In World War II, the British experiment produced an extremely thick and big guy, the A39 Earth Turtle heavy assault tank.
A total of 6 Tortoise tanks were produced, and their role was defined as "to carry German artillery fire into the necessary positions on the front line, to suppress and cover the German lines, to help the infantry open a way forward".
This "defensive line" largely refers to the German Siegfried Line, which was built in 1939 as Germany's "Maginot", which the German army has built since 1936, building it into a defensive zone stretching more than 600 kilometers along the border between Belgium, Rwanda and France, and arranging a large number of pillboxes, minefields, anti-tank trenches, dragon's teeth and artillery positions.
In 1942, anticipating that the British would increasingly face German defensive warfare in the future, it was proposed to develop a heavy assault vehicle that could withstand blows and counterattack suppression in the rain of bullets. This concept was supported by the British General Staff, who also knew that the current Churchill tank could not stand it at all.
A33 "Endeavor"
As a result, many related design plans were submitted, such as the A33 Excelsior tank developed according to the A27 "Cromwell", the A38 "Valiant", and the fantastic scheme left on the drawings was even more unknown.
A38 "Daredevil"
The British even managed to deflect the Americans in their development debates, allowing the U.S. military to develop a tragic T14 heavy tank. The Americans found something wrong and wanted to back off, but the British said that if this assault tank succeeded, they would buy 8500, and the Americans were lame.
AT-1
In the end, the Nuffield Machinery Company, which produced a sneak of British tanks, gave a reliable plan, called the AT-1 assault tank. It is armored to 150mm, can be armed with 75mm cannons and 95mm howitzers, and weighs 45 tons.
AT-2
However, the British Staff AT-1 was not cold, they denied everything, and put forward various unreliable indicators, such as installing 6-inch mortars and flamethrowers on tanks, or removing the cannon for 200mm armor and 2 machine guns...
The AT-13 with the addition of a 17-pounder gun
Throughout 1943, Naffield was constantly revising the AT project, and they again increased the bodywork on the basis of the AT-1, adding new weapons... This modification won the approval of the British General Staff, which was subsequently changed to "Project Earth Turtle" and asked for the addition of the 17-pounder gun.
The guns are not AT-3
I don't know if the designers in Naffield are crazy or not, under the guidance of the military design god, the modification of the earth turtle is like no end. By the time the General Staff inspected it again in February 1944, Nuffield had gone from AT-1 to AT-18, and countless models, engineering prototypes, drawing board plans, and scrap drafts had been produced.
AT-16
The British intervened again at this point in the design, believing that the 17-pounder gun was too small and not strong enough to be fitted with a larger gun. The 32-pounder gun program, which was already being developed at the time, was used in one of the AT-16 programs, and the army ordered an unarmored steel prototype.
The AT-16 was chosen primarily for its simplicity and safety, and although the AT-17 and AT-18 used the same chassis, they were both Spitfire tanks with high-pressure gas cylinders and fuel packs in the hull.
That month the military changed its mind again, because of the urgency of the front, they decided not to build a prototype, demanded that 25 such tanks be produced immediately, and immediately named it the A39 "Earth Turtle". The purchase price at that time was 141666 pounds per vehicle.
In this way, the earth turtle began intensive production, but due to the lack of complete process research and development and assembly line engineering optimization, the production of the earth turtle was extremely slow, and it missed all the big battles that people expected. The Siegfried Line was atpped by Saturated Allied bombardment for five months before collapsing in February 1945. During this period, none of the Allied heavy tanks could reliably surprise it.
When the war was over, the production of turtles gradually reduced the military's enthusiasm for turtles, and in February 1946, the National Defense Commission directly slashed the production of turtles in half.
At that time, five turtles had been produced, and the sixth was still undergoing final assembly.
With a total weight of 79 tons and 230 mm of front armor, the ground turtle is welded from castings and rolled armor plates, making it the heaviest tank ever developed in World War II. For comparison, the Tiger tank weighs 56 tons, and a Tiger King tank weighs only 68 tons. Of course, the earth turtle certainly can't be compared to the rat tank, which is a 188-ton freak.
In order to cope with this strange weight, the British prepared a 650-horsepower Rolls-Royce Meteor V12 gasoline engine, which barely maintained the maximum road speed at about 19km/h and the maximum off-road speed of 6.5km/h.
This engine comes from the Merlin engine on the famous Spitfire fighter, but the Earth Turtle is too heavy, and the Meteor V12 is mounted on this behemoth, with a specific power value of only 7-8.5 horsepower/ton. According to the standards of modern trucks, when the specific power value is less than 8 horsepower/ton, the vehicle cannot even go up and down the slope well.
Therefore, the earth turtle is very awkward when traveling off-road, and if it slightly touches the dirt slope or soft ground, it will immediately lose its cruising speed and really become a slow crawling turtle.
The tank volume of the earth turtle is average, one says that it only has 530 liters of fuel capacity (the same as the Tiger tank), and the other says that the earth turtle has two fuel tanks, 390 liters on the right side, 245 liters on the small, and 635 liters in total, which is not very large.
It should be known that the Tiger King tanks all have 860 liters of fuel tanks, and the level of the Earth Turtle is a little stronger than the Soviet heavy tank without additional fuel tanks. Because the engine has been in a roaring state for a long time, the fuel consumption of the earth turtle is extremely large, and with road support, it can run more than 100 kilometers thankfully, and the maximum distance of the test is 87 miles, about 140 kilometers of full road maneuvering.
