David Fletcher | Bottom 5 Foreign Tanks | The Tank Museum

and as I've said before if you don't agree with any of these things well don't agree but don't tell everybody we don't want to know no one's interested so keep those things to yourself [Music] now you'll remember that we did a four awful tanks thing or five all thanks for looking at the the British tanks and we thought to make it reasonable we bring in the forum ones that that poses problems immediately what we've tried to do is produce five tanks which were all in the museum here and which were so awful that they qualified that hasn't been possible in fact we've had to bend the rules a little bit to squeeze them in anyway for a start they're not all tanks but nevermind they're all armoured vehicles and they're all in this museum but two of them we're going to have to do using photographs because they we they don't exist in Britain at all but that's the reason we've done it to make it to give a bit of balanced and the thing really if you like so that people can see that Britain wasn't the only country that built awful tanks it's just that some of these are awful for different reasons now I'm making this one my number five it's not because there's anything particularly good about it there isn't but what I really wanted to do was use it as an example of how so many countries still clung on to the idea of the carbonyl oeid carrier Poland France some others and Italy mainly Italy built about 2,000 of these things not all with flamethrowers but they built quite a few of them and really they would past their prime they shouldn't be gone into action at all and that's really the main failing with them but this is essentially a carbon Lloyd carrier it's got the carden loyd type suspension here the only difference is that whereas with the original carbon Lloyd the 1926 model the two crew member City the side of a Model T Ford engine saying that 20 horsepower this thing's got a Fiat engine a four-cylinder engine across the back forty-eight odd horsepower and it does make quite a difference in performance but it can't beat the suspension this sort of suspension is simply no good for anything but the best quality roads it gets hammered Sandoval his business and is probably the main failing with these vehicles now as a fighting vehicle in any case it's too small the maximum armor thickness was about 13 to 14 millimeters which isn't really very much they weren't that fast they were quite easy to take out and of course the arm at all points dead ahead so that there's no Traverse for the gun it gets caught whichever way it goes a British armored car could probably take one of these out it was certainly run rings around it if we didn't do anything else and that was considered quite a bad thing but that was the fact is the Italians had loads of these and used them in quite large numbers in fact so many that when the italians capitulated and change sides the germans took over what was left and used them as police vehicles for internal security work and I would think that must going to come down in the world from wherever they were in before having to go into one of these things now this particular machine it's a CV 335 and it's fitted with a flame-throwing device now flamethrowers are quite rare they're absolutely awe-inspiring for anyone looking at them quite frightening in many ways but not really as dangerous as that all that the British flamethrower the crocodile was probably the most lethal it felt fired at a sort of napalm really a thickened sort of petrol fuel which stuck to whatever it was fired at and carried on burning and you don't want that but ordinary petrol five out and set lights looks dreadful great clouds of smoke roaring flame but it really isn't that dangerous unless you get fried by it of course but that's the secret these things of this Italian vehicle had a trailer on the bank you can see it here a two wheel trailer carried about 500 litres of petrol and that would produce a Ghouta flame for the flamethrower 500 litres may sound a lot but it does laughter long winning using a flame thrower he casts out of the front in terrific Jets and really sort of them he's used up in no time and the other thing is that a trailer is really not a good idea behind the tank I know we fitted it in Britain too the Churchill crocodile because we had to there was no alternative but generally speaking it inhibits the movement of a tank considerably and it would really have affected these things quite seriously because they're underpowered as it is they really are too small and too cramped it's unpleasant for the people inside especially in somewhere like the North African desert and difficult to maneuver because they can't see out clearly can't see what's coming at them and generally got wiped out that way but that's the idea behind these vehicles they were very low very compact little vehicles that they were really from an age before the the real tank had been invented and that's the fault with them they were not ideal fighting vehicles for the Second World War and they soon got wiped out that's the main drawback really now we're looking at the m22 the locust and it's an airborne tank it was designed as an airborne tank and it's that aspect of it that I want to talk about the idea was and it's a crazy idea was that the tank was gonna be flown by the c-54 which is a four-engined troop carrier if you like later became a well known airliner but that's why it has this amazing system of clever PSA's on the side the idea was that you drove the tank up to the aircraft and did the turret lifted off the turret and slid that inside the aircraft and then drove what's left the chassis of the tank underneath the plane and it was lifted on four hoists so that became part of the undercarriage almost of the aircraft and it meant a that the aircraft had to land at an acknowledged airstrip not anywhere and it also