Richard Smith's Bad Ideas | Bottom 5 | The Tank Museum

hello everybody my name is richard smith i'm the director of the tank museum here in bovington and today i'm going to do another bottom five tanks because slating other people's work is quite cathartic please remember to like subscribe or click the little notification bell if you don't want to miss out on these videos and i'd just like to say thank you to all our patrons for making this possible please join them if you can those of you who are regular viewers of our youtube channel here at the tank museum will know i've already done a bottom five tanks but much like the top five tanks there's no upper limit to the number of bottom five tanks you can pick if you want to go and berate other people's work the key thing in all of these is picking your criteria and then matching stuff to it and in my first bottom five tanks that i did the criteria i picked there were looking at vehicles for which there was a fundamental design problem but they still went in production and ended up on the battlefield today i'm going to look at something a bit different so picture this this scenario is what i'm going to base today's bottom five on for those of you who worked in the corporate world in the past like i have this will be distressingly familiar you arrive in the office in the morning and you're told you have to go to a seminar and you go into your seminar in a meeting room with your cup of coffee and you see there's a management consultant and he's standing in front of a whiteboard and has a great big stack of colored post-it notes and he opens up his brainstorming session with the phrase there's no such thing as a bad idea and as you listen to the gentle thud of heads on desks you recognize the fact you're going to have to write off the rest of your morning and the key problem here is he's just said something just blatantly untrue but you at that particular moment are not armed with a way of proving him wrong well today ladies and gentlemen i am going to arm you with the arguments you need in that scenario and i'm going to equip you through the medium of tanks [Music] now of course the best example of proving that sometimes there really is such a thing as a stupid idea is not a tank but is i give you the russell boomerang grenade let's just ponder this for a second yes a boomerang grenade there are a number of issues you could probably identify with this off the top of your head it's a the example here is in the the auckland war memorial museum where wonderfully they catalogued this as not merely the russell boomerang grenade but the australian russell boomerang grenade just to make it clear which country's fault it was actually the only one i've seen is in the infantry museum for the australian army uh in new south wales and hunter valley it's a wonderful museum they never get a chance to go there the way you justify going there so the hunter van is a beautiful wine growing area lots of vineyards around it but i thoroughly recommend a visit but i think those are the only two examples left but the russell boomerang grenade for me is the standout example of any military object where during the design process after the suggestion of what about a boomerang grenade someone in the room should have the moral courage to say no no that's a stupid idea and that's the basis on which we're going to look at my bottom five tanks today now number five on my bottom five list of stinkers today is the vicar's independent now this one you can see is a bit of a harsh choice for a bottom five tanks because it's not all bad in fact there's some really good things about this tank the designer of this tank for instance is walter wilson and i am a huge fan of wolves wilson he's the guy who designs mother he's effectively the the parent of those first world war rhomboid british tanks and i think he's a bit of an engineering genius he had a huge track record before the first world war and afterwards well wilson is a really good guy if you're wanting to design technology so he's actually got a good designer and the concept of mobile fortress as you can see represented on it it's not completely redundant by the time you hit 1922 and when the specifications for this tank are done and mobile fortresses is kind of what those first world war tanks were and there's some actually genuinely clever engineering on this and walter wilson is fantastic and some of the ideas kicking around here this for instance this is an anti-aircraft gun on a tank being designed in 1922. whether you'd hit anything with it as a completely moot point but you've got an anti-aircraft capability on a tank and down here we've got a hole for a stretcher and now it might not be terribly encouraging for the crew to have a hole for a stretcher but the concept's quite clever because one of the big problems on tanks and throughout history has been if you get people inside who are injured how do you get them out you have to kind of haul them out through the top and this is designed so you can push your stretcher in load the guy onto the stretcher and pull him out it's not a great advertisement for joining a tank crew but but it's a clever idea the suspension is quite a good design on the side it dries with a steering wheel and to be honest my favorite feature on this tank is at the front where there are steps built into the tank to help you climb the tank one of the banes of my life is watching 19 year olds run to the top of a tank as if it doesn't