Yeah, it's not that it lacks in any other measures like crew size or amount of machine guns. The British version was way better, to begin with. 45-50mm hi-velocity anti-tank gun and 5 crew members would make good enough tank a really good one.
And it was a good tank on top of that. One of the best in the world for a year or so. Look up the old Bogart film _Sahara_ , an M3 plays one of the leading roles, and they used an actual M3 to film it, when it was still a brand new tank.
The love of MGs on tanks is nothing compared to their love of AA guns on ships. When they refitted the Richelieu they absolutely ladled 20mm and quad 40mm AA onto it.
I hadn't watched this one, but was looking at the 1944 Burma campaign. Of course the Chieftain had done a tour. But the description of the M2 as a mobile machine gun nest with a 37mm gun on top to deal with tanks is precious. It made me chortle out loud.
Just watched it the other day. Maybe that's why RU-vid is recommending this to me again? Was better than I expected, I watched the whole thing in one sitting, which is unusual for me.
Haha yes I've climbed inside that very tank in cairns, curater is a great bloke very friendly really good museum they even have a shooting range where you can shoot mg42's Brens etc.
My uncle commanded one in North Africa. At Kasserine, they rigged a cord to both triggers and fired straight ahead, at enemy infantry , until the belts were exhausted.
I love this thing in WOT. Yeah it's got that handicap of a turret and the strange main gun placement, but I didn't do too bad in it and when you survive a game, you get a sense of accomplishment in it. That feeling only increases when you do well in it! Lol!
It measures miles, the testing it. That's how you calibrate speedometers and odometers, and verify fuel consumption, oil consumption, etc. You saw them attaching those to every car they ran through tests at magazines like _Car and Driver_ until a few years ago when GPS equipment became good enough to replace it. How else do you exactly measure distances traveled?
Great series of videos Nick! I've been wondering: how did a tall lad like yourself get around the height restrictions for US army tankers? Do they have waivers for the tall yet determined?
I don’t believe there are any. I served in the mid 80’s, and I knew a few lanky Soldiers who somehow managed to fold themselves up enough to fit into M60A3’s.
Nick explains this in one if his videos. He "misstated" his height on the paperwork when initially putting in for tanks and nobody ever called him to task for it.
Something about this monstrosity of a machine is so charming to me. I wanna see it upgraded, with a welded hull, better engine, HVSS, and a reworked forward crew compartment to allow for better armor sloping, and possibly even more traverse for the 75mm.
It ❤️ was years before I realised that the Sherman was a Lee/Grant with a 75mm gun in a fully rotating turret. The same engine and suspension should have been a big clue. ❤️
The entire point of this tank is that it has a fucking 75. Like WTF actually goes through the heads of people like you? Or maybe you just don't know that an M3 Medium and an M3 Light aren't the same thing? And apparently didn't bother to watch the video at all. They probably thought "man that tank is a killer, thank God I'm in the newest, most modern tank our military has available, and we have this great big 75mm gun". Not sure which M3s Mediums were facing the Tiger though unless it was in the East. When they introduced the M3 Medium in Africa all Germany had was Pz IIIs and IVs, and this totally dominated them for months. But the time they sent Tigers over they were already reequipping with the M4 Medium.
Amazing to think the US went in just 4 years from fielding this M3 in 1941 to fielding the M24 in 1945. Although the Germans made some slight advances in those years also...
@@agentkaos1768 I'm referring to the M24 Chaffee, not the M4 Sherman. It's not a direct tank-to-tank comparison, since the Grant was a medium tank and the Chaffee a light one. It's more a comparison of how sophisticated tank design had become.
Can you hear the response of tank mechanics in early WWII being told they had a great 'user interface'. Hey, I'm not using my face to work on this thing.
I really like the idea behind the M3, the lack of a coaxial machine gun seems to be the biggest problem it has. Was there insufficient room inside the turret for a 30 calibre? Maybe a slightly larger or redesigned turret might have been possible. Also I had no idea there was a museum like that in QLD, I really want to holiday in cairns now.
+Marc83Aus M3 Medium Lee/Grant both have a .30 cal M1919 coaxial MG in the turret. The particular tank in the video might have had it removed as part of its decomissioning.
In many nations it's preferred if museums don't have functioning weapons. They need to either be disabled or removed. Most machine guns you find on museum tanks are dummies that don't work. A museum is allowed to have weapons but it needs a high amount of security to prevent theft and needs all kinds of licences. So most chose to just disable the weapons. Smaller weapons like rifles are often put behind protected glass so that they don't have to modify them and possibly ruin the historical significance.
+Soviet Santa Thanks for the correction! Apparently that was their commentary about how easily it caught fire under combat and killed everyone inside. This was a lend/lease tank and they hated it.
+Shkotay D I think it generally was more than 6 brothers. The russians also used them as armored personnel carriers, so basically they stuffed an entire infantry squad INTO the tank in addition to the crew who still had to drive and shoot while basically being crammed together like sardines in a can.
I would have at least alluded to the story about BEF tanks facing Rommel in 1940 without an HE capability to counter 8.8 cm Flak guns. For all its faults, the M-3 could have changed the course of that particular battle and there were plenty of similar situations in North Africa.
srry chieftain for being late. i just loggin my WOT profile. i wanted to tank(thank) you for you service in the army. also to all the great vets in WOT. yous videos are awesome, and your bloopers are funny. keep enlightening us with the knowledge of tanks :D.
