Semovente Ruotato da 90/53 Breda 501

The Cannone da 90/53 was the best gun Italy had. Designed as anti-aircraft artillery, it fired a shell that would defeat about 107 mm of armour at 800 m — enough to destroy any tank the Allies fielded, at ranges where the tank could not answer. The problem was never the gun. It was that a towed 90/53 weighed too much to reposition once the fighting started, and in the desert a gun that cannot move is a gun that is found and killed.

So the Regio Esercito put it on wheels, repeatedly. Thirty autocannoni were delivered on the Lancia 3Ro lorry in 1941 and went to Libya and Tunisia; 96 more were built on the Breda 52 between 1941 and 1943, about 120 vehicles between the two. They worked, in the narrow sense that the gun could be driven to where it was needed and fired.

The reports from North Africa were consistent about what was wrong. The lorries could not carry enough ammunition for a sustained action. They went badly off the road, which in the desert is most of the ground there is. And they had no protection at all: the gun crew worked standing on an open flatbed, in the open, in a theatre where the RAF strafed columns as a matter of routine.

In late 1941 the Ministry of War therefore asked for something different — not another gun bolted to a truck, but a purpose-built, highly mobile self-propelled gun able to keep up with and support the armoured divisions. The answer Ansaldo built is the vehicle in these photographs.

The Semovente Ruotato da 90/53 Breda 501 took the chassis of the Breda 54 heavy lorry, itself developed from the Breda 51, and rearranged it around the gun. The engine — petrol, 140 hp — went to the rear, which is the decision everything else follows from: with no engine in front, the armoured cab could sit low and the whole length of the deck was free for the 90 mm and the men serving it. Drive was 6×6, and the gun sat on a pedestal between the first and second axles.

The crew of eight — two drivers and six on the gun — worked behind plate for the first time on one of these vehicles: 30 mm at the front, 15 mm on the sides, 8 mm at the rear, with side panels that folded down to widen the platform when the gun was in action. Thirty millimetres is not tank armour and was never meant to be: it stops shell splinters and aircraft cannon, the two things that had been killing gun crews standing on the open flatbeds of the Lancia 3Ro and the Breda 52.

The most important number on the vehicle is the least dramatic one. The Breda 501 carried 30 rounds of 90 mm ammunition. To see why that matters, set it against the tracked vehicle built for the same gun in the same period: the Semovente 90/53 carried six to eight, and depended on separate ammunition carriers built on L6/40 hulls following it around the battlefield.

A tank destroyer with eight rounds is a weapon that fires until its ammunition runs out and then has to find its supply vehicle, in the middle of an action, under fire. One with thirty can fight. The Breda 501 was, on paper, the first Italian 90 mm mounting that could sustain an engagement without an umbilical to a lorry — and it carried a machine gun at each end besides.

The prototype was completed in 1943 and went to the Centro Esperienze d’Artiglieria di Nettuno in July for firing trials. Italian sources record a single prototype; others give two. Either way it is a handful of vehicles, on a test range, in the month the Allies landed in Sicily.

The armistice of 8 September 1943 ended the programme. No production order was placed, the vehicle never reached a unit, and it never fired at an enemy. The photographs that survive were taken at the works and on the trials ground — armed men and civilian officials in overcoats, standing beside a vehicle that had come two years too late to be useful.

It is worth being precise about what was and was not solved here, because the vehicle is easy to over-praise. The Breda 501 fixed the ammunition problem and the exposure problem, and its 6×6 chassis addressed the off-road complaint. It did not make the 90/53 survivable against armour: 30 mm of frontal plate is defeated by any tank gun on the battlefield of 1943, and by most anti-tank rifles at close range.

What Italy had built, twice over, was a first-class gun on a vehicle that could not take a hit — first without armour, then with just enough to stop splinters. The tracked Semovente 90/53 reached Sicily and all 30 were lost there. The wheeled one reached a test range at Nettuno and stopped.

• Nicola Pignato & Filippo Cappellano, Gli autoveicoli da combattimento dell’Esercito Italiano (Ufficio Storico dello Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito).
• Nicola Pignato, Italian Armoured Vehicles of World War Two (Squadron/Signal).
• Filippo Cappellano & Pier Paolo Battistelli, Italian Artillery of World War II (Osprey).
• Ralph Riccio, Italian Tanks and Combat Vehicles of World War 2 (Mattioli).