Tank Chats #58 Buffalo & Weasel | The Funnies | The Tank Museum

you don't have to show me hanging on to this thing so did grim death how should we say the patience with the the slightly loony that the British seem to have for some reason the aboard wearing socks I think they call it Indochina those days I'm standing behind the Buffalo I know it's a peculiar place to do a talk from but there's so many things I want to show you at this end and it's the better place to look at it from really now we're looking at them obviously from the point of view of 79th Armored Division and in the collection that's happened here we chosen this one as being the last vehicle for you to look at in the 79th armored div series but we've got a pretty good collection I think you've seen most of them by now but they were used purely in the assault and load carrying roles for the viola Buffalo and they were very very effective now the Buffalo itself was only called that by the British technically it's the LVT for an L V T stands for landing vehicle tracked and it's an amphibian which is what we're going to talk about now the whole idea of the ends of these big amphibians seems some stemmed from a chap called Donald Roebling who invented a vehicle for going into the Everglades in Florida and rescuing people in areas where you couldn't get a boat and you couldn't get an ordinary car that's the reason they were then the US Marine Corps got hold of the idea and built some amphibians based on this and from them developed this thing the the LVT it was built by an outfit called the federated meat corporation which sounds a bit odd there we are they were in based in California and they were the main manufacturer there about two or three outlets but they're the ones that really matter now this vehicle it's quite large as you can see quite a big vehicle but it's quite light as well weighs about 16 tonnes now it has a crew of two they're both stationed in the front once the driver ones the co-driver and directly behind them is a seven cylinder radial aircraft engine it's an air-cooled engine it's the same engine as you'd find in the Stuart tank actually and it's there to drive the thing along the earlier model e LVT to the engine in the back they had a compartments at the rear end here and of course the result was that driveshaft rang clear through the hole in the middle which is where they put the people or the the the stores and it was a difficult vehicle to get in and out of you had to climb over the top so the lv t4 was brought in as a replacement really with this hinge ramp at the back it enabled them to get the people in it would take about 30 or 40 people apparently the British liked to cram as many people in as they could the Americans were preferred a little bit of space around their people so they have a few less but usually it takes between 30 and 40 and they can go in this way over through the back or you can load stores in origin see you and put a vehicle in and we'll come to that in a minute but the the winch itself is hand operated this works the the ramp up and down and seals it when it shuts so it's waterproof the vehicle travels quite effectively it'll go in the water traveling at about 7 miles an hour out of the water it'll it'll actually do quite a good deal more it'll do 25 miles an hour the only trouble is that the tracks have these funny scoops on them which are designed to make it like a paddle steamer really make it go along to the water although they work alright they do have this slight problem of some getting stuck on land on Madden on sand the vehicles fine but on grass or anything else it gets rather routed and stuck in its ways and on hard surfaces it's very difficult to drive it grinds down these scoops and wears them out now you can take them off but it's more trouble it's worth take them all off and put them all back on again if you're just gonna drive a few yards up the road so they tended to manage without or try and avoid is they good now it's quite an interesting vehicle in other respects the driver and co-driver sit at the front they've actually got a machine gun which mounts in the SU construction which is fired to the superstructure but that isn't used in fact on this one it's been more less sealed off so it doesn't work anymore it does have a pair of 30 caliber Browning's usually on the sides here and a 50 caliber over the cab now the British for some reason decided they wanted a more substantial gun at the front so they fitted the 20-millimeter Oerlikon or Polston cannon one of the other which they used as an anti-aircraft and an anti landing gun the trouble was that the 20 millimeter wasn't all that popular with the crews and I have talked to people who said that the first thing they did when they got into one of these vehicles was throw the machine gun over the Sun laid into the water so no one could find it and that at least got rid of it while they drove across and nobody asked any questions afterwards they were lucky to get out alive half the time that's the vehicle itself powered by this seven cylinder air-cooled engine which keeps it moving but it's about all they were used in the Pacific they were use there mainly to climb over the atolls that separate an island they're attacking from the sea so they climb over the swim through the lagoon and then go up the beach and disgorge their passengers not that many but that's how they did it and they didn't go very far inland because the chances