Back in the early 70's I was plant inspector for a company in Alexandria Sydney by the name of Bradford Kendall. Though I assume they was not the original company name or foundry location (perhaps changed when they joined with the American Essco company), they certainly were still very proud of their achievement even then. A couple of the older guys in the foundry worked on the project and it was pretty interesting to hear their conversations about it. Shame, they would be intereing to hear today if around to tell a few stories about it.
George

Originally Posted by Ropetangler

His biography or perhaps autobiography (it must be 30 years since I read it) is a great read, and as I recall he triumphed in spite of the many obstacles in his path, and the lessons of the lack of capacity to build our own war equipment would seem to have been lost to our present political and social leaders and perhaps most important of all, the opinion leaders, who seem more occupied with having a choice of 300 car models, and perhaps a similar number of differing coffee blends at their disposal when they wander down the street to get the weekend papers to catch the goss on all the local cellebs.
Rob

That's a long sentence, but I like it!

Jordan

Originally Posted by Ropetangler

......the lessons of the lack of capacity to build our own war equipment would seem to have been lost to our present political and social leaders

You mean the 29 (maybe?) operational Abrams tanks we bought from the US to defend a nation bigger than the North American continent?

Nothing we couldn't do again. Who's for an Australian heavy engineering revival?

The Sentinel tank in the AWM collection in Canberra is a second type hull (no hull mg, more ammo racks) with an otherwise undocumented (as far as I know) single 25 pdr main gun.

The twin 25 pdr mounting was built to reproduce the recoil of the 17 pdr anti-tank gun, after the turret stayed on, a 17 pdr was obtained and fitted. The big concern there was that they couldn't allow the gun to recoil inside the turret, so they just bolted it solidly in place and used the tank's mass instead - and it worked. It was briefly the most powerfully armed Allied tank.

Other innovations were in the engine - first with a WV24, or 3 V8's in one block, a similar design was used later by the US for one of the many engines in the M4 Sherman, and another first - first tank with the engine & transmission removable as a unit, straight out the back after unfastening the rear armour, no crane needed, as is used in most current tanks.

Originally Posted by Gerbilsquasher

Nothing we couldn't do again. Who's for an Australian heavy engineering revival?

Yes we could revive industry but tanks these days are highly complex machines . A small nation Israel , has built tanks , and very good ones too .

And, there was the recent case of the huge lemon we built in the form of the Collins class subs built in South. Aust. Did they ever sort out all of the problems with those ?

Mike

Originally Posted by morrisman

Yes we could revive industry but tanks these days are highly complex machines . A small nation Israel , has built tanks , and very good ones too .

And, there was the recent case of the huge lemon we built in the form of the Collins class subs built in South. Aust. Did they ever sort out all of the problems with those ?

Mike

Yes todays war vehicles are very complex, and also have complex command and control systems, but for that reason alone, I think it is vital that we keep expertise in design and construction of these systems. I would be the first to acknowledge that I know next to nothing about submarines. And I have been wrong before, but I imagine that there was a lot of good stuff in the Collins class subs, but a small percentage of bad stuff led to a poor outcome. We need to find out why we had a bad outcome, and put measures in place to ensure that these mistakes are not made when we try the next time. As I recall, when the F111 aircraft first entered service, several aircraft were lost, and the eventual fix involved a redesign of the swing wing box. This was a major problem and cost a lot to resolve, but when done we had an aircraft which gave 40years of service, and if parts had still been available, it would most likely still be in service. It was a phenomenally successful design, in spite of serious, early teething problems.
My point is that if we throw our hands up and say "it's all too hard, just buy our hardware off the shelf in some other country", all we are doing is losing any chance to develop that expertise for our country, and frequently we are paying for that same expertise to be developed for the benefit of that other country.
Heaven forbid, but if hostilities were to break out between us and some Asian power, it may not be in the interest of America to come to our aid, or they might be in trouble up to their necks, and may be unable to help. Who are we going to turn to for the hardware. How are we going to maintain it in full battle readiness, if we throw out our manufacturing sector because China can supply cheap consumer items way cheaper than we can? The opinion makers are right now questioning the wisdom of supporting a car industry, saying the money can be better spent, and this support is making cars in our market more costly. As I see it, without a car industry, we will never be able to make anything as complex as an aircraft, tank or even an armoured personell carrier, should the unthinkable occur. My 2 cents worth anyway,
Rob

Don't get me started (but you have)...
Australia is capable of making all sorts of military hardware, but the playing field has been manipulated for political ends. I won't go into details but a couple of relevant points are -

• The Government sees interoperability with US and to a lesser extent NATO forces as very important - hence there is a preference for US equipment. It is also seen as a show of solidarity with the US to buy their products even if they are unlikely to be really useful (such as the latest missile destroyers). Hardware like the Abrams is used more as a training aid so that crews can be slotted into US deployments if necessary
• Large multinational defense contractors are there to make a profit. DoD typically has limited technical abilities to understand the intricacies of design issues, and politicians, especially when trying to score points, do not appreciate the problems that poor specifications and even just developing something different can cause.
• Stung by new project overruns, DoD leans towards "established products" - in Australia, Australian developed kit is unlikely to get a look in unless it is sold into other countries so that the ADF can see that it has history behind it. (NB The US has a history of not wanting to buy defense equipment unless it is made in the US because they want to be able guarantee supply)
• The ADF typically want more from equipment than other forces in the world, so anything coming into service is usually modified to gain extra capability. In some cases these mods are minor but sometimes it is a lot of work to meet these requirements. Rarely does the DoD want to pay for a full development cycle with several prototypes. As a result "production units" sometimes have problems that should have been knocked out at the prototype testing stage. Collins was larger than the Swedish version it was based on and operates under different conditions. Typically with a ship/ submarine, the first of class is the "prototype".
• O/S companies typically see Australia as a low-tech backward place that is not capable of doing this sort of thing. I've seen a number of discussions with O/S suppliers who start from a position of "Aussies know nothing" and then spend a lot of time defend that position in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. I think this view has been taken up by our politicians - and if you want to sell millions of dollars of hardware to a country of course the locals can't do as well as you can.
• Lastly, a point for those who suggest things like Collins are no good. If you had sparse resources and wanted an opponent to underestimate your capabilities, would you tell the world exactly what they could do or would you let people think they were not as good as they really are...

Michael
(From a state of defense)

Lotta good points above ...

But I don't know if I agree with the last one. If you had sparse resources, and everyone knows this, then I think you would want to make sure everyone 'overestimated' your capabilities, as a deterrant, rather than underestimate and then find out in battle what you had ... Haahaa.

In the reality ... I don't think anything regarding our resources is unknown to our neighbours. Its fortunate our neighbours do not have expansionist policies.

Greg

From memory, the good old F-111was bought from the yanks "under sufferance" and political power. When our Airforce got them and found all the problems they grounded them until they could make modifications to get them back in the air. The redevelopment techniques were so good that the info was given back to the yanks to do the mods during manufacture. Yes we have the technical expertise!
The Collins class apparently have proved them selves as a potent part of our Navy as well
I do worry about our technical expertise being taken off shore due to the lack of funding or interest from our own manufacturers.
I feel that we may end up being a nation of "fitters" installing hardware and software from foreign manufacturers rather than developing and manufacturing our our totally Australian product.