Worst Tank of WWII

Actionjick

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The question might be posed is the worst tank better than no tank? Even today an infantryman armed with only his rifle might be disturbed by an L3 clanking towards him with bad intent.?

Imagine how the bloody infantryman felt back in the 30s.
 

The Purist

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View attachment 14917
Just need a big enough lever, or a large enough bomb.
One thing I've learned over the years is that there exists a lot of photos that show wrecks that look to have been blown apart or flipped by artillery or bombs. As it turned most of the time these wrecks were blown up later by explosives and/or bulldozed out of the way.

In the attached I am wondering if there is 500lb bomb crater right next to the tank (opposite side) or if a bulldozer did this to clear the road
 
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A_T_Great

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World's worst tank? French FT-17M MG armed almost no armor, and very slow.
 

Actionjick

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"Ci Arrendiamo" features L3/lf tankettes. Played this as the British once, for the old Boys Anti-Rifle was actually effective in knocking out those
flaming tin-cans.
That is one of the cool factors of early war scenarios, the lethality of weapons that in later war scenarios are not really considered tank killers.
 

T34

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My final nominee might surprise a few people, but how many tanks saw as much use by the enemy as by friendly forces?

I will admit that the T35 violates one of my pet peeves about tank design: Multiple turrets. In ASL multiple turrets are kind of cool because they allow you to fire at a variety of targets in the same phase. However, in reality, multiple turrets are an anathema to good tank design. The T35 had five rotating turrets, one with a 76mm howitzer, two with 45mm anti tank guns and two with machine guns.

I will also state that I think the T35 gets a load of positive press that is completely undeserved. It was a parade ground tank that was useful on Red Army Day or on some other Soviet holiday parading through the streets of Moscow. It had no place on the battlefield of WWII and the number of scenarios dedicated to it in ASL are almost certainly fiction. Documented cases where the T35 was used in battle were a single unit in the Battle of Moscow and (ironically) by the Germans who pulled one out of a museum to use in the Battle of Berlin. There are tons of models you can buy of the T35, one has been completely rebuilt by Russia to celebrate its triumph in the Great Patriotic War:
.

In reality, the T35 had a number of weaknesses that kept it from participating in WWII. First, Operational Mobility. It had an operational radius of less than 100 miles, a ridiculously low amount in the vastness of Russia given the lack of railroad access. The most significant weakness of the T35 was a total reliance on infrastructure which was not available and would, in case of war, be a primary target of the enemy. Weighing in at a gigantic 54 tons, there was really no chance of getting them where they needed to be.

Usually, a tank weighs a lot is armor, but the reason the T35 was so bloated was its turrets. Turrets provide a huge amount of weight to a tank, requiring 360 protection as well as gear that drives them. This is largely the reason that multi-turreted tanks fell out of favor during the war. They are hard to maintain and expensive to produce. All the while providing less protection than would usually be expected of a heavy tank.

Weight also meant that the tank had to be long...very long. Walking along the side of a T35 would give you a first down (almost 32 feet.) This placed a tremendous amount of stress on the tracks during turns and made it extremely difficult to drive. In profile, it was virtually impossible to miss.

Mechanically, these things were a nightmare. For a country of relatively low tech workers, a lot was expected of the 11 man crew to keep these things running. The five turrets meant that the mechanics of the tank were very complex. Soviet maintenance standards were notoriously bad and the needs of these machines were immense. Most broke down on the way to the front.

Production was stopped because of the immense man hour cost of producing them. A total of 60 were built between 1935 and 1938.

No one is going to argue that the T35 is the worst tank in ASL. It has a lot of effective firepower on a 1941 battlefield and its protection is not bad vs. a 37L. The chief problem with this is that ASL provides insufficient penalties for firing multi-turreted tanks. A multi-turreted tank, trying to engage multiple moving targets with a number of traversing turrets isn't going to hit anything. They also tend to show up in multiple scenarios where I am somewhat dubious as to their actual effective participation.

And these were no doubt excellent parade ground tanks, drawing ooo's and ahhh's from the crowd as they rumbled through Red Square.

But for an immense investment, the T35 provided virtually no combat value. That's why my third nominee is the T35.
 

Michael Dorosh

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Well in fairness the FT17 was a WW1 tank and in that context it was quite successful and revolutionary given it was the first tank to incorporate a fully rotating turret.
It was also the most numerous tank in the Canadian Army in the Second World War.

Well, in the summer of 1940, anyway, when the Americans shipped 236 loads of "scrap metal" (so as not to violate neutrality) over the border to the Canadian AFV Training Centre.

14995

 

WuWei

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I wonder, if the 'Tank Flip Attack' will become 'official rules' when the reprint of the Italians with 'Soldiers of the Negus' gets published...
If your infantry wins CC against a tank, that's what you can imagine to have happened. No need for special rules here.
 
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