are you get stuck in Britain they weren't used on d-day we're not quite sure why because a few had arrived they were used for the attack on wall shirin and they were used as amphibians then and they really acted as landing craft and then they were used most famously in the Rhine crossing mainly by the Royal armoured Corps and to some extent by the Royal Engineers they were done between the two usually the they took the cruise from Churchill averies which they'd finished with and they decided to do away with the average so a lot of the every crews were retrained to drive these vehicles and it required a bit of nautical still as well as driving skill to get the hang of how to operate them now the other thing which wanted to quickly talk about is what's inside it in this case we've got a weasel it's m-29 see it's rather high up to have a good look kappa we can have a quick look at it but it's a bit knocked about and looks a bit tatty when you see it up close but it's it's all there and it shows you how these things worked with this ramp it would take a thing like a universal carrier or a Jeep or something like that if you wanted to and it meant that the Buffalo carried these big big vehicles across the river and they were there to support the infantry on the other side now it's very unusual this particular version of the weasel is actually the amphibious version the m-29 see and it's very unusual to see an amphibian inside an amphibian they were built by the Studebaker corporation in Indiana and they were quite incredible vehicles they were designed originally without the amphibious bits on the on the fore and aft end as over snow vehicles and they were the partly to do the brainchild of a chap called Geoffrey pike pike was as mad as a hatter as far as I'm concerned and he went around the only thing I can remember about him was he never wore knee socks for some reason he abhorred wearing socks and went around in not bare feet but with just shoes and he was the man who was obsessed by this business of fighting in the snow and he had them he wanted this thing developed and when they got over to the states where all this was gonna be produced the Americans they don't have quite the how should we say the patience with the the slightly loony that the British seemed to have and they found him Pike a bit of a pain in the whatsit but then never mind they pull up with him for a while and when this thing had been invented it really performs superbly it's powered by a Studebaker six cylinder engine and probably mote motors along its flat out at about 30 six miles an hour in the water it's not so good it'll do four miles an hour if you're lucky but that's only the amphibian the other vehicle that the snow of snow vehicles is slightly empty because it's got no freeboard worth talking about pretty standard pretty fair chance getting soaked by going out in it the weasel will take a driver and about three men in the back it won't it doesn't take a big load and it virtually has no freeboard at all it's about 12 inches on one of these things and in a rough sea it's hopeless it will sink like a stone so if you had a weasel amphibian you were told to test it only on calm water not to taken out in rough water at all because that was asking for trouble and your notice this horrendous difference the tracks on the Buffalo as I said are designed to pull it through the water like a paddle steamer and a fitting with paddles but the tracks on the weasel have no real paddle attachments at all they've just thrash about in the water and they're the only means this vehicle has for propelling itself you can't really see it but in the in the front here in this front amphibious panel is a motorized Bowl are driven off the engine and at the back are a pair of rudders which are worked by cables from the steering wheel in front of the driver but since you can't see him it don't really matter the French used them a lot in Vietnam after the war when they were I think they call it Indochina in those days when they were trying to fight and they found it was very effective in paddy fields and that sort of thing and that would be the secret of the weasel it's light weight high mobility in wet conditions absolutely fantastic that really sums up 79th armored div we've looked at all the vehicles in the tank museum collection it's not everything that the division used but it's all the key vehicles we've had a look at them one after another very effectively I think and with the Buffalo and the Wiis will be managed to finish it off and bring it up to date as far as that's concerned but the whole thing of a 79th Armored Division which was quite a remarkable unit in its day that whole thing has vanished completely as if it had never been it's quite amazing the only thing that survived is the badge right thanks very much for watching don't forget to subscribe to YouTube and to support us on patreon because we really do need that it helps us a great deal thanks very much you

Channel: The Tank Museum

Views: 621,855

Keywords: david fletcher, david willey, tank chat, tank chats, documentary, tank, ww2, second world war, world war 2, buffalo tank, weasel tank, weasel tank ww2, weasel tank chat, buffalo tank chat, d-day, dday, funnies, percy hobart, david fletcher tank chats, david fletcher funnies, hobart's funnies, tank museum, bovington, the tank museum, bovington tank museum

Id: ksc3MdjWsxc

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 26 2018