meant that the tank had to be put together before it could go into action for instance you've got to take the the hull here drive it round to the side the aircraft load the turret back on fix the turret up and then drive off to where the action is the fact is you're not going to get there it's not even worth considering so that's the negative side of it really otherwise it was quite a good tank it was designed by mom & herrington limited and it has a lycoming engine in the back giving it quite a lot of power and it was quite a neat little tank the only trouble was it wasn't really fit for operations on a 1944 battlefield and that's what we did with the few that we had over him in Britain they were supplied to Britain because the Americans never used them in the airborne role that they decided on and we used them and flew them across the Rhine an operation plunder as part of the reinforcements of the parachutists who'd already landed the idea was that these tanks would come out and they'd provide fire support for the troops but quite honestly a light tank like this smaller than with only a 37 millimetre gun is completely a waste of time on the 1944 battlefield with tigers and panthers roaming about and you could see why it was likely to get clobbered it was however a well designed little vehicle with a quite a good suspension it has your notice a rod here holding the suspension in place this was essential because it wasn't and otherwise wasn't rigid enough without that and with the lycoming engine in the back and a gear box at the front quite a neat little tank in other respects driving to the front sprocket as most American tanks were in those days of welded construction and it would have well a normal crew of three you'd have to in the turret and a driver down here who didn't know where he was at the time but that's the vehicle but it's really this business of moving it by air the idea that you could take it to bits lift up the turret clip it under an airliner and have that fly to an airbase and land and then go through all the business of putting back together and getting into action that's what's really at fault for this design and it was never tried that way it could be done but it was never used in action in that form at all when the British used it we took it over the Rhine in a glider the glider landed in the middle of the battlefield and although it wasn't any good for the people inside the tank they were where the fighting was they were gonna get clobbered anyway but with that in sight it was fairly effective but they used them later on I've seen them being used as runabouts with self-propelled artillery batteries and that sort of thing and they were used as a commander's tank so he could do a recce of where he was going and set himself up so he often saw later in the war late 1944-45 you'd see them acting as a support vehicle with a soaked old artillery battery after the war I've even seen one of them in RAF service in the Middle East and that's quite astounding but they were there ready to frighten people and they do that all right he looks quite effective with the gun but it is only a small tank quite an ineffective one by 1945 standards so what I thought I'd do now is the next one on the worst tanks list is the Russian t35 and I'm particularly looking at the later model the 1933 onwards model which was the longer one and I really want to make that my next sort of next most horrible tank if you like we've chosen to do it up against the independent partly because we haven't got a t35 here there's one in kubinka in rats row but it's a long way to go just to see one tank and we've got the independent here which some people most people in fact outside Russia say was the inspiration for the t35 the Russians say no it wasn't but argue about that later the thing is that both tanks have five turrets and it's that among other things that makes it nearly as awful as the tank can be because there's no reason for a tank to have five turrets it sounds great it sounds of shooting in all directions half the time it's shooting in none but the against the independant the t35 was a monster it was something like 35 feet long this thing's only 25 feet long but they were both roughly the same width and it meant that the t35 was almost impossible to steer it's all to do with a thing called the L over C ratio and that's to do with the width of the tank as against the length of the track on the ground and if you do that if you calculate it wrong and get it outside the scale they'll over see which is acceptable then you end up with a machine that won't steer conversely if you do it the other way around and make the tank too wide for its length you get a tank the won't go straight you can't win either way but that's what happens this thing and with the t35 they found that it was a draw and a half for the crowds in Red Square when 235 came rolling down the road people were overjoyed to see that Russia had produced such a massive battleship of a tank it had five turrets of guns pointing in all directions and really looked like the bee's knees as far as that was concerned but in action and only a few of these were used in action it was an absolute disaster largely due to the fact that it couldn't fire its guns when it was moving not at least with any hope of hitting anything and therefore you had to stop to fire to fire accurately anyway the t35 was armed with a 76 millimeter gun in the turret here and then it had four sub turrets at the front the sub turret on the Left had a 45 millimeter gun the one on the right is you're looking at it had a machine gun only whereas at the back it was the other way round that what we would call the nearside had a 45 millimeter gun the other turret had just a machine gun and that was the whole armament of the tank it had machine guns front had machine guns out to the roof for shooting and aeroplanes a separate one