Bottom 5 Tanks | Drachinifel

hello and welcome back to the tank Museum I'm drink NFL and enough of you clicked like And subscribe on the last video that I did with them but they let me out of the t-55 turret they've stuck me in a seven heart turret and they also managed to squeeze my colossal head into a barrier that's four sizes too small so I'm not sure if that's an upgrade or not but nonetheless we're here at the new tank Museum exhibit it's called tanks for the Memories yes haha very funny um the tank in popular culture so as you saw from the previous video that was my top five Naval Maritime related tanks today we're here to have a look at some of the less successful tanks of the round so this is going to be the bottom five Naval and Maritime related tanks one of them is actually right behind us that way which you'll be seeing later on in the list and actually one of my favorites is over there as well which so if you haven't seen the previous video the top five go and see that anyway let's get on with more tanks [Music] thank you join us at tank fest book now at tankfest.com number five on the list the DD Sherman and indeed DD tanks of World War II in general now this is number five on the list because to be fair to them they did occasionally work but let's just say their developmental history was a little bit fraught they tried a number of tanks with this DD tank idea so you have this collapsible canvas skirt or screen that goes around the tank and is supposed to occupy enough volume that the displacement of the heavily armored vehicle doesn't just cause it to immediately sink there's also some propellers attached to the back to let it move through the water but uh well for the first few attempts to test one of these devices ended up with a tank rather than surprisingly sinking they eventually decided that the initial test Vehicles Valentine tanks were actually not particularly brilliant ideas because well the Valentine was Obsolete and because of the way the turret and the gun was laid out you had to rotate that to point backwards in order to fit it inside the skirt so they move over to the Sherman which was a modern tank and thanks to its gun and turret layout it could actually Point its gun forward which is you know the direction of the enemy when you're doing an amphibious Landing which is what you use these things for unfortunately when it comes to trying to make any kind of heavily armored vehicle amphibious you are on a bit of a hiding to nothing most of the time and in this case well as we can see this is a canvas screen and well canvas is not known to be bulletproof travel proof blast proof bomb proof rock-proof tank trap proof obstacle proof or really anything proof above maybe a four inch crab and so these things have to discussing habit of having the canvas fabric ripped apart and then them sinking and if the enemy didn't get you the sea conditions didn't get you the weather etc etc well then the smallest of waves could also over top you in theory these things could withstand waves a few feet tall and indeed on D-Day where the average wave height was between four to six feet some of them actually survived but an awful lot of them didn't and once the waves got up to about six feet these things were basically toast they had to do a lot of modifications to try and keep these things viable as well this is actually a slightly later model where it has additional steel reinforcement attached to the turret which then attaches to the screen which helps keep the screen higher but there were a few other problems getting a tank like this into the water using this kind of device for one thing the Sherman is fairly boxy not quite as boxy as something like a tiger but it's length to beam ratio for those of you who are into Naval things is not exactly great and that makes this very difficult to steer also as you can see it's quite tall while it's out of the water and given that the water line is quite high that means it will sit quite deep in the water so there's a lot of resistance which means it's very slow and it will generally refuse to stay in a straight line so if you take one of these off of a landing craft you are going to be wobbling around at a fairly slow pace a pace where a decent current might wash you out to sea anyway and you're going to have great interesting times trying to keep yourself pointed at the beach and all this while the enemy is firing on you and any kind of significant impact is going to cause some rather major leakage which you're not really going to be in the best place to try and fix so whilst is a good idea in theory for getting tanks to the beaches and as I said D-Day some of them did actually manage to get there and did perform fairly useful service there's a laundry list of issues with the DD tanks development there's a laundry list of issues with their implementation and they had to go through so many fixes after the first successful kind of implementations that it's difficult to call them an unmitigated success they're certainly not that ambitious yes useful when it works but there's an awful lot of Tanks off of the Normandy coast and in various other places where these were tried and so as