Carro Veloce L3/35

The tankette was one of the more seductive bad ideas of the interwar years: a tank small enough and cheap enough that an army could have hundreds of them — two men, a machine gun, a few millimetres of steel, and the speed to arrive somewhere before the enemy did. The template was British, the Carden Loyd Mark VI, and in 1929 Italy bought four of them to study.

Italy adopted the concept more completely than any other army. Fiat-Ansaldo developed the imported design into the Carro Veloce (“fast tank”) and put it into production on a scale no other tankette reached. By 1940 the descendant of those four British machines made up the largest part of Italy’s armoured strength — not a supplement to the tank force, but the bulk of it.

The L3/35 weighed 3.2 tonnes — about as much as a large family car — and stood 1.3 m tall. Two men sat in it side by side, a commander and a driver, behind 6 to 14 mm of armour. A Fiat-SPA CV3 engine of 43 hp pushed it to 42 km/h on a road, with 125 km of range.

Its armament was two 8 mm machine guns, with no cannon of any calibre. This determined how it could be used: the L3 could engage infantry, transport and unarmoured positions, and had no means of penetrating armour plate. Contemporary light tanks — the Soviet T-26, the German Panzer II, the British cruisers — all mounted a gun of 20 mm or more.

Italy built about 1,300 L3/35s between 1935 and 1938, on top of some 1,200 of the earlier L3/33 — between 2,000 and 2,500 tankettes across the family. Nothing else in the inventory came close. When Italy went to war, this three-tonne machine-gun carrier was the most numerous armoured vehicle the Regio Esercito possessed.

The variants tell their own story of a design being asked to do things it could not. The L3/38 got torsion-bar suspension and a single 13.2 mm gun. The L3 Lf became a flamethrower, dragging a 500-litre fuel trailer at five tonnes. And the L3 cc bolted on a 20 mm Solothurn anti-tank rifle — a late, frank admission that the thing had nothing to shoot at tanks with. It saw only limited service in North Africa.

What lifts the L3 above a footnote is that Italy was warned — twice, in blood, before the war even started. In Ethiopia, L3s were repeatedly knocked out by infantry armed with rifles, who fired through the vision slits and killed the two men inside. Against an enemy with almost no modern weapons at all, the tankette’s protection was already failing.

In Spain, the L3s of the Corps of Volunteer Troops met the Soviet-supplied T-26 and BT-5, both gun-armed, and were totally outclassed. The two campaigns established, before 1940, both of the type’s central weaknesses: its armour could be defeated by infantry weapons, and it had no answer to a gun-armed tank. The L3 was nevertheless still the most numerous Italian armoured vehicle when Italy entered the war in June 1940.

In June 1940 the L3 went into action on the Italian–French border, in the Alps — mountain ground where a tiny, light vehicle at least had the excuse of reaching places a real tank could not. It was the last moment its size counted as an argument in its favour.

Then came North Africa, and the excuses ran out. There the L3 met the British, whose Boys anti-tank rifle — a weapon one man carried — could punch straight through it. Beyond those left on occupation duty in the Balkans and elsewhere, few L3s remained in front-line service past the end of 1940 — a front-line career of roughly six months. Others went east with the Italian expeditionary corps in Russia, where they faced Soviet armour of the same classes that had already outclassed them in Spain.

The L3/35 was inadequate for the war it was required to fight: too thinly armoured to survive contact with anti-tank weapons, and armed only with machine guns at a time when opposing designs mounted guns of 20 mm and above. The assessment does not depend on hindsight — the Ethiopian and Spanish campaigns had demonstrated both failings before 1940, and the type was largely withdrawn from front-line service by the end of that year, after roughly six months of combat.

The comparison with the German Panzer II is instructive because it isolates the variable. Germany also entered the war with a light tank as its most numerous type, fielding 955 of them among some 2,439 tanks in May 1940, and that force broke the French army in six weeks. The difference was organisational rather than technical: concentration into armoured divisions, a radio in every vehicle, and integration with motorised infantry and air support. Italy fielded a comparably weak vehicle without that structure and obtained the opposite result. The L3’s record is therefore evidence for a wider conclusion about 1940 — that the capabilities of the individual vehicle mattered less than the doctrine and communications built around it.

• Nicola Pignato & Filippo Cappellano, Gli Autoveicoli da Combattimento dell’Esercito Italiano (Ufficio Storico SME).
• Filippo Cappellano & Pier Paolo Battistelli, Italian Light Tanks 1919–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).
• Nicola Pignato, Italian Armoured Vehicles of World War Two (Squadron/Signal).