on the main turret as well and one on the back so it had machine guns sprouting out everywhere but they really weren't that effective in action because there's such a lot for the tank to fire at that it misses and that's the big problem with them the other thing was it had a much more robust suspension than independent that independent has of called spring suspension on the t35 it had a rather like a Sherman in a way had a bogie type suspension but - all hidden behind armor plate of course now the other thing with the t35 was it was thinly armored it weighed about 45 50 tons but because of its size it couldn't be armored to the sort of scale that was needed and therefore those few that went into action were usually if they hadn't broken down beforehand and most of them broke down mainly due to transmission failures then it tended to be knocked out by the smallest anti-tank gun could make a hole in it and that was really no good it looked threatening it looked absolutely dreadful when it came into action but in fact it wasn't much of a risk at all it had guns firing everywhere but they couldn't hit anything and that really made all the difference the t35 vanished from the scene it really was useless as a tank probably excellent as a spectacle in something like the Red Square parades but not as a fighting tank aBSI useless it had a v12 engine in the back was saying actually not the same engine but the same size as the engine in independent except that and t35 was about 500 horsepower drove through a brake and touch and break steering system which was had no effect anyway because steering was nearly impossible but that was how it worked and that's why as a fighting tank I would rate it down pretty low well I know you're not supposed to say nasty things about German tanks but on this occasion I'm making it section I've chosen the YAG tiger which is going to be number two on our list and it's here really to show how you can make a dreadful tank by making it too heavy this thing weighs about 70 tons it's actually the heaviest type of tank to see service during the Second World War and it was so heavy that there were places it couldn't go many places it couldn't go and also it was quite slow it had a theoretical top speed of 23 miles an hour a lot faster than the old elephant over there but still quite slow and really rather a ponderous beast because it's relying on the gun sticking out the front to do the damage it's got no Traverse more than just a little bit for the gun itself at all and it that makes quite a difference it was a self-propelled gun it was designed around the tiger to the bottom half is pure Tiger - same armor thickness the only difference and I'll come to that in a minute is in the suspension but the top half is different again it's a very heavily armoured carapace with 128 millimeter gun sticking out the front which is quite a powerful weapon at the best of times one of these things dug in and well defended could hold up a whole Armored Division quite easily by itself the trouble was that they couldn't always do that they were always breaking down which is a nightmare with these things and of course if they were caught in the open they were badly knocked about anyway so that's the disadvantage of having a gun point sticking out forwards but what I wanted to talk about as well was the suspension which makes this thing quite interesting the original Tiger King Tiger has a torsion bar suspension which you would have thought would have been quite adequate for this thing as well as it happens Ferdinand Porsche came along he would interfere if he could and he advised using his own system which uses separate bogies of two wheels joined by a horizontal torsion bar the problem is that the whole unit the whole suspension unit is attached to the hull by a bracket and it's that bracket that can make up the weakness and you'll see there's there's a suspension unit missing from the left-hand side it broke and you can see where it's come off the main vehicle and that really makes a difference it means that the whole weight of the vehicle is carried on those brackets and not on the suspension unit itself whereas the torsion bar suspension running across the tank carries the whole tank anyway carries all the weight and doesn't normally come off so it's a lot more reliable than that point of view but that's the the real difference between this one that's what makes this vehicle an interesting vehicle in the collection having that sort of arrangement in it but with 250 millimetres of frontal armor it was virtually indestructible but at the same time it had to be where the enemy were it was no good just waiting for them to come and if it tried to get anywhere by moving it will break down almost invariably that happened and that is really what's at fault with these things they're too heavy we've got other tanks in the museum that a heavier but thank goodness they were never used in action but otherwise it's quite a remarkable vehicle but from that point of view from the mobility point of view you can forget it it's got no mobility at all so now we come to the worst horror on my list this is number one the real nasty tank of them all and the one I've chosen is the ARL 44 it was a French tank actually designed while the war was on designed on the quiet really they didn't want the Germans finding out and that's one of the reasons it's so awful the French they've they haven't had anything to do with tanks for four or five years except German ones coming around telling them what to do so they decided to base it on the shabi that's why we've decided to show it to you from the side the SHA be there is an IRL 44 in the French Museum at Sameer there's another one in one of the towns in France as well so there are a couple that exists we don't have it of course it's an awful tank and probably one want it but because the French hadn't got any tanks of their