well I'm just about to do a tank chat on the Coventry armored car if you like
tank chats why not subscribe to the tank museum channel and watch them all now
what we're looking at here is the Coventry armored car and Coventry is
quite an odd name for an armored car in fact they were a design put together out
of sort of other people's designs and partly used Daimler and Rootes group
information to make this vehicle it wasn't all that good but we'll come to
that in a minute but this is it the Coventry it weighed about 11 and a half
tonnes which is quite heavy for an armored car but that was because they'd
rather try to stick everything on it except the kitchen sink I'm not even
sure about that it's powered by a Hercules engine or
6-cylinder Hercules in the back why they used an American engine we're not too
sure but presumably they had nothing British that would suit and it was a
petrol engine by Hercules stuck in the back there straight-6 it drove through a
5-speed gearbox of which four of the speeds were synchromesh they didn't use
synchromesh on the first gear because it was only used for hill climbing and that
sort of thing something sort of quite powerful but very slow so the other four
gears were the normal driving is it drove through them it had separate
forward and reverse but it had a prior standard gearbox a lot of it otherwise
was based on the Daimler you'll notice for instance even the turret is Daimler
like except that the Daimler turret was a good deal higher than this but that's
how it was done it has a crew of four normally three and the turrets and a
driver in the front here now when the driver got into place apparently he had
to remove the steering wheel to get in he was that cramped and if they put a
nut on the steering wheel which young did removed the steering wheel got into
place put the steering wheel back because the car without steer it was a
bit of always sometime and screwed the nut up again and that's a particular
feature of this view it seems a clumsy feature but it was the
essential way of getting in there was also a driver's position in the rear
which would be used by one or other of the turret crew who get into this
position to drive the vehicle out of the problem drivers in the other direction
in other words he had two speeds second and third in the gear change he wasn't
allowed to go into the higher gears in case he got too fast so he only had a
clutch pedal he didn't have any others but he was mainly involved with steering
stopping and changing gear on the vehicle because his view was limited and
in any case it was only done to get the car out of trouble the least that was
the idea but that's the vehicle it's armored to about fourteen millimeter
quite odd that they didn't use the extra two millimeters of armor that they used on
the the Daimler the Daimler had sixteen millimeters but this had fourteen and
as I say it was quite heavy weighed 11.5 tonnes which is quite a lot for a four
wheeled armoured car I think the nearest the base the big AEC which was similar
sort of weights otherwise most of the armored cars that were in the operation
during the Second World War which were mainly Daimler and Humber were lighter
and they all they needed to be as well so that was the problem now although the
vehicle appeared in 1942 as a design and then to theoretically entered service in
1943 it was never actually used in action in fact the Eighth Army who did
reports on new vehicles said that they felt it was obsolete already and that
was before it ever went into action so although a number were built for the
British Army it was never ever used by the British Army during the Second World
War so it's quite interesting from that point of view it's got a 2-pound again
with the coaxial besa alongside it and probably the two pounder was one of the
problems it had really had it stayed by 1943 and the two pounder was considered
to be a bit under whelming as far as tank guns concerned it had no other use
it couldn't fire a HE worth them spit so and it was probably an out-of-date
gun and that's probably why it was declared something efficient at the time
although the dangle and a 2 pounder and was used for years after the war until
the Saladin came out well as this thing wasn't what we did was sold twenty odd
of them to the French the French then used them first of all in North Africa
and then ship the whole lot to Indochina where they were fighting this war
against the Viet Minh and they they left them there
so they can't have been that much useful that's why they were done the vehicles a
bit wider than the Daimler it's eight foot nine wide and it was said at one
point that the track of the front wheels was wider apart so that when it followed
the tank it didn't fall into a rut it had wheels in two ruts but whether
that's really true or not I don't know but that's it the Coventry armored car
there was a mark - which had a 75 millimeter gun but that involves first
of all throwing one man out of the turret so you had a two-man turret and a
driver of three main kinds - the four and a much higher turret of course to
take the 75 so that's the only difference and that never developed any
further they only built one or two of them on the on the prototype of the mark
1 hull but this is the mark 1 this is the version that came into production
but was never used at all as I say in action by the British Army
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