Carro Armato M14/41

Ask which tank Italy fought the desert war with and the answer given is the M13/40. The production figures say otherwise. Between 1941 and 1942 Fiat-Ansaldo built 744 M14/41 by the most common count and 752 by another — the difference is whether hulls diverted to semovente conversion are counted in the tank column — against 710 M13/40. The M14/41 is the most-produced Italian tank of the Second World War.

It is also the tank of the decisive battles. The M13/40 fought and largely died in 1940 and 1941, at Bardia and Beda Fomm and Bir el Gubi. By the time of Gazala in May 1942, of El Alamein, of the Mareth Line and of the last stand in Tunisia, the standard Italian medium in the line was the M14/41. It carries the reputation of the M13/40 because it is almost the same vehicle, and almost is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

The reason for the new mark was the desert itself. The M13/40 had gone to North Africa with the Fiat SPA 8T diesel of 125 hp and air filters that were not equal to the ground they had to breathe; engines wore out on the approach march and tanks were lost without an enemy anywhere near them. The M14/41 answered with the Fiat SPA 15T, a water-cooled V-8 diesel of 11,980 cc giving 145 hp at 1,900 rpm, and — more to the point — with a filtration system designed for sand rather than adapted to it.

The gain in power was real but modest, and the arithmetic is worth stating because it is usually skipped. At about 14.5 tonnes the M14/41 had 10.0 hp per tonne against the M13/40’s 8.9. A twelve per cent gain, in a tank whose problem had never really been its top speed — what the new filters bought was the far scarcer commodity of arriving at the battle under its own power.

The rest of the changes were the kind that do not photograph well and matter to the people inside. Riveting was reduced where it could be, the quality of the frame and of final assembly improved, the mudguards were extended, and a stowage door was added on the right side of the hull. These are the marks of a factory learning its own product rather than of a new design.

What did not change is the more important half of the sentence. The armour was identical — 30 mm on the hull front and 25 mm on the sides, as flat riveted plate standing essentially upright, with the rounded transmission cover at the nose and 30 mm at 16° on the turret face the only curvature or slope on the vehicle. The rivet-shear hazard that could kill a crew through unpenetrated armour was reduced by having fewer rivets and was not removed. The M14/41 went to fight Grants and Shermans with the protection specified in 1940 to stop British cruiser tanks.

The gun was not touched at all. The Cannone da 47/32 put roughly 47 mm through plate at 100 m and 31 mm at 800 m, measured at 30°, with 104 rounds carried and four 8 mm Breda 38 machine guns for everything else. Against the British cruisers and Stuarts of 1941 that was a serviceable weapon and it had a useful high-explosive shell, which mattered more often than the anti-tank tables suggest.

Against what arrived in 1942 it was not a weapon at all. An M3 Grant carried 51 mm on the hull front and a 75 mm gun in its sponson; a Sherman carried more. The Italian crews were being asked to close to a range where their own 30 mm of flat plate was defeated comfortably in order to reach a range where their gun might do something, and that exchange was the arithmetic of the whole 1942 campaign for them.

At Gazala on 26 May 1942 the Italian armoured contribution was 228 tanks, mainly M13/40 and M14/41, in an Axis front line of 560. Facing them the British had 849 tanks in the line and a further 145 Grants and Stuarts in reserve. Rommel broke that line and took Tobruk with a force two-thirds the size of the one opposing it, and the Italian mediums were rather more than a third of it.

The battle is remembered as an Afrika Korps victory, and by the tank returns it was fought by a force in which Italian vehicles outnumbered German ones. The Ariete and Trieste divisions did the work at Bir Hakeim and along the Cauldron, in vehicles that every account then and since agrees were inferior to what they were shooting at.

The M14/41 fought both battles of El Alamein, in July and again from 23 October 1942, by which time the gap between it and the Shermans arriving in the Eighth Army had become unbridgeable. It then covered the long retreat across Libya and stood on the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia in March 1943.

It was still fighting at the very end. On 25 April 1943, at Jebel bou Kournine, Italian armour beat off a British attack, and M14/41s remained in action through every Axis operation in Tunisia until the surrender on 8 May 1943. Three years after entering service the design was hopelessly obsolete, and it was still the tank in the line on the last day.

The most useful thing built on the M14/41 was not a tank. The Semovente M41 da 75/18 put a 75 mm howitzer in a low fixed casemate on the same hull, and it worked for the reasons the tank did not: the gun was a generation larger than anything the turret ring would take, the vehicle stood well under two metres, and it could be built faster than the tank it replaced on the line.

That is the same discovery German industry made with the StuG III in the same period, and it is why hulls kept leaving Fiat-Ansaldo after the tank had stopped being worth building. The count of M14/41 varies between sources precisely because of it — authors differ over whether a hull completed as a semovente belongs in the tank column or not.

The armistice of 8 September 1943 put every Italian vehicle within reach into German hands, and the round-up of what was still in Italy is a measurement of where the M14/41 had gone. It yielded 21 M13/40, 92 M15/42 — and one M14/41. The most-produced Italian tank of the war was almost entirely absent from the country that built it, because almost all of it had already been left in North Africa.

The type appears in the German recognition manual D50/12 as the Pz.Kpfw. M14/41 736(i), alongside the M13/40 as 735(i) and the M15/42 as 738(i), though German correspondence used other names for the same vehicles. The M-series tanks that did see further service were mostly those of the Italian garrisons in the Balkans, taken over where obsolete armour was still adequate for occupation and anti-partisan duty and where nothing better could be spared.

The M14/41 is the clearest measurement available of what Italian industry could and could not do. It was the largest tank programme the country managed, and it produced somewhere between 744 and 752 vehicles in two years — a figure that a single German or American plant could better in a quarter, and the ceiling of what Fiat-Ansaldo could reach.

Within that ceiling the changes made were the sensible ones: a bigger engine, filters that worked, fewer rivets, better assembly. None of them touched the gun or the armour, because touching those would have meant a new tank, and Italy did not build a new medium tank in time. What it built instead was 744 more of the one it had, and sent them to Gazala.

• 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).
• Ian W. Walker, Iron Hulls, Iron Hearts: Mussolini’s Elite Armoured Divisions in North Africa (Crowood).
• Nicola Pignato, Italian Armoured Vehicles of World War Two (Squadron/Signal).