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bovtm_df.jpgDavid Fletcher MBE, former Tank Museum Historian, presents another in a series of exclusive articles inspired by the historic documents and photographs held in the Archive.

 


There are some tanks that don’t fit into any category at all, and others that are so obscure that it is very difficult to learn much about them. When these factors both apply to one tank then you know you have a problem and such a case relates to the vehicle I am going to try to describe now.

 

It was originally described as the Tank, Light, Three-Man Experimental and was awarded the General Staff identification number A3E1, which certainly classified it as a tank, it was also issued with the War Department number T1021 but no road registration number that I am aware of. It was built by the Royal Ordnance Factory to a contract dated 8 August 1925. It appears, albeit briefly, in a number of books and I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of them to see what they tell us.

 

To begin with we turn to what we call the MeeWee list. MWEE, the Mechanical Warfare Experimental Establishment was based at Farnborough and its job was to test every new vehicle for the British Army. In fact at the time we are talking about, before 1928, it was known as the Tank and Tracked Transport Experimental Establishment and for a while it used to change its title every year or so as someone in charge endeavoured to describe precisely what it did, rather like they do today, but we have always known it as MWEE (pronounced MeeWee) which was one of its longest running titles. Anyway MWEE, or the T & TTEE if you wish to be more accurate, compiled a register of every vehicle they tested with additional data, some more useful than others.

 

Unfortunately in the case of A3E1 it’s a bit thin, a bit too thin you might think, but at least the information, coming straight from the horse’s mouth as it were is quite trustworthy. The thing arrived at Farnborough from the Royal Ordnance Factory on 29 March 1926 and was issued to the Superintendent of Design on 27 June 1929 by which time T & TTEE had become MWEE. In fact it had been effectively disposed of since it is never heard of again. It is recorded as having an AEC four cylinder engine rated at 52bhp, in effect a bus engine, along with an AEC four speed gearbox and steering by Rackham clutches. It was 6ft 1.5 inches high, 17 feet 9 inches long and 6 feet 9 inches wide, it weighed 6 tons 14 cwt. was armoured with 12.7mm, say half an inch plate and had a top speed of 16mph. It was given the MWEE number 52.

 

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While at Farnborough it was a participant in the special demonstration laid on for the assembled Dominion Premiers on 13 November 1926. It was staged on Camberley Common on what appears to have been a particularly wet and windy day. The plush little souvenir book issued for the display says that it carried the identification number 5 and adds the following details; the engine was water-cooled, which we could have guessed, and the vehicle had a cross-country top speed of 10mph. It could climb a 35 degree slope, had a circuit of action of 45 miles and could cross a gap (or trench) of 5 feet 9 inches. It had a crew of three and was armed with two machine-guns. The blurb on the page is not terribly revealing, it says ‘An experimental type of machine to carry two machine guns mounted front and rear and to be inconspicuous. It embodies an effort to reduce the cost of manufacture by utilising a commercial type of engine and a cheap type of cast steel track.’ On the page it is identified as a Three-Man Tank although when MWEE booked it in they describe it as a Tank, Three-Man Machine Gun Carrier, and if that is not enough when it was photographed, perhaps at MWEE, it had Carrier M/G No. 1 1925 written on both ends, so perhaps it wasn’t a Light Tank after all. It was photographed at Camberley, not very well due to the awful conditions but you can make out the number 5 panted on it and in any case it is the only known photograph of the vehicle in addition to the two posed portraits, that we have.

 

There weren’t that many books on tanks published in those days but two I have contain references to this strange vehicle. The earliest is Fritz Heigl’s Taschenbuch der Tanks which first came out in 1926. A3E1 appears in a supplement that was published in 1927 where it is referred to as a ‘Light Dragon MG Carrier’ but since it is written in German much of it is unclear to me. It does however appear to say that the vehicle could climb a vertical step of 0.8 metres and ford to a depth of 1 metre, although how it knows this is not clear and since some of the other details, like the armour thickness being 8 – 10mm are clearly wrong, means that they should be treated with some caution.