However, many testers in the British army ridiculed the turtle for not worrying about refueling, and it was really not possible for two soldiers to push a cart to catch up with it. Or simply contact a Spitfire: "Hey, Captain Lance, come down and give you some oil, the road is pressed for you." ”
Like tanks such as Churchill, the Earth Turtles were equipped with a Melit Brown transmission, model H51D, which could provide 6 gears of operation.
The most commendable thing about the Earth Turtles is the weapon, which is equipped with a QF 32-pounder gun (94mm), which is much stronger than the 17-pounder gun that the British used at the time. The QF32 comes from the 3.7-inch AA anti-aircraft gun, for which the British army developed a variety of APCBC and APDS, especially the 32PDR Sabot Mk.3.
QF 3.7 in AA gun
In tests in 1948, the QF32's shell-piercing shell easily shattered the Panther tank's defenses head-on at a distance of nearly a kilometer, and according to estimates, this gun may be the fiercest gun of World War II, and it is not even afraid of rats.
The tortoise secondary weapon is three 7.92mm Bertha machine guns, which were authorized by birmingham Light Weapons Company to copy the Czech ZB-53 machine gun, directly using German bullets, which were complained about during the war.
In addition to the gunner-operated side-by-side machine guns, two machine guns were mounted on top, and the necessity of these two machine guns also caused a lot of design controversy, they were dangerous to the probe personnel, and could lead to accidents due to tacit understanding.
Therefore, The Nuffield side temporarily installed a small device on the hatch of the earth turtle, which when the hatch was opened, could block the continued firing of the machine gun.
The earth turtle appeared too late to catch up with the end of the war like Pershing, and the entire A39 prototype was not delivered until 1946, and the war was long over.
Later, the British took the 6 delivered A39s to Salisbury Plain (the place where There was Stonehenge) for testing, but the embarrassing thing was that the armored soldiers thought it was an assault gun and were reluctant to try this tank. They were then handed over to the artillery under the title of "testing the needs and standards for future anti-tank self-propelled guns."
But when the artillery was excited to get the turtles to the range, the local range officials claimed that they could not ensure the safety outside the range, and you guys were too far away.
This kind of thing did not happen at all in wartime, but now that the war is over, the earth turtle has become a hot yam, pinching the ash in the hand, taking it and using it and no one wants it, and wanting to hit a target is still crooked.
The turtles were then sent to allenby military base in Powiceton, Dorset, and then to an artillery panzer training school in Loulworth, where there was a shooting range known as the "English Channel", and My mother was no longer afraid of me hitting the cannon outside.
In Lourworth, the A39 Earth Turtle was tested against the Centurion 3 tank, while various tests of the QF32 gun continued, and there was a lack of interest, and everyone thought that the army could not be equipped with such obsolete things at all, and the new FV200 series tanks were much more promising than it.
Bertha machine gun with German bullets
The following April 1948, 2 earth turtles were handed over to the Army's Army Regiment of rhine (BAOR) stationed in Germany for use and testing, where the armored forces accepted the "new tank" and conducted a more adequate fire test.
In June, the Earth Turtles conducted some live-fire tests against a German Panther G tank that shot the Panther head-on at 915 meters, shattering a roof above the driver's seat and tearing off a piece of gun shield.
In fact, the troops were very satisfied after use, they thought that the earth turtle's cannon had incredible energy efficiency, the earth turtle was an extremely stable high-fire platform, why did it not appear in the war earlier, a chariot like this can withstand thousands of troops.
An earth turtle is pulled by 2 trucks
Still, the earth turtle is pointed out to a number of serious problems – too heavy, too slow, too slow to hold the bridge, it is a traffic disaster.
Not only the German bridge, the army actually paid more attention to the transition ability of the field boat bridge, and the mobile bridge of the legion at that time could not play the earth turtle at all.
Later, the British army really could not stand the "turtle speed", so they distributed the turtle hair out to help test the bearing capacity of Germany's important bridges one by one, so as to determine the future development weight of Allied tanks. Anyway, the bridge that the earth turtle can cross, everyone can cross. The road that the earth turtle can push, everyone can push, so they also removed the earth turtle's weapon and replaced it with some related measuring equipment.
The body is too wide and very unsafe to put on a truck
In fact, this "pressure test" was also carried out in Britain, and the earth turtles were taken to various places to press the road to test what level of traffic in the country could be maintained in wartime.
When the "probationary period" of the Rhine Legion ended, the disheartened people abandoned the development project of the earth turtle, and it was permanently hidden in the snow.
In fact, it was from this time that the British began to plan "universal tanks", they looked back at the previous roads, such as infantry tanks, cruisers, and assault tanks such as the Earth Turtle, thinking that the troops only needed a general tank equipment, which gave birth to the early concept of main battle tanks.
Only two known earth turtle hulls remain, one of which was sent to the Povington Museum in Dorset after testing in 1949, and the tank can still perform running in the 21st century.
The other was thrown in the Scottish Kirkurbury military training area, which had turned into a turtle shell in the wind and rain of the years.
Not only the shell of the turtle, but also a broken turtle shell, seeing such a hard dead turtle, everyone wants to spray two cannons to see, but it seems that its front is still very top, and the cannon is all the side.
If the turtles had been born at an inopportune time, what a wonderful battle it would have been if they had appeared on the Siegfried Line in 1944.