Plan 1919 | The Tanks of Plan 1919 | The Tank Museum

so the mark-5 two star for a start of course it was done as a new version of the mark 5 star it was the same length and we ought to talk about length a little bit because with the demise of the Germans with their sudden retreat and their demise in November 1918 you can't see the need for these wider tanks and I think they were all built like this because we imagined that the war would go on into 1919 everyone was thinking like that and we imagined that the Germans would build wider trenches in defense of the homeland as much as anything else so he needed widened or longer tanks to get over them and this is the mark-5 to star it's really it's about 23 24 feet long and you'll see it's fitted with the wider 26 and a half inch tracks for some reason they decided to reduce the weight on these tanks by increasing the width of the track from 20 and a half inches to 26 and a half and it means that each tank has an overlapped area of track sticking route around the side the drawback was for every time it went over any sort of rough ground this part tended to weaken it wasn't really the best idea to put wider tracks on and just expect the tank to stand on them because so much of the weight was taken by the end of the track itself but that's how they did it and it was a feature of most of these later Patton tanks so what they've done basically is built a mark 5 with about 6 feet of extra armor or so and in the center of the tank the only difference is in mark 5 two-star they've altered the layout of the front part so that it's more balanced it's a better design altogether and therefore more easy to steer than the old mark 5 star which used to number about rather badly they've also moved the commander's separate cupola from the back to the front so it comes up up behind the driver's cab they've also fitted the Ricardo 225 horsepower engine much more powerful than the old 105 that the ordinary mark 5 had in it and also moved the engine further back to also the point of balance really which is what they were after now what they decided to do they had and I'll come to this a bit more with the market later on but they had their doubts in Britain about not the ability of America to reduce the market but whether enough of them will get across the Atlantic or the bits of them to warrant building them in this country and in France so they built the mark 5 to star as am an insurance against that it was here it was nearly as powerful and it had the lengths to deal with the problems they foresaw and that's why this tank was considered as an alternative to the market in the last months of the war and why it would have been involved if it had been in planned 1919 that's what makes it so different this particular tank is a female and tell that by the way the sponsons arranged and it was it stayed for years as did most of the mark-5 two stars they were actually issued to the experimental bridging establishment at Christchurch and they were used with jibs fitted to the front with different kinds of hoists on them this one had a hydraulic jibe with a Janney pump at the back and it was designed to carry and lay bridges and destroy pill boxes with a demolition charge and also to trail mine rollers in front of it so it was really a universal Royal engineer tank a forerunner if you like of the aviary of World War 2 but longer there's a long gap between them so there's no actual influence of the two and it will be used to do in Fuller's words the initial breakthrough of the front when the other tanks were sweeping around the back the faster tanks and that was really the whole idea behind these large heavy tanks so now we've come across to look at the market and the market is the tank as far as planned 1919 s concerned but it all came at a bad time the Armistice intervened they had originally ordered 655 for the British and they only built about 24 of them and out of those 24 only six or seven were used in army service so it really was the end of the market but this was the tank that was going to lead the way in the main frontal assault in plan 1919 now we know it as the market it was also known as the International or the anglo-american tank because it involved British and American designers it was a bit of a step away from what we done up until now the sponson behind me was actually designed by Herbert Alden who was a major in the United States Army he was working with John Rackham who was doing the basic vehicle design so the two of them together really designed this tank and it was only produced as a mail you only see this version with the six pounder sponson and the reason is that on top and the superstructure on top of the machine guns and it really did the job of both male and female in that sense now what they were going to do originally was order 1,500 of these tanks and they were to be built by Armour and bits and pieces sent over from Britain and by mechanical parts including the engine which was a 300 horsepower Liberty v12 that was going to be shipped across from the United States and the two would come together at a place called nervy pandu in France which is now a village in those days was just just open country where the French were gonna build a factory for the new tanks to be produced so that all the Allies could have them Britain America and France the French actually dropped out quite early on then changed their minds and decided they'd like some tanks anyway but tank itself is quite impressive it's powered by this v12 engine now the 600 tanks ordered in Britain and in fact they were ordered in Scotland it was North British loco and beer Moors who were going to build them and those tanks had a Ricardo v12 in because we thought that even if in America they managed to produce a tank version of the v12 Liberty aircraft engine we thought that you boats would sieve them off as they came across the Atlantic and that we'd never have enough of them so we decided to produce our own engine which is also why we produced the Mach 5 to star there's no Turnitin to this if the market wasn't ready in time but the real key was this massive number that were being produced at the factory in France if they never got around to it it's quite an interesting tank in many respects although the track is 26.5 inches wide you'll see they've widened the frames so that they come out to the very edge of the track this did away with the