Doodle tanks ussr medium tanks5/18/2023 ![]() ![]() Ironically, the Valentine infantry tank was poorly armed for fighting infantry. But due to its compact dimensions - just 2.6 meters wide and 2.3 meters tall - it weighed only 17 tons compared to, say, the Sherman medium tank’s 30 tons. Its 60 millimeters of affordable riveted armor left it near impervious to early-World War II tank guns. The Valentine was full of contradictions. The first production vehicle rolled off the assembly line in May 1940 - too late to participate in the Battle of France. Vickers supposedly submitted the so-called Infantry Tank Mark III to the War Office on Valentine’s Day 1938. The final design retained the A10’s hull while introducing a two-man turret in which the tank commander doubled as a loader. The company wanted to adapt its A10 Cruiser tank into a more heavily-armored infantry-support tank. The Valentine originated as a private venture by Vickers. We know what the Red Army thought about its British Valentines thanks to Soviet archives that Yuri Pasholok translated and which Peter Samsonov expanded on at the website Tank Archives. But the surviving 3,332 Valentine served the Red Army throughout World War II. Canadian and British factories shipped nearly half (3,782) to the the Eastern Front for service with the Red Army.Ĥ50 of those Valentines sank into watery graves, victims of German U-boats, mines and bombers. With 8,275 built, the Valentine tank was the most numerous British tank of World War II. The Valentines had emerged from the Vickers Elswick factory in Newcastle-upon-Thyne a few months earlier for £10,000 apiece. ![]() The ships carried 193 disassembled Hawker Hurricane fighters, nine Matilda II heavy tanks and 11 Valentine Mark II tanks. ![]() The USSR was still reeling from the Nazi invasion that launched that summer. It was the second of dozens of Allied convoys that would brave the U-boat-infested waters of the North Sea to deliver vital military aid to the Soviet Union. 11, 1941, 11 merchants ships from Arctic convoy PQ-1 entered the harbor of Arkhangelsk in northern Russia. The British Valentine tank in the Red Army ![]()
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