Get Inside the Tanks
with Richard "The Challenger" Cutland
the AMX 13-90 (Part I)
Hello!
Today we're visiting the North of England...
...to see a very unusual tank: The AMX 13...
...and because the AMX was such a radical tank for its time...
...this will be just the first of two videos featuring it.
This particular vehicle here is not a museum piece...
...but one that has been restored by the man standing next to me...
...Warwick Bolton.
Warwick, why the AMX?
Well, I was just looking for a tank to restore at the time...
...and this one became available.
I didn't know much about it, but it fitted the bill.
It was about the right size and a bit different.
And what can you tell us about this particular vehicle's history?
Very little actually, I know it served in the Dominican Republic...
...and then was returned to France and bought by a Belgian dealer...
...and that's where I bought it from.
How big a restoration job was it?
Immense! It was a total non-runner, there were parts missing...
...although it looked fairly complete, when you actually got in to it...
...there were parts missing from the engine, transmission...
...inside was a nightmare.
And what would you say was the hardest part...
...of the whole restoration project for you?
Changing the engine, that was almost a nightmare of a job...
...I mean, that there is the engine hatch that it comes out of...
...but to get the engine out, you have to strip it down in situ...
...pull it out - it comes out vertically...
...then for the new engine...
...I managed to find a brand new one in Holland...
...again, a brand new engine, in a box, complete...
...you then have to strip it down...
...get it through the hatch...
...get it in situ...
...bolt it back up and rebuild it.
It took about 3 days in and 3 days out.
Background
The AMX was designed shortly after WWII in 1946...
...but when compared to what was in service...
...it contained some quite radical thinking,
Let's try to understand why.
Concept
Like all armies after the war...
...the French initially made do...
...with the mass of available vehicles left over...
...they even had a brigade equipped with German Panthers...
...right up to 1950.
(Panther Ausf. D)
At the time, France was also involved in what had become...
...a long and bitter colonial war in Indochina...
...with similar troubles brewing elsewhere, notably Algeria.
Faced with this and also the start of the Cold War...
...the military had a difficult mix of challenges to face.
One key requirement was for a light tank...
...that could also double as a tank destroyer.
It was to be fast and manoeuvrable but with a decent punch...
...but more than that, it had to be light enough to be air-portable.
Now getting a big gun into a small chassis has always been...
...the biggest challenge for tank designers...
...the usual solution in WWII had been to sacrifice...
...a fully rotating turret in favour of a gun with limited traverse...
(StuGIII. Video from www.thetankchannel.com) ...like the Hetzer, StuG and all the other German tank destroyers.
(StuGIII. Video from www.thetankchannel.com)
But free from the problems of an actual armoured war...
...the designers could explore more innovative solutions...
...and this is immediately apparent in the AMX's turret.
Turret
The AMX has what is called an "oscillating turret"...
...which means that to raise or lower the gun...
...the whole turret moves up and down...
...rather than the gun moving within the turret...
This has been tried before...
...in aircraft gun turrets...
...and also the experimental German flak tank of WWII: the Kugelblitz.
There are, in fact, two parts to the turret...
...a lower housing that rotates through 360 degrees...
...and an upper assembly that moves up and down.
Fixing the gun like this also allowed for another innovation...
- an autoloader, which both increased the rate of fire...
...and dispensed with the need for a loader.
In turn, this allowed the whole turret to be smaller and lighter...
...which meant that the vehicle itself...
...could also be smaller and lighter.
The French even restricted the height of the crew to 1.7m...
...that's just 5ft 7 inches!
Another clever point was that the gun was mounted relatively high...
...so that when the tank was in a hull-down position...
...very little of the turret and nothing of the hull...
...would be exposed to enemy fire...
...a very valuable thing...
...in its ambush role.
But there was also a disadvantage...
...despite mounting the gun so high...
...and keeping the overall turret height down...
...the gun only be depressed to six degrees...
...when ten is the usual rule.
This could be a real problem when the tank was positioned...
...behind the crest of a slope...
...if the gradient was too steep...
...the gunner could not depress the gun far enough...
...to fire directly down the slope on the other side...
...and the tank would have to move onto, or over, the crest...
...to engage its target, exposing itself to return fire.
Gun
The original gun itself was in fact a development of the 75mm L/70...
...gun from the German Panther but with a slightly shorter barrel. The original gun itself was in fact a development of the 75mm L/70...
...gun from the German Panther but with a slightly shorter barrel.
(Panther Ausf. D) ...gun from the German Panther but with a slightly shorter barrel.
In the Panther this had required a turret ring 1650mm in diameter...
...but so clever were the AMX designs that it needed a turret ring...
...of just 1450mm...
...giving it the same amount of bang in a much smaller turret...
...that could still traverse a full 360 degrees.
The 75mm gave it good anti-armour capability at the time...
...especially when firing hollow-charge ammunition...
...and also allowed reasonable high-explosive shells to be fired...
...which was important in its role as infantry-support...
...in the colonial wars that the French faced.
This vehicle has the 75mm, but later the gun was upgraded to 90mm...
...with some variants getting a 105mm gun.
This was because the original 75mm...
...could not penetrate the frontal armour...
...of the T-54 and the Centurion...
...two tanks it would come up against...
...often, when in service with Israel.
Outside
Few tanks are as distinctive as the AMX...
...with its low-profile hull, this weird-looking turret...
...set well-back with this long overhang at the rear...
...what we tankies call the "bustle"....
...housing the autoloader mechanism...
...you could easily mistake it for a self-propelled gun.
Crew access was good since each of the three crew got his own hatch...
...the driver's hatch is front-left...
...the commander's hatch is at the left-rear of the turret...
...and next to that, is the gunner's hatch.
We can't see it, but there is also an escape hatch under the turret.
Moving further back, there is a small flap...
...in the back wall of the bustle...
...through which the autoloader ejected the empty shell cases.
Other interesting things to note...
...unlike most tanks of the time, the engine was at the front right...
...next to the driver...
...you could see the cooling fan on top and the service hatches.
I'll be talking a bit more about the engine later.
A spare wheel was carried above the engine...
...and you can see a spare track section next to it.
Moving rearwards...
...there are grenade launchers on the lower part of the turret...
...and a standard French machine-gun...
...mounted coaxially with the main gun.
OK - so that completes our overview of the AMX...
...but what's it like inside?
How does the autoloader actually work?
And what's it like to drive?
Answers to all this and much more - in part II.
Next Time
Archive pictures, thanks to: The Tank Museum, Bovington...
...Getty images, Topham Picturepoint, The National Aviation Museum.