It's also apparently due to some tagging arguments that happened ages ago as to whether vehicle tags should be general or character tags that never really got resolved. Some people do it one way, others do it the other, and tags flop back and forth in categories.
While it's absolutely true that the Italian tank industry lagged quite a way behind the other major nations, you are in the wrong claiming that they didn't make anything that could even be considered "adequate".
The Italian M13/40 and M14/41, while clearly a generation behind other nations' medium tanks (since it was influenced by the Soviet T-26, which the Italians met in Spain),
That's the entire point Italy never produced a single design the entire war that was actually equivalent to designs coming out of the leading nations at the same time, the M13/40 was probably the closest they got in late 1940. It was still slow, but it's armor and gun was at least vaguely competitive but that was the 'peak'. The problem was it was never really replaced. Italy was still sending variants of this at Grants and Matildas in 1942 and Sherman and Churchills in 1943.
could be a match in terms of firepower and armor (not in terms of speed, of course) for the British cruiser tanks up to the Crusader Mk. III (which introduced the 6-Pounder gun).
If you mean it could fight the Mk 1 and 2 then yes, but the Crusader is widely regarded as pretty bad itself, so saying it was adequate to fight them is a bit of damning by faint praise.
In firepower alone, perhaps they had somewhat of an edge, since British tanks that were fitted with the 2-Pounder tended to be ineffective against soft targets (infantry, artillery positions,...), as the gun didn't have a HE shell (I leave to others to tell if one was eventually made, if it was ineffective, the fact remains that none was ever used);
HE shells existed for 2 pounders, but weren't issued, likely because they had so little filler they'd have been of dubious use anyway.
in contrast the Italian 47/32 gun had comparable armor penetration and could fire a reliable and effective HE shell,
It might have been reliable, it certainly wouldn't have been very effective. The gun on the M13 being just 7-10mm larger would've been only marginally better then the US 37mm or British 40mm. Really none of the 37-50mm guns had what could be called effective HE shells. For instance the best US 37mm HE shell contained about 40 grams of HE (for comparison a US hand grenade had about 55), the 75mm contained 666 grams or fifteen times the charge.
Even the HE shell for the 57mm 6 pounder was largely considers inadequate for general purpose use, so while the 47mm might have had an HE shell it's effectiveness was probably questionable.
thus diminishing the need for separate tanks with close support howitzers (like the Germans, who initially had the Panzer III for tank fighting and the Panzer IV for support).
Yeah, no, no sub 50mm guns were inadequate for any demolition task against even meager fortification. The Panzer III after all had a slightly larger gun still at 50mm and the Germans still felt the need to produce a 75mm support tank. The reduced need for support tanks was really only realized when one moved to ~75mm guns which had a charge rate adequate for most common support tasks, although even here it was still sometimes felt a heavier charge could be advantageous and most powers continued fielding vehicles with 100+mm shell guns.
These tanks of course had a major flaw in their underpowered engine, which reduced speed especially in uneven ground, and especially in the initial period their reliability was terrible. However, it should not be forgotten that early on most of Italy's tank forces (not counting the CV.33 tankettes) were built hurriedly and from scratch, and so not only there wasn't any experience, but there wasn't an adequate support system;
Yeeees... which was a good part of why they were terrible. You're sort of proving my point here. No one sets out to build a sub-par vehicle that performs badly, duh, it's a myriad of limitations on resources, time, and technical skill that produce that result. Even if one wants to admire the determination to try, the end result being crap isn't changed. There were many reasons Italy failed to produce anything like adequate armored vehicles of course, but the end result is still that they failed to produce anything like adequate armored vehicles.
the Germans themselves had similar problems when they formed their own tank forces, but they could work it out thanks to experience acquired during the Anschluss and the other invasions before the war broke out. In the end, the latest version (the M15/42, with a longer 47 mm gun and a finally adequate power train), while outdated by the time it got in production, was pretty much the same of the Japanese ShinHoTo Chi-Ha.
Again saying it was equivalent to another awful vehicle isn't exactly disputing the point it's awful. Also the /42 went into production in 1943. This is my point, if this thing had been in service in late 1940 early 1941 it would have been great, but it wasn't and by the time it was in service it was crap.
