As someone who DOES NOT BUY the excuse that the A13 Covenanter wasn't complete garbage because it found use as a decoy and 'mechanical training', this bit made me wince. The Crusader wasn't bad, but when you've got the Valiant to compare it to...
Sir John Valentine Carden Survives. Part 2.
- Thread starter allanpcameron
- Start date
As I may have mentioned before I think Nuffield is a scapegoat for a lot of mistakes made by the War Office and Army. He was not some all powerful figure who could force things through, Nuffield had to work to a spec and get designs and prototypes signed off just like every other manufacturer. The company was called Nuffield Mechanisation and Aero, but never did any aero work or got any RAF contracts, because the Air Ministry just said no and that was that. If the War Office had just said "stop using the Liberty" then he would have switched. He likely would have complained, but fundamentally he had to work within the the limits set by the government.
That the Liberty kept being used is down to a combination of Martel pushing for it (and there is a man who should take a lot of blame) and the industrial logic of trying to avoid re-tooling and re-training staff on a new engine, to keep production high. The fact Nuffield also wanted to keep using it is not particularly relevant, he wasn't the one writing the specs or approving designs for prototyping/production. Cavalier/Centaur happened because the War Office were concerned Meteor wouldn't work out (or would have problems) and so wanted a 'safe' option, because outside of the desert the Liberty engine was acceptable. Not great, probably not even good, but acceptable enough as a backup.
Castle Bromwich certainly had problems and I wouldn't particularly defend Nuffield's actions there. That said one of his main complaints had been that the factory wasn't getting any support from Supermarine, yet when Vickers got sent in they immediately seconded large numbers of staff from Supermarine to help, so this is not a particularly fair comparison. The Shadow Factories that worked best had the 'parent' organisation fully commit to it, the Rolls Royce Glasgow merlin factory for instance, but Vickers never committed to properly helping Castle Bromwich until they got control. You can, and should, blame Nuffield for his mistakes there, but Vickers are also to blame as are the Air Ministry as they were paying for it all and had ultimate control.
He asked for it, Vickers refused and the Air Ministry didn't intervene. I get he is a hate figure, but there is plenty of blame to go around.
Here is a breakdown of a US Army tank Battalion in WW2 which serves to give you an idea of what the personnel were doing - its 720 men strong - our Guards Tank 'Regiment' would be similar
It has 76 tanks, 16 half Tracks and 64 trucks/jeeps
Granted some of the supporting arms - mechanical and medical is likely to be from another cap badge - but these would be 'B' echelon and not involved in actual fighting per se
Of course some of the Guardsmen while excellent infantry will not really be suitable for armoured forces e.g. being too tall to fit in a tank or the only skill they have with a spanner is using it to stir their tea 😁.
Fortunately the Guards are multi-battalion regiments and judicious transfers will probably take care of this.
Yes
Guards Armoured Division OTL had 4 Armoured Battalions and 4 Lorried or Motorised Infantry Battalions. 1 each from 4 of the Guard Regiments I think. And I'm sure they were other Guards units elsewhere that the mechanically non-adept could be sent to as PBI or even brute muscle Pioneers.
allanpcameron
Donor
That is a fair point, certainly he blamed the Air Ministry for keeping changing the specs on the Spitfire that his workforce at Castle Bromwich had to keep adapting to. Likewise with his tanks. He was certainly willing to offer his company's undoubted experience to the war effort. I would argue that the problem was with lack of designers of tanks, rather than simply a company good at making cars trying to transform into a company making tanks.
That's the whole point of the storyline. Yes the Matilda II was a good tank in 1939 and 1940 (armour and gun, not speed nor range) . Yes the Comet and Centurion were very good tanks in 1945 (the Centurion still had range issues). As the inventor of the tank, pre-war the War Office had got itself into a muddle: infantry vs cruiser; speed vs protection; etc.
The Cromwell was a good tank, or would have been in 1941/2, by 1944 not so much. The Crusader's problems, like the Covenantor, wasn't just the engine, but also the cooling system, a design fault. The Churchill was good a climbing hills, but shouldn't have been let loose until it was actually working properly.
Meanwhile the Panzer III and IV were developed and in the case of the PzIV was still useful 'till 1945, and the PzIII as stugs etc. Yes, the big cats had problems, and weren't as numerous. Excluding Light Tanks: The Yanks moved from the Grant to the Sherman to the Pershing. The Soviets moved from the T34/76 to the T34/85 and from the KV1 to the IS1. The Brits had Matilda I & II and A9, A10 and A13; Matilda/Churchill/Valentine and Grant, Covenantor and Crusader; Churchill and Crusader & Cromwell; Churchill, Cromwell and Sherman (inc Firefly); Churchill, Cromwell, Comet and Sherman...
That wasn't Lord Nuffield's fault, that was the war office not having a clear understanding of what tanks were for and what, therefore, tanks needed to be like. I agree that if the War Office had given Nuffield (and LMS and Vauxhall and Vulcan) proper help with design, proper oversight on production quality, and had sorted out the gun issue, then yes, the Crusader, possibly even the Covenantor, might have been good enough. But the didn't that was part of the reason (in part) for the Great Tank Scandal.
What I've written about the A15 comes from OTL, I haven't changed anything. Likewise the A22 (Churchill) except taken the panic out of the process and given the two companies time to properly go from prototype to production.
My keeping Carden alive, meant that instead of Little finishing the design for the A9, A10, A11, and Valentine, Carden completes his drawings. Vickers was basically the only company experienced enough to design and make tanks (though the loss of Carden impacted that badly). The Valentine in TTL is the Valiant. Better protection, room for improvement, better engine. The Victor is somewhere between the Cromwell and Comet and will be available early 1942. So if Yanks go Grant to the Sherman to the Pershing, then the British could go Valiant to Victor to Centurion clone.
