M3 Lee

The fall of France in June 1940 taught the US Army a blunt lesson: its planned medium tank, armed with a 37 mm gun, was already obsolete. What was needed was a 75 mm gun — but American industry had never built a turret, or a turret ring, big enough to carry one. Waiting for that technology meant waiting a year or more, and Britain, buying American tanks after losing most of its own at Dunkirk, could not wait.

The answer was a deliberate compromise: mount the 75 mm gun in a limited-traverse sponson on the right side of the hull — a solution borrowed from French practice — and keep a fully rotating 37 mm turret on top. The M3 was rushed from drawing board to production in barely a year, with the first tanks rolling out of the brand-new Detroit Tank Arsenal in April 1941.

The M3 was tall — over 3.1 metres, a silhouette crews learned to hate — with a riveted hull of up to 51 mm of armour, a crew of six or seven, and a Continental R-975 radial engine of around 340 hp driving it at up to 42 km/h. Two-tier armament defined it: the hull-mounted 75 mm M2/M3 gun with about 30 degrees of traverse, and the 37 mm turret gun above.

Britain ordered its own version with a lower, roomier cast turret housing the radio, without the American cupola: this became the Grant, while tanks with the original turret were christened Lee. For all its improvised look, the M3 was mechanically sound — reliable, well-powered, and equipped with a gun that could fire both effective armour-piercing shot and, crucially, a good high-explosive shell, something British tanks of 1942 almost entirely lacked.

The Grant went into action with the British 8th Army at Gazala in May 1942, and its 75 mm gun came as a genuine shock to the Afrika Korps: for the first time, a British-operated tank could stand off and destroy Panzer IIIs and IVs — and shell German anti-tank screens with high explosive — from beyond effective return fire. Rommel himself noted the new tank’s impact on the fighting.

Grants and Lees fought through the retreat to El Alamein and formed a substantial part of Montgomery’s armour in the October 1942 offensive, alongside the first Shermans. In Tunisia the US 1st Armored Division took the Lee into America’s first tank battles against the Wehrmacht, learning hard lessons at Kasserine Pass in early 1943.

Around 1,400 M3s went to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease, where the tall, riveted tank was bitterly unpopular — Soviet crews knew it by the grim nickname of “a grave for seven brothers” — though it filled a real gap in the desperate months of 1942.

The M3’s longest career came in the Far East. In Burma, where Japanese armour and anti-tank guns were far weaker, British and Indian Lee/Grant regiments fought with the type right through to 1945 — at Imphal, Kohima and the Irrawaddy crossings — long after it had vanished from European battlefields.

The M3 was always meant to be temporary, and it was: production ended in December 1942 after ~6,258 had been built, and the M4 Sherman — which used the M3’s engine, drivetrain and much of its hull layout beneath a proper 75 mm turret — replaced it within eighteen months.

The chassis lived on everywhere: as the M7 Priest self-propelled howitzer, the M31 recovery vehicle, the Canadian Ram, and the bizarre searchlight-carrying Canal Defence Light. Few stopgaps have ever bridged a more important gap.

It is easy to mock the M3 — too tall, riveted, its main gun stuck in the hull — and crews did. But in mid-1942, at the low point of Allied fortunes, it was the only tank in British service that could meet German armour on something like equal terms, and it did so at the moment it mattered most.

The M3 Lee was not a great tank. It was something rarer: the right tank, in the right place, exactly on time.

• Steven J. Zaloga, M3 Lee/Grant Medium Tank 1941–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).
• David Fletcher, The Great Tank Scandal: British Armour in the Second World War, Part 1 (HMSO).
• R. P. Hunnicutt, Sherman: A History of the American Medium Tank (covers the M3 medium lineage).