Chris Copson | Bottom 5 Tanks

hello I'm Chris copson this is my bottom five list of Tanks hope you enjoy it it's very much a personal selection so feel free to disagree [Music] this video has been made possible by our supports on patreon our YouTube members and our super thanks donors please join them if you can't and support tank Museum and thanks for watching number five on my list is this fv4004 the Conway gun tank now this is a tank that's a result of to some extent blind panic 1945 the Berlin Victory Parade Western observers get their first real glimpse of the is-3 the Joseph Stalin 3 heavy tank and they realize that is bigger and uglier and tougher than anything we've got and our classes things like our Centurion so there's a sudden rush to devise something to take on the is-3 and later on the T10 and there was a tank called conqueror that was developed to do this the idea is the heavy tank would sit a tactical band behind the front line if Russian heavy armor appears it goes forward and sorts the problem out the trouble is conqueror is not ready and won't be for quite a while so what they do is to take an ordinary Mark III Centurion Hull and stick a much bigger gun on it and this is the 120 millimeter gun that was going to be installed on conqueror the trouble is what they've done is they've stuck a much bigger gun in A Lash up on a turret on a relatively small tank and it really doesn't work it's unstable as you can see it's high it doesn't give much protection to the crew there is a rumor story going the rounds that if this gun is revised to the side and you fire it on the wrong sort of ground it'll actually knock the tank over I don't know if that's true but in any case the manty's unstable and this is a project that doesn't see the light of day it simply doesn't work number four on my list is this a lot of you will recognize this tank it's very much one of the most marred tanks in our collection this of course is the yard tiger now what about it well it's got a massive 128 millimeter gun it has got 200 millimeters of armor I mean weighs 72 tons the thing is an absolute Brute it is the most heavily armed and heavily armored tank committed to battle by any side during World War II and there's no evidence one of these things being knocked out by enemy action so what's wrong with it well the fundamental problem is that in the back of this thing is a poor little 600 horsepower Maybach hl230 engine and that is the same engine that powers Tiger 1 which is 20 tons lighter so you're expecting a relatively small engine to pull an enormous load and that meant there were colossal problems with these things they only made just over 80 of them um and most of them were lost either through breakdown or simply because they ran out of fuel because they are unbelievably thirsty you say breakdown that's bad news because they hadn't got anything that would recover a vehicle of this size so they had to be left on the battlefield and blown up with demolition charges to stop them falling into enemy hands now what this is all about is the German Obsession and I think it's coming from the top for Mr Hitler himself building bigger and meatier and better armed and heavier tanks at the expense of mass production imagine the amount of Labor that came into designing and building a handful of these things that wouldn't affect the war effort one way or the other if you'd put that effort into producing something useful or getting the panther right it might have done some good so a lot of people admire this tank in my considered opinion it's a heap of junk it couldn't effectively do the job number three on my list is this this is the British A9 Cruiser tank now the cruiser tank is a concept the British army takes on in the years before World War II and the idea is it's the tank equivalent of Cavalry so it's fast it's relatively lightly armored and its Advantage is mobility so far so good how does this one do well it's certainly quite quick it'll do 25 miles an hour it's got a six cylinder 150 horsepower aec engine in the back it is really quite lightly armored the armor plate on this is ranges between 9 and 15 millimeters and this is one of the problems it might be relatively quick but if it comes across serious opposition the armor protection simply isn't good enough and these things the cruiser tanks suffered enormously in France in 1940. it's got a crew of six and looking at the front it's it's hopelessly cluttered isn't it I mean so far turret two pounder gun that was a respectable tank gun for the period but then you come down to the glassy and you've got the driver's position and then you've got two uh machine gun turrets now those are horrible and cramped the crew actually call them dust bins and it was like sitting in one but my main problem with this is you look at the front of the tank it's difficult not to see somewhere that isn't a shock trap any incoming round is going to get funneled into the middle of the tank it is an incredibly poor design um the British army is a bit like this in 1940 I'm afraid we have a whole range of different types of tanks that we send to France we have light tax