re: #119 Targetpractice

Yet that’s what I’m largely discussing, that the Italian military suffered because the economy wasn’t there to support them. They had world-class ships because they concentrated the lion’s share of their prewar military resources into ship production, trying to match French naval build-up in anticipation of competing with them for control of the Med.

They were also facing the Royal Navy in the Med, even given that for Britain it was a secondary area of operation after the North Sea and the Atlantic.

But this isn’t an isolated deal, as the British leadership prewar devoted most rearmament spending to the Royal Navy, which meant early war tanks for the Royal Army were archaic trundling monsters and the Royal Air Force was flying fighters still covered in doped fabrics over wooden skeletons.

British tank doctrine was based on engine capacity which in the 1930s was dire all round. They went for two different designs, the cruiser or whippet tank, light and fast and the infantry tank, slow and heavily armoured and the operational doctrine was based on those concepts. The Matilda II infantry tank was the heaviest tank used in combat by anyone in 1940 but the engines available at that time were gutless so it was necessarily slow. The Crusader cruiser tank used in the North Africa campaign was twice the speed for two-thirds the weight but less well-armoured.

By the end of the war British tanks were getting power plants based around aircraft engines, including actual reworked Merlin engines which vastly increased their power and speed. The US Shermans got a rotary engine option which also derived from aircraft power plants for the same reason, lots of power in a compact form.