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Old October 9th, 2009, 01:32 PM
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Default Re: M10, Wolverine, Achilles Self-Propelled Guns

Quote:
Originally Posted by Cross View Post

1. Change the name of the Tank Destroyer M10 (unit 187) to ‘Wolverine’ or ‘Wolverine M10’ or ‘3in SP Wolverine’.
Please don't These names were something created in the British Department of Tank Design as part of a general naming scheme for British and US tracked vehicles. They never caught on outside the department and you wont find any contemporary sources using them. In fact, even manuals for these vehicles do not use these names.

If you want to use the proper British names for these vehicles, they were simply

SP, 3-inch, M10
SP, 17-pr, M10

Even your internet reference alludes to this fact: "The name "Achilles" was however not a wartime designation; at the time the vehicle was called 17pdr M10, or 17pdr SP M10, or even occasionally, "Firefly"."

Quote:
2. The Achilles (units 44,155, 223) supposedly had additional armour added, during the conversion from M10 (3in gun) to Achilles with 17Pdr.
Not as a rule. I'm aware of one or two pictures of 17-pr M10s with add on armour, but the bulk were just plain old US M10s with a different gun.
Incidentally the original US vehicle was prepared for bolt-on armour from production, hence all the bolts on the front (all) and side (only early production vehicles). It appears to have been used very rarely.

Quote:
British names
‘Wolverine’, was the British name for the above unconverted M10’s in British service, but Achilles I/II was the official British name for unconverted M10’s, aka. 3in SP Wolverine.

Achilles Ic/IIc, was the British name for M10’s converted to 17Pdr gun. aka. 17Pdr SP Achilles.
See above - say Achilles and Wolverine to a WWII vet of any sort and he wouldn't know what you were talking about.

Quote:
Armour

The only other change carried out on the Achilles was the addition of 17 mm thick armour plates welded to the front and sides of the M10 to increase armour protection, as well as a 20 mm thick shield fitted to the top of the turret to provide protection from overhead threats that resulted from the M10 having an open top turret.
The turret top protection in the two pictures was a US invention, apparently improvised locally in Europe in 1945. Again a feature very rarely seen on US M10s and to my knowledge never on British M10s.

The British M10s did occasionally come with a so-called blast roof, which covered only the front part of the turret and again, it appears to be something developed in the winter of 1944/45 and rarely seen on M10s.

The roof you see most often in pictures of M10s are on M10s converted to M36 of which the very late production vehicles recieved an armoured roof. The roof appears to have been retrofitted to other M36 in post-war use in Korea and with the French and Pakistani army. I do not recall if the Yugoslavian Army M36 had roofs?
In any case, it is feature that probably did not make it to the front in WWII.

cbo
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