Carro Armato M13/40

Italy entered the Second World War with an armoured force built largely around the tiny L3 tankette — a two-man, machine-gun-armed vehicle barely able to scratch an enemy tank. It was painfully obvious that the Regio Esercito needed a real battle tank, and the answer came from the Fiat-Ansaldo partnership in the form of a family of “M” (medio, medium) tanks. The first, the M11/39, mounted its main gun awkwardly in the hull; its successor put the gun where it belonged.

That successor was the Carro Armato M13/40 — the designation reading “medium tank, 13 tonnes, 1940.” With a 47mm gun in a fully traversing turret it represented Italy's serious attempt at a modern medium tank, and it became, for better or worse, the principal Italian tank of the war, the vehicle that equipped the armoured divisions sent to fight in the Western Desert.

On paper the M13/40 was a conventional and not unreasonable design for 1940. Its 47mm Cannone da 47/32 gun was, at the time of its introduction, genuinely competitive — able to penetrate the early British cruiser and light tanks it first faced, and backed by a useful high-explosive capability and a heavy battery of four machine guns. Riveted construction made it straightforward for Italian industry to build.

But the design carried deep flaws that grew more crippling as the war went on. Its riveted armour was a deadly liability: when struck, the rivets could shear off and ricochet murderously around the inside of the tank, wounding the crew even when the shot failed to penetrate. The diesel engine was underpowered, leaving the M13/40 slow and sluggish in the very desert where speed meant survival, and it was mechanically unreliable, prone to breakdowns and choked by sand.

Above all, Italian industry could not build them fast enough or improve them quickly enough. While British and German tanks evolved rapidly, the M13/40 was uparmoured and uparmed only marginally — chiefly into the near-identical M14/41 with a slightly more powerful engine. By 1942 its 47mm gun and thin armour had fallen hopelessly behind the Shermans, Grants and up-gunned German tanks ranged against it.

The M13/40 spawned a small but important family. The M14/41 was essentially the same tank with a more powerful, better filtered diesel suited to desert conditions, and the M15/42 stretched the design further with a longer 47mm gun and a petrol engine, though it arrived too late to matter.

The chassis's most successful offspring was the Semovente 75/18 — a low, turretless assault gun mounting a 75mm howitzer on the M-tank hull. Far more effective than the tank it was based on, the Semovente became Italy's best armoured fighting vehicle of the war and a genuinely dangerous tank-hunter in defensive fighting.

The M13/40 fought its war almost entirely in North Africa, equipping the armoured divisions — Ariete, Littorio and Centauro — that formed the Italian armoured component of the desert campaigns alongside Rommel's Afrika Korps. It first saw heavy action against the British during Operation Compass in late 1940, where large numbers were knocked out or captured, many falling into British hands and being pressed into Commonwealth service for want of anything better.

The M13/40 was the tank Italy actually fought the desert war with — around 700 were built, more than any other Italian type. On paper it was a fair match for the British cruisers and the early American Stuarts, with a 47 mm gun that could hurt them; in practice its riveted armour, thin protection and mechanical fragility in the sand told against it as the campaign wore on and better Allied tanks arrived.

Yet the tank's reputation should not rest only on its losses. At Bir el Gobi and above all in the desperate defensive battles of El Alamein, the crews of the Ariete and Littorio divisions fought their outclassed M13/40s with conspicuous and often-acknowledged bravery, standing against superior British armour to the point of destruction. The fault lay less with the men than with the obsolete machines and the strained industry behind them.

By the time of the Italian armistice in September 1943 the M13/40 and its derivatives were thoroughly obsolete. A number of surviving vehicles were taken over by the Germans after 1943 and used for occupation and anti-partisan duties in Italy and the Balkans.

The M13/40 is the tank that symbolises both the ambition and the limits of Italian armour in the Second World War. It was a sound enough idea — a conventional medium tank with a turreted 47mm gun — fatally undermined by riveted armour, a weak engine, mechanical fragility and an industry that could neither produce nor modernise it at the pace of war.

Outclassed almost from the moment it reached its peak, it nonetheless carried the bulk of Italy's armoured fighting in the desert and was crewed, again and again, with a courage out of all proportion to its capabilities. If its chassis found redemption in the excellent Semovente assault guns, the M13/40 itself is best remembered as a brave, outgunned workhorse — the steel embodiment of Italy's unequal armoured struggle in North Africa.

• Nicola Pignato & Filippo Cappellano, Gli Autoveicoli da Combattimento dell’Esercito Italiano (Ufficio Storico SME).
• Filippo Cappellano & Pier Paolo Battistelli, Italian Medium Tanks 1939–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard 195).
• Nicola Pignato, Italian Armoured Vehicles of World War Two (Squadron/Signal).