As we all know, tanks are great. Scary, hard to destroy, and usually pack a lot of firepower.
But they are incredibly difficult to get anywhere fast. They’re large and heavy,
and usually are transported by road,
or more often than not, by rail. But in the early years of the second world war,
airborne infantry had emerged as an exciting new weapon. Troops could be dropped deep behind enemy
lines to cause havoc and take key objectives before an assault. The issue was that at
the start of the war there was no way to equip these important troops with armoured vehicles.
And so, 4 nations set out to solve this problem, taking wildly different approaches.
The basic premise was shared by all, however, and the era of the Glider tank had begun.
By the way, apologies for the audio in this video - my voice isn't great because I'm really sick.
I left it as late as I could but it just had to happen. So. Enjoy!
During the invasion of France and the low countries, Germany had deployed a number of
airborne troops that were incredibly effective. In June 1940, the British followed suit, and began to
develop their own airborne forces. It was decided that gliders would be a big part of this force.
To deliver the infantry to their targets, the British would put out requirements for 4 different
gliders, each with different cargo. The first 3 would all carry various amounts of infantry. The
Hotspur would carry up to 8 men, the Hengist would carry 15 and the Horsa would carry 25.
The last design, specification X.27/40, was going to carry one tank or two universal carriers.
And this glider, known as Hamilcar, was going to be designed around an existing tank – the
Light Tank, Mark 7, Tetrarch. The Tetrarch had been designed in 1938, and the British already
considered it largely obsolete. Its armour was extremely thin at only 14mm, the 2 pounder gun
it mounted was outdated, the cooling system was faulty, and the size of the vehicle meant that
it could only have a two man turret, which meant that the commander was overworked.
But due to its small size and thin armour, the British thought the Tetrarch an ideal airborne
vehicle, as it weighed just under 8 tonnes. And so they designed Hamilcar to carry it into battle.
The glider was massive, 21m long with a 34m wingspan, and weighed over 8 tonnes even before
anyone drove a tank inside. It was larger than any of Britain’s 4 engine bombers, which were also the
only aircraft that could actually tow the vehicle. The pilots sat in tandem above the huge cargo
compartment, which had a large, hinged door to allow the vehicles to exit.
To eliminate the need for ramps, the glider could be lowered to the floor by deflating the
shock absorbers on the wheels, meaning the tetrarch could drive straight out.
This swing door would open automatically as the tank moved forward, but it was not uncommon for
this method to fail, and the tank inside simply smashed straight through the wood and canvas door.
By June 1944 only 80 Hamilcars were completed after 4 full years of production, and only
34 Hamilcars would be deployed in Operation Tonga, the British airborne operation on D-Day.
20 of these would be carrying Tetrarch tanks. One didn’t make it over the channel,
as the Tetrarch inside broke free and destroyed the glider. Two more collided while landing,
destroying both aircraft and the tanks inside. The rest made it down in one piece.
However, after all this effort and ingenuity, the Tetrarch’s simply weren’t good enough. They
were largely obsolete at the start of this scheme – never mind in 1944, and struggled
to make an impact. The Hamilcar would glide into action on two other occasions, but it would now
be carrying purpose-built, American armour. In March 1945, Hamilcar gliders would take off
with a new cargo – the M22 Locust. The M22 was developed specifically for airborne operations,
and was designed from the ground up to be superior to the Tetrarch. The British had wanted to build
it themselves, but they just didn’t have the spare manufacturing capability to make another tank,
so asked the Americans to design and build it to fit a British specification.
It was one of the smallest tanks that the US had ever built, and carried 3 men. In order to
meet the weight limit it also had incredibly thin armour, with the thickest point being only 12.5mm.
But the Locust was incredibly mobile, and the plan was to use that mobility as protection.
Armed with a 37mm gun, the M22 had very similar firepower to the Tetrarch. In an attempt to
remedy this, the British would end up fitting some Locusts with littlejohn adaptors, an experimental
device that would narrow the end of the barrel to around 30mm. Using special, malleable ammunition,
the round would be squeezed as it left the barrel, allowing for a much higher velocity projectile.
Little is known about where these devices came from or how they were attached,
as they’d originally been designed for the slightly larger 2 pounder on the Tetrarch.
8 Locusts would be deployed in Operation Varsity,
securing bridgeheads across the rhine. One glider crashed,
another 3 were heavily damaged by anti-aircraft fire, and only 6 tanks reached the ground intact.
One then broke down and one was destroyed as it attempted to rescue allied troops that were
under fire from a German self-propelled gun. It wasn’t a great start but the 4 remaining
M22s did manage to get into the action, repelling multiple German attacks alongside the airborne
infantry until vehicles from the 44th Royal Tank Regiment came to relieve them. Which, to be fair,
was exactly what they had been designed to do. Varsity was the final major airborne operation
of the war, so was the last time the Locust saw action before it was declared obsolete in 1946.
The British and American glider tanks were interesting, albeit a little bit predictable.
