TOG II*
Weighing 80 tons the TOG II* is the heaviest tank in the Museum. It is one of those impracticable freaks that the military procurement process occasionally produces.
In September 1939 some British military officers and engineers thought that the new war would evolve in the same way as WWI. The war would be static, with the opposing armies occupying two lines of trenches running from the North Sea coast to the Swiss border, separated by a “no man’s land” swept by artillery and machine-gun fire.
Sir Albert Stern, Secretary of the Landships Committee during WWI, believed that the sort of tanks being produced in 1939 would not be able to cope with these conditions. In company with other engineers involved in tank design in 1916, including Sir Eustace Tennyson D’Eyncourt (Former Director of Naval Construction), Sir Ernest Swinton and Walter Wilson, Stern was asked by the War Office to design a heavy tank using WWI principles. The group was called officially called ‘The Special Vehicle Development Committee of the Ministry of Supply’; unofficially it was known as the TOG committee (TOG: The Old Gang).
The first design resembled an enlarged WWI tank with a Matilda II turret on top and a French 75mm gun mounted in the front plate of the hull. Fosters of Lincoln built a single prototype and trials started in October 1940. It was powered by a Paxman-Ricardo diesel engine and had an electric final drive. The electric drive burnt out and was replaced by a hydraulic drive; this also failed and the vehicle was scrapped.
In the meantime the committee was designing a larger vehicle of great size, the TOG II. Its most original feature was the diesel electric transmission where the V12 diesel engine drove two electric generators, which powered two electric motors, which drove the tracks. There was no gearbox or mechanical transmission. (Ferdinand Porsche installed a similar system in one of his unsuccessful prototypes built for the German Army.) The tracks, after passing around the front mounted idler dropped down below floor level to create more internal space, an idea thought to be unique to this tank.
Fosters completed the single TOG II prototype in March 1941. It was so heavy that it was only possible to weigh half the vehicle at a time. The design specified machine-gun sponsons on each side where the side doors are, like a British WWI tank. These were quickly abandoned. The tank was fitted with four different gun turrets between 1941 and 1944, ending up with the type of turret designed by Stoddart and Pitt for the A30 Challenger Heavy Cruiser Tank. This mounted a 17-pdr gun, making the tank a TOG II*. The TOG II’s great length (10m) made it very difficult to steer and combined with its weight and low power:weight ratio (7.5hp/ton) made the tank cumbersome and unwieldy.
In reality ‘The Old Gang’s’ ideas were wrong; tanks needed to be smaller, agile and more mobile. The TOG II was finally abandoned in 1944, although the A22 Churchill had been adopted as Britain’s standard heavy infantry tank long before.
Seen in the rear hall of the Tank Museum, Bovington, Dorset, England.
TOG II*
Weighing 80 tons the TOG II* is the heaviest tank in the Museum. It is one of those impracticable freaks that the military procurement process occasionally produces.
In September 1939 some British military officers and engineers thought that the new war would evolve in the same way as WWI. The war would be static, with the opposing armies occupying two lines of trenches running from the North Sea coast to the Swiss border, separated by a “no man’s land” swept by artillery and machine-gun fire.
Sir Albert Stern, Secretary of the Landships Committee during WWI, believed that the sort of tanks being produced in 1939 would not be able to cope with these conditions. In company with other engineers involved in tank design in 1916, including Sir Eustace Tennyson D’Eyncourt (Former Director of Naval Construction), Sir Ernest Swinton and Walter Wilson, Stern was asked by the War Office to design a heavy tank using WWI principles. The group was called officially called ‘The Special Vehicle Development Committee of the Ministry of Supply’; unofficially it was known as the TOG committee (TOG: The Old Gang).
The first design resembled an enlarged WWI tank with a Matilda II turret on top and a French 75mm gun mounted in the front plate of the hull. Fosters of Lincoln built a single prototype and trials started in October 1940. It was powered by a Paxman-Ricardo diesel engine and had an electric final drive. The electric drive burnt out and was replaced by a hydraulic drive; this also failed and the vehicle was scrapped.
In the meantime the committee was designing a larger vehicle of great size, the TOG II. Its most original feature was the diesel electric transmission where the V12 diesel engine drove two electric generators, which powered two electric motors, which drove the tracks. There was no gearbox or mechanical transmission. (Ferdinand Porsche installed a similar system in one of his unsuccessful prototypes built for the German Army.) The tracks, after passing around the front mounted idler dropped down below floor level to create more internal space, an idea thought to be unique to this tank.
Fosters completed the single TOG II prototype in March 1941. It was so heavy that it was only possible to weigh half the vehicle at a time. The design specified machine-gun sponsons on each side where the side doors are, like a British WWI tank. These were quickly abandoned. The tank was fitted with four different gun turrets between 1941 and 1944, ending up with the type of turret designed by Stoddart and Pitt for the A30 Challenger Heavy Cruiser Tank. This mounted a 17-pdr gun, making the tank a TOG II*. The TOG II’s great length (10m) made it very difficult to steer and combined with its weight and low power:weight ratio (7.5hp/ton) made the tank cumbersome and unwieldy.
In reality ‘The Old Gang’s’ ideas were wrong; tanks needed to be smaller, agile and more mobile. The TOG II was finally abandoned in 1944, although the A22 Churchill had been adopted as Britain’s standard heavy infantry tank long before.
Seen in the rear hall of the Tank Museum, Bovington, Dorset, England.