affect them whatsoever and steps for someone my age genuinely helpful so there's some great stuff on this tank so why have i included on my bottom five well there's two key reasons i'm including this tank on my bottom five list today the first one's an engineering problem um that engineers tell me and i'm a historian not an engineer so don't call me out on this engine is telling me there's a really important ratio between the length of the track on the ground and the width of the tank and this tank is too narrow for its length and what that means is that when it ties to turn a corner effectively it try it tears itself apart this tank when it was in mobility trials uh kept damaging the rear of the tank whenever they went go around the corner and not being able to go around corners could be seen in some areas as a bit of a problem it leaves this tank vulnerable to what i would call the dalek defense and the dial defense is daleks downstairs go upstairs and this one tank coming towards you go around the corner and that's too easy as a way of uh defeating your tank so the corner problem is kind of fundamental and should have been picked up during that design phase the second one and the second key reason and possibly the most important reason why i'm picking the independent on my bottom five list today is a bit more subjective and that's that if you ask a seven-year-old to design a tank for you they either design a conqueror the big gun the nice smooth lines or they design the independent i mean look at it you can have too many turrets and this has got five and it's nice he's got five turrets if you want to be inside one of these turrets you're kind of horribly hunched down and it's not exactly ergonomically friendly um is it really fightable with people looking in so many different directions with limited vision it's there's an absurdity about it which we can see today that just doesn't resonate anymore that and admittedly the russians love these things the russians copied these to high heaven but that doesn't make it good and it's so impractical it's it's a reduction absurdum of of a concept of a mobile fortress that it it's absolutely nuts and somebody somewhere during the designing process should have said no no that's a stupid idea and so because the independent was clearly designed by a seven-year-old that's why it's number five on my bottom five list of tanks today now number four on my bottom five list of tanks today is a vehicle which stuart wheeler described to me eloquently the other day as a tank that comes in its own box it's the tetrarch now again they're redeeming features for tetrarch in a way that they're redeeming features for all the tanks i'm going to be talking about today apart from one but we'll come to that later um so the concept of a light tank when this was being designed in 1937 wasn't completely redundant there are lots of people producing like tanks it's it's it's later on in particular in 1940 when uh people realize that light tanks good way of getting kills um and there's a variation on the theme even that in the 21st century in ukraine of light infantry and light vehicles die in droves um so light armor in 1937 is all right and there's there's some clever engineering on this tank because engineers like being clever they want to show that they're a genius the the steering mechanism on this actually the tracks themselves bend rather than breaking one track and accelerating the other to turn i don't know what benefit it gives to have a bendy track but it's got some clever stuff in it so the concept of light tank is all right the reason it's on my bottom five tank isn't necessarily the vehicle itself it's how it's then used so the second world war breaks out there's lots of light tanks around uh things like because mark sixes get massacred in may 1940. um but one of the things that emerges from the beginning the second world war is airborne forces and british like others develop airborne forces and someone decides it would be a great idea for our new airborne forces to have some armor support um and these are seen as appropriate vehicles for supporting airborne forces because they're small and light and by at 1943 sixth airborne has got a squadron of tetrax and they spend a lot of time in trials figuring out how you get a tank to support airborne forces and they do it by using them in hammel car gliders and this is the remains of a hammer car glider around our vehicle here and they do lots of trials and hammer cars to figure out how you land them safely and the trials themselves have a few issues and they they find that if you don't secure these properly then it doesn't end well for the pilot of the hamel car and actually seven pilots died during the trials which should have given people a clue about tanks and gliders potentially not mixing very well but they managed to figure out a system and the tech sharks land in support of sixth airborne on detail but the problem is through this and the reason i've included my bottom five tanks is that the obsession through this whole process is how do you get a tank into a glider and they seem to completely lose sight of the fact that the purpose of the tank is not to live in a glider the purpose of the tank is to do something on the ground and it's on the ground that by 1944 these are a complete waste of time because six airborne on d-day finds itself in the path of 21st panzer which is a formidable fighting outfit and if these had been encountering the german tanks