Marvelous Knouterer!Knouterer wrote:Hello MarkN,
Here's the relevant page of the WD of the 8th RTR, which is WO 166/1408. I'm not going to scan dozens of pages of documents now because frankly I don't find the question that fascinating; but I can say that the available sources seem to agree that C Sqn had Mk IIs exclusively from the end of August. When I wrote "as of 18 Sept." I did not mean to imply that the situation before was any different, perhaps I should have expressed myself more precisely.
One thing everybody in Great Britain agreed on at the time was that in case of enemy landings by air or sea counterattacks should be made as rapidly as possible. It therefore made sense to organise this tank battalion in such a way that one squadron could move faster, instead of limiting all three to the very slow speed of the Mk I - even before Milforce was formed and C squadron was attached to it.
Thank you very much.
What you have done is enough. Although I would be most pleased to have a read of subsequent pages, I appreciate you have better things to do than satisfy my curiosity.
Most people, when trying to understand the internal workings/equipment holdings of a unit are determined to place the newest/best equipment in A sqn/coy first, trickling into B and C is left hold the potty. All very disorganised and asymetrical. There is both merit in this belief, and much evidence, when considering disorganised, last minute and hurried inflows of random equipment. See the units and formations of 1 Armd Div on arrival in France 1940.
However, I have contended, that intended 'mixed' establishments have logic and symetry. Why have a hodge podge when there is enough to go around and time to organise?
The order to 'task organise' with an entirety of a single type confirms that, under normal circumstances, they were mixed. Thus lending huge credibility to the internal distribution that I presented above. Notice the entry of 23 August (context is everything!!!) where it mentiones the "new role for I tanks". New role/task, new task organisation.
Thank you.
PS.
Given that 9 out of 10 troops of A and C sqn/coys are now A.11, despite the imprecision of the wording, I have no problem accepting that one of the sqns must be mixed - as well as the examples sitting in sqn/coy HQs. I wonder where the 6 (2 x A.12, 4 x LT) tanks of 8RTR Regimental HQ sat in the MILFORCE/NZ EF orbat. They don't appear on the snippets of MILFORCE instructions quoted in this thread. But that's just one of the interesting conundrums that will have to be locked away as 'unknown' as it's really beyond my true interest.
Also tangental to my interest, but for the benefit of Rich, that's 27 A.11s in total accounted for post-BEF losses just within 8RTR. The Newbold PhD thesis based upon other official records has a further 8 examples listed on 10 June. Other documents (copies thereof), show production still hadn't concluded at that point: 3 in June and 1 in July. At the very least, we have 35 remaining after Dunkirk, perhaps 38. This doesn't in any way prove the total produced must be 139, but it would certainly disprove that it was only 127.