After looking at gburdon’s thread showcasing his excellent Firefly build, I must ask out loud about the placement of the .30 cal weapon on the TC cupola mount.
Two questions for the team:
Is it appropriate to depict any Firefly with a .50 or .30 on the turret?
If not, why did the Brits choose not to arm the vehicle with a commanders secondary weapon?
In my limited research, I have yet to see a combat photo of a Firefly equipped with the exterior secondary weapons.
thanks in advance,
Steve
To try to answer your question as a non-Brit, the British army had a strict doctrine that tanks were not to go independent of the infantry, which was depicted in the movie “A Bridge Too Far”, where the British tank column stalled until their own troops caught up with them, even though their support was desperately needed at Arnhem.
This was due even partly to Montogomery’s experiece in loosing tanks in WWI (remember they invented them first) when they got isolated from the infantry as well as later in North Africa.
So the mentality goes that if the tank is covered by infantry, why would the tank commander need his own machine gun?
We, the Americans, on the other hand saw the tanks more as a modern cavalry, needing to not always be supported by infantry.
If you notice, that is the main difference between the Lee and Grant tanks, where under the British specifiaction, the commanders cupola machine gun was done away with, as well as the main turret enlarged.
Tom [C):-)]
[:-^]
It took me longer to scan and upload than it did to find this;
OK, to be fair, they are Polish Fireflies in Normandy, not British, but hey, they are Fireflies…[;)]
If you look at enough British Sherman and Firefly pics, you’ll see that the .30s and.50s are occasionally used. In the equipment stowage manuals, they allocate space for MG ammo as well as diagram them in place. It must have been a unit-level decision to either have them or not.
Steve
Here’s one of the references I used when doing this build.
Sherman and Sherman Firefly:
The M4 Sherman if probably one of the best known tanks of the Second World War. It was developed from requests by the British for a tank with a 75mm gun in a rotating turret, instead of the sponson used on the Grant.
Two designs were considered, one using a cast hull and the other a welded hull, with both basing the engine and running gear on the M3 Grant. A welded hull model of the M4 was produced as the M4A1 and production began in February 1942, for delivery to the British. The basic Sherman has a turtle backed hull and a cast turret. The driver sat in the front left with an assistant driver/machine gunner alongside him. The engine was an air-cooled aircraft radial mounted in the rear of the hull. The drive shaft then passed along the floor to the transmission unit in the front, where it drove the track drive sprockets. The turret mounted a 75mm gun and a co-axial machine gun, with the gunner on the right, the commander behind him, with the loader/machine gunner on the left. The early Shermans have the characteristic of having rounded corners to the top of the front hull, while the latter one had “squarer” corners.
The 75mm gun soon became obsolete and the British re-gunned some of their Shermans with the 17-pdr anti-tank gun, which became known as the Firefly (Left). This gave them a method of knocking out the heavier German tanks at longer range. The Americans used a 76mm version to achieve the same. To accommodate the larger gun the coaxial machine gun was removed and a larger counter weight fitted to the back of the turret. Towards the end of the war the later models also had the hull machine gun removed so more of the larger 17-pdr ammunition could be carried. To provide protection against infantry some tank commanders often mounted a 0.30" Browning or BESA machine gun on the turret.
Cheers;
Gregory
ok to be fair…I’ve seen this picture, I don’t consider it to be a combat photo. Training perhaps? My understanding is that the Firefly was parcelled out to individual company levels to provide “Tiger killing” capability to the regular line Sherman equipped tank units. I didn’t think it was an action photo… too many tanks of the type… in the open …too close together.
On a more personal level, You seem to be implying that I am some kind of idiot for asking the question, and gloating over the ease with which you have googled the information… Sometimes your arrogant tone becomes irksome. I would appreciate being treated with some measure of common respect, as I try to treat you. I am not a historian, but a model maker. I am not an expert on allied armor, my meager experience is limited to actually serving as a US Army tanker, and working for over 16 years at General Dynamics building tanks. This information is provided to inform your superior intellect as to my humble limitations.
Easy there, no implication of mental abilities implied. I’m simply stating it was easy to find a photo of something you said you couldn’t find. Sorry to offend you, I was only kidding. That’s what the little winky thing is supposed to imply.
BTW, I didn’t Google this, I actually pulled out a book, scanned in the photo, posted it to my hosting site and posted it for you. Next time I won’t bother…
American doctrine also held that the TC’s MG was an anti-aircraft weapon. This is why it was the much heavier .50, rather than an anti-inftantry .30 caliber weapon (like the coax & bow guns).
The British had completely different doctrine, Royal Armour Corps not quite being the Armor School over in Ft Knox. Air power for the Brits was “sorted” by a different service, too. But, as a clean guess, the British armor is seen less with TC weapons due to the critical lack of MGs for the ground forces. A track with a Bresa or Bren on board is likely to have the “supporting” infantry likely suggest that they could make better use of it than the TC.
Interesting…when I was a TC, we were taught that the .50 was also a tool to engage all light skinned targets, thereby saving main gun ammunition as well. And, as Audy Murphy demonstrated, the old M2 can be a pretty effective weapon against enemy infantry.
regards,
Steve
I am perfectly content with that.
Yeah, I forget if it was an old Armored Corps manual, or something else. But, technically, Hague Convention prohibits using calibers larger than 8mm on human targets. And the Airdailes told the Armor types that the .50 was “good enough” (possibily to “protect” the supply of aircraft 20mm) with the slight additional slant distance over the .30 (I’d really not want to be in the “beaten circle” downrange of a TC engaging in AAA, though ).
