Chapter CXXXII: The Value of Improvisation
Chapter CXXXII: The Value of Improvisation
The Basque armoured force that spearheaded the attack towards La Coruna could generously be called a composite battlegroup, a harsher description would be a hodgepodge of whatever vehicles could be scraped together, crudely armoured and fitted with a gun. Certainly there was a great variety of different vehicle types present in the column, a large proportion of which were indeed conversion of various lorries and large cars, but in Spain every faction was using 'improvised' armoured vehicles of some sort. The Basque efforts were amongst the best as they had the fortune to have captured the nearest thing pre-Civil War Spain had to a tank factory, the SECN (Sociedad Española de Construcción Naval, Spanish Society for Naval Construction) armoured car works outside Bilbao. The SECN works had designed and produced the 'Bilbao Modelo 1932' armoured car, essentially a US commercial truck chassis and engine with a machine gun turret placed on top, though the chassis had been carefully strengthened and actual armour was used instead of the crude steel sheet used on other factions vehicles. It was originally not a combat vehicle but for riot control, hence why the majority of the pre-war production had gone to the para-military Assault Guards and not the regular army, but if you were a scratch militia unit lacking heavy weapons it was still a formidable opponent or a wonderful boost to morale, depending on which way it was facing. The real strength of the column however was not the armoured cars however but the M36 tanks, or more technically the 'Carro de combate ligero Trubia naval modelo 1936' (Trubia Light Tank, Naval Model 1936) as per the utterly literal Spanish naming convention.
Although it looks nothing like it, the M36 was originally based on the Renault FT, a tank Spain had acquired from a reluctant France after the disastrous Battle of Annual. Despite only middling performance during the Rif War the Spanish Army decided it needed a domestic tank programme, both to fix the perceived 'faults' in the FT and for reasons of prestige. In the end they would have two programmes, both operating out of the Trubia Artillery factory, hence the names of the tanks, both aiming to increase the speed, range, firepower and desert reliability of the Renault FT. Sadly for the Basque the M36 was based off the less ambitious FIAT 3000 inspired project (the FIAT 3000 being the Italian copy of the Renault FT), so lacked the powerful engine, improved suspension and twin turret of the rival Trubia A4 project. That said the M36 was still much faster, longer ranged, comparably armoured and mounted twice the firepower of the Renault FT it was based on, though with no compartmentalisation and inadequate cooling it was hard on it's three man crew. The problem was that the FT was twenty years old and was no longer anything like an acceptable benchmark for armoured vehicle design.
Against this force the Monarchists could call upon the lightly equipped garrison forces of La Coruna and Ferrol, some hastily armed rear echelon troops and the battered remnants of the 1st Armoured Division, which has been sent to the area for re-equipping and re-building. In an interesting parallel to the Basque, SECN would play a key role in equipping the Monarchist forces, because SECN was not a typical Spanish company. Founded in 1909 to rebuild the Spanish fleet and restore Spanish shipbuilding, it was part owned by the Biscay Furnace Company (hence it's Basque occupied factory), the Spanish Trans-Atlantic Company and crucially Vickers-Armstrong. The British connection through Vickers, and the other large British shipbuilder John Brown, remained strong, particularly in the shipbuilding and industrial complex at Ferrol, hence it was the obvious location to rebuild and refit a British equipped armoured division. That said the 1st Armoured would not be rebuilt exactly as before, after the massacre of the at the hands of the Republicans' T-26s the Monarchist Military Council had had made it clear that the division would not accept any more Light Tanks, not even the newest Mk.VI, but would have to receive 'proper' tanks. In this viewpoint they had allies in the recently changed British tank establishment, the new hierarchy had taken a turn against the entire concept of light tanks.