problem of the track breaking by him going over bumps and they fitted a dimple into the middle of the track to make it more much stronger anyway so that the whole thing lasted longer now that meant that because the track frames were wider the hull had to be narrower they wanted the tank to fit the British railway loading gauge which was very restrictive because it dated back to 1825 and but they did it by doing away with the internal frames that make hold the tank together and they took away those internal frames increased the floor space that and the fact that the engine had been moved to the back and put in a separate compartment meant that the crew could move around more readily in the infighting area at the front which was more sensible you'll see the driver's cab at the front there the driver sat above an in the middle and had a jolly good view ahead of him he also found the tank easy to drive it only had two speed epicyclic s-- and they acted as gear change and the steering mechanism people thought that a four-speed epicyclic would work better but the Americans thought a two-speed would do and they appear to have been right the tank did work perfectly well with a two-speed epicyclic the commander and machine gunners then arranged themselves in that top part so they could see out on the battlefield and machine gun anyone they didn't like who happened to be wandering about but they only normally carried two machine gunners so the guys had to hop about of it to be in the right place at the right time to fire the machine gun in the right direction that was one other feature of the tanks a little bit old but then it saved people tripping over one another the commander has a raised lookout on top of the vehicle that raised lookout is designed to be retractable so that if the tank goes on a railway wagon that it won't clear the loading gauge for that thing so that is lowered a little bit to fit over the roof of the tank when it's not needed by the command and when it's going by rail that is so that's really the market it's about 34 feet long it's a little bit longer than the others and therefore quite a excellent tank for dealing with wide trenches which is what it was designed to do it also brings in just quickly the mark 7 which was a another tank built in Scotland a tanker the hydraulic transmission they ordered 70 of those but they only produced two by the time the armistice came about so the whole lot would cancel most two were given to various museums one of them came down here to Buffington the other went to the Imperial War Museum when they used to have a museum in Crystal Palace something and that's the only real occasion the mark 7 even comes into it no mark 7 has survived so we can't see one but it really looked like a mark 5 slightly longer at the back and well covered in cooling venters because it needed more air getting into it because it was hydraulic and the hydraulic tanks tended to build up a lot more heat inside them so now we'll move on and look at the mark 9 now the mark 9 it's very difficult to dump it him with the other 1919 tanks it's never actually mentioned as part of plan 1919 but it must have been intended because there was no other use for it at all now they ordered something like 200 of them from Marshalls Gainsborough but they only seem to have completed about 35 after the Armistice pull up aid to the whole idea of running tanks a year later but it's an interesting vehicle anyway it wasn't a fighting tank which is why it doesn't have sponsons on the side like any other fighting tank does it was designed as a troop carrier or what we call today an armoured personnel carrier it could take 30 men inside now the only difficulty was these 30 men had to stand up there was nowhere to sit no we're comfortable anyway and right down the middle of the tank it was the drive shaft which was spinning round so he didn't want to catch a leg on that and you've got to imagine 30 men swaying uncomfortably in this tank standing up because only a few could reach a handhold and steady themselves everybody else had to hold on for the best they never actually did this so we don't know but 30 men in there does seem and an awful problem why they didn't put seats over things like the driveshaft so that some of the men could sit down heaven knows that they didn't that tanks quite interesting inside anyway because they're trying to make as much room as possible within the tank it was designed to carry 30 men or up to ten tons of stores inside which is why it has those two huge doors each side that you can load it through plus more in a roof rack on top and even more on sledges towed behind the tank but the controls inside are really unusual the gear change is a lever above the driver's head and it activates a series of rods that run back to the gearbox at the bank so the engine and all the mechanical parts there as far as possible forward and the gearbox and transmission as far as possible backwards to make as much room inside as you can do and that's why they did it and the other controls for the brake levers were actually run through the floor now the other thing they did to make as much room as possible inside the tank they cut away most of the interior frames normally with the tank you have track frames on the inside here as well as on the outside and the idea of the other tanks was to have as much training as possible inside to stiffen them up to make him stronger the Martin I didn't have that it has most of the frame cut away they were all designed by a chap called John Rackham who was the young officer who was in charge of tank design at that time and this tank is purely his work they say one thing you will find if you do get inside and you can do that if you visit the museum is that across the floor up some huge girders they are there to stiffen the tank to keep it reasonably strong while the troops are in there and the idea was to carry 30 men into action so that the idea of the theory at least was that the infantry would arrive at the scene of battle less tired than if they walked so they climbed out and stood around or went into action straight away that was the idea but of course they've been inside a tank and the tank is a naturally unpleasant place for anyone to travel in he wasn't used to it it's full of fumes the tank was well ventilated as tanks go but you'd still get some fumes coming up and that would all make it unpleasant