How much easier and cheaper to put the gun on wheels, with a much lower profile resulting, and tow it with the Carro Armato hull, instead of using it as a mount.
This is a very close match to the perspective taken by the US Army Tank Destroyer command as a result of evaluations done at the closing of the Tunisian campaign. It lead to a shift, where fully 1/2 of Tank Destroyer battalions were shifted to towed (M7) 3-inch guns rather than self-propelled guns (M10).
When the US Army went ashore in Italy and France, that approach was very quickly recognized as a mistake, and abandoned. By the end of 1944 all of the towed TD battalions were being transitioned to self-propelled mounts (M10s, M18s and increasingly M36s).
Larger calibre AT guns were … so cumbersome and they often ended up just been ng abandoned the n combat, which was why so many ended on SP mounts so instead.
Not only abandoned (when on the defense), but also unable to reach and deploy quickly enough to fill their envisioned roles (when on the attack).
Dug-in and camouflaged AT guns were an extremely dangerous counter to an armored attack … when they were placed in sufficient numbers along the route that the attack takes. But that was hard to achieve. One characteristic of armored attacks was that they are nimble -- they change direction, split and re-concentrate faster than towed mounts could keep up with, particularly when one includes the time needed to adjust fields of fire, dig-in, and camouflage the emplacements. All of that was much faster in a self-propelled mount. Also, shifting positions turns out to have been the single best survival tactic -- take a few shots and pull back out of the field of fire, shift to an alternate position and engage again. VERY effective, but not possible with towed mounts.
I suspect vehicles with main guns so vastly out of proportion to their armor are more beloved of miniature wargamers than they were by their crews.
My father was in the Tank Destroyers in WW2. His favorite was the M18. That has made it one of my favorites, and I have put a fair bit of effort into my studies.
For those who don't know, the armor was … shall we say … VERY out of proportion to the gunpower. Here I am showing, on an actual M18, the thickness of the turret side armor. Yep, pretty light stuff. Not even fully proof to a Mauser 7.92mm rifle bullet at close range. But very popular with it's crews.
And so, back to the original topic, the Semovente M41 da 90:
Because yes indeed, these oddjob Semoventes are indeed beloved by some of the miniatures wargamers out there, present company included.
And the preferences of the crews are included. At least in miniature.
-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)
makes corrections when some models don't turn out the way he expected!