Fittingly for this chapter, given the Spanish obsession with it, the first light tank was probably the Renault FT, which remains a surprisingly good archetype for the breed. Faster, thinner armour and a less potent armament are the key light tank ingredients, along with the vital garnish of cheaper. Even allowing for all the advantages of speed, the light tank recipe was always more attractive to the Treasury than the men who had to fight them. The bloody experiences from Spain had confirmed the lessons from the RAC's regular training exercises; the most valuable parts of the Mk.VI were the binoculars and the radio, the machine guns being mostly a distraction from the reconnaissance role and certainly of questionable value against a modern opponent. While accepting that they may have a place in colonial policing duties, both the Director of Mechanisation, Giffard LeQuesne Martel, and the Head of the Royal Armoured Corps, Percy Hobart, agreed the current generation of light tanks had no place in an armoured or cavalry division. Unfortunately did not agree on what should take their place, but that is a subject for later chapters.
Vickers were well aware of these developments and did not intend to give up what had promised to be a valuable cash cow without a fight. While it was rapidly established that a 2pdr turret, even a 'French style' one man unit, would never fit (or technically it would fit, but it would buckle the turret ring after a few shots), there was still an option to up-gun the tank. A dive into Vicker's vast back catalogue of designs and prototypes yielded the 1" (25.4mm) autocannon, developed in response to an Ordnance Board request in 1931 it used proven technology and could easily be produced with existing tooling, making it ideal to rush into production. Vickers also included a raft of upgrades to the suspension and engine to improve performance, the resulting tank was technically the Mk.VI(S) Spanish Light Tank, but Vickers dubbed it the Castaños after the Spanish Peninsula War general, correctly believing naming it after a general from the last war when Spanish monarchists fought on the same side as the British would help it's chances. Such PR aside the Mk.VI(S) was a considerable improvement, while the armour remained relatively thin it was faster, less prone to over-heating in the Iberian heat and most importantly had the firepower to take on the T-26 at long range and even the vaunted H.35 at moderate distances. Vickers had offered the tank to the Monarchists in place of the already ordered standard Mk.VIs, this had cautiously been accepted and a squadron constructed and sent to Spain for trials. Their arrival would cause a minor panic amongst the Wehrmacht observers, they would report back to Germany about yet another new foreign tank with a bigger gun than the just entering production Panzer II and it's increasingly unimpressive 2cm KwK 30. As always the German military mission, and their bosses back in the Reich, worried that if their rival could send such 'good' tanks to Spain, they must have even better ones back at home.
The Mk.VI(S) was not the only surprise waiting for the Basque armoured unit, but the parenthood of the second development is more contested. As discussed it was not possible to fit a 2pdr turret to a standard Mk.VI chassis, but that did not mean it was impossible to fit a fixed 2pdr and create a SPG (self propelled gun). Given how successful the specific design was, and how important the wider idea became, both the informal tank repair yards of Ferrol, where the recovered Mk.VI wrecks were collecting, and Vickers main works in the UK claimed to be first to develop and build one. The required work was not particularly complex, that would prove to be one of the main attractions of the SPG type design, so the first prototype could have been assembled either location. Vickers UK would claim it was based on the Birch Gun produced for the Experimental Mechanised Force in the 20s, the Birch Gun being a QF 18pdr fitted to a Vickers Medium Mk.III chassis. The engineers at Ferrol would just say it was an obvious way to make use of the various damaged Mk.VI chassis they had and some 'spare' 2pdrs they had acquired. To try to bury the argument the 'compromise' name of "Cervantes" was assigned, a properly Spanish name that also fit the developing convention of 'C' names for Vickers tanks in Spain.
The Vickers Cervantes, nothing more or less than fixing a standard issue Ordnance QF 2-pounder onto a Light Tank Mk.VI hull and then putting a steel box around it with a canvas roof. While not as enthusiastic about the idea of SPG as theorists like Liddell Hart (but then who was) Hobart was more willing than his predecessors to investigate 'new' ideas, provided of course it did not distract from the main priority of getting the RAC's divisions properly equipped and above all trained. The British military mission in Spain was "encouraged" by Hobart to assist in developing tactics for the new vehicles and closely observing how the SPG equipped units performed.
