Bernd
09/11/2018 (Tue) 18:37:33
No.19190
del
Here come the panzers.
Austria-Hungary didn't build much armoured vehicles and after WWI and Trianon the little Hungary didn't have any capacity nor for developing neither for building them.
Pic #1 So to help the situation we chose to buy foreign war material, options were extremely limited. Ofc out military followed the Spanish Civil War and really wanted to acquire some German Panzers as they saw what those were capable of but at that time the Reich protected their assets tightly so we ended up buying a bunch from the Italian L3/35 tankettes. They were utter shit so they got some facelift but that didn't help. They were rebranded as CV35 or 1935 but usually is called Ansaldo which is the name of the Italian company they were built by. They saw some action here and there, participated in the invasion of the Soviet Union where they suffered 100% casualties by the end of the first campaign: not by the enemy but by mechanical failures. Oh well.
But before all this events took and unexpected turn. A Hungarian born engineer, Straussler Miklós (Nicholas Straussler) worked in Britain in the car industry was charged by the British military to return to Hungary and build experimental armored vehicles for them in cooperation with the Weiss Manfred company. He got his British citizenship in February 1930 and not long after he could start his work. They created 22 designs for the Alvis-Straussler Mechanisation Ltd. The Hungarian military kept back 4 built vehicles from the V-3 and V-4 series, 2 for each. I think in Britain they got AV markings (insted the V).
Pic #3 The V-3 was an amphibious armored car, pontoons could be attached for river crossing manouvers.
Pic #2 The V-3 during river crossing. In fact this particular one was the first ever river crossing in Europe by an armoured vehicle.
Pic #4 The V-4 got a Hungarian 40 mm gun and a version of the Gebauer machine gun which was especially redesigned for tanks.