The
American "Skeleton Tank"
including photos by Bryan Foster
The History of "the Skeleton Tank"
One
of the fascinating aspects of early armour, is that as the
technology was quite new, without any given standard, the range of
experiments and often seemingly bizarre contraption was very wide
indeed. One of the most unorthdox designs that came out of the Great
War, was the American so called "Skeleton Tank" or "Spider Tank".
This design may look, and also was strange, although not in reality
quite as bizarre as, say, the Russian "Tsar" tricycle tank or the
German K-Wagen. While these strange tanks - or really their
inventors - were victim to the notion of bigger always being better,
the Skeleton Tank also had to do with the question of size, although
in quite a different way.
The
Skeleton Tank came out of a real dilemma, observed with small tanks
like the French FT-17 or the Ford 3-tonner, namely: a small tank had
many advantages, not least that it was easier and cheaper to
manufacture, and it of course required much less enginepower than a
big tank like, say, the British Mk IV or French St Chamond. But
there was one real drawback that came with small size: it heavily
reduced the trench crossing capacity of the tank in question. The
Skeleton Tank was built in the United States in
1918 was an experiment to
achieve the maximum trench-crossing performance consistent with a
weight of around 8 tons.
Thus you would have a tank with all the logistical advantages of a
small tank, but the trench-crossing capacity of a big one.
The
idea was to reduce many parts of the hull to bare essentials. Built
by the Pioneer Tractor Company, of Winona, Minnesota, under the
direction of Edwin M Wheelock, the Skeleton Tank had many structural
members simply done of ordinary threaded iron pipe, joined by
standard plumbing connections!
This may seem strange, but it had the advantage - beside cheapness -
in that could be easily disassembled when moved, say over the
Atlantic, and then easily re-assembled again. It also meant that
much of the tank could be repaired and maintained with standard
tools and equipment.
The
hull was a rectangular box armoured to a 12mm standard, was
supported on these round piping members between the tracks and
carried the driver at the front. The other crew member, the gunner,
was behind him and operated the single machine-gun mounted in a
cylindrical turret. The engines (two Beaver fourcylinder with
forced water cooling, total h.p. 100, giving it a quite satisfactory
ratio of 11 horsepower units per ton, which was more than the double
enjoyed by the British Mk V, which only sported 5 hp per ton) in the
hull, drove sprockets at the rear of the track through a drive shaft
to a differential carried in a separate small box between the rear
horns of the tracks. The Skeleton Tank could do a speed of some
8km/h crosscountry. For its weight of only
9.145 tons it was still
7.65 meters long and presumably satisfied the trench-crossing
performance required of it. (It was also 2.56m wide and 2.89m high.)
The tank was tested in mid-1918 at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in
Maryland, and was obviously a success, as the compony was awarded a
contract for no less than 1.000 tanks. But as the First World War
soon ended, nothing came out of this. It's unique trench capacity
suddenly ceased to be such an important consideration and there was
also no further development of this strange yet interesting vehicle.
The "Skeleton Tank" today
The fantastic thing is, that the prototype vehicle is still in existance, and can be seen, really beautifully restored (with the aid of VFW Post 8185, Port Deposit, Maryland) in the Aberdeen Proving Grounds Museum in Maryland, USA. These photos have been taken by Bryan Foster - they are big, but worth it! (Thanks for help with this article is also given to Ben Man.)
Now I wonder, who will be the first to do a "Skeleton Tank"? Any takers for that challange? I am myself quite tempted to scratch-build one, and perhaps I will - but first I must finish my Holt Gas-Electric Tank.