@ 9:20 -- Don't be daft! You don't disassemble the whole track to flip to the unworn treads, you unpin one link, loop the track around the other direction & mount it on the opposite side of the tank!
It's not the direction that needs changing, it's the side: Inside to outside. That means that all the end connectors need to be flipped 180 so that the guide horns are still on the inside.
@@TheChieftainsHatch Sorry, the smiley somehow went missing off my post. It was supposed to be a joke [turning the tracks inside-out, since the guide horns on the inside of the treads would then end up wrong-way out. But the idea would work if someone had just thought about how to make the tracks properly in the 1st place!] ;-D
The official documentation may have stated the name was Grant and not General Grant, but here's a link to an official British tank recovery training video in which the M3 is called the General Grant. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-XvgkqdQvqq8.html
Grant, Sherman and Sheridan didn't care to be called general nor be saluted when out with the troops. Grant was Grant, Sherman was Uncle Billy and Sheridan was Phil. They also wore civilian clothes and boots while wearing a general issue coat to resemble contract mule skinners that drove supply wagons for the Army so they could blend in with the crowd in case snipers were lurking somewhere.
Hello Chieftain, always when I see such a thing as welded machine gun ports on this tank I wonder if those spots are actually harder to penetrate than the rest of the armor. When I think about sloped armor I wonder if there ever have been considerations about a plate fin armor type, where you apply additional armor with spaces in between (that are supposedly not being larger than an incoming, lets say, 75 mm projectile) . I am sure this question has already been answered somewhere, but I have not come across it yet. Thank you :).
I'm not sure if this applies to you talking about the Grants 37mm stabilizer around 15:45, but the Shermans stabilizer had even more issues, I don't know if these would also apply to the Grant. Ordnances official line was that it "was not precise enough to permit the Sherman to fire on the move but rather helped the gunner keep the reticle on-target during movement, so that when the tank stopped to fire, the gun would already be roughly aimed in the right direction. Gunner who had been extensively trained on maintaining the gyrostabilizer felt that it was a worthwhile feature, but due to combat attrition, more and more replacement gunners were not familiar with the system, and it fell into disuse in some units in late 1944" - Source 'Panther vs Sherman: Battle of the Bulge 1944: Zaloga, Page 28' However the reality was much, much worse. 1.The gyrostabilizer took at least 5 minutes to spin up before it could be engaged. 2.Once it was spun up, the gyrostabilizer could not be left running for extended periods of time because of wear and tear on the system. 3.Before the gyrostabilizer could be used at all, it had to be calibrated. This process took a trained gun crew about 20 minutes to accomplish. 4.Calibration of the gyrostabilizer had to be performed at least daily, and more often under conditions in which temperatures were very low or very hot, when they changed much during the day. 5.Fine tuning the calibration could be done only when the main gun was fired. 6.Depending on many variables, fine tuning might require the discharge of one to three rounds on average. 7.Once the gyrostabilizer was fine tuned for HE rounds, for example, it had to be retuned to use a round of different weight like shot or smoke. 'TK-525 Operation and Maintenance of the Gyro-Stabilizer. Chassis Group, Tank Department, The Armored School, Ft. Knox, KY. (2-16-44-500)' Further reports suggested that not even trained crews used the thing, opposite to what Ordnance officers suggested who also possibly suggested it was much better than it actually was claimed to be in manuals. These reports seem to of been self-serving and intended to obscure the fact that the system was essentially worthless in combat. Not surprisingly they managed to leave out these few important details when claiming the gyrostabilizer worked just great when the crews were properly trained and motivated to use it.
I would love to understand why the f**ls wanted a 37mm unless it was at least semiautomatic and had explosive shells. I can see a machine gun of some sort including a .50 cal or 20 mm but a manually loaded one round at a time 37mm just seems idiotic and about the worst option possible. I'm not sure why they didn't turn them over to the artillery as self propelled guns when the tankers replaced them with M4s. Something else I missed.
I would so put another sponson on the other side, two more to the rear & regular M4 sherman turret on the top, just for the lulz :D Oh, and two MG casemates to the sides, one to the rear, one in rear turret face, four fixed MGs to the front and quad fifty for AA defence :D
Milometer. Used in vehicle testing to verify distance traveled (and therefore speed as well). Not all vehicles have built in odometers, they aren't always very accurate even when they do.
Thank you. Now that you say it, I can see it. I did not realize how far back it was, and thought it was about the size of a Ferret. Still, with only four road wheels on the tracks, I imagine it isn't exactly large.
Although I personally prefer to say "Main gun", "rifle", or "Smoothbore", it is worth noting that officially the loader in a US WW2 tank was referred to as the "Cannoneer". It is also worth noting that the M3 gun as found in M3 and M4 mediums are derived from the rifled french artillery piece officially titled "Canon de 75 modèle 1897." Even the US Army will occasionally refer to the gun as a cannon. ( eg www.army.mil/article/143018/ ) So it may not be -common-, but it's not wrong, and never say 'never'
+kloppanator Not usually. But it's regularly on Tuesdays at 4pm Pacific. Anything else is a target of opportunity, subscribe for email notification of launch