a result from a naval Maritime perspective this is not the best way to get a tank to the shore um lcts exist for a reason so that's why it's on my number five because you can guarantee if I was in the Navy and I was told right you're now going to go and help some tanks get on the beach this is not the thing I would choose coming in at number four the tiger one now you might be looking at the tiger one and thinking drat you've truly lost it this time there is no way this has anything to do with the Navy or water in general well you'd be wrong in natural fact there are two things that connect the tiger to the Navy and amphibious operations generally one of which is interesting the other of which is why it's on this list the one that's interesting is the gun the 88 mil now long before the 88 Mill was a tank gun long before it was even a flat gun which is where this particular gun is derived from the 88 mil has a long and storied history in the German Navy it was initially a secondary or tertiary depending on which class of ship it was on gun on various ships of the German high seas Fleet or the Kaiser liquor Marina and in fact its first anti-aircraft iteration was also aboard Kaiser liquor Marina ships when they realized that you know aircraft were a thing back in World War one and so there were eventually two different variants of the 88 mil aboard German warships and that tradition of 88 millimeter guns continued through the interwar period which would eventually lead to the development of the anti-aircraft 88mm fat gun that saw deployment in the early part of World War II and that then led to the 88 mil that is deployed on this tiger so although it's a little bit of a convoluted link it is a definite link now the reason why the tiger is on this bottom list well it's big it's boxy and that means it's heavy and a heavy tank has problems getting over say things like the bridges of 1930s and 1940s Europe the infrastructure just isn't designed to cope with a tank of this kind of weight and that brings you down to the problem of well how do you get the thing across a river if it's going to collapse the bridge that means it has to go through the river it's not going to float and so you have to have some kind of amphibious kit a snorkel is a good thing that means you can submerge the whole thing and the engine will keep going but the crew also need air to breathe and at that point you need to be able to seal the tank up and the first version of the tiger one could do that you had a nice 13 foot long snorkel which could be attached to the back to keep the engine running but then you had to seal everything else up with endless amounts of rubber and well a lot of that rubber basically meant the tank was non-functional as a fighting vehicle whilst it was sealed up which if you were trying to you know use it as a tank was a little bit of a problem because the enemy is very unlikely to let you stop on the far side of the river and say oh yeah excuse me right I'm just going to go over here and I'm going to put some Rubber seal around this Viewpoint I'm going to put some Rubber seal around this machine gun or I'm going to put some Rubber seal around the tank turret and I'm going to put some rubber seals here here and here and then we're going to get back in the tank and then we're going to drive this monstrous thing down into the river and just hope it's not deeper than 13 feet we're somehow going to persuade its rather temperamental transmission to get us back up the other side and then if you would be so kind we are going to stop and we're going to extract all the rubber from the tank and then we're going to return it back to fighting service and then we can actually fight that's not how combat works so the river crossing capability of the tiger whilst it was notionally there was actually pretty useless and a lot of it was eliminated later on in later models of the tiger as they were produced and since that is a connection to amphibious operations the water um therefore for the fact that the tiger can't really cross Bridges and practically can't really cross rivers unless it's in a completely peaceful environment which you know being a tank at war is not usually the place you'll find it in that's why it's on number four as my worst tanks from a naval Maritime perspective number three on the list the type 95 hargo tank of Imperial Japan now this is a tank that actually served in both the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy and had a number of sub-variants Believe It or Not There was a sub-variant of the type 9-5 which actually was known as a semi-decent amphibious tank but we're looking at the original flavor hargo now as I said used in the Japanese Navy so very definite Naval connection but honestly it's an awful awful tank bearing in mind we're talking about World War II so okay start of the war 37 millimeter gun that's not awful there are some things like the Panzer one running around with machine guns Panzer twos running around with 20 millimeters so maybe that's not too bad to hold against it but it's very lightly built now if you come up to a town can you wrap your knuckles on the frontal glasses you should come away with