now this is an m3a1 now to be quite honestly there's very little difference
and you'll notice this when you see the other stuarts but there are differences
but they're mostly inside and that's what I want to talk about basically the
tanks the same as an m3 it's powered by the same seven cylinder continental
air-cooled engine in the back drives down to the front through a
transmission under the nose here it's got the same form of suspension with two
vertical volute bogies and the large trailing idler at the back and the drive
sprocket obviously at the front but basically it's it's the same as the
others now the only thing is two or three things have happened in the
meantime for a start in America particularly they've taken to welding
the tanks and you'll notice that this tank is more or less exclusively welded
which is quite an advantage from the visual point of view and also from the
safety point of view because rivets flying about inside is something you
don't want and that does happen when they hit but the real importance of the
m3 a1 which is why the Americans regarded it as a completely new tank was
the installation of a turret basket for the crew the gun crew to sit in on the
turret crew to sit in now because this tanks designed in the way it is for the
engine at the back and the transmission at the front there's quite a high
driveshaft coming straight down the middle of the fighting compartment in
the earlier tanks you'll see the difficulty of getting over it but on
this one the turret basket rotates above it it means that the turret basket
itself is already cramped it's only designed for two men but they're sitting
almost with their chins on their knees just trying to do their job but it does
it's done to make it a bit easier for them it was done actually for two
reasons the first ones they'd introduced a power Traverse system now they'd found
in the earlier tanks the ones without turret baskets that the powder of earth
system was just too fast and the chaps are falling over trying to follow the
turret round they couldn't do it especially with that shaft running right
down the middle he was but with the turret basket they
could turn with the gun and that helped a lot he can't meant they can keep their
eye on the target and have the gun ready to fire at any point of the compass
they'd also fitted a mechanical stabilizer it only worked in elevation
not in Traverse and a lot of people especially the British soldiers didn't
like it very much they tended to disconnect it and dump if they could but
it has got one in it an automatic stabilizer from the main armament in the
vertical plane only the gun is a m6 37 millimeter it's the longer version of
the 37 millimetre gun which meant that it had quite a high impact on Armour for
it was about equivalent to the British two pounder very effective the only real
difference was that the 37 could not only fire solid shot I mean
armor-piercing shot to feel like it could also fire a high-explosive shot it
wasn't massive but it made a loud bang and find the life out of people if
nothing else and that was a considered an advantage over the British 2 pounder
the gun is in a fixed mounting and it means that the gun and the correction
machine gun are locked in the front of the turret and are aimed by the gamma
when the power Traverse operates he goes round follows the target and then aims
the gun and fires it when necessary and it gave the tank a lot more flexibility
than the old m3 but that's the real advantage of this tank the only real
drawback was from the point of view of the that gunner who sat down next to the
driver he's sitting down here and he's got a browning machine gun which he can
use from the lat position now unless they stopped that basket in exactly the
right place leaving the gap for him to get out he was well and truly trapped in
there if the tank caught fire he'd had it and there was no way out no other way
at all he had to go through the gap in the turret basket and then out through a
hatch in the turret roof and there was plenty of room
but amid an undignified scramble but then with the place on fire you want to
get out as quick as possible if turret didn't stop there if the men
inside had panicked and gone out and just left it he was in real trouble
the driver could normally get out through the front visor but not the lat
gonna normally he was trained to go out the top way and if he couldn't and he
was in trouble otherwise the tank is basically the same as the rest of the m3
series we should expect and from outside it's almost impossible with this type of
homogenous armored turret to tell him apart the tanks got about an inch of
armor down both sides and about 1.5 to 1.75 inches on the front it's it's
always thickest from the front it makes sense to do that anyway it was the most
fight able tank much more so than its predecessors it still suffered from the
rather short range these tanks would not go a great distance with the existing
fuel in them about 70 miles was the maximum and in the desert this usually
meant that if they were pursuing the Germans although they were in a faster
tank this thing could go a lot faster than the German tanks it could never
really catch up with them because he usually had to stop every now and again
to refuel and the crews have made it a point of honour to stop and refuel
before going into action so that the tank was at its fullest when
they went into action and therefore they had some reserve of fuel to do the sort
of maneuvering that you might have to do in a tank versus tank fight especially
in the desert where it was going on low over the place
otherwise you run a risk of running out of petrol in the middle of an action
which is not all that much fun but that's how it was done but that's the m3
a1 and it makes it slightly more interesting from the viewers point of
view to know that they were different inside and that's what this is all about
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