Early Tanks?

Just a quick question as this has baffled me for some time.
Sorry I'm on my phone so can't post pics or links.
Id just like to know how the hell some of the ww2 Tanks, with small, skinny turrets, competed with or did any damage to other Tanks or anything for that matter, how can a Shell fit through It?

Google Japan's ww2 Tank "Type 97 light Tank".
Now can someone explain how that Is worthy Tank In ww2, It weighs only 15tons and has 37mm gun, 37mm!! What can they even do with that? And how would It of even competed with the Sherman's 55mm main gun?

So yer my question really Is the shells must of been so small on the Jap Tank.

Short answer is the Japanese tanks didn't stand up.

They went nuts building troop support light vehicles and when the Russians handed it to them with heavier tanks the Japanese had already committed too many resources to their naval campaign and the production of heavier tanks came too little too late.

Tanks were pretty much new in WWII having only just been developed and little utilized in WWI so every country was basically feeling along like a blind man.

The US blew it pretty well at first too with too many useless light tanks being shredded on the field.


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Many tanks weren't designed for pitched battles with other tanks (as seen in the battle of the Bulge etc.), but rather as infantry support. If you were attacking, say, a machine gun nest this little Japanese tank would do nicely. Also, consider the terrain on which the Japanese fought. It wasn't great plains and open spaces.

The tactical mindset was also different for different nations. The French banked on the Maginot line - a fortified barrier - rather than on the swift air cover/infantry/tanks of the German Blitzkrieg. The French (or British) were never set up to go nose to nose with the panzer divisions. The BEF found that out the hard way.

Just think of these light tanks as the right tool for the job. You're not going to get a Tiger tank down a jungle path.
You're also not going to set these light tanks against a bigger opponent.

I got beat to the punch a bit.....so I will just add this,

Theory on warfare....make a weapon that fits the situation. The Japanese fighting style was island to island, fortify and dig. They focused on naval/air power, their infantry was trained (and trained well) at island fortifications and trench warfare. Tanks through out history have had very narrow theatres of use, ie, north africa. Locations that a tank will not get bogged down or get hit from above/below.

Each tank is designed (even in the early days when they were still getting their feet wet) for a specific environment. One tank will not fit all, which is why the U.S. has a variety of different tank type concepts. The army tank will not serve any applicable function for a marine unit, which is why they developed a LAV for their use. The European countries understood this concept very well, there are a couple build models through the last fifty years, in which the tank body was generic and they could fit different turrents into it, ie, anti-aircraft, howitzer, light ammunition, or heavy tank barrel. They really did some cool concepts with these, but it focused on the point that one tank will not fit all environments.

reply to post by thisguyrighthere

Did the Japs have any Tank battles with a Sherman?
Just It seems the Sherman was In a different league let alo.e compared to the Tiger lol, then again they were Allies.

reply to post by Zakka


Found this, but no tanks were not effective in the pacific theatre.

Combat Operations in the Pacific and Later:

Due the nature of the war in the Pacific, very few tank battles were fought with the Japanese. As the Japanese seldom used any armor heavier than light tanks, even early Shermans with 75mm guns were able to dominate the battlefield. Following World War II, many Shermans remained in US service and saw action during the Korean War. Replaced by the Patton series of tanks in the 1950s, the Sherman was heavily exported and continued to operate with many of the world's militaries into the 1970s.

reply to post by pointr97


Thank you.
So the Japs weren't very succesfull with Tanks, surpising for them.
Again though how big would the Shells of been on the Jap Tank?
What distance would It be lethal at witb such a small turret?

From what I am reading if the 37mm tank cannon is anything like their 37mm light anti tank gun it was capable of penetrating 20mm of armor at 1000 yards according to wikipedia. Admittedly this is pretty light penetration, but as has been said other places the Japanese strategy was not all that big on tanks.

Japanese anti tank gun 37mm

The Sherman was barely adequate for WWII combat, and really it took something like 3 or 4 of them working in coordination to take out a single Tiger tank, usually losing two Shermans in the process. The reason we were eventually able to sweep them is because we produced more Shermans than any other tank of the war. Also, the Tigers weren't produced in great numbers.

The Soviet T-34 was also a top tank of the war, outclassing most of the tanks the Germans were throwing against them.

Originally posted by Badgered1
The tactical mindset was also different for different nations. The French banked on the Maginot line - a fortified barrier - rather than on the swift air cover/infantry/tanks of the German Blitzkrieg. The French (or British) were never set up to go nose to nose with the panzer divisions. The BEF found that out the hard way.

