I went to that place called Armourgeddon
where I did this: then this: because they had a tank I could talk about in this video
(which has been sponsored by Audible, but more of that later). Here's a strange beast. When I was a little kiddlington I used to think this was called the Lee/Grant,
because the Airfix kit said Lee/Grant on the front of the box and I and my brother when we
were wargaming always ended up calling these Lee/Grants. Wait a minute - stop! That's not Armourgeddon. That's Bovington Tank Museum, or the
Tank Museum, as I wish it now didn't call itself. No, the vehicle they have at Armourgeddon
was in a rather different state of repair, but a rather good one if you
want to be able to see inside. And here we have the hull of a Lee,
or I suppose you could say the hull of a Grant, because they were almost exactly the same,
but this one was strictly speaking a Lee. And it is the only Lee in Britain,
and it's here at the Armourgeddon workshops. And it's being, as you can see, lovingly restored.
This red is the common colour of the primer, the rust protection undercoat
that's used on a lot of tanks. You can see that this is [related to] a Sherman, because it has the same suspension
as the very early Shermans. There was a return roller on the top here
which is characteristic of the early Shermans. And one nice little design feature of the
Sherman's suspension, wheel system if you like, is that the sprockets you see are on a separate plate. So you can take them off with these bolts here,
remove this bit when it gets worn out, chuck that away, and then bolt on a new one
and you're good to go. So that made it quick to maintain
in that department at least. Another thing which helped is
that you've got all these bolts here. Now a lot of people say that, "A tank shouldn't have
bolts on the front, ... German tanks don't have that. They're nice and smooth, it's just armour. The front
of a Panther is just weld and armour, and it's great." Well, yeah, but if you want to repair a Panther and
you have to, for instance, work on the front differential, which you actually have to quite often if you're
a Panther and you've worn out your gearbox, or you've damaged something, or it's
taken a shock. How do you get to it? Well I'll tell you. You get it into a workshop, you take
the turret off, and you ... take everything apart. And it has to go that way,
and up and out, it was an enormous job. But with one of these, take off the bolts,
and then you've taken the front bit off the tank, and there's the stuff that you have to get to. Diggly diggly ding with your ... spanners
and wrenches and what have you. Okay, I exaggerate, I imagine it was a
little bit more complicated than that. But the point is you could get to
what you needed to get to quickly, stick it back on and you were good to go. And you didn't
necessarily need massive cranes and all the rest of it. So a much smaller workshop could handle
the job of keeping this sort of thing maintained. Here we have two welded-up holes that once had
the barrels sticking out of them of machine guns. The Americans at the start of World War Two
had this idea that it's just great to festoon everything
with more machine guns. You can never have too many machine guns, because
it just goes ba-ba-ba-bam, and it looks really good in the films when you're trying to promote,
"Buy our tank, Army people, go on, buy our tank. It looks great, look ... it's covered
in machine guns and they go bang!" But the British decided that actually they were a bit rubbish
and they removed them and just put armour over the top, because a fixed machine gun almost never hit anything.
You couldn't aim it accurately. They are very noisy, and they take up room,
they create heat and smoke, and you've got to store lots of ammo for them.
And so really what is the point? ... In the Lee, ... in the American version,
there was a crewman sitting behind this who worked those machine guns
who was also the radio operator. But the British dispensed with that,
they had their radios in the turrets, and the loader in the turret would be also the
radio operator, typically. And so that saved a whole man. And you don't want too many eggs in one basket. If one of
these goes up in smoke, you could lose the entire crew. So the fewer men that are in there,
the fewer you're risking in battle. This box, I've just been told, was used for
storing the grousers, the things that you attached to the sides of the tracks
to make everything a little bit wider, so that you've got better ground pressure,
lower ground pressure if you like. So if you're in the desert and you're going over soft sand,
it's good to have wider tracks. And if you are going to store large lumps of metal, well you
may as well stick them on the front so they act as extra armour. This big hatch here is the driver's vision port. And this thing is, well, you could say it's the main gun, but
others might argue that the main gun was on the turret. But this is the big gun, this was the 75mm.
Sometimes referred to as a howitzer, but I'm not sure if that's strictly true
because it was a mainly a direct-fire weapon. It was designed to shoot at things
that you could actually see. It had two crewmen, they had to be behind this
... it's got a bit of a naval gun look about it. Also it may remind you of a World War One tank. Same sort of thing, you think of the
side sponsons on a British World War One male tank. Well it's this sort of arrangement,
and it was actually a rather outdated arrangement. If you wanted to shoot at the enemy with ... this tank,
you had to come right onto the top of the hill, so that you exposed almost all your tank to take him on. Whereas if you've got a tank which has its main gun
in the turret, then perhaps you just exposed the turret. You just creep up the hill, expose the turret, shoot,
and then you're a much harder target to return fire against. So this made this tank design
a little vulnerable to the enemy guns, which unfortunately in the desert in North Africa,
the Germans had pretty good guns. And whilst this was an adequate piece of kit,
in the long term it was considered an obsolete design. And the British and Americans both concluded that it
was much better to go for something with just one turret, forget about the big gun in the hull thing,
stick a decent gun in the turret. It's ergonomically better, you need fewer crew,
you're a less vulnerable target, and they developed multipurpose guns that could fire
both high explosive and armour-piercing effectively. Whereas this is only really a high-explosive gun.