Now, if I remember rightly, it was Patton who felt the most important tank weapon was the coax MG. I want to remember that the AirLand Battle recommendations also included discretion so that TC’s could bring what they felt was the best weapon available to bear on the targets available under ROE for the Op in question. Which, was not necessarily Armored Corps Doctrine in '44; and probably not even close to RAC doctrine, either.
The prohibition of large scale ammo on troops targets is an old myth. I can shoot a 120mm main gun round and aim it squarely at an enemy soldier. Same deal with a 25mm, .50 cal, 40mm, 155mm artillery round. Heck, you can call a 500lb bomb on a dude in a foxhole.
The myth has roots back in the day when an infantry units’ largest caliber weapon was the .50 cal. Soldiers were instructed not to fire the .50 caliber at troops because the heavy weapon was needed to defeat enemy vehicles. Firing it would give away the .50’s position.
To reiterate, there is not nor has there ever been a law where you cannot fire a .50 cal at troops. In fact, we, and probably other nations, employ .50 caliber sniper rifles.
I clearly am no historian, so I could easily be asking a dumb follow up, but I’m not to shy about putting the shoe leather in the ole mouth, so…
What was the British supply of .30s and .50s like? Didn’t the Brits have an affinity for the Bren gun? Was .30 or .50 a standard round in the British supply chain? If not (and here is where the giant leap in logic starts) couldn’t that explain some of the rarity of seeing one mounted on a Firefly tank?
And while we are at it [#offtopic] why did the British manage to name all their armor equipment with cool names like Achilles, Wolverine, Firefly[8D], while we’re stuck with M this and M that?[D)] And no, Sherman, Lee and Grant do not count as cool, they count as presidential, but not cool. And just in case T26 jumps in - Pershing isn’t cool nor presidential.[;)]
Although I will admit… Hellcat sure counts as cool! [:D]
IA: each Sherman came fully equipped, including the .50 and .30 MGs. crated along with the other allocated tools and equipment. Voluminous ammo was supplied too. US MG ammo would travel the same QM routes as 75mm Sherman ammo.
The Bren was best as an infantry LMG – its uses mounted on vehicles were very mediocre.
Wolverine was a US name for the M10 tank destroyer. Achilles was the UK name for their version of the M10 tank destroyer. As for the three presidential names, only one of them was a President, the British gave US tanks Civil War general names (Grant, Lee, Stuart, Sherman). We gave the M36 tank destroyer the name Jackson (another Civil War general) to continue the naming convention. We then expanded it during WW2 naming the M24 after the US “Father of the Armor Corps” Adna Chaffee and the M26 became the Pershing.
My answer was not intended to be a totally comprehensive nor to define every possible instance, nor exact in every single case, but only a general statement from what I gathered by reading history books regarding the Eighth Army and so forth.
Personally, unless I had a specific tank in mind I was building form a photograph, I wouldn’t bother to mount any machine guns for the TC’s use.
The tracked vehicle you refer to was called the “Bren Gun Carrier”, and was considered a very effective application for that particular weapon.
Interestingly enough, in the 1944 Bogart movie “Sahara”, Bogie “hunkers down” inside his tank and shoots down an enemy plane with the turret mounted 37mm gun. In this movie, sitting out on top of an open hatch trying to shoot back while you are being strafed by an enemy plane does not seem like the most intellegent thing to do. [:-^]
Probably way off-base but a great movie for a Lee walkaround, though.
Tom [C):-)]
Would that have included the Firefly as well?
I don’t know if you realize it, but the Brits kept a special group of advisors here in the 'States as a mission to specify the special differences they wanted in the armor sent over for their army use.
I know that the British were the first to use the Sherman in combat in North Africa. As a bit of trivia, the Sherman was the result of their asking us to make a copy of their Matilda for them, the Lee/Grant being an interim varient.
Tom [C):-)]
I know for sure that lend lease M4A2 to Russia came fully equipped for each vehicle. I would assume the same for British bound M4A4s. Not 100% sure though.
I think your history of the Sherman origins needs some revisiting. The Sherman links back to the T1 Medium series, then to the T4 and T5, then to the M2 Medium and then to the M3 Lee. These were US perogatives (although they kept an eye on overseas tank development). The M4 was more akin to the Cruiser tanks than the Matilda I and II Infantry tanks. The US had no equivalent in their development or production of the slow infantry tank like the Matilda II. The Sherman was a “Blitzkreig”, fast exploitation tank.
If you’ve heard differently, can you point me to where that was? Hunnicutt makes no mention of any influence by British Infantry tanks.
If I can add my 2 cents worth from the other side of the pond. If you look at photos of early Shermans in the desert , they do carry .50 MGs on the commanders cuopla . There is anecdotal evidence of crews being trapped inside the turrets by MG ammunition burning and exploding . It also seems that when used at the beginning of the Italian campaign a lot of the guns were snagged by wires in vinyards as the tanks passed through . It would seem that the external guns were regarded as more of a hazard than neccesary.Whatever the stories , it was certainly British doctrine that a tank commanders job was commanding the tank , not being distracted by becoming a machine gunner . The guns were certainly carried because they were frequently mounted when the tanks went into leaguer at night . A lot of things like this were down to unit fashion . The British Army was a lot less rule bound than you would suspect . Certainly reading the literature available , none of the British tank crews expressed any great need for externally mounted MGs. It is a matter of record that tanks supplied by the US to the UK were very completely equipped ,right down to binoculars for the commander . So the guns were available , they were just not utilised that much by the crews.
[censored] ugh! that is the last time I mix beer, the internet and lame attempts at humor together. Ya got me Rob[#oops]. Somewhere my junior high school history teacher is cringing. [D)] Obviously I should have put the “am no historian” in bold. Thanks for the gentle correction.
And for what it is worth, I still like the action names more than the dead general names.