The Maginot Line was more strategic than tactical. It turned out to be one of WWII's largest blunders when the Germans simply maneuvered around it instead of going through it as planned

reply to post by Zakka


In the early stages of the war there was not a tank that was so heavily armoured that it needed any large caliber tank cannon (m3 stuart, panzer 3, bt 2, pzkpfw 2). infact the armour was so weak during the early stages of the war that even 20mm autocannons could do some type of damage to the tanks. it is not until the development of the m4 sherman and the panther tanks and the t34-85 tanks that the autocannons and the 37mm could not do anything but just scratch the paint off of the tanks. there was still some high velocity anti tank cannons that were 50mm and they could penetrate most medium tanks during the middle of the war. also ammunition type was also critical.


im not much of a tankman so this is all i got for this topic

The T34 was a good tank, but it was production capacity of Russia and the simple design of the T34 that was the downfall in the eastern front. The Sherman tank was mass produced during WWII. The Sherman was really a medium sized tank, not a heavy sized tank like the German.

I a Top 10 Tanks program the T34 #1 beat the M1A1 Abrams #2

Originally posted by Papagrune
The T34 was a good tank, but it was production capacity of Russia and the simple design of the T34 that was the downfall in the eastern front. The Sherman tank was mass produced during WWII. The Sherman was really a medium sized tank, not a heavy sized tank like the German.

I a Top 10 Tanks program the T34 #1 beat the M1A1 Abrams #2

I'd love to see the criteria used for that selection...
I'm not knocking the T-34 (for its day, an excellent machine), but I can't think of any area where it's superior to the M1A1 (also an excellent machine, and several decades more advanced than the T-34).

Originally posted by Brother Stormhammer
a Top 10 Tanks program the T34 #1 beat the M1A1 Abrams #2

I'd love to see the criteria used for that selection...
I'm not knocking the T-34 (for its day, an excellent machine), but I can't think of any area where it's superior to the M1A1 (also an excellent machine, and several decades more advanced than the T-34).

The criteria: "It uses a subjective scoring of factors such as service length, innovation, "fear factor", etc."
en.wikipedia.org...

Originally posted by spoor

Originally posted by Brother Stormhammer
a Top 10 Tanks program the T34 #1 beat the M1A1 Abrams #2

I'd love to see the criteria used for that selection...
I'm not knocking the T-34 (for its day, an excellent machine), but I can't think of any area where it's superior to the M1A1 (also an excellent machine, and several decades more advanced than the T-34).

The criteria: "It uses a subjective scoring of factors such as service length, innovation, "fear factor", etc."
en.wikipedia.org...

The program was about the relevance of the tanks. It wasn't pitting them against each other. The T-34 was the most relevant because of its role of defeating German armour on the Eastern Front.

But the show was bogus anyways, nothing but Yankee propaganda. They put the Abrams in as the best modern tank, but the only thing close to a modern Russian tank in the show was a T-72 (and they put that ass Tom Clancy in the show just to run his mouth off about it). I'm pretty sure that the T-80 or T-90 rank a bit higer than the T-72, and give the Abrams a run for its money

reply to post by Zakka


I just finished reading “Death Traps: Survival of an American Armored Division in WWII”
By Belton Y. Copper
www.amazon.com...

He was an Ordnance officer with the 3rd armored division and follows the fighting from Normandy up to the end of the war. He goes into detail about the nuts and bolts of Tank warfare, the problems with the Sherman tanks and experiences with German tanks. It's a really good look at the ups and downs of the U.S army experience in Europe.

A couple of quotes from the book:

Pg 175 (Appendix I)
“When the war began in Europe, a confused debate was raging between American tank designers in ordnance and senior officers in the army ground forces. In the summer of 1939, when I was at Aberdeen Proving Ground as an ordnance cadet, our main battle tank was the M2A1 medium tank with a 37mm gun mounted in the turret. After the Germans invaded Poland in September, the debate became more intense. The armored and cavalry officers favored a large-caliber, high-velocity antitank gun mounted in the turret. The infantry officers still thought of the tank as an infantry assault weapon. The artillery officers thought that if a tank was going to carry a gun larger than a 37mm, the gun should conform to artillery specifications, which required a gun to be capable of 7,500 service rounds in combat. To meet this, a 75mm gun and larger would require a relatively low velocity. It apparently never occurred to the artillery officers that few tanks would ever survive in combat long enough to fire 7,500 service rounds. The result of this was the new M3 battle tank, designed by a committee.”

