Quotulatiousness

March 28, 2017

David Fletcher’s Tank Chats #3 Medium Tank MkII* (Vickers Medium)

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 20 Mar 2015

The third in a series of short films about some of the vehicles in our collection presented by The Tank Museum’s historian David Fletcher MBE.

In 1923 Vickers Ltd. of Sheffield and Newcastle, started to manufacture tanks for the British Army. They were the first representatives of a new generation of tanks, designed to fight on the move and restore mobility to the battlefield.

As designed the Medium tanks had a 3 pounder gun in the turret; a Vickers machine-gun in each side of the hull and Hotchkiss light machine-guns in the turret. These last were later eliminated in favour of a single Vickers machine-gun, mounted alongside the main gun and described as co-axial, since it elevates on the same axis as the main gun. This modification altered the design from Mark II to Mark II*. Using these tanks the Royal Tank Corps established standards of gunnery which, in their day, were never equalled.

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