"The halftrack?" Topic

A question for the more knowledgeable of the forum. What happened to the halftrack? It appears that modern armored vehicles are either fully tracked or fully wheeled. Was there an inherent problem with the halftrack design? Why was it abandoned? Help me Obi-wan

As I understand it, the main problem was cross country movement. They had trouble keeping up with the the AFVs for which they were meant to support.

Of course you could always google to find the complete answer …

One of the reasons for halftracks was in design.

The design of steering for fully tracked vehicles is difficult, a half track just uses well tried wheeled vehicle steering,

The transmission to multiple wheels is also difficult, the halftrack had the equivalent of one set of drive wheels.

Both problems now have multiple tried and tested solutions.

x42

The halftrack was not as fast as wheeled vehicles, and it did not have the cross country ability of the tracked vehicle. So most armies changed to fully tracked when speed and weight and expense are not a problem, or fully wheeled when speed is important, and costs need to be low.

He halftrack is cheaper than full tracked. It is easier to maintain than fully tracked and less expensive than fully tracked. But the advantages have narrowed as fully tracked vehicles have gotten better.

Mike Bunkermeister Creek
Bunker Talk blog

There was a half track version of the land rover. It had Scorpion series tracks. Was on trial as a tow for the 105mm Light Gun. I saw one at Larkhill, but never got to drive it. Must have been early 80s.

My Mother's cousin worked in the US Motor pools in WW2 and his comment to to me about half track was " worst parts of a truck attached to the worst parts of a tank"

They just turned out to be a fairly bad idea.

Too bad, they look cool.
-Kle.

a fairly bad idea

Yeah, like the Gamma Goat. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gama_Goat

Jim

Blown tires and thrown tracks.

So later use in wars after 1950 Korea. I know that Israel used them in the Six Day war of 2968. I seem to remember some being sent to Anniston Army Depot with their tanks for repairs in the Yom Kippur War of 1973?

In other conflicts that people remember them in?

Back in 1978 I was with the US 5th Special Forces Group and was stationed in the Sinai Desert and saw the IDF Border Patrol units still using the half tracks.

ISTR a photo of a Russian cargo truck in WW2, probably a Studebaker Lend-lease, with 3 axles and double wheels on the rear 2 axles. The truck had what looked like a "rubber-band" tread stretched over each side of the 2 rear axles. Not sure how well it worked in snow, but it seemed like a great idea to try out to keep cargo moving in "General Winter".

In the years after WWII, a lot of vehicles that were outphased by US military ended up sold to various corners of the world. You could probably find them scooting around in South America or Africa for a number of decades.

Israel still used them in the '90s for low-intensity stuff with rioters and such.
-Kle.

We should remember that the automobile was not actually a very mature technology in the 1930s. There were a lot of concepts that may have seemed like useful ideas at the time.

The halftrack was one of them.

What do you get with a halftrack? The worst of two approaches, with the best of neither.

The halftrack suffered almost all of the complexity of a tracked vehicle. Your vehicle bore the cost of drive sprockets, tensioners, roadwheels, return rollers, the track itself, a more complex steering mechansim, the added weight of all those bits and pieces, and the reduced speed and maneuverability inherent in tracked drives. With metal tracks you were very tough on paved roads, with rubber tracks your traction wasn't much better than tires on wet, icy or muddy surfaces.

The halftrack got few of the benefits of a tracked vehicle. It did not have the even distribution of weight that a tracked vehicle has, because a large portion of it's weight was not resting on the tracks but rather on the wheels. It could not turn like a tracked vehicle because that would involve dragging the wheels sideways across the ground (very un-healthy for the wheels and their suspension).

The halftrack got few of the benefits of a wheeled vehicle. It could not travel on roads at the speeds of wheeled vehicles (very un-healthy for tracks of their day). It did not have the low rolling resistance of a wheeled vehicle (had to move those tracks around their long run of roadwheels and return rollers). It did not have the low cost of wheeled vehicles (all the complexity of the tracked suspension was there in addition to the wheeled suspension).

Once it became clear that light weight tracked vehicles could achieve the same mobility on roads, and that multi-wheel-drive vehicles could achieve the same mobility cross country, and both could do for lower costs of production, maintenance and training, the halftrack vanished from the automotive world.

In the post WW2 era all of the major AFV producers went either to tracks or wheels. Look at the US M59 to M113 APC line, or the Soviet BTR line. Better to go one way or the other, than go for 6-of-one and half-a-dozen of the other.

That said, they sure looked cool!

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)