you
and this is the light tank marked 6b the
design was originally worked out by
vickers-armstrongs and they built some
of the early ones would in fact it was
one of the very first British tanks
which was widely built companies that
had been building railway engines that
kind of thing all came together to build
these tanks because it was the first
really mass produced tank before the
Second World War it's got armor about 14
millimeters thick but if you get a
chance to look at one of these closely
although it's a riveted construction
you'll find that the whole thing has
been beautifully made all the plates
have been filed to perfection so that
they go right up against one another
you can't literally slide a cigarette
paper between them and that was done to
keep splash out splash had been the big
problem in the First World War when
plates weren't really made that well and
fit together properly you used to get
liquid lead from bullets splashing in
and hurting people's faces so they
didn't want that and to cut it down they
made the hour as perfectly as possible
slows down production of course misses
the tank up but makes a beautiful job
things finished as well as a modern car
in many ways it's powered by a meadows a
six-cylinder Meadows petrol engine and
it's unusual for a British tanking that
it's driven at the front you can see the
drive sprocket at the very front of the
tank here the engine the medes engine
drives to a five-speed vickers-armstrong
gearbox and then into the differential
which drives across the tank to the to
drive sprockets so it really is quite a
neat and compact little design and the
driver sits down here we've got a little
place in the front which opens up you've
got a flap at the top and a big flap at
the bottom and then there were two men
in the turret this wasn't quite the
first of the three man tanks but it was
the first production model in large
numbers it's got two Vickers machine
guns a 303 and alongside it a point 5o
half-inch calibre machine gun which in
those days as a guard is an anti-tank
weapon so you've got the two machine gun
side-by-side in the turret
they can be fired they defied individual
you can't fire them both together you
can fire one or the other
and that's your lot and the tank has a
quite a regional top speed but one of
the big problems with it was that across
country it tended to buckets rather
viciously largely because of the
suspension and these Springs it caused
it to leap up and down rather a lot made
it difficult to fire on the move which
was the British raison d'être if you
like for thanks ins before the Second
World War anyway um other features worth
looking at the armoured cover over the
radiator at the front that was a sort of
cooling cowl that's let air in but Inlet
bullets in is hopefully not anyway and
but they were only light tanks they were
light reconnaissance vehicles and to be
quite honest as fighting tanks they were
absolutely useless
the point-five machine gun couldn't
really damage a German tank and the
armour on these was so thin that the
average German tank could shoot in one
side out the other that any difficulty
at all so they weren't really a lot used
and yet for all that they fought with
the British Expeditionary Force in
France in 1940 they fought extensively
in the western desert and they were even
later sent out to Java where some of
them were lost in rather foolish
circumstances there was also a version
of the light mark 6 there was sold to
the Indian Army and that thought briefly
in with British regiments in them the
Middle East for a while so they had a
terrific wartime record in the early
part of the war anyway very reliable
although the BEF and in France found
that the tanks they had had a set of
tracks that were very worn and they'd
been the training tracks and the set
post tracks for use on good going when
de when there was action imminent and
they never had the right tracks on at
the right time so they had a lot of
problems that way but generally the
tanks were very mobile very reliable
quite fast but as I say fighting
machines no good at all that's typical
of all of them in fact all these light
tank series they had no value as
fighting
whatever and there's no point in them
after that
you