and the demotion itself is unpleasant plus the men are in the dark they don't know where they're going acceptance to be shot at so they know that when they get out there in action straight away and that's why the tank was designed as it is quite unusual at the front the driver sits extremely hard over to the left as you can see and he's there for its enormous left hand drive tank and that does seem odd for a British tank directly behind it is a look that was put up there for the commander so he could view the battlefield from inside in relative safety and to the other side was a Hotchkiss machine gun position now that raises another interesting point there's a machine gun position at the front and another one at the back designed for the tank crew to use and the Hotchkiss the air-cooled Hotchkiss was the standard tank core machine gun but there are a number of loopholes down each side of the tank they're there for putting rifles through I think five of them each side a capable of taking a machine gun but they're fitted inside with a mounting that looks as if it's meant to take the Hotchkiss which would be unusual because the British infantry didn't carry the Hotchkiss machine gun it wasn't used by them instead they used the Lewis gun which has a much larger jacket and it we think possibly you could get the Lewis gun through the holes in the side of the tank and it would give the tank a fair amount of anti-infantry firepower but as I say they were never used it never actually came to that the tank itself was lethargically slow it would do four miles an hour on a good day and that's not very much really it's probably due to the amount of tracking contact with the ground it makes these tanks difficult to steer and very sluggish the idea is to have those few feet as possible track actually touching the ground at any one time and that seems to be in the main fault with the mark 9 a few of them were intended to be Hospital tanks they were going to carry stretchers but I still don't understand why they needed a tank carrying ten tons of stores the ordinary supply tanks which they used that until then carried enough supplies for five battle tanks that's in the way of fuel water extreme you nishan and that sort of thing and that was enough and I think five battle tanks on the battlefield is as much as you want to see in a day if you're going round loading them up but ten tons of style seems amazing to me unless it was for the infantry in which case they probably used it but a lot of their stuff a bulky rather difficult to get in and out those doors it's all going to be unloaded and carried to the place of action time anyways is quite hard work still it makes an interesting vehicle the idea that a troop carrier could be used on the battlefield as as early as 1918 1919 quite remarkable but none of this came to pass the whole tank story but as far as the mark nines concerned more or less ends with the armistice they're just a few that were kept for a while and then disposed of and this is now the only survivor I thought I'd start off I'm just gonna talk about the medium tanks now we don't have a medium B or a medium C so I'm gonna just talk about them quickly now the B was designed by Walter Wilson he tried to make it as short as possible by putting the four-cylinder Ricciardo engine in in fact he probably made it too short they say the tank was very cramped and uncomfortable they were only used for training and weren't produced in large numbers now the medium C was designed by Sir William Tritton of fosters and it has always reckoned to be the best tank of the whole first world war better than anything we've produced up until then so fat lot of good because it didn't appear until after the Armistice now the medium C was bigger than the medium B it was powered by a six-cylinder Ricciardo engine the same as you'd find in a mark 5 or a later tank so it's quite a good and powerful machine but the tank has gone they haven't they saved one up until the time of the war and then scrapped it and that was the last medium see that we had a chance to get and it's gone now but the tank that followed it is the tank that really matters the medium D was the tank that general fuller decided was going to be the if you like the main strength of his plan 1919 now again we haven't got a no medium D is survived and the real secrets in the medium D was the suspension up until this time no British tank had any suspension at all but Johnson bearing in mind the weight that suspension could add to a tank designed a complex system which had Springs on each end and then had wire rope and the wire rope ran under each one of these pulleys here and over a similar pulley in the frame of the tank so that in a way acted as a suspension as this wheel was displaced by a bump in the ground it pulled on the wire and pulled the spring the tracks what they called snake track it was only ever Purdue for the light infantry tank and really although it follows the principle of the medium D and that it's flexible both laterally and them individually shoe will go its own way over rough ground it's a bit different from the one that was used the one that was used on the medium D had a central core of flexible steel wire rope the same system as they used for the suspension of the track the tank itself was light infantry tank then this was taken into the tank museum but scrapped and the only thing they've sell from it is one section here with two bogies in it and the piece of track that's all we've got left of this tank but it does do to illustrate how the suspension worked on the medium D and it was really quite unique okay there if you enjoyed that the film regular bits of film we've made if you'd subscribe to YouTube that helps us a great deal and more so if you'll support patreon because that's something that we really can do with thanks very much you

Channel: The Tank Museum

Views: 133,562

Rating: 4.9869666 out of 5

Keywords: first world war, plan 1919, plan 1919 alternate history, mark v**, mark v two star, mark VIII tank, Mark viii, Mark IX, medium tanks, ww1, david fletcher, david fletcher tank, david fletcher tank chats, plan 1919 tanks, fuller, alternative history, tank museum, bovington tank museum, tank museum plan 1919

Id: 8_2NCjXyO18

Length: 22min 19sec (1339 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Arch_D0rnan]

They have like 6 videos about Cambrai, Plan 1919 tanks etc.