Anyway, that's my intent, not to scapegoat Nuffield.
Allan
One day someone will make a timeline where Covenanter is finally allowed to shine.
To add to this the British didn't do too badly until war had started on the tank front. The matilda II was very good in 39-41 and the A9, A10 and A13 were also all good (though admittedly flawed) tanks for the early stages of the war. The issue the British have is that they started rearming too late. Put the start of the war in the west off by 6 months and the numbers of good tanks improves a lot. No light tanks in France for instance as well as probably no Matild I's. In addition a lot of the early flaws etc will have been found and efforts to fix them will have begun and possibly even finished.
Once war starts however it becomes a mad scramble and the War office kind of looses it's head a bit. and it all goes wrong until late war tanks appear. Give the designers that 6 extra months and you get better tanks. In addition decisions like delaying the start of the 2pdr replacement program do not help either. That, combined with the decision to focus on the 2pdr post dunkirk lumber British tanks with the 2pdr longer than was needed.
Something that I have been thinking about...
What if Nuffield decides that the best way forward is to build vehicles that can work together with the Valiant\Victor\etc instead of trying to compete head on with Vickers?
He is a businessman after all, if his customers want Victors he might look for opportunities to make money around them instead of trying to sell a competing tank, he might pitch an APC, for example, those new Victors will have infantry working alongside them after all. And while he's thinking about it, maybe look for a way to get in the new massive tank factory that's being thought of, helping build Victors is not what he wanted to do at first, but if there's where the business is, that's where he will have to go, money is money in the end and sometimes a businessman has to find a way to land on his feet and improvise.
What if Nuffield decides that the best way forward is to build vehicles that can work together with the Valiant\Victor\etc instead of trying to compete head on with Vickers?
He is a businessman after all, if his customers want Victors he might look for opportunities to make money around them instead of trying to sell a competing tank, he might pitch an APC, for example, those new Victors will have infantry working alongside them after all. And while he's thinking about it, maybe look for a way to get in the new massive tank factory that's being thought of, helping build Victors is not what he wanted to do at first, but if there's where the business is, that's where he will have to go, money is money in the end and sometimes a businessman has to find a way to land on his feet and improvise.
I'm sorry, but I don't consider Nuffield blameless. The disaster that was Castle Bromwich was mainly the lack of meaningful control, with no clear direction. That's Nuffields fault. On tanks, his determination to continue to use the Liberty, even after it was obvious it needed replacement, hardly helpled.
The biggest issue I feel was the War Office civil servants (they can be next out against the wall after the Air Ministry). Having finally decided to build tanks, they didnt give the orders to Vickers (the only British company with experience), but instead scattered small orders around companies who had capacity because they werent doing well. Ignoring the obvious issue that they had no experience building tanks (and would obviously have to learn), and that they had free capacity because they werent doing well because they were inefficient and/or poorly run.
The way the Generals followed theory didnt help - theories that a tank needed sportscar-like speed rather then a slower but reliable performance, not making any allowance for changes that would be needed over time (something that the navy, for exmple, had allowed for for 40 years), and taking so long to decide on tanks that they wasted resources on useless light tanks. We wont go into the daftness which was shoulder-controlled fire-onthemove...
The biggest issue I feel was the War Office civil servants (they can be next out against the wall after the Air Ministry). Having finally decided to build tanks, they didnt give the orders to Vickers (the only British company with experience), but instead scattered small orders around companies who had capacity because they werent doing well. Ignoring the obvious issue that they had no experience building tanks (and would obviously have to learn), and that they had free capacity because they werent doing well because they were inefficient and/or poorly run.
The way the Generals followed theory didnt help - theories that a tank needed sportscar-like speed rather then a slower but reliable performance, not making any allowance for changes that would be needed over time (something that the navy, for exmple, had allowed for for 40 years), and taking so long to decide on tanks that they wasted resources on useless light tanks. We wont go into the daftness which was shoulder-controlled fire-onthemove...
They didn't seem to consider that a tank travelling at 20 mph (30 fps) is virtually stationary to an anti-tank round travelling at thousands of fps 😋
I suspect that TL may include them hunting sea mammals on the Frisian Islands
The Covenanter, sadly, was where all the problems with OTL British early-war tanks design came together - pre-war specifications based on flawed doctrine, lack of a decent engine, companies that had never built tanks before working to rushed schedules, obsolete manufacturing techniques, poor build quality and a bodge-it-till-it-fits mentality that led them to spend far too long trying to fix bad designs.
The best you can do with the Covenanter, IMHO, is take a long, hard look at the prototype, realise that the pieces are never going to fit in the box and start writing a spec for a "large cruiser" that can be viable in 1941 - and an engine to power it.
Garrison
Donor
Well I did let them capture Rommel in France, which was granted the high point of a very short frontline career.
It would be nice. Honestly all it might take is the manufacturer to actually weld the damn things like they were supposed to instead of saying they could and then riveting them because they realized 'oops, this is harder than we thought, let's blagg something together to meet a deadline like the video games industry that hasn't been invented yet'.
Which is a shame because an all-welded Covy with a decent radiator would make for a pretty useful (and pretty) 'light' tank for the early war. I recall the original specs were actually quite decent and reasonable but relied on welding and aluminum wheel castings to keep the weight down, neither of which turned out to be available but the money was already spent and [pompous voice] 'An Englishman always honours his agreements (to other Englishmen of similar or superior social status, all others void where convenient)'.