Carro Armato L6/40

By the late 1930s Italy’s armoured force rested almost entirely on the L3 tankette: two men, two machine guns, no turret, and nothing that could hurt another tank. The L6 was the answer to that, and by Italian standards it was a real advance — a proper turret that traversed, a cannon in it, torsion-bar suspension, and a hull of welded and riveted plate up to 30 mm thick.

It reached the army as the Carro Armato L6/40: leggero, six tonnes, 1940. The prototypes had carried the designation M6 — medio — before the Italian classification was redrawn and a six-tonne vehicle stopped counting as a medium tank. The name change is the shortest possible summary of how Italian armour compared with everyone else’s by 1940.

The crew was two: a driver, and a commander who sat in the turret and did everything else. He observed, chose the target, laid the gun, fired it, reloaded it, worked the coaxial machine gun, read the map and told the driver where to go — while the tank was moving and being shot at.

It is the same flaw that crippled the French SOMUA S35 and R35, compressed into a smaller vehicle. A German Panzer III of the same period carried five men, of whom one did nothing but command; the difference does not show on a specification table and decides every engagement in which both tanks see each other at the same moment.

The armament was a 20 mm Breda Model 35 — a good weapon, and an anti-aircraft one. It fired a small high-velocity shell suited to aircraft, trucks, gun positions and infantry, and it was paired with an 8 mm Breda machine gun. Against soft targets the combination worked exactly as intended.

Against armour it did nothing at all. The L6 entered service in the year the T-34 and the KV-1 appeared, and it could not penetrate either from any angle at any range; it could not reliably beat a Matilda, a Valentine or a Grant either. A tank whose gun cannot fight tanks is a reconnaissance vehicle with tracks, and that is how the L6 had to be used.

The L6 made up a large share of the armour Italy sent to the Eastern Front, where the expeditionary corps fought along the Don alongside the AB 41 armoured cars and what was left of the L3s. It was employed as its gun dictated — screening, patrolling, escorting, and supporting infantry against anything that was not a tank.

The end came with the Soviet winter offensive of 1942–43. The Italian sector was broken open, and the surviving vehicles retreated west across the Ukrainian steppe in conditions for which a six-tonne petrol-engined tank with 30 mm of plate was not equipped and never had been.

The L6 had its baptism of fire in the Balkans in the spring of 1941, and it was there that it did its most useful work — not in the invasion but in the occupation that followed. Against partisans in Yugoslavia and Greece it had the qualities that mattered: it could go where wheels could not, it was quick enough to escort a convoy, and its 20 mm was devastating against opponents who had no anti-tank weapons.

The L6 held that role from 1941 to the armistice of September 1943, and the vehicles the Germans took over then went on doing the same work in Yugoslavia — as the Panzerkampfwagen L6 733(i) — until the end of the war.

The hull turned out to be the valuable part. With the turret removed and a fixed armoured superstructure built in its place, the same chassis carried a 47 mm gun as the Semovente 47/32 — a weapon that could actually hurt an enemy tank, mounted low, on a vehicle that no longer had to turn a turret to use it.

Roughly 300 Semovente 47/32 were built against 283 L6/40 gun tanks: Italy made more of the conversion than of the tank it was converted from. The same thing happened one class up, where the M13/40 hull produced the Semovente 75/18, the most effective Italian armoured vehicle of the war. Italian industry was better at building gun carriages than tanks, and the L6 is the smallest demonstration of it.

The hull had one more job, and it is the one that best explains Italian armour. The Semovente da 90/53 mounted a 90 mm anti-aircraft gun on a tank chassis and was a genuinely dangerous weapon — but the gun took up so much of the vehicle that there was almost no room left for what it fired. Each one carried about six rounds. After six shots it was a 17-tonne vehicle with nothing to shoot.

The answer was to build the ammunition supply on the L6. The L6/40 Trasporto Munizioni carried 26 rounds of 90 mm inside the hull and towed a purpose-built Officine Viberti trailer with 40 more — 66 rounds between them, eleven times what the gun vehicle could hold. One carrier was built for each Semovente, about thirty of each, and in action they moved as a pair: the semovente fired, the L6 came forward, and the crews passed shells across in the open.

It is the neatest illustration of what Italy could and could not do. The gun was excellent — a 90 mm that could kill any tank in the Mediterranean — and the industry could build the gun and could build a chassis to carry it. What it could not do was build a vehicle that could carry the gun and its ammunition, so the ammunition had to follow in a second vehicle, in the open, under fire. At Sicily in 1943, where 24 of the Semoventi fought, the pairs were broken up and the guns were abandoned when their carriers could not reach them.

The L6/40 was competently made and correctly conceived for about 1936. Its suspension worked, its turret worked, its gun was a good gun of its kind, and it was a generation ahead of the tankette it replaced. It reached the front in 1941 against opponents who had moved two generations further.

Production ran to 283 vehicles between 1939 and 1944 — fewer than the Semovente built on its own hull, and a fraction of what any of the major armies fielded in a single year. It fought on the Don and in the Balkans, and its most successful campaign was against people with rifles.

• Nicola Pignato & Filippo Cappellano, Gli autoveicoli da combattimento dell’Esercito Italiano (Ufficio Storico dello Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito).
• Filippo Cappellano & Pier Paolo Battistelli, Italian Light Tanks 1919–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).
• Nicola Pignato, Italian Armored Vehicles of World War Two (Squadron/Signal).