Pg. 174
“Major Arrington's order to prepare final combat loss reports had given us the losses for the entire division. Of 158 M5 light tanks, we lost more than 100 percent. (Although the M24 light tank that replaced the M5 was far superior in both firepower and armored protection, it was still too light for major assaults.) Of a total of 232 medium tanks (including 10 M26 Pershings), 648 were totally destroyed in combat and 1,100 needed repairs. Of these 1,100, approximately 700 had been knocked out in battle. This meant that we lost 1,350 medium tanks in combat, or a total loss of 580 percent. It was obvious why we soon ran out of trained tank crews and had to substitute raw infantry recruits during the Battle of the Bulge.

I had mixed thoughts about the capability of Japanese armor. Japanese tanks were reportedly extremely light and much inferior to ours in firepower and armor, but the Japanese reportedly had gotten the complete plans and specifications for the German Panther tank some time ago. If the Japanese could manufacture Panther tanks in large numbers, this could pose a major threat. But even if Japanese armor posed no major threat, we had every reason to believe that if the Japanese infantry fought as tenaciously as it did in the South Pacific islands, it would inflict severe losses on us. Our men felt that an invasion of Japan would be extremely bloody and costly to both sides.”

At the beginning of the war tank design was still in it's infancy. Most armies in the 1920's and 1930's were still dominated by old school Infantry, Artillery and Cavalry officers. Even after the experience of WWI they didn't want to change their ways. As far as they were concerned a tank was still just a toy to support the infantry or artillery. Heinz Guderian was the only person that saw it's potential and ran with it. But even he had problem with the technology of the time only being able to do so much. The early tanks engines could only produce X amount of power, thus limiting them to only carry X amount of weight. That's limits the amount of armor, how big the gun is what type of terrain it can handle etc.

Japanese WWII tanks were great when compared to any native resistance they came against, as most people in Asia and the South Pacific at the time were completely unprepared for modern warfare - let alone the mechanized variety. Also the Japanese tanks were comparable to the Marine Corps armed versions of LVTs or something like the M3 which is what the Allies used in the island hopping campaign during WWII in the Pacific. They didn't exactly have big guns either. Keep in mind that in those situations when big guns were needed, nearby ships or aircraft were called in. This makes sense given the islands terrain and the nature of the combat theatre having everything on an island being in range of a battleship or Navy/Marine air wing. Big tanks weren't needed in the Pacific and were more likely to be a liability.

Even now we still use light armored vehicles for coastal assaults because they have higher mobility than their larger counterparts and can be deployed in greater numbers which work much better for rushing tactics.

A little late in my reply but the Sherman carried a 75MM gun.

reply to post by Zakka

The T-34 really does not come into this debate nor indeed the Sherman since they were not around for the Blitzkreig nor many of the tank duels in the eastern Libyan desert up to late 1942. The Lee Grant appeared before the Sherman with a silly small turret for a small cannon and a hull mounted large calibre.

Limiting ourselves to say the invasion of France, German tanks were not much superior to French heavy tanks, however the way the French used their tanks in ones and twos was inferior. French tanks had narrow turrets for one or two man operation therefore the workload was impossible. The French and British did not equip every tank with radios like the Germans did so they could not direct and manage massed tank units in the field.

A final factor in favour of the German tanks was adoption of a three man turret.

The British did show some intelligence using light tanks at Arras like a fast cavalry unit however they were outgunned and lacked logistics support.

In the desert the Matilda was pathetically under-gunned as was the slightly better Crusader, however the crusader was mechanically unreliable and were up against formidable German fixed anti tank guns. Rommel used his 88mm anti aircraft guns aggressively as highly mobile anti tank units and was more effective with mobile A/T guns than with tanks.

Originally posted by Dimitri Dzengalshlevi

Originally posted by Badgered1
The tactical mindset was also different for different nations. The French banked on the Maginot line - a fortified barrier - rather than on the swift air cover/infantry/tanks of the German Blitzkrieg. The French (or British) were never set up to go nose to nose with the panzer divisions. The BEF found that out the hard way.

The Maginot Line was more strategic than tactical. It turned out to be one of WWII's largest blunders when the Germans simply maneuvered around it instead of going through it as planned

Actually the Maginot line worked very well, the blunder the French made was to think that the Ardennes forest would deter the Germans. The attack was expected through Belgium.