So it's a bit of a hotchpotch of a design. They put these together pretty quickly.
They needed a tank, they needed it now. And they were working on the Sherman at the time, but
they needed something to get out there and fight the enemy. And this is what they came up with. And considering that they had to put
something in the field quickly, it's not that bad. And here in Armourgeddon's vehicle repair workshop
we see masses of stuff to be cleaned up, to be identified, to be repaired,
and to be stuck back into the Lee. One day perhaps it'll be a runner, and won't that be exciting?
Now at the moment they don't have a turret on it, but in a few weeks, they're hoping
to get a turret to stick up there. In the meantime I see that I have
a radial engine to tell you about. Now this is the Continental R-975. It's the first of the
two kinds, there was the C1 and the C4. This one developed 400 horsepower,
which is, well, enough to move a tank. It's a radial engine, which was a
configuration designed for aircraft. Yes, this was for taking an aircraft and hurling it up
into the sky, but instead they used them for tanks. And they worked perfectly well, Shermans used
radial engines as well. There are some drawbacks. One being that they're quite tall, and so
the Americans produced some rather tall tanks. And tall tanks make more conspicuous targets. But it was powerful enough. It was smooth as well. A lot of British tankers who were
in British tanks and in Shermans, said that there was a smoothness
to the radial-engined tanks. And that they would set off without quite
so much of a jolt, which they rather liked. Another thing is that it's air-cooled. And one of the drawbacks
of being air-cooled is that it has to draw in air from somewhere, and one place to draw in air is
through the top hatches of the tank. So when the engine's running
and you're driving along in your tank, it's drawing air down through the turret hatches. So if you're sitting in that turret hatch
and you're in a column of tanks, and they're throwing up dust,
that dust is being sucked down onto you. And if it's raining you don't just get the rain
that would have fallen on you anyway. Oh no, you get a bit more rain that sucked in to you,
so you've get even wetter. But what the hell: radial engines, they worked. Right, so here I am in the engine compartment. Obviously when this was in use you wouldn't be
standing here, because this would be full of engine. Noise, noise, four fuel tanks in the back here. Ah, and through here, you wouldn't have to do this very often,
certainly couldn't do it at speed. Ha. This is where the fighting compartment was.
And to the right here the 75mm gun. This here is the housing for the gearbox,
and in front of that, in that box there, is the differential. And between where my legs are now, there would have
been a big prop shaft that went through this slot here, and through that little hoop there,
and into the back engine compartment. So that will be transferring power
from the engine to the gearbox. So you've got a whirling piece of steel here which is
not insignificant given that this is where the driver was. You can actually see some of his controls here, and here. So this got pretty hot and uncomfortable.
Don't forget that this was used in desert warfare. So here you are in a steel box, in the desert,
sitting astride a great big bit of whirring steel. Yep, you'd certainly would be warm enough.
So stay hydrated everyone, do drink plenty of water. Now while I'm here, may I point
out the construction method here. So we have these rivets, and these rivets
go through a sheet of metal here, which is holding this slab of armour
to this slab of armour. Now the Germans at this stage were welding their tanks
together, and so the slabs of armour were the box, if you like. Whereas the British and Americans were
still using this creating-a-frame approach, and then rivet onto that frame your slabs of armour. This is not the strongest way to make a tank,
but it's quick! Here, just been sprayed, are a couple
of the bits that the driver would use. So remember, he's sitting astride the gear box,
and so the gear box would be here. And so these would be along his centreline, and
he'd have his feet on the outside, on the pedals there. So there's another one which goes there.
