"Favourite crap tank" Topic

Title self explains really. What's your favourite AFV that frankly wasn't very good?

My third placed tank is the M3 Lee / Grant. Not so much a tank as a caravan with guns. But not really bad, because tactically they were quite handy against your Panzer III and IV-F1.

My runner up is the Panzerjaeger I. A Panzer I with a 47mm gun, this effort was unable to defeat or repel any other AFV on the battlefield. But dayum, that old Nitto 1/76 model was sweeeeeeet and it is basically to tanks what a Triumph Vitesse convertible is to sports cars. How can one not like?

But the winner has to be the 'strine Sentinel tank. Never issued to any actual armoured unit, it is best known for having a port star's junk as part of the glacis:

What's your favourite rubbish tank?

I suppose my favorite Pzkw Mk II is a crap tank.

FT 17

M-3 Stuart

Covenanter

#3 L3/35 Not really a tank, but a tankette.
#2 Chi-Ha
#1 M13-40

You take that back, BW1959! Its like a battle cruiser. If you use it right, it can't be beat. The problem is the endless temptation to use it wrong.

Numerous, relentlessly reliable. Truly a Honey.

A9, Crusader, T-70

Land Battleships!

T-35
High profile
Slow speed
Crap armor
5 turrets, all with uselessly small guns.

British Mk IV B light tank. They're just soooooo cute lol. Still not sure how they found anyone to crew them against real tanks lol. My runner up would be the Rolls Royce Armored Car.

Matilda 1; WW2 tank designed for the Great war.

KV-2. Big boxy charm, you need rungs to climb to the top of the turret, ridiculously high silhouette, transmission sucks but damn, packs a punch!

KV2 and T35

M4

T35, then Type 89

Ditto the Covenanter-- looks like a real tank, but…

I'm torn. Early war best of British crap, the A9 cruiser (although all of them through A13 are nothing to write home about, except as a "Dear Mr and Mrs <insert name>, we regret…" letters) or the Russian T28 / T35.

Gaaah! I can't choose!

I nominate the Soviet T-60. To quote the Tank Encyclopdeia "The T-60 was simply dreadful. As a result of the combination of inferior armor, a sub-standard main gun, poor mobility and a two-man crew, it was universally hated by the Soviets…. As stated earlier, crews named them "a brother's grave for two" because they were so vulnerable to German attacks.

Honorable mention to the M3 Lee. It was competitive in mid-42 but I'd hate to crew a tank with a riveted hull aka designed-in shrapnel.

The Turan. A design who's time had come and gone I think.

Jap Type95. It looks 'cute'. ;-) Years ago, I had to scratch build one in 1/72 because nobody made them.

M5/M5A1 Stuart.

Another vote for the KV-2. Awful, ugly, clumsy, but still intimidating AF. I have way too many of them.

- Ix

On the US side? T14 assault tank. Overloaded, unreliable, and slow, but lead to the Sherman Jumbos.

German? Neubaufahrzeug. Because land battleships are cool, even when they suck.

Soviet? Either T28 or T35 land battleships.

British? Man, I don't think I can limit it down to just one! Pretty much any of the Cruisers before the Cromwell were crap, and most of the Infantry tanks were pretty bad, too. That I actually like? Have to go with the Crusader 2 or 3.

Japanese? Probably the Type 97 is my guiltiest pleasure. fast, but with a crew of 2 the poor TC was overworked running that 37mm.

T64!

When sat in the drivers seat my head and shoulders were out of the tank! There was no way I could operate it with the hatch down – completely useless.

DB

Some of the tanks mentioned here were not crap at all when they were introduced, and some, like the M3 light, were not crap at all.

For true, high quality crap at the time they were introduced, I´ve always been partial to the British MVI light series as well as those wonderfully sexy but oh so awful early cruisers, and finally the American M2 medium.

crap at the time they were introduced

Now Texas Jack's qualification is a really good one. It's why I characterised the M3 Lee/Grant/Winnebago-with-guns as "not really bad", because it was briefly useful. And helps to resolve some of the above ruminations on whether eg the KV2 was crapper than the T35.

The KV2 had a whacking great gun, it is true, but you could only traverse the turret on level ground. Should the crafty enemy oppose you on a slope, your KV2 becomes less useful. Although the T35 did indeed have five turrets all useless, when it was designed the 45mm was a reasonable equivalent to the German 37mm or British 2-pounder and the 76.2 was on a par with the German short 75mm. So as both were grossly oversized, I would perhaps call it slightly in favour of the T35, i.e. the KV2 was crapper because it was never good to start with whereas in 1935 or whenever the T35 could have done some damage.

The Neubaufahrzeug is an interesting one. Did I read they they were made of mild steel, not armour plate?

SdKfz 140/1
link

I'd probably give my vote for the T-35. While it may have seemed a good idea at the time, the whole land battleship concept never worked and they were just too complex and unreliable. More were lost to breakdowns in 1941 than were lost in combat.

Given the KV-2 was really meant for attacking fortified positions and as a breakthrough vehicle, not for fighting enemy tanks, many of its faults were less pronounced if used in its intended role. So while not a great success in 1941, it doesn't seem like it was truly crap for its intended use.

Chris

So what is wrong with the Sdkfz 140/1? Looks like a reasonable replacement for the Sdkfz 222 or 234/1 armored cars with the same armament and better off road mobility.

The Sdfz 250/9 seems to have been adopted later in the war as a replacement for the armoured cars and the Sdkfz 140/1 looks like a similar improvement although one produced in limited numbers.

