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now what we've got here is the m22 which the British called the locust and
though we've done it before it was one of our worst foreign tanks but this is a
more studied approach and we're trying to look at the vehicle as a whole so to
give you some idea of what the m22 was like in many other respects it was a
good tank it was only chosen for one cockeyed system which was never used but
it was a quite a good tank although very small one as you can see in fact it's
hardly any taller than I am I'm short enough it was powered by a lycoming
horizontally opposed air-cooled engine in the back of diesel and through the
usual control differential steering at the front so you had the shaft running
under the fighting compartment now it has a driver in this little box at the
front here and three men in the turret which must have been rather cramped it
is quite a small turret but they managed to get three men in there so it must
have been quite handy when they got the idea of what they were supposed to do
now the tank was designed by the Marmon Harrington company in Indianapolis they
used largely their own equipment to design the tank it's not like any other
that was in service for the US Army it's got a vertical volume suspension not
unlike that on the Stuart but for some reason they braced it with these bars
that join them up I don't quite know that they're listed but not explained in
the the manuals about this so I don't know what I think they were there just
to probably prevent it from bouncing too much also of course the original design
called for the hull that's this part to be lifted by the airplane at c-54 it was
designed to go and clamped on these things the turret which is the other
main fighting part would have been loaded into the aircraft and that was
really what I drew on to criticize it last time but otherwise it's a fairly
conventional tank a welded construction
quite a regular suspension and transmission but incredibly small now
the other thing is the very fact that the British called it the locust
now I think that's rather odd in itself and originally according to Winston
Churchill's directive they will also be named after American generals and
preferably those who'd fought in the American Civil War
now that never was a general locusts to my understanding of the thing but who
knows and so it's an odd name for a tank at the best of times they were used once
and once only by the British Army in the Rhine crossing and they were loaded then
into hamilcar gliders the same as the Tetrarch have been in normandy and they
would take an interaction that way it's a little bit lightened the Tetrarch
weighs between seven and eight tonnes so it's a wee bit lighter but and has about
25 millimetres of armor at least it was the armor was built to a 25 millimetres
standard it's actually only about half an inch thick on the sloping part
because it's designed to deflect the shot and the turret however is in one
inch or 25 millimeter armor around it's armed with a 37 millimeter gun with a
coaxial browning alongside it originally with the T 9 the prototype they had two
machine guns in the hull and putting more machine guns onto a tank was not
only a standard American practice but some they felt they'd be more useful and
they tried they said when the T 9 was designed that they wanted as many
machine guns on it as possible well they soon found that the the extra machine
guns in the front added to the weight and in fact in order to reduce the
weight they did away with those how machine guns they did away with the
leveling system for the main gun in here the stabilizer and they did away with
the meant the automatic turret Traverse anything to save weight all those bits
were removed and the tank was sent to action but they will only use the one
time by the British Army with the Hamilcar Gliders to
land across the Rhine that was the idea some of them served after then as
battery offices charges for the Royal Artillery so you'd have a self-propelled
battery say equipped with sexton's with these things as the the recce vehicle
if you like for the battery they go ahead select where the guns were going
to be stationed and used that way but not really in action in the same way as
a fighting tank but they're quite interesting it's quite an unusual
vehicle it had quite a good top speed the top speed was reckoned to be about
35 miles an hour which is quite good for a small vehicle powered by a relatively
small engine but it was quite powerful enough for this thing and they're quite
an interesting little tank if you like the videos here at the tank museum then
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