Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look
at a Vickers Class C/T, which is
a Vickers machine gun modified
for use in tanks or armoured vehicles.
This is something that Vickers spent a bunch of time
working on in the 1920s, and '30s.
Both armoured vehicle guns and also aircraft machine guns.
And they made some sales, these were mostly international sales.
The British government didn't have a whole lot of need for standard ground guns
after World War One because, of course, they had a tremendous number of them already.
The British government, using some of those guns,
actually did a lot of its own conversions of tank and vehicle machine guns like this.
But the Vickers Company got into it as well to sell on the international market.
And they did, they managed to sell not a lot of these,
but small numbers of them to a bunch of different countries.
So this particular one went to Argentina.
They also sold them to China, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Holland,
and probably a couple of other small countries as well.
So we've got a number of clear modifications here.
Obviously you've got this very distinctive big shoulder stock.
The idea is if this gun is going to be mounted in an armoured vehicle, space is important.
With an infantry gun you're kind of sitting back behind it shooting like this.
With an armoured vehicle gun you want the gunner's shoulder
to be right up against the back of the gun.
He's got a pistol grip here for the actual firing instead of spade grips.
And then there are a pair of leather pads added
to the side of the gun where the gunner's head is going to sit.
So obviously some changes there, but fundamentally
the mechanism inside the box is just standard Vickers.
So barrel's been shortened a bit, because ... you don't really need the long range in a tank.
This is much more likely to be used at close range on infantry.
Before we take a closer look at it, which we will in just a moment,
I want to point out that this bipod is not an original part of
the gun as it would be sold to the Argentines.
This is ... a Boys anti-tank rifle bipod
that has been set up to allow this thing to be used in a ground role.
There was some investigation of ground-mount kits for tank guns,
and the British government did make some of those.
The idea being if a tank becomes disabled in a combat zone and the crew has to evacuate,
well let's at least give them a way to take the gun out of the tank and continue to use it.
So this sort of thing did see use, but not this one specifically.
So with that in mind, there are some weird features to this, the top cover works differently.
This actually has a left-handed feed block, so let's take a look at that up close.
The markings on here are a little bit hard to read,
but this reads Vickers Class C/T Automatic Gun,
Manufactured by Vickers-Armstrong at the Crayford Works, in Crayford, Kent, England.
We have a serial number up on the barrel jacket, this one is E317.
As I said, this one actually was sold to Argentina.
Now normally the top cover on a Vickers gun, this section of it, lifts up.
On these guns, because they have to go in a tank,
you want again to make as efficient a use of space as possible.
And so instead they fitted a button on this side, and the [top cover] opens up to the left.
Now everything in here is pretty much standard.
On a typical Vickers gun you have a spade grip back here,
and when you push in the spade grip this gets pulled backwards,
like that.
That then transitions up into the top cover, it pulls this back.
Which transitions to the front of the top cover, pulling that back,
which pulls this lever back, which actually fires the gun.
Vickers came up with a pistol grip design where pulling the trigger here pulls a bar,
that comes to the back, which then activates that,
which then goes all the way back up to the front, and fires.
Now it has a built-in grip safety. If you don't depress this button, you can't pull the trigger.
So you have to hold that down in order to fire the gun.
You can actually see this moving right back there.
They also added an ejector tube under the gun.
So typically the Vickers would just eject downwards.
However in a vehicle you want to spit the cases out of the vehicle.
So they added a tube, kind of like a Maxim gun here, so that cases will eject out the front.
If we take a closer look at the back of the water jacket here, you can see it's got these flanges
which allow it to rotate and lock into position in ... an armoured pintle sort of mount on a vehicle.
The buttstock is an aluminium casting here with a ... leather covered pad on the back of it.
And it's got a detachable mount so it can just snap onto the back of the receiver.
Now if you've been looking at this gun and you've been thinking to yourself,
"Something just seems a little different about this, it doesn't quite look right."
You are correct. This actually has a left-hand feed block.
And that's again done to accommodate the constrictions of space inside an armoured vehicle.
So for example one of the Vickers tanks that was made had this and a .50 calibre Vickers.
And this was on the left side, the .50 was on the right.
So you'd want this one to feed from the left, and the right-hand gun to feed from the right.
Now what Vickers did is rather clever, you can open this up,
and just pull the feed block out.
They designed a left-hand feed block that is completely interchangeable with a right.
So you can change the feed direction on the gun by only swapping the feed block.
You don't have to do anything else, and all the internal parts are completely standard.
So you'll notice that in order to make use of ... some of the same basic components,
on the standard feed block the release lever (this is for pulling out a belt
that still has ammunition on it), that release lever is on the bottom.
Well, in order to make it work effectively on the right-hand feed block, they put it on the left side.
However, when you look at these, the slide arms go to the same place.
