Why This ‘Obsolete’ American Tank Won Because Its Gun Couldn’t Turn D

Nungshigum Ridge, Manipur, the 13th of April, 1944. Last light. There are tanks on the summit. That sentence should not be possible. The ridge overlooks the main airstrip at Imphal, and the men holding it chose it precisely because of what it is. A spine of ground so steep that armor was not a consideration.

Not a risk to be guarded against, not a threat to be planned for, simply not a thing that could happen. It was not stupidity. It was the correct reading of every precedent available in April of 1944. And yet there are tanks on the summit, and their engines are still running, and the men commanding them are sergeants.

No officer of the tank squadron is still standing. Not one officer of the infantry battalion that climbed beside them is still standing. Every single one of them, across both units, has been killed or wounded on that slope. The attack was finished by the men who were never supposed to be finishing it.

Look at what they finished it in. A tank 10 ft and 3 in tall, riveted, a small turret with a small gun on top, and then, low down in the right side of the hull, a stump of a barrel poking out of a box. That is the main armament. It is bolted into the side of the tank, few degrees of swing and no more.

The gun could not turn. The machine on that summit was an American stopgap, designed to be replaced, obsolete in every other theater on Earth by the time it climbed that hill. Its designation was the medium tank M3. The British called it the Lee. To understand how it got up there, you have to go backwards.

Start with the hour before that photograph in your head, because the hour before was worse than the summit. The plan was not subtle. On the 13th of April, the 5th Indian Division went at Nungshigum with everything the Imphal perimeter could spare. Air strikes first, then massed artillery, then infantry and tanks together up the same ground.

The infantry were the 1st Battalion of the 17th Dogra Regiment. The tanks were B Squadron of the 3rd Carabiniers, part of the 254th Indian Tank Brigade, and every one of them was an M3 Lee. These were not green crews. 3 weeks earlier on the 20th of March near Tamu, six tanks of the regiment had run head-on into six Japanese Type 95 light tanks and destroyed five of them and captured the sixth intact.

So, the Carabiniers already knew exactly what their Lees could do to enemy armor. Nungshigum asked a completely different question because there was no enemy armor on that ridge. There were men in bunkers dug into a hillside, and the only reliable way to kill them was to bring a gun close enough to put a shell through the firing aperture.

There were seven men inside each of those tanks. A driver, a wireless operator, a gunner and a loader for the small turret gun, a gunner and a loader for the big hull gun, and a commander sitting above all of it. Seven men, two entirely separate weapons on two different levels, fighting the same fight in the same few seconds. Keeping a crew like that coordinated on flat ground was work.

Doing it with the hull pitched nose up on a slope, tracks hunting for grip is close to unimaginable. We know what that climb was like from inside because one of the crewmen sat down in front of a microphone 55 years later and talked for 6 hours and 20 minutes. His name was Arthur Francis Freer. He was a Yorkshireman schooled in Kingston upon Hull who had joined the Royal Armoured Corps as a volunteer and trained as a wireless operator.

The Imperial War Museum holds the recording as catalog number 19,822. He later wrote a book about it. He called the book Nungshigum. Freer describes a Royal Engineer officer walking ahead of the tanks on that slope on foot showing them where the ground would hold. Think about what that means. The gradient was severe enough that the tanks could not simply be driven up it.

Somebody had to walk in front and choose the line in the open with the summit above him. He describes Japanese infantry coming down off the crest and getting in among the holes, trying to place charges against the sides of the tanks by hand, not firing at them, touching them. He describes hearing over the wireless that the tank commanders of his own squadron were going down one after another.

Then he describes his own tank commander being mortally wounded above him. He describes reaching the top and finding a sheer drop. And he describes something that has stayed with him for half a century, which is that after the action was over, when the crews were cleaning out their tanks, somebody found a live grenade lying in the bottom of the hole.

They did not fight it alone. A separate Imperial War Museum interview with Gerald Hillary Cree, who commanded the 2nd Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment, records his battalion putting covering machine gun fire onto Nungshigum for the Dogras and for B Squadron. That is the shape of it. One battalion firing across at the ridge so that another battalion and a squadron of American tanks could climb it.

