Autoblinda AB 43

The AB 43 is the AB 41 refined rather than rethought. The hull, the four-wheel drive and steering and the two driving positions — one facing each way — all carried over unchanged, because they had been right from the start. What changed was the power and the turret.

The engine went from the FIAT-SPA ABM 2 of 88 hp to the ABM 3 of 108 hp at 2,800 rpm, which lifted road speed to 88 km/h and range from 400 to 460 km. On top went a new, larger turret, roomier and better shaped, still carrying the 20 mm Breda 35 and a coaxial 8 mm. It was the best armoured car Italy designed in the war.

And it was barely an Italian vehicle. The design was ready in 1943, but series production only began in 1944 — by which time the armistice of September 1943 had put the northern Italian factories under German control, and Fiat was building the AB 43 for the army that had occupied it.

Roughly 102 were completed, though some accounts give as many as 120, and they were taken on German charge as the Panzerspähwagen AB43 203(i). They served in the Balkans and in northern Italy on occupation and anti-partisan work — a reconnaissance car designed for the Regio Esercito, delivered almost entirely to the Wehrmacht, and used mostly against the population of the country that had drawn it.

There was one version that could have fought armour. The AB 43 “Cannone” replaced the 20 mm with a 47 mm gun — and which one matters. The idea began with the Cannone da 47/32 M35, the Böhler gun built under licence in Italy, but the vehicle that was actually built mounted the longer and more powerful Cannone da 47/40 M38: the same weapon that would arm the M15/42, firing Effetto Pronto shaped-charge rounds able to defeat far thicker plate than a 20 mm could scratch.

It was presented in December 1942, completed early in 1943, and still being tested in the last days of July. The turret designed for it was never finished, so the vehicle ran with its fighting compartment open at the top and the gun behind a shield — and that, with its height and the limited traverse the mounting allowed, is why it was refused. Sources differ on how many existed: some speak of a single prototype, others of as many as a dozen. Either way the armistice of September 1943 ended it before any reached the Regio Esercito, and the one Autoblinda that could kill a tank never received the turret it had been designed around.

What happened to the AB 43 afterwards compresses the political history of Italy in 1943–45 into a single vehicle type. Some were issued to the Repubblica Sociale Italiana and used against the Allies — including at Anzio — and in second-line anti-partisan units.

Others went the other way. Italian partisans took about a dozen AB 41s and AB 43s over the course of the war, and in the most remarkable case the workers of the Manifattura Rotondi handed six AB 43s and a Lancia Lince scout car to the 81ª Brigata Garibaldi Volante “Silvio Loss” when it reached Novara. Armoured cars delivered to a partisan brigade by the men who had been building them.

The survivors were collected after the war and given, as a priority, to the public-order units of the Carabinieri Reali and the Corpo degli Agenti di Pubblica Sicurezza — alongside recovered AB 41s, L3s, L6/40s and even M13/40s, because a country with no army and a great deal of unrest had immediate use for anything armoured that ran.

They stayed in that service until 1954. An armoured car designed for desert reconnaissance in 1942 spent its longest continuous employment patrolling Italian towns for the police of a republic that had not existed when it was drawn.

As a machine the AB 43 was the right answer, arrived at correctly and too slowly. The Autoblinda layout was excellent from the beginning — fast, long-legged, with a driver at each end so it never had to turn round in front of an enemy — and the 43 fixed the one thing that was genuinely short, which was power.

Its history is the arithmetic of when. Around a hundred were built, from 1944, in factories under foreign control, for an occupying army; a dozen more were completed as the tank-killer version and never got a turret; a handful were handed to partisans by the workforce; and the rest finished as police vehicles. In four years the same design served the Regio Esercito that ordered it, the Wehrmacht that took it, the RSI, the partisans and the Italian Republic.

• Nicola Pignato & Filippo Cappellano, Gli autoveicoli da combattimento dell’Esercito Italiano (Ufficio Storico dello Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito).
• Filippo Cappellano & Pier Paolo Battistelli, Italian Armoured & Reconnaissance Cars 1911–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).
• Nicola Pignato, Italian Armored Vehicles of World War Two (Squadron/Signal).