The Carro Veloce started life as a 2 man tankette in 1933, armed with one 6.5mm machine gun. Some bright spark thought it would be a fantastic idea to replace the machine gun with a rather large flame thrower. Early versions of the L3/33 had a fuel tank that was towed behind. This stored 500 litres of fuel for the flamethrower. Later models moved this trailer to a container above the engine
I'm not sure you'd get me in one of those, especially towing all the fuel!
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely not. It's a terrifying idea to be driving that
DeleteI remember reading about one of the early (if not the first) tank vs. tank battles in Spain. Three republican T26B's were assaulted by three of those cute tankettes. One of the latter overturned, and the flamethrower variant was chasing T26s around to get in range. They just let it come close enough to get a sure shot and then blow it.
ReplyDeleteThere are some stories about Ethiopians throwing spears with such force, that they pierced the armour and magically killed the driver, but that's probably not all that likely.
I think the spear thing is unlikely, but there are apparently records of these things being knocked out of action by infantry assaults in Etheopia. I would imagine fouling up the tracks would be more than enough to stop one of these things.
Deleteapparently they were so unreliable that most were turned into pillboxes or just abandoned by their crews at the first sign of a problem
Dangerous tank go BOOM!
ReplyDelete