they'd have lasted minutes they didn't actually encounter 21st panzer very heavily on the basis that most of the tech sharks were immobilized because they'd had parachute cord tangled all over their tracks which is not very helpful when you're trying to get vehicles into action but this concept of taking a vehicle for a purpose that's already redundant and losing sight of what you're trying to do should have stimulated somebody in that process to say no no that's a stupid idea and because they lost sight of the fact that ultimately a tank needs to do something on the ground rather than something in the air the tetrarch is number four on my bottom five list today number three on my bottom five list of tanks today is valiant now when your tank is used as a teaching aid to tell others about how not to design a tank you can probably reasonably conclude that the design process really didn't go as well as you may have hoped it would and valiant is an absolute howler when i said earlier that most of the tanks i'm going to look at today have got some redeeming features but there's one exception this is it it is a stinker of a tank and it's designed the design starts about 1943 and it's meant to be um an infantry support vehicle so it's not meant to be speedy you don't need to carry a decent-sized gun which probably explains to some deformed looking turret but pretty much everything that could go wrong in designing this is going wrong and the thing to focus in on for me here is the 1943 bit by 1943 tank design and tank warfare is getting pretty mature so the tigers on the battlefield the t-34 has been around for quite a long time sherman's mature design which makes this one even worse and there's just nothing good about it the the it failed its trials for mobility after about 13 kilometers at most of driving and the things that they were picking up in the in the testing on this were and that you couldn't change gear probably and first gear would jam uh the you couldn't get your foot properly onto the brake the pedal arrangement was designed to uh trap your feet so you couldn't get out the drive had real problems trying to get prince to get his head out of the turret it's almost designed to hurt you and and if you think about this tank one of the things i was pondering this the other day this tank appears in quite a lot of video games and video game designers and tanks pride themselves in authenticity but if you're going to have the valiant authentically in your video game then if you're using the mouse it should trap your fingers if you're using a keyboard it should probably electrocute you somehow the game should try and physically harm you if the valiant is to be betrayed authentically well apparently video games physically harming the user are somewhat frowned on nowadays but because it is not merely a howler but it's a howler that's designed at a point where people should know better it's designed by people who should have known better vicars for heaven's sake are involved in the design of this tank this is one of the most mature tank designers in the world and to produce something this bad during the design process somebody somewhere must have said no no that's rubbish and because they didn't valiant is number three on my bottom five list today now number two on my bottom five list of howlers today is the fv4005 which the tank doesn't even have a proper name really but we here normally call it the big gun scent now the background to this tank is at the end of the second world war the british relationship the soviets and the western relations soviets it's a bit tense and the situation doesn't help very much by the fact that the soviets got these enormous tanks and things like js2 and js3 to which there isn't really a western counter so there's this race to design a british tank with a great big gun and looking at it i think i can confidently say that the design process starts with a visit to the pub and in the pub they obviously have a discussion of how big do you think we can go with the gun and that results in a tank with this enormous 183 millimeter gun on it in a turret that i can only describe as uh an anti-tank gunners dream now the the original part of the tank we've got here is actually the turret and the gun the the chassis is is a is a more modern century it's designed for a centurion chatty but a mark iii this is a more recent one but it looks the part but when this went for gunnery trials officially what happened is they fire 150 shots from this gun and the results are what they called generally satisfactory which i think is something of a euphemism but here at the tank museum our last serving second world war veteran was a chap called harold his nickname was spud which is uh on the side of this tank uh is his nickname spud because he was involved in test firing this tank and his account is when they test fired this tank the day he was there they were meant to fire several shots and the first shot they fired was firing the gun straight forward and when they fired it the whole of the front of the tank lifted from the ground and their second shot was meant to be over the side of the tank but they figured actually no no i don't think we're going to do this so for this tank the fv4005 because it was clearly the result of a conversation in a pub and the following morning rather than saying yeah the following morning someone should have said tell you what no no that's a stupid idea i'm putting this the fv4005 as number two on