own no designs left really they decided to base it mechanically on the shabi it had the same suspension in the same tracks what they wanted to do was make a tank as French as possible with no British or any other American influence in their design whatever and for that reason they wouldn't adopt him a British American or even a German suspension system they would insist on having a French type suspension system that's why they chose the shabi as the running gear for the new tank and when you think the shabi dates back originally to 1926 that really is going a bit but that's the way they work things now the other thing was the French had noticed that the British and the Americans hadn't got a really heavy tank nothing that would stand up against a tiger - for instance we had some guns that would take out the tiger - but that's not quite the same thing the hen got a tank that would really slug it out with the tiger - so the French decided to build a heavy tank they hadn't got a heavy tank probe lined up for themselves but they thought they could contribute something to their part in the war by coming up with a heavy tank designed around and the shabi and the one they chose is the one we know as the ARL 44 and mainly by the people that made it now the tank was designed with a smaller turret to begin with that a American 75 millimeter gun but they did away with that they decided to go for a much larger turret and the 19 millimeter gun it was modified to man Haig and in fact it was quite effective the trouble was that it was too long it stuck out at the front and if they turn the turret round it stuck out at the back so what the French did quite ingenious well he had a system whereby the 90 millimeter gun was retracted into the turret so far the breech actually stuck out the other end you undid a hatch in the back of the turret and the breech from the set of the 90 millimeter gal she's stuck out there and that was how it was transported it was quite a hefty tank anyway it weighed about 50 tons and had 102 millimeters of frontal armor so it was quite thick and quite devastating but the gang apparently didn't always work pretty effectively and the turret was cobbled together they can got in the armor in France and they haven't got that set up to make it so they decided to salvage Armour from the French battleship Dunkirk which had been scuttled and because she'd been scuttled they were able to get bits off it rather than take it to bits there and then and they made the turrets from Armour they'd taken off the Dunkirk the drawback was that they didn't weld it very well and it was quite a crude thing to begin with but that's how they did it and you ended that with a tank which had quite a an old how surmounted by what looked like a very modern turret with an effective gun in it but they were very slow in getting it produced in fact by late 1944 early 45 the Germans had been cleared out of that part of France so they could make design it in the open but they were still very slow at getting it produced and in fact the war was over long before the tank was available for anybody to use so the idea was there but in practice they weren't able to do it but that's the sort of problem you think now the other thing was the engine they wanted an engine of about 500 600 horsepower for some reason they didn't want a British engine the meteor probably would have done perfectly well but they've decided in the end to take a captured German Maybach engine it's something they'd done earlier at the end of the first world war they'd use Maybach engines in one of their other heavy tanks because they were available and the way back engine was a damn good engine but probably didn't the finish didn't really want it they wanted something of their own in there and they didn't have an engine that would do so the thing had a German Maybach engine in it way to say 50 tons and was quite a solid frontal armor carried five men carried two in the hull a driver and a hull machine gunner and three in the turret but it didn't succeed and the tank lasted only a short while after the war took part in one of the 14th of July parades in Paris and then vanished and no one's seen it since apart from those that have survived in the museum so really quite interesting tank but a tank that has disappeared from the most people don't even know about it but it did exist after the war and the ARL 44 as a tank design has got to be the worst of those foreign tanks that I've listed we've come to the end of these we've looked at these tanks and there are my my choice of five worst foreign tanks we've done the British ones now we've done the worst of the the foreign ones as well and only two of them I'm pleased to say we had to go really make it up as we went along we used a tank from another place and filmed it against a tank here which was similar to it but that was all we could do with the others we were very lucky that we had those tanks here and it's very difficult finding a foreign tank which is so awful it ought to be listed and I've probably done a few which have annoyed people that's tough I don't care but that's the way it goes and we just done that really they're all meant to be a bit of fun anyway so all I'm gonna say is if you can subscribe to YouTube it's a great help to us and if you can support us on patreon then we're very welcome to see you there thanks very much you

Channel: The Tank Museum

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Keywords: david fletcher tank chat, Top 5 tanks, top 5, top five, the tank museum top 5 tanks, tank museum top 5, top five tanks, bottom 5 tanks, worst 5 tanks, 5 worst tanks, worst foreign tanks, bottom 5 foreign tanks, david fletcher, bovington tank museum, david fletcher tank chats, jagdtiger, worst tanks, david fletcher top tanks

Id: gZHwasYjcIA

Length: 28min 12sec (1692 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 22 2018