So these will be stuck back in the tank. And this is the 37mm gun which, when they've
got a turret to stick it in, they'll stick it in. And you can see that (ignore the shield by the way,
this is just a temporary thing put on for a show) you can see that it's really not terribly big. This is the size of the cartridge, the shell
that they were firing out of it, it's just 37mm. The standard German anti-tank gun
at the start of World War Two was this same calibre. And they sometimes referred to them as "Doorknockers",
because you could shoot again and again at something like a Matilda, and it would just ping off
rather embarrassingly and frustratingly. So these were not stupendously powerful,
and they were deemed quite quickly to be obsolete. And on most tanks they were replaced,
but on some armoured cars and light vehicles they were still using these
right the way to the end of the war. And they're still useful, I mean, they will go through
an armoured car or a half-track or anything like that, if you've got some lightly armoured vehicle
this is absolutely adequate. And don't forget, the smaller the shell
the more you can carry, and the quicker they are to manoeuvre
and so the faster you can shoot. So if there is some light-armoured thing like
an armoured car buzzing around the battlefield, you're far more likely to hit it with one of these because
you can get off loads and loads of shots against it. And if you do, this is adequate. But if you come across something big,
if you came across a Panther or something, then you'd be incredibly lucky to harm it much with this. It's not impossible, and there are tales of guns like this
knocking out Tigers, but it's really rare. You can see that the breech
at the back here is pretty small, and so that would go "chunk" in, and like that. And this is the actual shell that came out of it. Yes, this gun, which was in Australia
and was brought back from there, when they opened the breech
they found this in it. So it seems ... Okay, it's not actually live, it didn't have
any propellant in it so it was reasonably safe. But it does suggest that no one had checked. As you can see the turret is missing, but it would
be here. And that would have three men in it. It's a tiny turret to have three men in it. But there was a commander and
a gunner and loader for the tiny gun up there. Down here you had two men working the main gun. And there was a time when
there were a total of seven in here. You had a radio operator who would be sitting over
there, and the driver of course whose position was there. The turret basket for the Lee.
And you can see the shell brackets there. And they look so tiny having been
looking earlier today at a 100mm calibre. They look like tiny, almost comically small, shells. In fact the whole thing looks quite small.
If Alex were to stand next to it to give you a bit of scale. There you go, there's a person next to the turret basket.
So it was a pretty small turret. Oh, but I promised to tell you all about Audible,
and I so hate to disappoint. Audible is a giant website
(you see, this is what it looks like), selling all manner of audio material. And if you go to the address appearing now on your screen,
or click the link in the description (which is easier), you can do what I'm about to do
for free with their introductory offer. You just have to type in the magic word "to anika".
Here we go then, t-a-n-k, and see what we get. Right top hit there, "Tank Action", that sounds good, action. "Fury of the Tiger", sounds a bit over the top, could be a novel. "Tank", that looks fairly novelly. What, what was that? "Isolation Tank"? Ah no, no, no forget that, it's not a proper tank.
No action ever happens in an isolation tank. What was that about fish?
Oh ... fish tank, yes, I get it. No, no, no. We want to talk about proper tanks,
you know with turrets and bang and action. Okay, let's have a look at this first one then. Okay, so there it is, and there are suggested other things that
are similar. Ah, you can listen to a sample, that's always good. "The scattered houses of Fontenay had been
badly knocked about by our own artillery..." Oh, okay, French houses being blown up
by the British, so that sounds all right. Ah, but is it excellent all the way through though?
I mean maybe they just pick the best bit. Oh yeah, lots of five-star reviews there,
and by a ... decent number of people as well. You see he got 97 there, and 86 and 88, and no-one's giving it less than three, all right, one.
One person has given it fewer than three stars. But, you know, perhaps that person didn't like tanks -
some people don't, you know. In addition to one audio book per month,
you get two Audible Originals. These can be anything audio: podcasts,
stand-up comedy, those sorts of thing. And this is not a streaming service, you download
the files and keep them. They are yours, your property. Ah, the inevitable Stephen Fry there.
Oh! David Mitchell, I like him. And well, lots more. In fact to listen to everything
on the site would take over three centuries. So you're really spoiled for choice. So to listen to your chosen stuff whenever you want,
www.audible.com/lindybeige, or text "lindybeige" to 500 500, (works best if you are in the USA)
and find out about the free trial period offer. Phew! Now back to the Lee. Now one feature that you may notice is the way these
rivets have all been very thoroughly welded in place. You can see a circle of welding around every single one. And I've just been told that the reason for this
is that it was possible for an enemy bit of incoming fire to hit the end of a rivet, causing
the entire rivet to ping off and shoot into the tank, injuring one of the crew. And possibly ricocheting
around and injuring more than one of the crew. And so to stop that happening
they've all been welded firmly into place, which I'm sure was tremendously
reassuring for all the crew. Here we see two contrasting designs of wheel.
This is the later style, and this the earlier. Now the main difference is that
I can put my hand all the way through this one, you see, and of course holes
are good because they save weight. Whereas this one is solid. You've got some
spoke-like constructions in the raised bits here, but you can't put your hand through there
because, well, it's solid. Now some of the early versions like this
were converted to be more like that, and they actually welded over little bits of metal
so that people couldn't put their hands through. "Why were they worried about people putting their hands
through?" I imagine you may be thinking. Well, it's because the Japanese found that
if they put a big steel bar through there, then when the wheel turned and it came
to hit the spring here, or the bogie arm, it could really foul up your suspension and break
something. Perhaps snapping one of the wheels. And so that was the cause of this change in design. And when the British replaced that 7th crewman who, if
you remember, was operating those useless hull machine guns, they put in place these,
these are water containers, hence the big "W". The rubber seals here have perished,
but this is the original thing. And yes, it was full of water, drinking water.
