M3 Lee

The fall of France in 1940 confronted the US Army with an uncomfortable inventory. Its standard medium tank carried a 37 mm gun; the German armour that had just crossed France carried 75 mm weapons, and American industry had never built a turret ring large enough to take one. A new tank designed properly would take years. The war was not going to wait.

The answer was a compromise adopted deliberately and openly: mount the 75 mm where a turret ring was not needed — in a sponson on the right side of the hull — and put a 37 mm gun in the turret above it. The M3 was ordered as an interim design from the start, a tank built to be superseded. It was also the vehicle on which American industry learned to build tanks at all: the new Detroit Tank Arsenal run by Chrysler, together with locomotive and railway-car builders including Baldwin, Pressed Steel Car and Pullman, turned out about 6,258 of them between 1941 and December 1942.

The result was tall, ungainly and unmistakable: over 3.1 m to the top of the cupola, a silhouette that could be seen and hit long before its crew saw anything. The 75 mm in the sponson had limited traverse and could not be brought to bear without turning the hull, which meant exposing the whole vehicle to fire the main gun — the single defect every crew mentioned.

Against that stood the things it did have. Six or seven men worked the guns and radios, which made the tank commander’s job manageable in a way that contemporary two-man turrets did not. The 75 mm fired a genuinely useful high-explosive shell as well as armour-piercing, so it could deal with anti-tank guns and not only with tanks. And the mechanical package underneath — Continental radial engine, vertical volute suspension — was reliable in a way European designs of 1941 rarely were.

Britain, buying tanks wherever it could find them, ordered the M3 directly and asked for changes. The result was two versions with two names, both borrowed from opposing generals of the American Civil War: the Lee kept the American turret with its tall machine-gun cupola, while the Grant had a redesigned, lower turret with a bustle for the radio, in British practice, and no cupola at all.

The distinction was not cosmetic. The Grant’s lower profile cut the worst of the M3’s height problem, and putting the radio in the turret matched the way British units actually fought. It is the reason the tank is remembered under two names, and the reason the version that made its reputation in the desert was the British one.

The Eighth Army had 167 Grants when Rommel attacked the Gazala Line in May 1942, concentrated in the 4th Armoured Brigade of the 7th Armoured Division. They were the first Allied tanks in Africa that could kill a Panzer III or IV at the range at which those tanks preferred to fight, and for a few days the arithmetic of the desert war changed: the panzers found themselves under accurate fire from 75 mm guns that outranged their own 50 mm.

It did not win the battle. Rommel’s answer was the one he always reached for — pull the tanks back onto a screen of anti-tank guns, including the 88 mm, and let the British armour come to him — and Gazala ended in a British defeat and the loss of Tobruk. But the Grant had made its point. For the first time the Afrika Korps had met an Allied tank whose gun it had to respect, and the lesson was written into the Sherman that followed a few months later.

The Soviet Union received M3 mediums under Lend-Lease and formed a low opinion of them. The tank was tall, its riveted armour could spall lethally when struck even without penetration, its petrol engine burned readily, and its crew of six or seven meant that a knocked-out M3 killed a great many men at once.

Red Army crews gave it the name that has followed it ever since: bratskaya mogila na semerykh — “a grave for seven brothers.” The judgement was harsher than the tank deserved on a battlefield where it was frequently the best-armed vehicle a Soviet unit had, but it captures exactly what crews feared about a design that was tall, riveted and crowded.

The M3’s last front was the one where its faults mattered least. In Burma, Lees serving with the Indian armoured brigades of the Fourteenth Army fought on into 1945, long after the type had been replaced everywhere else. Japanese anti-tank weapons were few and light, so the height and the riveting that condemned the tank in Russia were tolerable.

What the jungle war wanted was exactly what the M3 had: a large high-explosive shell for bunkers, a second gun for close-in work, and mechanical reliability at the end of the world’s longest supply line. The tank designed as a stopgap for a European tank battle finished its career blasting Japanese positions out of hillsides on the road to Mandalay.

Its most important legacy was not the tank itself but what was built on it. The M4 Sherman was, in essence, the M3’s lower hull, engine and suspension with a proper cast turret carrying the 75 mm — the turret ring problem having been solved in the interval. The same chassis produced the M7 Priest self-propelled howitzer, the M31 recovery vehicle and, in Canada, the Ram.

That is the fair verdict on the M3. It was not a good tank and was never meant to be one: it was an admission that America had started late, cast in steel and shipped in quantity while something better was designed. It reached the desert a year before the Sherman, gave the Eighth Army a gun that could answer the panzers, and taught American industry how to build medium tanks in the numbers that eventually decided the matter — the 6,258 M3s were followed by some 49,000 Shermans on the same running gear. A stopgap that arrives on time is worth more than an ideal design that does not.

• 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).