The Germans and Soviets thought a lot more outside the box. But before we get into
that – a little announcement. I’ve started a discord server. Naturally I’m a small channel
so I’m not expecting a huge amount of people but I’d love the chance to talk to you guys
in a more productive way than trying to reply to all your comments on here. Join the server
through the link in the description and we can start figuring out what it’s for – discussions,
video suggestions, memes, cool photos, maybe even some behind the scenes. We’ll see how it goes!
And if you’re not already subscribed, may as well click that while you’re here.
Anyway, back to putting tanks in planes. Or how about, turning a tank into a plane?
The Soviet Union had been experimenting with tanks and aircraft for a few years, slinging T-27
and T-37A tanks under huge bombers and dropping them into battle from incredibly low altitude.
I talk about this in more detail in one of my recent videos if you’re interested,
but the conclusion was that it just wasn’t a great idea. The crew had to be deployed separately,
presumably by parachute, and the vehicles themselves would have to be small, lightly
armoured, and lightly armed. The same issues the British and Americans ran into with their designs.
Sometime after war broke out the Soviet Air Force asked an Aircraft manufacturer , Antonov,
to design a glider for tanks. But this wasn’t a glider that tanks would go inside – it was a
set of wings that you would attach to the tank. And this wasn’t even a “new” idea.
In 1932 American designer J Walter Christie had come up with this idea of flying tanks
into battle, and there’s lots of lovely drawings of these vehicles flying around.
The Japanese have some nice drawings of one of their designs too, a modified Type 98 light tank
with wings strapped on. But these were just drawings. The A-40 actually flew. Allegedly.
The only account we have on this vehicle is the Soviet one, so take everything with a pinch of
salt. The A-40, at its core, was a T-60 light tank. T-60 had a 20mm cannon and over 20mm of
armour, so it was not completely useless as an assault vehicle. On the back of the tank was all
the key parts of an aircraft – a twin boom biplane to be precise. This was mounted to the vehicle by
a detachable cradle, with the plan being to tow the aircraft to its target, it would glide down,
land, shed its wooden wings, and start fighting. And it did all these things on September 2nd,
1942, during its first and only test flight. Towed by a TB-3 bomber, it was released, glided smoothly
down by the expert Soviet test pilot Sergei Anokhin, and was driven back to base after
its wings were jettisoned. However, this wasn’t even the entire tank. The armament, headlights,
ammunition, and even most of the turret had been removed. And it was STILL far too heavy and
produced far too much drag for the TB-3 towing it to stay airborne for any length of time. In fact,
no Soviet Aircraft could pull it fast enough to avoid stalling, and so the project was shelved.
Again there is absolutely no proof any of this ever happened. The “photo” I’ve been showing
of it in flight is actually a drawing or a model done by Antonov themselves,
no footage exists of the test flight. The German design, thankfully, has lots of photos and lots
of footage. Probably because it was one the largest aircraft of the Second World War.
The Allies had tried to put a small tank in a big glider. The Germans went for a similar
plan – but decided that their glider was going to be able to carry medium tanks. This meant
that the glider had to be insanely large. The end product, the Messerschmitt 321 Giant,
was aptly named. 28m long, 10m high and had a 55m wingspan. That’s about half a football field.
The cargo space was enormous, offering 1100 sq ft of floor space and being able to carry
up to 23 metric tons of cargo. The Giant had been designed to have the same load space as a
standard German railway car, so as long as a tank was under 23 tonnes, the Me 321 could carry it.
The aircraft had two clamshell doors at the front, and used ramps to embark and disembark cargo.
But, just like most German designs where bigger was somehow always better, there was a catch. The Me 321
had no way of taking off. It was too heavy to be towed by the Junkers 90 as planned,
so instead the Germans were forced to improvise, and tow the glider using a trio of BF110s,
flying in a tight V formation. This was obviously incredibly dangerous, so they instead created an
entirely new airframe – the Heinkel He 111 Zwilling. This aircraft combined two Heinkel
He 111s into one, uniting them through a new centre wing section and adding a fifth engine.
Sometimes this still wasn’t enough, and underwing rocket boosters were needed to
help the glider lumber into the air. Despite its insane cargo capacity,
the size and sluggish nature of the Me 321 meant that it was never used as an assault glider.
It was too easy a target for AA gunners or marauding fighters, it needed large, clear landing
zones, and it was impossible to move once it had landed. The glider was instead used as a transport
on the Eastern Front, where it was the culprit of the deadliest aviation accident of it’s time,
Destroying the glider, it's 3 tugs, and killing all 129 men inside. It would hold this record for 19 years.
It was adapted into a powered transport, the Me 323, by adding six French made engines to the
aircraft, and was more successful in this role. I think I’d still prefer to be a Tetrarch crewmen
than ever go near one of the things though. I hope you enjoyed this video, even it was partly
aviation based. Maybe you hated it. Maybe you have lots of great suggestions for my next one. Well,
please do join the discord and we can chat about it. And if not, I’ll see you in the next one.