You're in the desert you're going to need lots of these. Far, far, more useful than a couple of
stupid machine guns that never hit anything. Now there are lots of bits that they've taken out of
the Lee to restore, and this will be cleaned up, and restored, and put back in
and that'll be great. But what is it? Well, it's part of the
gyroscopic gun stabilisation mechanism. There are a couple of flywheels here.
There's one that goes round and round in that plane. So that would gyroscopically stabilise this thing, which would stay level as the tank that
the rest of it would be fixed to (I think) moved around. And there's another one which rotates in the other plane there,
which has a very good electrical contact, a brush, there. So there are lots of electrical wires, so clearly
there's a fair bit of electrical circuitry involved in this. I was surprised that it had flywheels in both planes, so far as I know the gun was only actually
stabilised in the up and down direction, because you'd have to move the entire turret left and right,
which is asking rather lot of a system like this. But anyway, it has two flywheels and
these would sense the movement of the tank, and these would send information to, I think,
a hydraulic system which would be much more powerful than these tiny little fly wheels.
And it'll be the hydraulic system that actually ... provided the force
to move the gun up and down. So the idea is you're rumbling across the countryside
and you're going up hills and down hills. And you see a target in front of you and
whilst you are still moving you aim the gun at it, and the gun then stays pointing at the enemy
and so you can fire accurately on the move. There were a number of problems with this.
One being that it really didn't work very well. If you want accuracy you really with World War Two
technology had to stop and aim properly and shoot. And crews didn't rely on these
and it's another thing to go wrong. And another thing that's in the tank
that you can bash your head on. And my information is that most of these systems
were actually ripped out quite quickly by the crews, who didn't trust them and didn't want them. Return rollers. Return rollers installed in their places. 75mm shell rack. Modern art installation. And this American armoured car is a Greyhound,
sporting the same gun, 37mm. And these were used to the end of the war. Now this was a Lee, that is to say it had
a particular kind of turret that was about this tall, and had a big sloping front. And the
American version had in the commander's position a little machine gun turret with a .30 cal Browning in it. And the British didn't like that turret: they wanted a
radio in the turret, and they didn't like such a high turret, and they didn't like this
silly extra machine gun thing. These Americans with their silly extra machine guns. So instead they just had a proper
commander's hatch, ... a simple hatch. Here we see a Grant on the left and a Lee on the right
making preparations for El Alamein in 1942. You can see that this chap is
clearly poking out of a top hatch, whereas this cove is next to the
rather useless top machine gun turret. This one is standing outside the tank museum in Latrun
in Israel. Note the British markings and no top MG turret. But wait, do I see a vision port
in the side of the one next to it? I do! It's a Grant. The main body of the turret isn't much shorter.
That's not a muzzle brake on the hull gun, that's a counterweight to balance with the breech
on the earlier slightly shorter-barrelled version. 1,386 Lees were sent out from the USA
bound for the Soviet Union. Thanks to German U-boats and their ilk though,
only 969 Lees arrived. When I first saw this picture I thought, "Oh dear, this French tank museum has
made a right pig's ear of restoring this Grant. That turret looks like a primitive mock up, and that mantlet
is totally unconvincing. And what's this handle meant to be?" Then I twigged that this was actually a command version,
cunningly disguised by British engineers to look from a distance like a gun tank. And the
hull gun mantlet is actually a door for getting in and out. The British were using the Grant and the
Americans were using the Lee in North Africa. And those names ... were developed, invented, coined, by the British naming the American tanks
after generals of the American Civil War. But actually the British did use Lees.
This is a less known fact. When the Lee had been deemed obsolete against the Germans,
it was considered still perfectly fine for taking on the Japanese. The Japanese had not developed any large
or particularly good tanks. And so a load of Lees were given to the British and
shipped out east and were used against the Japanese. But with the silly little machine gun
turret at the top removed. And this particular Lee ended up in Australia,
as you might imagine out in the Far East, and now it's come all the way back here
to Armourgeddon. [ So telling the difference between
a Lee and a Grant is very easy, really. ] Lindybeige! [ If it has US Army markings, then it's a Lee. ] [ If it does not have US Army markings, and has no top MG turret, then it is a Grant, unless it is a Lee that has been sold to a country which has then converted it, perhaps by removing the top MG turret, apart from the Russians who didn't do that, well, not normally, and ... ]
