Reading up on The Battle of the Bulge brought research on just how quickly the Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant (where a quarter of all American tanks were built) was assembled.
Here’s a video on how the the Detroit Arsenal Tank Plant was built. If you can look past the Chrysler rah rah tone, there’s a lot of information on how quickly it was built and what went into building it (including 51,000 tons of concrete, and 13,000,000 pounds of steel).
Skip ahead to 13:40 to see the first tank off the assembly line drive through a house.
Evidently they started producing sample tanks six months after groundbreaking and before the entire building was finished. There were giants in the earth in those days…
Here’s a video of the plant producing and testing M3 Lee/Grant tanks.
The Grant/Lee tanks were well armed and armored when deployed by the British to North Africa, but the exceptionally high silhouette and extremely limited traversal range for the main gun meant they were quickly outgunned when German Panzer IV’s with their own 75mm main guns mounted in full 360 turrets hit the battlefield, and were quickly replaced by the M4 Sherman tank for European battlefield roles. (M3s continued to be used in the Pacific theater with great success, since it was superior to any tank the Japanese fielded outside the home islands before the end of the war.)
Tags: logistics, Military, tanks, video, World War II
The M3 also starred alongside Humphrey Bogart in the movie Sahara (1943).