Welcome back to our tour of Matilda.
We’ll go into the turret. Of course, the whole purpose of the tank is the weapon system, the 40mm gun and the coaxial machinegun.
Two hatches at the top. Loader’s hatch is rectangular and small, the TC’s hatch is a little bit larger,
and you’ll see that the hatches are held up with pistons,
which make opening the hatch a very, very simple affair.
Anyway, in I get, and let’s see how well I fit, which probably isn’t very well at all.
TC’s cupola seems to have a lock here, to rotate around.
Pull it out and you should be able to swing.
Of course, it’s not swinging for me. There we go.
Simple as. So in addition to being able to rotate the cupola,
the periscope inside the forward hatch is also rotating 360 degrees and adjustable in elevation.
Nothing else on the outside of any note. Spotlight, little hooks for lifting up the cupola as required, to the front, gunner’s sight.
Actually, this is as far down as I can go sitting on the commander’s seat.
I hope it moves.
So now that I’ve dropped down into the turret, this is where things start getting, perhaps, a little cozy.
I’m standing on the turret floor, and as you can see my head is already above the height of the hatch.
Now, granted, I am a little taller than the typical tanker of the time.
The commander’s seat that I was sitting on with my head out folds up out of the way once you’re inside,
and there is a small amount, it looks like about 4 inches of elevation adjustment.
There is a platform for the TC to stand on when he’s buttoned up.
I can only assume that the platform is about 3” high
and it’s to bring the typical tanker of the era up to a sufficient height that he can look out the periscope.
The other toy he has is the wireless set, the radio to most people today.
The Number 11 was the original that came in Matilda and with that you had a one-way intercom system.
You could radio other people, and you could talk to your crew. Your crew could not talk back.
Which probably was an advantage for some commanders.
Later on, the Number 19, which was a very common radio set for the British forces by the end of the war came along
and this allowed two-way communication and also of course communication with other tanks,
and there was an intercom box located to his left shoulder that he could select various functions.
Nothing else in the commander’s seat, next step is to go forward into the gunner.
Coming forward to the gunner’s seat, he is of course seated in front of the commander and, again, cozy.
It looks like the seat does have an adjustable height by way of a foot pedal, but it seems not to be working, so I’m stuck in the up position.
Traverse, there’s two forms. Power or manual. Well, manual is simple.
There is a hand crank, you pull in the grip and you crank one way or the other just like any other hand-crank you’ll ever see on a tank.
At least, most of them.
He also has a power traverse option, that is run when the engine is running.
It is a pneumatic system, he will select manual or power, and he has a spade grip,
he pulls in to release the lock and then he starts rotating the handle left or right.
He’s got about five degrees of free play before it starts to traverse.
It has a maximum speed of 20 degrees a second giving you a full rotation in 18 seconds.
The minimum speed is a quarter of a degree a second which will take you quite a while to get around.
If you wanted to use power traverse, you’d have to pump up the recuperator a little bit,
and an interesting feature is that there is a ‘lock’ function where you can lock the traverse in a position.
So what you can do is, let’s say the tank is hit and you want to bail out, the gunner turns the handle before getting out.
Whether the engine is running or not, he turns the handle and he starts to get out.
If the engine is not running and the turret is not in the correct position for the driver to get out, what the driver can do is start the engine,
because the power traverse is locked to one side the turret will spin,
and when the turret is in a position that the driver can get out, he turns off the engine.
Seems a little convoluted.
These days what you do is make sure that you turn the turret yourself before you get out so that the driver has an opportunity to escape.
Elevation is perhaps a little bit simpler. There is to the left here an elevation lock, for lack of a better term.
Just pull it out here and that should free up the gun. Simple as.
There is no elevation gearing. This is a shoulder pad.
You put your shoulder to the gun, put your head to the sight, and you simply do this to aim in elevation.
Combine that with your power or manual traverse, and this is how you aim.
The result of this was you actually had a sort of form of rudimentary gun stabilization.
Because this is so well balanced, I’m basically using… I was going to say using a finger but I’m not.
But it’s not taking me very much effort to do this at all.
As the tank is bouncing over the bumps, the gunner has the ability to generally keep the target in his sights.
Now, it’s not full stabilization, he’s not going to be expected to hit anything at long range,
but in close quarters he actually has a reasonable chance of hitting on the move, something which a geared gun cannot do.
Of course, as guns got bigger and bigger, you could no longer do the shoulder-mounted system.
After you got past the 6-pounder that was about as far as you could go.
The gun itself is a 2-pounder, a 40mm. 2-pounder because that’s the weight of the shot, the British had their own unique system.
This was at the time one of the best anti-tank guns you could find. You could make an argument for the Italian 47.
You can see the breech, it’s not a big shell.
Now here’s the other problem, that the only thing this thing fired was AP.
There was a close support version with a low-velocity 3” gun, however that only fired smoke.
It wasn’t that there was no HE round for the 40mm, but it generally was not issued to tankers.
Apparently there was a… at least, I have heard that lobbing high explosive shells from a gun is the job of artillery,
so the anti-tank gun, the towed 2-pounders which were manned by the artillery, they got the high explosive shells,
but the infantry support tank which was supposed to be shooting up infantry and infantry targets was not given anything other than AP.
So you’re basically shooting really really large bullets at people.
The only thing it was useful for was if you met a tank.
Which, in fairness, Matilda was pretty good at dealing with, although it wasn’t primarily the function.
To the right is a Besa machinegun, a 7.92 again, the bizarre British caliber which was actually from Eastern Europe.
The Germans used it as well, RTR used their 7.92 all the way through the war.
Elevation and depression on this thing is pretty ridiculous.
I can’t elevate as much as I want to because my leg is in the way,
but if I look how far this depresses, it goes pretty much to a full 18 degrees, so you can really abuse some hills in this one.
Or you can put 40mm rounds into very very close infantry targets.
He has his unity periscope here just for general observation, again rotatable and adjustable in elevation.
To aim he has a x1.9 telescope with the simplest reticle you’ll ever see.
It’s a cross with a couple of notches for right and left but no elevation graduations whatsoever, so you’re basically firing burst on target.
You fire a shot, see where the puff of dirt is, if you can see a 40mm puff of dirt, and then fire again.
To fire, he has two pistol grips for his right hand. His left is on the traverse, his right on the pistol grip.
The left one is for the main gun, which is a simple mechanical lever which comes up here to the firing system,
and one for the coaxial machinegun on the right which again is a mechanical cable.
He squeezes the palm grip, or trigger, and that will set off the 7.92.
So I’ll just lock this back into place. There we go, nice and secure.