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The Medium Mark A "Whippet", had successfully demonstrated the value of this class of fast tank, but it had a number of shortcomings, mainly difficulty of handling. The Medium Mark B was designed to overcome this fault and at the same time incorporate some new features. The lozenge-shaped silhouette of the heavy tanks was adopted but the main part of the armament was, however, carried in a rectangular superstructure raised above the top line of the track. Advantage was taken of the high hull to include a form of sponson with one ball mounting on the door each side. The engine used was a four-cylinder Ricardo - a smaller edition of that designed for the heavy Tank, Mark V. It was placed further back than in earlier tanks and left more room for the crew compartment. This engine, linked with a fourspeed epicyclic gear-box, made the machine relatively easy to control, but it was underpoweredand the top speed of some 9 km/h was not considered good enough. The initial order for Medium Mark B's was increased to 450 in the summer of 1918, but the end of the war brought about a cancellation of the order after only forty-five tanks had been completed. The Armistice occurred before the Medium Mark B was used in action. Some were sent to Russia with the British expedition in 1919. One of these Mk B's fell to the hands of the Bolsheviks, and they used it well into the twenties. (The two others found their way to the Baltic, where they were used by the Latvian Army.) My model has been made from the resin kit by Matador Models, and save some minor modifications have been straight from the box. (The Red Star emblem is not strictly speaking the correct one, at least not for the early twenties, when the hammer was still supplanted by a plow. I will probably replace these later on.) Click on the thumbnails to see more photos of these models:
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