Grease, if you've a taste for expensive but very good books, I highly reccomend South Albertas by Donald Graves. It will give you an excellent functional overview of CW tank regts in NWE, recce regts in particular, and also discusses the Crusader AA a fair bit.
Pics of the AA turret here. It mounted twin 20mm Oerlikons. Write up here.
Regards
Jon
What's the Rap on the Crusader III tank?
That was the Crusader AA Mark II and III. But the Crusader AA Mark I (single 40mm) and Crusader triple 20mm also saw extensive use in the early stages of OVERLORD.Martin_Schenkel wrote:In 44-45, Armoured and Tank Brigades would have been authorized 20 AA tanks (6 per Bn, 2 per Bde HQ). The Armoured Recce Regts also had 5 AA tanks. By 1945 most had been withrawn, however some were retained as they proved to be quite effective when used in direct fire against soft ground targets. But it seems as though the freeing up of crews from the AA tanks was on the whole more useful than the ground fire from the tanks. Apparently the Recce Regts were the ones to keep the tanks more often, aa they worked well in conjunction with the Stuart lights.
Regards,
Martin
"The 73rd, 114th, and 120th Light Antiaircraft Regiments in 76th and 80th Brigade respectively were equipped with 30 Crusader AA Mark I 40mm SP AA guns, each of which towed a second 40mm gun during the assault. The guns partly equipped a number of troops, apparently two in the 73rd LAA and four each in the 114th and 120th LAA. The 93rd Light Antiaircraft Regiment manned 27 Crusader triple-20mm AA SP, each of which towed a triple-20mm AA gun mounted on a 40mm carriage, in three batteries, two attached to 3 British and 3 Canadian Division of 1 Corps and one attached to 50 Division of 30 Corps." (Footnotes from the appendix "NEPTUNE Assault Forces" from my work in progress.)
Shrek wrote:I can remember Macksey spending a few paragraphs on the Crusader III although he does not directly quote any tankers who operated it. I agree that the Crusader series of tanks have aesthetic appeal, and the Mark III wasn't even undergunned - but the Liberty engine (originally designed for aircraft) apparently did not perform well in the desert climate. According to Macksey (IIRC), the water pump for the Liberty's cooling system was not drained prior to shipment to the Middle East, and the cooling system was not refilled after arrival in Egypt. That's bound to cause trouble in North African temperatures.
Also, the Crusader apparently used a chain transmission (!), and if the chain broke it would fall to the bottom of the tight engine compartment, meaning that you had to lift the engine to put the chain back in place - i.e. a workshop job, and the British did not have anything similar to the German's workshop companies until the time of Crusader - Operation Crusader that is.
Strict maintenance may have done something to improve the Crusader's reliability. It was probably let down by the dusty desert climate, the absence of a competent technical branch in the British army until November 1941, and finally by better Grants and Shermans being available once teething problems had been solved. Still, there were AA tanks on Crusader chassis with British forces in NW Europe in 1944. I don't know if they suffered from as many mechanical problems as the original Crusaders did, but you would assume that some of the technical issues had been solved by then.
I have not yet bought David Fletcher's two books on British Tanks in WW2, but judging by the title of the first volume, it addresses all the mechanical shortcomings of early British tanks.
I heard that the Crusaders were deliberately 'souped-up' in the desert. The crews took off the engine governor to get absolute maximum power out of the engine and boost the top speed from the officially rated 27 mph to over 40 mph. They did this because they were scared of German '88's, due to the lack of cover in some desert battlefields there was nowhere to hide, and thus the thinly-armoured Crusader's only protection against the '88 was to go so fast that the tank became very hard to hit.
Downside was that redlining the engine this way caused massive wear and tear on components, and the engine very quickly became worn-out and thus unreliable. So it's not the fault of the Crusader III that it was unreliable, it's the fault of the crews that abused their machines and demanded more from it than it was designed to deliver. The crews simply preferred a fast but unreliable cruiser tank in combat to a slow but reliable one.