The most ridiculous tank in history: The Semple Tank
In 1939, the British developed the TOG tank. It was brilliant, innovative, powerful and deadly if it had been developed and applied at the end of the First world war, 20 years ago. By 1939 standards, it was outdated and bulky, designed for the era of trench warfare rather than the era of the new mobile war.
At the same time, on the other side of the world, in New Zealand, they also woke up with the idea that a new world war might begin.
When the inevitable happened, and on September 3, 1939, Britain declared war on Germany, so did New Zealand. Since Japan entered the war in December 1941, there was a real possibility of an invasion of geographically isolated New Zealand.
From the very beginning of the war, new Zealand realized that It had a shortage and need for all categories of modern weapons, including ships, aircraft and tanks, and they knew that their allies would not necessarily be able to fill this deficit.
New Zealand hastened to re-equip and modernize its armed forces, hindered by the fact that they had only limited heavy industry capacity. Therefore, to meet the need for combat aircraft, they adopted a number of obsolete aircraft from their allies.
To increase their naval power, they turned to Bob Semple, the Secretary of labor. He took up the project with great enthusiasm and came to the conclusion that the best approach would be to use what they already had. So he focused on retrofitting existing equipment, rather than creating something from scratch. He chose American D8 crawler tractors, which were available in New Zealand at the time, as the basis for his design.
The Caterpillar D8 was a proven and popular American crawler tractor, first produced in 1935 and eventually used worldwide. The tank concept was truly ingenious, but when several test versions were publicly demonstrated, they were widely ridiculed by both the press and the General public, and many mistakenly thought that the bolted armor was just a regular corrugated roof.
Bob Sample’s Tank
What he created was a 7.8 mm armor tank with a 12 mm steel plate welded to it. Armed with several Bren light machine guns pointed in all directions, a commercial tracked tractor with a 127 horsepower engine.
Materials were available, but unfortunately that didn’t make the design good.
As a tank, it was flawed in almost every aspect except for ease of production. In the people, this tank was most often called the Sample tank. A likely tank that Sample would have encountered in combat at the time was the Japanese Type 95 HA-GO light tank.
The Type 95 was much faster, able to reach speeds of 45 km per hour compared to a Sample speed of just 12 km per hour. The Type 95 was much more maneuverable. The Sample’s maneuverability was hampered by its height of 3.6 meters. This meant that it could tip over on bumpy roads or in ditches. While the Type 95 was much more stable and presented a much smaller target for shooting, it had a height of just over 2.1 meters. The Sample tank could travel 99 km and the Type 95 could travel 147 km before needing refueling.
Sample had six Bren 303 (British) caliber light machine guns.
One in the tower,
one in the back,
one on the left side,
one on the right side,
and two more in the front.
This was only suitable for shooting at trucks and counteracting infantry. The machine gun stores only had 30 rounds of ammunition, and the magazines had to be constantly changed during firing. The designer himself claimed that the armor could only withstand anti-tank shells with a caliber of up to 20 mm.
Who knows what would have happened if Bob Sample’s tank had been put into production?
Bob Sample himself said about the tractor tank project: “If there is an invasion, we need to have equipment as good as, if not better than, our opponents.”
In this respect, his tank failed miserably, but many, including himself, were proud of it, because they felt that they were at least trying to do something in their country’s darkest hour.
Only three tanks were built. In 1942, they were converted back to tractors when the delivery of Allied Valentine tanks began and the threat of a Japanese invasion decreased.
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Articles about weapons, civilian self-defense and engineering projects in the blog OBERON-ALPHA.