my bottom five list of tanks now number one on my bottom five list of tanks today was going to be the australian sentinel but this is a family show and when i explained to my wife why i was picking the sentinel she told me i was being rather vulgar she's australian and therefore clearly an expert on such things so i'm standing in this spot for a very good reason but i'm not allowed to tell you why but what i'm going to say is australia you had one chance to design attack one chance and you let the school down you let the class down and most of all you let yourself down and you should be ashamed of yourselves but i know you're not but because of that i'm not allowed to have this as my number one pick at all so i'm going to have to make another choice now having had to rule out sentinel as my top pick on today's bottom five list i've had to come up with another choice which illustrates beyond doubt that sometimes there really is such a thing as a bad idea and i know what some of you watching this today are thinking you're thinking richard all of your choices today have been british what about the germans they can be awful well you'll be pleased to know that my top pick today in today's bottom five list of tanks is indeed a german tank and i'm picking the mouse because if there was ever a tank which illustrates the idea that sometimes you can have a really stupid idea that should never have come to be the mouse takes the biscuit now we do of course have a minor problem in that we don't actually have a mouse in the collection involving there's only one left which kind of two spliced together and that's sitting in the in the russian tank museum in kabinka what we do have here in bovington is some fantastic archival material so we have things like this album here is a comprehensive album of the the trials that take place at burblington i've probably said that the wrong way i'm sure our german readers will come out correct me this is a blow by blow account the vehicle being trying try a child and here i've got the british army report about mouse that was written in may 1945 so right at the end of second world war when these people are accessible and you can find out what's going on and this is a wonderful treasure trove of information about something which really is one of the worst tanks ever if i'm going to pick out a single feature on mouse which makes it an absolute stinker it's it's gargantuan nature this is a tank which weighs in at 188 tons now that's five and a half shermans or essentially a bungalow and so you've got to think of a mouse not so much as a tank such as a building on tracks and if when you think about the implications of this officially the tank can go on a train as it's designed to be just i mean and properly just we're talking within you know small numbers of millimeters just fit on a rail car but you'd have to hope that the enemy were at the station because otherwise you've got some real problems so for instance if the enemy is on the other side of a river you know even the germans recognize the fact you can't get this thing over a bridge they design it with a snorkel to be able to go under a river up to 46 feet deep i just think about that that's a lot of water above you and the bottom of a riverbed sometimes a little bit boggy one of the things the photos here showing that mouse and boggy ground not a good blend and of course if you want to come out of the river you've got to go up the bank on the other side there is no chance when it comes to this thing it's ridiculous now it's got a lot of firepower it's got the the same 128 millimeter gun that a yang tiger had it's even got a 75 millimeter coax on it which again it's a level of absurdity which is nuts because it's got a 75 millimeter coax but they really struggled to get something like a machined on it at ferdinand paul she was the design had a real blind spot on machine guns he didn't do it with elephant either porsche generally one of the reports actually we got here is about porsche's approach to tank design it's actually a litany of failure when it comes to tank time he's to design he's not nearly as good at designing tanks as he thinks he thinks he is now the thing's got officially eight inch armor which is quite impressive but also makes it practically impossible to manufacture the process of making these things went on for years as they tried to get these gigantic slabs of metal to fit next to each other and and the project takes an inordinate amount of time it balloons in weight and it's it's a disaster zone the reason i picked that as number one is that clearly someone in this process should have said stop this is a stupid idea but in nazi germany saying stop this is stupid to the wrong person would get you shot and because the germans have a system that something like mouse did not get stopped i am taking mouse as my choice for project that comprehensively proves that sometimes there is such a thing as a bad idea thank you very much well i hope you've enjoyed my bottom five tanks today personally i think i've got quite a lot of my chest so i feel better for it if you have enjoyed it please subscribe to our youtube channel support us on patreon your help and support is enormously appreciated

Channel: The Tank Museum

Views: 217,245

Keywords: the tank museum, tank museum, bovington tank museum, david fletcher, david willey, military tank, WW2

Id: 3RZnQvgOJrY

Length: 25min 39sec (1539 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 21 2022