Every figure in this video was read off a printed document, and the document is named. The book is built the same way. 30 Allied Weapons, Armor, Anti-Tank, Artillery, Machine Guns. 182 pages, three editions, and every plate reproduced from the manual that issued it. Then the part no other reference prints, what each one cost to build.

Contract prices, man hours per gun, factory output by year. Four entries carry no cost figure at all, and each of those says why, rather than guess. The plate archive comes with it and every future revision free. And if you would rather not spend anything, there is a second book, 20 rifles, complete and free.

Both links are in the description and the pinned comment. So, step back one more link in the chain. Why was that choice even on the table? Why could tanks be sent up a slope that the defenders had written off? Because of two things that happened to line up, and neither of them was a plan. The first is the gradient itself.

The Japanese battalion on that ridge belonged to the 51st regiment under Colonel Kimeo Amoto, and their assessment was not lazy. Lee tanks had never been put up gradients like that in action anywhere. There was no precedent to warn them because the precedent was about to be created on top of them. The second is the thing this whole story turns on, and it is the reason the Lee was available to be thrown at a hill in Manipur in the first place.

The gun could not turn. That 75 mm gun sat in a sponson in the right-hand side of the hull. It had a narrow arc of traverse and nothing more, which meant that to lay it more than a few degrees off the center line, the driver had to swing the entire tank. It also meant the Lee could not take a hull-down position.

A tank goes hull-down by putting the crest of a ridge between the enemy and everything except its turret. The Lee’s main gun was not in the turret. To shoot with it, the Lee had to expose the whole of that 10-ft 3 body. There was a second penalty stacked on top of the first. The early hulls were riveted rather than welded, and a rivet is a weak point that lives on the inside of the armor as well as the outside.

A hit that failed to punch through could still shear the head off a rivet and send it whipping around the fighting compartment at the speed of a bullet. The armor held and the crew did not. On open ground against a well-sited anti-tank gun, that is close to a death sentence.

It is why the Lee was pulled out of front-line service almost everywhere by the middle of 1943. Now, put that same machine on the crest of Nungshigum. A ridge so narrow that Freer topped out and met a sheer drop. There is no flanking. There is no maneuver. There is one direction that matters, and it is straight ahead into bunkers at ranges where a 75 mm high explosive shell does exactly what it was made to do.

A gun that cannot traverse cost you nothing on ground where there is nowhere to traverse to, and the Japanese regiment on that ridge had very few effective anti-tank weapons, which removed the other half of the penalty. The defining flaw of the design had been canceled by the terrain. If you have found this worth your time, subscribing is the best way to say so, and it costs you nothing.

Now, go back one more link because somebody chose that flaw deliberately, and they chose it in a specific month for a specific reason. The month is July of 1940. France had fallen in June. Britain had lost its army’s equipment at Dunkirk and was ordering tanks from American industry with cash because the Lend-Lease Act did not yet exist.

The British demand alone was for 3,650 medium tanks. The United States Army wanted a medium tank with a 75-mm gun and did not have one. Designing a turret to carry a gun that size and then tooling a factory to build it was going to take time that nobody had. So, the decision was made to put the 75 where it could go immediately, which was low in the hull in a sponson with a small 37-mm gun in a rotating turret above it and a machine gun cupola above that.

A tank stacked in three stories. You will often hear that American industry simply could not cast a turret ring large enough. That is not quite the truth, and the difference matters. This was a decision about time, not about metal. The M3 was designed from the outset as an interim machine to be built now and replaced later by a tank carrying the same gun in a proper turret.

That replacement became the M4 Sherman. The Lee was, by intention, a bridge. The British changed one thing about it, and the change is why there are two names. British practice put the wireless set in the turret beside the commander rather than down in the hull.

So, the British tank mission specified a redesigned turret with a bustle at the back to hold the radio. Tanks that kept the American turret with its machine gun cupola stuck on top were called Lees after Robert E. Lee. Tanks with the British turret were called Grants after Ulysses S. Grant. One tank, two Civil War generals on opposite sides in the same production run.

And the afterlives of the surplus ones tell you what the army thought of it. 335 were stripped of their turrets and rebuilt as canal defense lights, which were tanks carrying a searchlight instead of a gun. Others became recovery vehicles and gun tractors. The moment the Sherman existed in numbers, the Lee stopped being a tank and started being a chassis.