As the best tank experts the Monarchists had, the veteran survivors from 1st Armoured had been gathered to serve as the trials units for these new vehicles, so when the Basque attack began they were sent to the front for an exceptionally realistic live fire exercise. Broadly speaking the plan was to use the Cervantes to stiffen the infantry units and blunt the Basque attack, initial trials having quickly demonstrated the SPG was more potent as a defensive weapon, while the Castaños squadron would be the mobile reserve and counter-attacking force. The plan depended upon knowing where the Basque were and whether they were sticking to the coastal route or trying to use the passes through the Galician mountains near the Portugese border. Despite the best efforts of the bulk of the Basque airforce, the scratch Monarchist fighter squadrons provided enough protection to the reconnaissance planes and the Basque column was located in the mountain passes. While the Mk.VI(S) Castaños performed well in the counter-attack, driving the shattered Basque almost back to their start lines, it was the Cervantes that shattered them in the first place, particularly the Spanish manufactured versions. Having been constructed using 'acquired' towed 2pdrs they had a generous supply of HE shells (the UK models had 2pdrs originally destined for tanks, so only got AP shells, as per doctrine) this made them far more versatile, able to support the infantry once they had knocked out the Basque armoured vehicles. These lessons were not missed by the British observers, though the value of all armoured vehicles having a supply of AP and HE shells was seemingly well known to everyone in the British Army bar the Ordnance Board.
The failure of their ex-Mexican Corsairs and ex-Latvian Bulldogs to control the skies was a particular surprise to the Basque, they had expected the Monarchist airforce to be fully committed to the larger battles in the rest of Spain. Of course no airforce, particularly not one with RAF advisors, would ever fully commit it's entire strength and leave areas defenceless, not unless matters had become catastrophically dire, but La Crouna should have had relatively weakened air defences. Numerically that was the case, squadrons and pilots had indeed been diverted down to the fighting fronts in Central Spain, but as the preferred arrival location for British convoys there was always a regular supply of new aircraft into La Coruna. As with the colleagues on land, the Monarchist air force commanders had made it clear after the previous campaigns that they were not going to accept any more second hand RAF biplanes, instead they wanted 'proper' modern aircraft. This put the British in something of a bind as there was something of a lack of modern aircraft available, or at least a lack of modern aircraft that the British were comfortable sending and that the Spanish would accept. The compromise was the Spanish Venom, quite what it was, how it got to Spain and the Air Ministry crisis it ended up involved in form the subject of the next chapter.
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Notes:
All real vehicles except for the Mk.VI(S) Castaños which I've entirely invented. The Vickers 1" autocannon existed and would, best I can tell, fit into a turret on a standard Mk.VI chassis, the other upgrades are pretty much the OTL ones Vickers gave to the Mk.VI during it's production life. A 1" shell is big enough you can fit a decent sized warhead on it and rough penetration calcs say it probably could punch through a H35 Tank at a decent range. In OTL the Army were happy enough with the Mk.VI as a scout/recon vehicle, and for imperial policing, it seemed more 'Cavalry' being fast and lightly armed which was important. Hobart and Mansell are not impressed with it and correctly believe politicians will see it as a cheap way of increasing 'tank' numbers so are trying to kill it. The Mk.VI(S) complicates that, but more on this in later updates.
Cervantes as you can tell is a real prototype. Vickers put it forward but it didn't fit with British doctrine (Cruiser tanks are for anti-tank and heavy Infantry tanks support infantry), it was also deemed expensive. Compared to a standard Mk.VI it was, but obviously compared to a conventional 2pdr A.9/A.10 cruiser tank it was cheap. The Birch Guns of the EMF have come up before, Hobart asking people to dig out the blue prints as he wants artillery that can keep up with his tanks. Don't let anyone tell you this isn't all connected.
The quite ropey M36 is utterly OTL, as was having two separate projects to copy and improve the Renault FT. The Basque managed to build half a dozen (ish) before being conquered, but had dozens in various state of assembly, so with a few months extra they've managed to assemble a credible number.
I was going to carry on to the much trailed Spanish Venom, but decided to just get something out and carry that aircraft over to a full aero-porn update.
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