some bruised Knuckles whereas if I do this not only do I not bruise my Knuckles it actually sounds Hollow you know you think it might be a mock-up if not but the fact it is definitely actually the original article it's not particularly fast either as well as not being particularly well protected and for all the compromises that were made in order to get this small lightweight tank available for use in various places and you know to be fair in some of those places like the Burmese jungle it proved to be quite useful but I didn't just being there you know any tank is better than no tank but it very rapidly proved to have a lot of weaknesses such as the boys anti-tank rifle a man portable supposedly anti-tank weapon that had been taken to the fields of france at the very beginning of World War II and found wanting against the earliest forms of German armor but more than a few of these fell victim to boys anti-tanks rifles over in the Far East Additionally the Matilda or more correctly the Matilda II again did relatively well in the early days of World War II but by 1941-42 was desiredly passed its prime in the western desert and in other theaters of the European War but when the Matilda came up against the hargo and the Matilda held a rather decided Advantage slow as it was the Matilda wasn't that much slower than a hargo Firepower was approximately equal slight advantage to the Matilda and the Matilda actually had armor that was worth something at least against these spawn calibers of weapons so when you think about it you you're taking a tank that's really in Europe only effective for six to 12 months of the campaign and an anti-tank rifle that basically isn't effective in Western Europe period and then you put it up against the hargo and suddenly they both become a viable and effective weapons and well the less said about what happened to these things when the M4 Sherman showed up Midway through World War II in the Pacific Theater well yeah the less said the better really these things are really just not particularly brilliant tanks even for their time period admitting they are slightly earlier than some tanks but even weighed up against their contemporaries they fall quite short there's a number of other issues I mean the lightweight does help them to be transported in relatively small Japanese landing craft that spare but you might notice the tracks are not exactly the widest it's a light tank but it's still a tank so it still weighs a fair bit and a number of these hargo got stuck in mud and wet sand which considering is a tank used by the Navy and is going to be used in amphibious Landings which generally do involve a degree of water is not really a feature that you want so basically on because this thing is only really useful against infantry who have no form of armored support or anti-tank weapons of any description Beyond a rifle or so but it was still used by the Navy the hargo is number three on my list of terrible Naval and Maritime related tanks number two on the list the l1e3 if you're a regular subscriber to the tank Museum Channel and why aren't you if you aren't you'll already know that David Fletcher does not have the highest opinion of this tank and it's uh something that I share with him where to begin it's an idea in the 1930s for a fully amphibious tank but there is there are so many issues you just look at it I mean for one thing it's supposedly a tang and its main Armament is a 303 machine gun yeah that's good that's really going to put Terror into the fear of your enemies um also have you noticed this this is not usually what happens when a tank gets hit by physical obstacles usually this is what the obstacle looks like this is not a very well protected tank in fact my great uncle one of my great uncles spent the first three years of the war running around the desert in an armored car that had more Firepower and more armor than this thing and that's an armored car this is supposed to be a tank um yeah I'm not filled with a huge amount of confidence with that additionally you've got these wonderful flotation pontoons fantastic keeps the thing afloat for what it's worth to maintain the buoyancy if they get riddled with holes someone had the genius idea of let's fill it with kapok or depending on the source possibly also ball sir well guess what kapok and Balsa are flammable so you've put four giant pontoons of extremely flammable material on the side of something that is presumably going to come under machine gun fire and to be perfectly honest as you can probably guess by the state of this frontal plate here these are probably the only things that could provide you with any protection whatsoever against incoming rounds and now you're probably going to be on your way to Valhalla in true Viking Style then as we highlighted with the hargo not exactly the world's widest track base so not really likely to be able to get in and out of the mud from Rivers which is going to be what you're most using this thing for very quickly or easily in fact if you've seen my previous video top five tanks the Scorpion is actually now just over to the right you can't see it in the on the camera but it is there and compare that Things