 

Next in the book category is The Fighting Tanks since 1916 by Jones, Rarey and Icks, published in the United States in 1933. It describes the vehicle as a Light Dragon Machine Gun Carrier and says that it was produced by Vickers-Armstrongs Ltd. which we know is wrong, while most of the figures quoted are equally dubious such as the trench crossing ability of 7 feet 2 inches, the weight of 11. 2 tons and a new one, the horsepower per ton rating of 5.4. They also state that the suspension was the same as that fitted to the Vickers Medium, which we suspect is wrong and that the crew communicated by means of Laryngaphone which is entirely possible although they are the only ones to mention this. However it is that description of it as a Light Tank, Dragon, Machine Gun Carrier that seems to be the most telling, as if those responsible for describing it didn’t really know what it was at all. A Light Tank, well maybe but a very odd one with a machine gun turret at each end, Dragon, very doubtful since the term dragon was normally used to describe an artillery tractor and this machine does not appear to have had a towing hook at the rear and in any case the engine hardly seems powerful enough to pull itself along, never mind anything else. And a Machine-Gun bovtm_a3e1_photo.jpg

Carrier, well hardly since one of the normal features of an MG carrier was the ability to dismount weapons for external use; you could not easily do that with these guns, sealed as they were in little turrets, so if anything it was a light tank, but a very peculiar one. A point made by B. T. White in his British Tanks and Fighting Vehicles (1970) where it gets a brief mention.

 

So as a historical oddity we have to leave it there, with two rather meaningless contemporary descriptions. Now it is time to turn and see what one or two more recent writers have had to say about it. Not that there are all that many of them. George MacLeod Ross, the arch apologist for the Royal Ordnance Factory, in The Business of Tanks (1976) doesn’t mention A3E1 at all, which might tell us something. Nor is it mentioned at all in Janusz Magnuski’s classic Wozy Bojowe of 1964. Chamberlain and Eilis, attempting to cover all possibilities, include it in their Pictorial History of Tanks of the World (1972) as a light tank and again in Making Tracks (1973) where it is listed as a machine-gun carrier. In the latter, by the way, it repeats the hint in the 1933 American book that it has the same box bogie suspension as the Vickers Medium tanks, but more of that anon. It also qualifies for an entry, and a picture no less, in Bob Icks and Duncan Crow’s Encyclopedia of Tanks (1975) but that adds nothing to what we know about it at all.

 

Which is about all you will find on it anywhere, well at least anything fairly informative. All we can do now is comment on what we can see. To begin with the engine appears to be located more or less amidships, not at the rear as one source suggests, but it does drive the rear track sprockets. The driver has his head inside a small, armoured cube at the front on the right, with a machine-gun turret alongside to the left. This not only obscures the driver’s view to his left but rather limits the traverse of the turret to the right. The rear turret, on the other hand, has a fairly wide arc of fire given that, in its normal position it is pointing in the wrong direction. Both turrets were probably manually traversed. The ability of the rear gunner to communicate with the other two men at the front, except by the unearthly tones of the Laryngaphone, is almost non-existent as far as one can see. He appears to have been more isolated than the rear gunner in a bomber. The matter of the suspension is quite interesting. Given that any kind of suspension on a tracked, armoured vehicle was still quite an innovation in 1926 one might expect it to be given more detailed coverage. The possibility that it was of the Vickers box bogie type seems unlikely, given that there is no evidence of vertical tubes enclosing springs and we suspect a system of individual pairs of rollers on trailing arms, working against short, coil springs as used later in the ROF’s A7 series tanks. This would have been quite a novelty in 1926 so it seems very strange that it is not mentioned. The other odd feature is the prolific use of return rollers, five on each side to support the track. It is tempting to link A3E1 with A1E1, the Independent since they were more or less contemporary and both adopted a layout of scattered turrets. Both were also rather long and narrow come to that, which should have made them difficult to steer, but they were built by different organisations for a different purpose so it seems that any connection is purely coincidental.

 

And that, as far as it goes, is about all we can say concerning this strange vehicle. By the time it was apparently consigned to the scrap heap in 1929 the first real light tanks had started to appear from Vickers Ltd. (Vickers-Armstrongs from 1928), far more practical machines in every respect.

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