M3

Last week some 200 officers, manufacturers, newsmen saw the Army's newest tank in action. It was an M3: a 25-ton armored hulk, abristle with four machine guns and two cannon, seven tons heavier than the few medium tanks already in service. The Army last week had only this one model, but within two or three months medium tanks should begin to roll from three new tank factories (Chrysler, American Locomotive, Baldwin Locomotive).

Host and demonstrator at the Aberdeen (Md.) Proving Ground was hard, white-haired, tank-wise Colonel John K. Christmas.* The day was cold and raw; the red Maryland clay was muddy underfoot. Colonel Christmas said that he would let the model speak for itself. Then he turned toward the tank, sulking 400 yards away on a slight rise, and waved his right arm. There was dead quiet for perhaps ten seconds. Then M3 turned loose a horizontal stream of red death, directed towards a silhouette target 900 yards away. From the muzzles of four .30-caliber machine guns spurted bright tracer bullets; from the turret, the shells from a 37 mm. cannon cracked into the faraway pines. Ordnance men from far & wide saw what they had come mainly to see: the steady (22 to the minute) fire of the 75-mm. gun mounted on the starboard side of M3's hull.

The tank's commander, rangy, red-haired Lieut. Colonel Frank R. Williams of the Armored Force, was sitting on a 14-inch-square leather seat, bolted to the iron deck, alongside the 75-mm. gun. His head, protected by a yellow leather crash helmet, was pressed against an oblong sponge-rubber rim which framed the eyepiece of an 18-in. telescopic gun sight. Whenever his target centered in the cross hairs of the sight, he touched an electric firing key, watched a 15-lb. high-explosive projectile rip through a framework target tank.

About 1,000 yards away, a radio-controlled, empty light tank lurched into view, quartered across the rough test ground. M3 set off in pursuit. Because the Army wanted to use the light tank again, Colonel Williams and his six-man civilian crew fired only their machine guns. Colonel Christmas explained what would happen to the light tank if Colonel Williams turned loose his 75: "We would send a dump truck out on the range and bring back a pile of old iron." As M3 gathered speed, a visible streak of .30 caliber bullets smashed into the hull and tracks of the smaller tank.

The 75-mm. gun, a radical departure in tank armament, gave M3 tremendous fire power. Said Colonel Williams: "We weren't trying for top firing speed with the big gun. . . . We might get up as high as 30 a minute." Any such rate of fire would take some doing. Two men load and fire the 75. The loader has to kneel in a tiny steel coop. Between the breech and a bulkhead, he has about three feet in which to work. When the gun recoils, he has something less than two feet. At 30 rounds a minute, the loader must, every two seconds, extract a 75-mm. shell casing from a semiautomatic breech, allow a split second for the gases to be blown out the muzzle, return the empty casing to its place in a rack beneath the breech, yank out a live shell, smack it in the breech, close the breech lock.

The man who drove M3 last week was typical of the civilian machinists and mechanics who do the dirty work at Aberdeen. Stubby, crinkle-eyed Johnny Day was born on the Aberdeen reservation. At 34, he has never had and never wants a job other than Ordnance testing.

To find out how M3 would take shell holes, Johnny Day drove the tank (at about 15 m.p.h.) up and over two steep thank-you-ma'ams. Before he tackled the first one, Johnny Day said: "You know, it's just posslble that this tank may go pants-over-teakettle here. But there's nothing like finding out, is there?"

He horsed M3 into low gear, poured on the coal. The front end bucked straight up, hung in the air for a moment, then crashed into the test pit. The rear end rose about four feet, happily did not go over. Said Johnny Day: "God, what punishment this machine can take!" He and his tank took it again in the Aberdeen mud bath: a 100-ft. concrete trough, full of muddy water. When M3 hit the water, photographers got their best shots of the morning, Johnny Day got soaked from chin to shin.

Also on exhibition at Aberdeen was a cast-armor tank hull which may well revolutionize tank construction. M3's hull took 1,100 man-hours to fabricate. The experimental hull, cast as a single piece of armor, was completed in 100 man-hours. OPM Director General William S. Knudsen recently inspected a model of the cast-armor hull, said: "That's the way to build tanks."

*No kin to the late, famed soldier of fortune, General Lee Christmas.

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