Chris

TigerII. Can't fit on a rail car or go over a bridge. Who knows how many PzIVs could have been made with the resources allocated to it.

"TigerII. Who knows how many PzIVs could have been made with the resources allocated to it."

Well, roughly 1000 (or two for each Tiger II). The Pz IV wasn't optimised for mass production. Amazingly a Panther only cost 20% more than a Pz IV. Pz IVs didn't break down as much as either though.

Anyway, my fave is the A13 Cruiser. Paper thin armour, unreliable, armed with a pop gun, but it looks so sleek and 'modern'. I own many, in multiple scales.

Mine has got to be the Luchs . A very good looking tank but with a gun that was ineffective in late war . I know it was only used as a recce machine but still technically a tank . Still a lovely looking machine.

Got to be the L6/40 for me. Hopeless tank, but so cute. I have footage of it somewhere doing a demonstration for some brass and it looks like someone has got their radio control tank out and are running it round the back yard. If it wasn't for the shots with real people you would think it was a toy.

Too many to choose from really ! But some good choices have been posted !

I guess if I have to choose the "best" crap Tank. As I generally always do … I'll say pretty much anything the IJFs used during WWII.

T-35 for its dippy landship goodness, and the Type 95 Ha-Go because, well, duh! Firing that peashooter sticking of the back of the lil' turret probably just made the sad trombone sound.

T-35 for me, too!

Renault AMR 35 ZT-2 tanks armed with a 25 mm autocannon

For Post WW2 .

British Charioteer

I'll second the vote for the A-13 Cruiser.

I thought about seconding the Pz II, but, actually, in 1939-40 it wasn't too bad.

Brits – Matilda I
Soviets – T-35
US – Probably Lee/Grant although to be fair they did perform reasonably well in the early desert and in the Far East (although to be equally fair almost any Allied tank did well in the Far East!)
Germans – Panzer I but it was really only intended as an interim to train people up

If your criteria is a crap tank when it was introduced, it's hard to accuse a lot of the designs so far cited of that. Even the Japanese tank park was pretty good when introduced. The Type 97 was competitive with other tanks in the world, & really only lacked in armament. Of course the problem with the Type 97 was that it was upgraded too late & kept in production too long, after it was obsolete. But in early '42 Shinhoto Chi-Has would have been pretty dangerous to the early M3 Stuarts it faced off against. And against the armor park of the Chinese it was a stellar design. Even the Type 95 Ha-Go was pretty dangerous when your enemy has few to no tanks available to them…

Damon.

The czar tank

If we accept the strictures that we are talking about tanks that were crap when introduced, not just some years later after the world had passed them by …

I would like to submit another name into this non-beauty contest that I am surprised no one else has yet mentioned: The Italian M11/39.

I mean, let's get a bit real. Introduced into limited force deployment in 1940, the same year that the T-34 went into production, when German Pz IIIs faced off against S-35s, Char-Bs and Mathilda IIs, and what do the Italians introduce as their newest "infantry support" tank?

OK, big gun in the hull, lighter weapons in the turret. Yeah, and slow. So it's a Char-B, right? Except the "big gun" in the hull is a 37mm gun, and a bit of an anemic 37mm gun at that. I mean even the US, with the M2, figured out that the 37mm gun went in the turret and the multiple MGs went in the hull! And armor? Like, if you're going to support infantry and move at the pace of infantry you want some armor, right? Oops, forgot about that part. Bullet proof, but not much more. Did someone mention rivets? Oooh, the Italians had that in abundance!

Really, to me it looks like a poor contender for 1935. In 1940 it's just amazingly dreadful.

Which is exactly why I need some!

I mean, who wouldn't tremble in fright when they see an M11 come trundling down the game table road?*

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

*Note: Oops, probably a typo. Should read: "Who WOULD tremble in fright…"

I offer the French Char C2, or FCM 2C, or FCM 1A, It had different names in use, depending on the time period of discussion. Produced at the end of WWI…. used sparingly during the interwar period…. and organized into their own unit, the 51st Bataillon de Chars de Combat for the 1940 campaign.

Not too many of the above mentioned tanks were in service /used from 1918 to 1940 period…. so why the Char 2C a "crap tank?

The discussion on the planning and production history is interesting by itself and adds to the "crap tank" designation. But the point for this topic which caught my eye in Wikipedia was this statement…..""For propaganda, each tank had been named after one of the ancient regions of France, numbers 90-99 being named Poitou; Provence; Picardie; Alsace; Bretagne; Touraine; Anjou; Normandie; Berry; Champagne respectively. In 1939, the Normandie was renamed Lorraine. As their main value was in propaganda, the giants were kept carefully out of harm's way and did not participate in the September 1939 attack on the Siegfried Line. They were used instead for numerous morale-boosting movies, in which they were often shown climbing and crushing old French forts. To the public, they obtained the reputation of invincible super tanks, the imagined dimensions of which far surpassed the actual particulars.

French command was aware that this reputation was undeserved. During the Battle of France in 1940, the six operational tanks of the 51st Bataillon de Chars de Combat were lost near the Meuse-sur-Meuse station.

For more background material: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Char_2C

A9.

Any twin turreted tank with machineguns only.

Char 2B is bigger than the room I'm sitting in, had no idea.

Yes they were invincible just like the Maginot Line. Cheers!

Maus

I assumed from the original question, not only did the tank in question need to be next to useless but also likable -- for its looks, for instance. Thus my choices of A13 and Pz II.