Track based this thing's track based there is a world of difference that's why the Scorpion's good so yeah the l1e3 it's not particularly fast it's not particularly heavily armed it's definitely not very heavily armored it'll catch fire as soon as somebody shoots at you it probably can't get out of the mud of the riverbank and well yeah amphibious tank more like slightly weirdly shaped floating biscuit tin for my money and number one on my list of worst Naval and Maritime related tanks which is a little bit of a paradox because theoretically a number one should be good but in this case it's very very bad we have this thing uh this lump of vaguely off color butter looking armor is a bmp1 and it's nothing to do with the gun I mean okay it's a short while gun but let's face it this is an APC so you're not expecting great things out there and it does have a rather nice looking anti-tank missile stuck on top of it now the reason the BMP one is on the top or bottom of my list of worst possible tanks is when you get this thing into water so this is supposed to be an all singing all dancing armored personnel carrier so it's enclosed it's supposed to arrive on a nuclear chemical biological Battlefield it even has little firing ports down the side so the troops can engage people outside without having to go outside themselves so this is all well and good except it's also advertised as being fully amphibious now we've seen how some of the other tanks tried to be amphibious in big skirts on the DD Sherman questionably wooden pock-filled floats on our number two tank and the tiger which just kind of runs under water and hopes it doesn't drown and the hargo which gets around the hole being transported to Shore by just being an overall terrible lightweight tank but you see this thing it's not got floats it's not got skirts it's supposed to be a self-contained amphibious unit that will float so you think okay great this is fantastic we don't need to do any modifications we can just drive around come across a river into the river we go we're into the lake we go and yes in theory this is possible however when you get onto the water you will come across these little things called waves waves tend to be this high on a good day bit higher on most other days and this wonderful thing can cope with waves up to a whole 10 to 12 inches in height you know up to a foot which basically means if one of these hits the water with any great ambition and another one comes in a few seconds later the week of the first one will probably sink the second one or if there's a stiff breeze or a strong current or the deer on the other side of the river is looking at them funny basically to go into the water in one of these things you will do a very very good impression of Captain Jack sparovsky and just watch as your command disappears gently into the Danube or the elb or whatever other part of Europe you happen to be Crossing and then you just have to hope that you are in the command turret or you've done the sensible thing and sat on top of the armor Personnel care thus obviating the armored protection element of it but dramatically increasing your chances of not drowning horribly so you know of all the tanks we've looked at the one that probably could use some extra flotation devices is the one that doesn't have any extra flotation devices and is supposedly the one that's able to sail around all on its own so yeah not really any question why the BMP one is on my well number one spot worst possible amphibious tank because it promises everything and delivers nothing but a slow and painful death in some dark German river have fun bmp1 drivers so thanks for watching this bottom five Naval ambibious Maritime themed tankless with medrick NFL and thanks once again to the tank museum for letting me use their collection or should I say letting me out of the t-55 so I can continue filming in their collection uh if you're not subscribed to the tank Museum YouTube channel then please do so if you would like to and you're able to please support them on patreon because well that allows them to continue making videos like this and inviting people like me over and of course I am currently standing at all the mighty HMS Barb tallest of all tanks King of the domain I can see every tank before me so well in this case I'm not imprisoned but I now have a ship so I will take this out to sea so if you'd like the tank Museum to get their bath back in due time make sure you click that like And subscribe button and who knows they might even let me back a third time bye

Channel: The Tank Museum

Views: 220,521

Keywords: Bovington, Dorset, Tanks, Tankfest, tanks, tiger, chieftain, tank museum, second world war, world war two, top five tanks, tank chats, david fletcher, british army, tiger 131, royal armoured corps, tank regiment, RAC, tank museum bovington, tanklife, bovingtontank museum, military history, ww2, ww1, armoured car, tankchats, army, veteran, wwii history, world war 1, world war ii, war history, royal navy, ww2 history, royal air force, wwii museum, wwi, ww2 tanks, ww2 weapons

Id: oO1Foqb5-bQ

Length: 21min 59sec (1319 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 21 2023