Carro Armato P26/40

By 1940 the Regio Esercito already knew its M-series medium tanks were too light for the war it was fighting, and work began on a true carro pesante. The requirement hardened when Italian officers on the Eastern Front reported back on the T-34 in 1941: a tank whose armour their 47 mm guns could not defeat and whose gun could destroy anything Italy had built.

Fiat-Ansaldo’s answer, the P26/40, was by a wide margin the most capable tank Italy ever put into production — the designation combining the projected weight in tonnes and the year the design was laid down. Its gestation was correspondingly slow: redesigns, an engine that would not arrive, and an industrial base that could not do several difficult things at once. The design year in its name is 1940. The first production vehicles appeared in 1943.

What emerged was, on paper, a serious fighting vehicle. The 75/34 Ansaldo gun sat in a fully traversing turret and fired both armour-piercing and high-explosive rounds — a genuine tank gun, broadly comparable to the 7.5 cm carried by contemporary German Panzer IVs, and a different order of weapon from the 47 mm that had equipped the M13/40 in the desert.

The armour was sloped and reached about 50 mm at the front on a 26-tonne hull: adequate for 1943, not exceptional. Taken together the numbers describe a tank that would have been genuinely competitive in 1941 — better armed than a Panzer III, comparable to an early Panzer IV, superior to anything the British had in North Africa at the time. The problem was never the design on paper.

The problem was propulsion, and it was never solved. The intended SPA 342 V12 of about 330 hp was chronically short in supply and late in development, and the search for something to move 26 tonnes drove repeated redesigns that consumed the years the programme did not have. Italian industry could design a good gun and roll good armour plate; what it could not do was build enough powerful engines.

That single failure is the whole history of the vehicle. A heavy tank programme begun in 1940 reached production in 1943 — the year Italy signed an armistice — and by then the reference points were the Sherman, the T-34 and the up-gunned Panzer IV. The P40 had not become a bad tank. It had become a 1941 tank arriving in 1943, in a country that was leaving the war.

The engine shortage produced one of the strangest images of Italian armour: hulls delivered without engines at all. Vehicles left Fiat-Ansaldo complete in every respect except the ability to move, because there was nothing to put in the engine bay.

The Germans, who by then controlled the plants, used them anyway. Unpowered P40s were dug in as armoured strongpoints, and turrets were removed and emplaced as fixed anti-tank positions in the defensive lines across Italy — the Gothic Line among them. Italy’s only heavy tank spent a large part of its operational life as a pillbox: a fighting vehicle reduced to its gun, which was the only part of it that had ever fully worked.

Almost none served the army they were designed for. Only a handful had been completed when Italy signed the armistice in September 1943, and the Germans, having seized the Fiat-Ansaldo works, simply kept the line running for themselves as the Panzerkampfwagen P40 737(i), producing on the order of another 80 to 100 vehicles into 1944.

They were not entirely satisfied customers: the Italian diesel arrangement did not suit German logistics, and there were efforts to re-equip the type with petrol engines. The vehicles that did run were used as medium tanks by German formations in Italy and on occupation and anti-partisan duties in the Balkans — never as the massed armoured force its designers had imagined, but as a stopgap for an occupier.

The P40’s only real campaign was therefore fought in German hands. Vehicles served against the Anzio beachhead in early 1944, where the 75/34 proved genuinely useful against Allied armour and against infantry positions, and then in the long defensive fighting up the peninsula.

It was the right kind of war for the vehicle, as it turned out. In a defensive campaign fought from prepared positions in broken country, a well-armed tank that could not move far mattered much less than it would have in the desert — and a dug-in P40, or a P40 turret set in concrete, was a difficult thing for advancing infantry to deal with.

The P26/40 is the might-have-been of Italian armour: the one design that could have stood in the line against a T-34 or a Sherman, finished at the exact moment the country it was built for stopped fighting. Roughly 100 were completed before the armistice and a similar number after it, under German control — around two hundred vehicles in total for a programme meant to give Italy a heavy-tank arm.

It sums up the whole Italian armoured effort with uncomfortable precision: the concepts were sound, the gun was good, and the industry could not deliver the one component — a powerful, reliable engine in quantity — on which everything else depended. That its handful of tanks fought mostly under German colours, and a fair number of them without engines, is the appropriate ending.

• 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).