Here is the money number, 6,258. That is the total of all M3 variants manufactured. 6,258 tanks built at full industrial effort by a country that had already decided the design was a compromise before the first one was finished. Of those 6,258, 2,887 went to Britain and the Commonwealth. And here is a detail that gets flattened in the retelling.

1,685 of those were Grants that Britain ordered directly and paid for in cash outside Lend-Lease altogether. Nearly a thousand more went to the Soviet Union. 777 went to Australia, where not one of them was used in action. They first went into battle at Gazala in North Africa on the 27th of May, 1942.

The Eighth Army had received 167 of them. The Eighth King’s Royal Irish Hussars and the Third and Fifth Battalions of the Royal Tank Regiment took them in. By the end of it, the Eighth Hussars had three Grants left. And the Third Royal Tank Regiment had lost 16. None of that makes the Lee a good tank, and it is worth saying so plainly.

It was too tall to hide, too thin-skinned by 1943, too complicated to crew, and its main gun was in the wrong place. Every one of those was the price of a single decision, and the decision was speed. A better tank designed in July of 1940 would have arrived in 1943, and in 1942, Britain would have had nothing to put in the desert at all.

The Lee’s faults are not really faults. They are the visible shape of a country choosing to be adequate immediately rather than excellent eventually, and then living with what that looks like. Now, this is the part where I have to be honest with you, because a story this tidy should make you suspicious.

The version you will usually hear is that the grant came as a shock to the Germans, who had nothing ready for its 75. That claim is contested, and I am not going to resolve it for you because I cannot. What can be established is narrower and more useful. Hans von Luck, a German officer who wrote the memoir Panzer Commander, judged the M3 in May of 1942 to be superior to the Panzer IV and able to work beyond the effective range of the German 5-cm anti-tank gun.

That is a German assessment from a named German, and it cuts against calling this machine merely a stopgap. It also cuts against me, because if von Luck is right, then the Lee was not an embarrassment that got lucky on a hillside. It was for one narrow window in 1942 genuinely the better tank, and everything after that is the story of the window closing.

I have to be equally honest about the men. The Regimental Museum of the Royal Scots Greys Guards holds a photograph cataloged as Regimental Sergeant Major W. J. Craddock of the 3rd Carabiniers, taken around 1925 when he was still a trooper. A hand-colored portrait of a young cavalryman from the horse era.

You will find accounts giving him a first name and a different rank on the day at Nunshigam. The record I can put my hands on gives initials and a photograph, and I am not going to invent the rest of him. The same caution applies to the commemoration. The regiment’s descendants do hold a Nunshigam parade.

The museum catalog records photographs of the officers of the Nunshigam parade of 1984. Whether that parade is led by sergeants, as the story is often told, is not something I can confirm from the record, so I’m leaving it where it belongs, which is unresolved and in the pinned comment rather than in this narration. What is not in doubt is the cost.

Edward Ashford-Sanford died serving with the third carabiniers at Nungshigum. Major McKinder Huntley Wright arrived afterwards to take over B Squadron and was killed near Shwebo that December. The regiment’s own account of the battle was written up by one of its troopers, Malcolm Leonard Connolly, who had been there.

The two books are still linked in the description. One of them is free. So, go back to the summit and look at it again. Nungshigum Ridge, Manipur, the 13th of April, 1944, last light. There are tanks on the summit and their engines are still running, and the men commanding them are sergeants.

Every officer of the squadron and every officer of the Dogras has been killed or wounded on that slope. Look at what they finished it in. 10 ft and 3 in tall, riveted. A stump of a barrel bolted into the side of the hull with a few degrees of swing and no more. The gun could not turn, but there was nowhere on that crest to turn it, and there was nothing coming at them from the flank that a turning gun would have saved them from.

And the men who took it to the top were not in anybody’s plan, either. 6,258 of these things were built as an apology for a tank. One of them ended the day on a ridge above Imphal, in the hands of a sergeant, doing the only job on earth its worst feature did not disqualify it from. The weapons were the story.

The men behind them were the proof.