reconnaissance infantry tanks slow moving heavily armored to support infantry and then we've got Cruiser tanks we haven't got one single decent medium tank that will fulfill the variety of rolls in my opinion and feel free to disagree I think it's a good thing that we had to leave a load of these things behind in France after Dunkirk because it meant we had to go and find something better foreign number two on my list is this this is the Matilda CDL and CDL means Canal defense light although that is actually a bit of a disguise because this had nothing to do with defending canals what this is um is a Matilda Mark II tank body um and you may remember the Matilda Mark II as an early War British tank with turret with a two pounder gun the turret has been disappeared and instead we've got this six-sided uh replacement with a decent machine gun and a long slot just over on that side now what that is is a three million candle power Searchlight and this is a peculiar Contraption um bony Fuller JFC Fuller had a lot to do with the Inception of it and this vehicle is designed to Blind and disorientate an enemy during a nighttime operation Searchlight itself three million candle powers that will project uh an area of light about 340 meters wide at a thousand meters obviously it is very very bright indeed you can make it flash twice a second and they're actually issued with filters as well so there's a blue filter an Amber filter the Amber filter uh two amber filters two tanks side by side um produce white light the blue filter actually made the tank itself appear further away so far so good um neat idea the only problem is try to find a use for it which they couldn't it was not effective enough and these things are we ordered to like 300 of these of the British army the Americans converted uh about the same number of M3 mediums but they saw practically no use during the war at all uh the British used a number of these during the Ryan Crossings um but they were ineffective the US Army used them at the Bridget Remagen and what they're trying to do is certain Dazzle German uh frogmen who tried to plant explosives to blur up the bridge but I think that worked very well either so um this is a brilliant idea without a real purpose total waste of time really number one on my list is this and this is a British Mark II heavy tank from the first World War um now why have I included this in my list of bottom five tanks because it's not significantly better or worse in most ways than the other tanks are in use at the same time the mark one mark IV Mark V um they all have a crew of eight they are takes four people to actually just drive and steer the thing and another four to fight it they are vulnerable to artillery he's the armor is relatively thin and the engine sits in the middle of the fighting compartment and it fills the air with carbon monoxide and makes it very very nasty indeed but what makes this uniquely awful is this tank doesn't even have the small degree of armor protection but the others had this is a training tank so it's spoilerplate not on plate it's never been proofed so how do these things training tanks end up in combat well you have to think back to the Battle of Aris which is in the spring of 1917. now the Tank's first appearance on the battlefield is in September 1916 there aren't many of them we lose quite a few we're desperate for tanks to put on the battlefield so by the time of Aris in the spring of the following year we're so desperate we even commit the training tanks despite the fact they don't have armor protection imagine going to war in a tank you do know for a fact won't really stop a bullet and when you look at this tank there are scars and dinks all over it around the back there are some quite spectacular hits from pieces of um shell shrapnel that have gone right the way through so you'd need to be pretty brave to actually do that but Aras I'm afraid is a complete disaster in any case for the tanks they get pinned in behind a railway bank that's a place called bullacaw they don't achieve much of what they're setting out to do and the Australians who the tanks are supposed to be supporting actually lose a lot of their faith in what they're thinking is a new wonder weapon so Aris is a disaster and one of those things as I said you know the fact we're committing um unarmored tanks to combat shows how desperate we are if anything good comes out of it it's the fact that quite a few of these tanks are left on the battlefield and actually captured by the German Army and they test far against them and that gives them um probably an overweaning idea of what will penetrate tank armor so they think that their new armor-piercing smk rounds will actually go through tank armor because they don't realize they've been firing unarmored tanks anyway that's my number one the British Mark II heavy well that was my bottom five list of Tanks hope you enjoyed it if you did please subscribe and if you can support us on patreon

Channel: The Tank Museum

Views: 221,989

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: e2NUEQsN0ms

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023