This is the point where the feed block interacts with the action arms in the gun.
And this going forward and back operates the slide to pull the belt in.
This has to be in the same position in order for the two parts to be interchangeable.
And sure enough, ... this is just a standard ground gun,
right-hand feed block in .303, and it drops right into the gun.
Or we can pull this out
and put back the original left-hand feed block.
I should also point out the two leather pads here,
this one's fixed to the top of the top cover.
This one is actually hinged, so that you can lift it up
if you have to take off the fusee cover to do any maintenance on the gun.
So that's just there to pad the shooter's face against the side of the gun,
which I'm sure would be much appreciated.
The water jackets on the C/T tank guns were a little bit shorter than normal
because they just didn't quite need the full length.
And one other accommodation that was made
for the use in vehicles was a change in the muzzle booster.
So normally on a Vickers gun there is a flange that's threaded onto the front of the barrel
out here that provides a cup like surface.
Because this recoil booster is an essential element in making the gun run.
It creates back pressure in here that pushes the barrel backwards.
So to change the barrel on a standard Vickers gun you have to take the booster off,
and then take the flange off the front, and then you can pull the barrel out the back.
Well, you don't want to have to get out of your tank to do that.
So what they did is designed a different style of barrel booster here.
They enlarged the front of the barrel, and cut this conical surface inside the muzzle.
That kind of gives it the same effect, and it fits into this booster.
And so that's going to go ... in that far,
and then this area generates enough back pressure to properly cycle the gun.
And what this means is you can leave the booster on the gun,
and still be able to pull the barrel out the back
because there's nothing oversized on the front.
So if you had to change the barrel for whatever reason,
you could do so from within the safety of the tank.
One of the most interesting aspects about these to me is the cooling system.
So the water-cooled system worked just really pretty much fine for the infantry.
However, ... it doesn't fit quite as well in an armoured vehicle.
What they were constantly trying to figure out how to do
is add a recirculating water system to the tank guns.
And the reason is these were expected to go through more ammunition, faster, than a ground gun.
If you needed the machine gun in a tank, you are going to be firing a lot of ammunition in it.
They wanted to be able to fire I believe it was 3,000 rounds in 30 minutes,
and that's going to require refilling the water jacket.
That's going to boil off enough water that it'll drain out the water jacket.
So they wanted a way to be able to not have to be trying to
pour water into the machine gun inside the tank during combat.
And the obvious solution was to come up with some sort of air-cooled mechanism.
But the Vickers doesn't really lend itself to an air-cooled mechanism,
or at least, ... that wasn't something that they pursued all that much of the time.
That was something they could do for aircraft guns where there's
a high-velocity slipstream of air over the guns to help cool it.
But again, once you stick this thing in the confines of a tank,
and you put armour around the water jacket
(or the air jacket as it might be), it becomes a difficult proposition.
So instead they started looking at circulating systems.
How can we ... have continuous water flow over the barrel?
And they tried like six different circulating systems,
they tried electric pumps, they tried all sorts of stuff.
And some of the most interesting ones were like,
"Ah, why don't we tie the water jacket into the radiator of the tank?
Like that makes perfect sense, right?
You've already got a circulatory water cooling system in this vehicle,
just plug this thing into it, presto."
Well the problem they discovered was first off, the guns have to move.
The radiator and the engine don't move relative to each other,
but the turret has to rotate and traverse up and down.
And so you're going to have some sort of moving linkage that's probably going to leak.
Some of their experiments found that the only way they were able to
position the moving linkage for the water system
made it so that if it leaked, it leaked onto electrical systems
and shorted out all the electrics in the tank.
If you did hook this up to the cooling system of the engine,
and then any of those pipes sprung a leak, or the water jacket,
like if this thing took a bullet hit around the armour, or through the armour, in the water jacket,
you then have put a hole in the cooling system for the whole vehicle.
And the engine will then overheat, and the whole tank will stop and become immobilised
because the water jacket of the gun took damage.
And obviously that's not a good thing to have going.
So they never really came up with a truly suitable system.
And by the ... late 1930s, ... the use of a .30 calibre machine gun as a significant tank armament
was kind of on its way out.
... There were lots of other available air-cooled guns you could use instead of a Vickers gun.
And I think the biggest reason the Vickers continued to be used in tanks
was because they were tanks that the Vickers Company was building,
and so they wanted to put their own guns in.
How embarrassing is it to build a machine gun yourself, and then build a tank
and put [in] someone else's, go buy a Browning machine gun and put it in.
So these were sold throughout the 1930s, there are records of sales from '33 to '39.
They may have started a little earlier than that even.
But once World War Two starts, the production of this sort of thing really comes to an end, so.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. There are very few of these Vickers tank guns still around,
and it was really pretty cool to get a chance to take a look at this one for you, so.
Thanks for watching.