Military History Photo Friday: The L3/35 Tankette

I was digging through some old photos the other day and came across this one of yours truly at a military museum in Rome. I'm standing beside an Italian L3/35 tankette. Tankettes were a popular idea for some nations in the Interwar period. As the name implies, they were miniature tanks, smaller and faster than the behemoths of the First World War.

The L3/35 was first mass produced in 1936 and measured 3.17 x 1.4 x 1.3 m (10.4 × 4.59 × 4.27 ft). It had a top speed of 42 km/h (26 mph), weighed 3.2 tons, and had a crew of two--a driver and gunner. Armament was a pair of machine guns. At its thickest, the armor was only 12 mm (.47 inches).

The tankette served in the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and large numbers of them were sent to help the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Their thin armor made them vulnerable, and having the guns fixed to the front meant the tankette had to be turned to bring the weapons to bear. Abyssinian warriors would rush up behind the tank and stuck their swords into the tracks, which was often enough to disable them! In the Spanish Civil War they had to face tanks sent to the Republican army by the Soviet Union like the BT-5 and T-26. These were real tanks with cannons and turrets and everything. You can guess how well the little Italian models fared.

By World War Two, the L3/35 was obsolete, but that didn't stop the Italians from fielding large numbers of them in North Africa. The British made short work of them. It's amazing any survived to end up in this museum!

Military History Photo Friday: The Volkshandgranate 45, A Grenade Made Out Of Concrete:

I've been reading Antony Beevor's excellent history book Berlin: The Downfall 1945 as part of my research for my Volkssturm novel. The Volkssturm were a German civilian militia formed in October 1944 in a last desperate bid to stop the Allied advance. The Volkssturm called up all able-bodied men aged 16 to 60 who weren’t already in uniform. It also called up some women.

A passing mention in Beevor's book told me of a weapon I didn't know about--the Volkshandgranate 45, or the "people's hand grenade 1945". This crude grenade was developed in the last months of the war and was the product of a chronic shortage of raw material. By this time most of the Third Reich's industrial base had been taken by the Russians, and the Germans resorted to making hand grenades out of concrete. These would be filled with bits of scrap metal, gravel, and nuggets of cement. The whole thing was fitted with a fuse and some explosive. Beevor says the Volkshandgranate 45 was more dangerous to the user than the target, and yet hundreds of thousands of them were produced in the last months of the war and distributed to the Volkssturm, Wehrmacht, and even some elite SS units.

It just goes to show how desperate the Third Reich had become in the last months of its existence. As the Nobel Prize winning author Heinrich Böll, who was drafted in to the army during the war, put it, the men were fighting not for their country, but for survival, and their only hope was that they would somehow survive after they were defeated.