A sample selection of quotes (pp 161-164)
Barnett seeks to find who is to blame for sending thousands of young men to their deaths in second rate death traps.mechanical abortions that foreshadowed the disastrous car models launched into world markets by the Britisth Automobile Industrty in the post war era...................
over hasty, botched, piecemeal designs and testing, exactly the same calamitous pattern as with the new models of British cars after the war..............
Only a minority of British Tanks could be said to be battleworty while in contrast virtually all the Germam production consisted of first class combat vehicles, even if the Tiger did present some maintenance and transporting because of its size and complexity.......
He apportions blame between British Industry and the War Office
He goes onto discuss that two years after El Alamien, the only single advancement British tanks had done was to marry a 17pdr gun to some Shermans. In the same time the Germans brought out Panthers and the Tigesr to combat the T34.the mechanical failings of British Tanks were largely the fault of commerical firms incompetent at design, development and manufacture. Batch production virtually by hand, utter want of standardization of parts and componets
The War Office held responsible for the failure to evolve clear design specifications to fit clearly concieved battle doctrine, a failure every bit as damaging and timewasting as those critical historians attribute to Nazi munition administration.
He does raise a point of the 7th Armoured Divisons poor showing in Normanby, for to long those men had gone into battles in tanks they knew to be inferior. They could take no more.
It is an interesting book, later I will add his views of American tanks but it is bed time here for me