TANKS – INSIDE AND OUT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 155, 12 June 1942, Page 7

TANKS – INSIDE AND OUT

\W 7 ITH its low, squat shape and its shrewd camouflage, the Valentine tank blends perfectly with most New Zealand landscapes. Its crew is tucked away snugly behind thick armour. It has good cruising speed and range. Its two-pounder gun carries a wallop that would do credit to a light destroyer (which is, in effect, what the Valentine is) and it makes light of most obstacles. New Zealand has Valentines, a surprising number of them, and at a military camp in the North Island, an Armoured Fighting Vehicles School is hard at it training men for the exacting ‘business of fighting them. After visiting the Second Maori Battalion, a party _from the NBS consisting of Gordon Hutter (commentator), Leo Fowler (script writer), and Douglas Ironside and Don Logan, technicians, spent a day or two with the A.F.V., securing sound pictures of the school’s activities and messages of greeting to the N.Z.E.F. in the Middle East. There are certain things a Valentine won’t do; certain types of obstacle it won’t surmount. It is just as essential to study these, the Army considers, as it is to study the Valentine’s more positive virtues. The NBS party was fortu- nate to arrive at the school on the occasion of a thorough demonstration of what the tank will do and won’t do. Wrapped in scarves and Army greatcoats -it had been snowing the day beforethe party watched a Valentine plough imperturbably through obstacles which would reduce a Universal Carrier to impotence; saw it slowed up and finally halted by cleverly devised traps which would be a whole series of headaches to an invader who attempted to land tanks on our beaches. And later they watched a tank demonstrate one of the most expeditious methods of dealing with obstructions-the application of a few rounds from its wicked two-pounder,

One of the most interesting recordings the NBS secured was a broadcast from the interior of a tank as it moved along a range, firing at a distant target. To carry this out, the wireless wing of the A.F.V. rigged up a shortwave transmitter in the tank, and the tank commander’s description of the shoot was picked up at the camp, several miles away, and fed direct to the recording apparatus. Most interesting of all, however, is the story of the A.F.V. School itself, which is a record of obstacles bravely overcome and, at the beginning, of improvisation in the face of a serious shortage of material. Now it is no longer necessary to improvise, most of the obstacles have been overcome, and the school is sending trained tank crews and instructors all over New Zealand. Commandant of the school is LieutenantColonel H: B. M. Groves, M.C., who saw service in tanks in the Great War and came to New Zealand fresh from the command of the A.F.V. School in the Middle East. As Colonel Groves explains in an interview which he recorded for the NBS, the New Zealand school started off ten days after the arrival of a trained team of instructors from the N.Z.E.F. in the Middle East. Ten days in which to get a whole new organisation started and under way! Improvised Communications An example of the improvisation necessary was the system of communications between Colonel Groves and his Orderly Room staff. In the Orderly Room a tobacco tin filled with pebbles was suspended from the roof and connected by vast lengths of string to the Colonel’s desk. An arranged number of pulls on the string summoned different members of his staff. Now, however, there is a " talk-listen " inter-communica-tion system which would do credit to a business executive’s office,

The school has five wings — Driving and Maintenance, Gunnery, Wireless, Technical, and Tactical. A sixth, the Experimental Wing, is in process of formation. In addition there is a draughtman’s office in full working order, a library of military training pamphlets and a 16 millimetre film unit Each wing is a more or less selfcontained unit, pre-occupied with individual problems of training. Driving and Maintenance, or D. and M. as it is more familiarly known, takes a future tank driver whose only qualifications may be that he is an expert driver of motor cars, and gives him a thorough grounding in mechanics. When a_ driver mechanic knows just about all there is to know about truck, Universal Carrier and Diesel engines, he’ll be given a course of driving ordinary Army transport. Then he will learn to drive cartiers and, finally, a Valentine. Learning to Shoot Training a gunner for a tank demands just as much care as the training of a naval gunner. Once the prospective gunner has got the hang of the mechanism of the guns he will fire-both the machine gun and the two-pounder, he is given crew control training, which is the technical term for the drill coordinating the actions of each member of the crew. At all stages he learns on models before putting his knowledge to the test in a tank. Sighting and firing the tank’s big gun demands the highest skill when both target and gun are in motion, as they would be in a tank battle. Experience of this is picked up on a pellet range, which saves endless rounds of valuable ammunition and equally valuable wear and tear of the tank, On the pellet range, crews are placed in moving turrets very similar to tank turrets and the targets are miniature tanks and other moving objects on a sand table. After the pellet range, the gunner is taken out and given a taste of live

shooting to give him "turret atmosphere." Finally he gets as close to the real thing as is possible without staging a tank battle, and he fires two-pounder shells from a moving tank at a moving target. Keeping Them Moving The Technical Wing works on the theory that while an army is popularly supposed to march on its stomach, there’s no doubt that a mechanised army advances according to the efficiency of its vehicles. And it is with the upkeep and care of special sections of these vehicles that the Technical Wing is concerned. The Wireless Wing turns out tank driver-wireless operators capable of sending a minimum of twelve words a minute. Here, again, the trainee is given a certain.amount of classroom work and then sent out "into the blue" to give him experience of operating while on the move and under varying conditions. One of the most important and interesting wings is the Tactical Wing, which covers all sorts of advanced military subjects. The tactics governing the best use of tanks are similar in many respects to naval tactics, and, in addition, change from month to month as new ideas are worked out and tested on the battlefield. Of equal importance, when it gets properly under way, will be the Experimental Wing, which will undertake the devising and testing of new forms of tank obstacle and modifications to present types of armoured fighting vehicles,