Of course, neither was a match for the British infantry tanks or the American-made medium tanks. However, for the former case, it should be remembered that, until the introduction of the Panzer III Ausf. J (with the long 50 mm gun) and the Panzer IV Ausf. F2 (with the long 75 mm gun), the two main tanks of the German units were likewise impotent against the Matilda's and the Valentine's thick frontal armor, which could be dealt with only with the FlaK 18 AA gun.
Thing is while the firepower lagged a bit the Panzer III and IV had at least been rapidly uparmored in response to experience against the 37-40mm guns of the western powers. The IIIs arriving in the desert in 1941 were all fitted with applique plating on arrival that rendered them highly frontally resistant to the 2pdr of the Infantry tanks, so unlike the Italian vehicles while they struggled to deal with the Infantry tanks they also enjoyed reasonable protection against them as well. More importantly at this point the 2pdr was also still the British army's main AT gun, which meant that German tanks could much more safely engage and overrun AT positions.
British reports specifically and repeatedly mention the failure of of the 2pdr to deal with German tanks outside of very close ranges, the same cannot be said of the Italian vehicles. It was of course also mechanically, ergonomically, technically, and even at the start armament wise superior as well.
The Semovente da 75/18, while not an outstanding vehicle (it shared with its ancestor the underpowered engine, it was cramped and with a small crew of three), proved to be quite decent; its short 75 mm howitzer proved good for firing HEAT shells, with which all tanks met in North Africa (with the exception of the Churchill) could be dealt with,and its short silhouette made it even more apt for ambushes than the StuG III.
WWII era gun fired HEAT was poor, the effect of rifling on HEAT wasn't fully grasped nor were things like proper standoff or the need for probes and proper fuzes. In particular when faced with any sort of slope HEAT of this era tended to splatter and give drastically reduced penetration.
The effect being that the stated numbers under ideal conditions for penetration pretty much never occurred in battle, the Bazooka for instance looks capable of penetrating the drivers plate of a Tiger, needless to say that wasn't how it worked in live combat... In point of fact they were found to mostly bounce of T-34s due to the sloped armor in Korea. I consider it highly likely it would splatter off the rounded and sloped fronts of Sherman's quite allot of the time. The round was also low velocity so it was a poor AT round with limited range and poor accuracy.
This is before we even get into the fact HEATs damage mechanism is weak compared to AP, particularly WWII era APHE if it fuzed properly. It's basically a rather thin penetration with fairly minor spalling many, many vehicles were hit with with RPG of higher caliber then this gun and not even disabled. Basically if the jet didn't find something flammable or a crewmen it didn't do much even if it nominally penetrated. There's a reason no one was scrambling to produce heat slinging shell guns as actual AT weapons during the war: they were a crappy substitute for a proper high velocity AT gun.
Penetration was probably pretty 'meh' anyway like 80-90mm based on German and US shells of that caliber. I seriously doubt that weapon could defeat the front hull or turret of a Sherman or T-34, it might defeat the hull of a Cromwell if it hit nearly square.
Improved and more powerful versions were studied and built up to 1944,
None of them improved even close to enough to raise above crap.
with the latest one (the Semovente da 75/46) with protection and firepower that made it a close match even for the StuG III (a tank destroyer that remained competitive throughout the war).
Congratulations a vehicle from 1944 produced in tiny numbers (15 total!) is roughly equivalent to a stop gap vehicle from 1942, it also wasn't a full match as the L48 gun used on the Stug by that point was superior boasting between 10-20% better penetration which was critical because by 1944 a number of Allied Medium tanks were approaching 90-100mm of frontal armor and the L46 could only barely reach the low end of that at about 500 meters.
Japan didn't have much for tank destroyer, at most a thing similar to the German Marder with the gun of the Chi-Nu, so Italy comes out on top.
Indeed, they managed to produce all of 15 vehicles that were notably better.
As for the medium tank analog... well, the Carro Armato P.26/40 was not on par with the M4 Sherman or the Panzer IV, I won't claim that. However, its level of firepower, protection and mobility made it a close match, as the Germans themselves acknowledged after 1943, when they deemed it comparable to the Panzer IV (with the advantage of sloped armor, albeit riveted one, although with the disadvantage of an engine still not worked out and therefore with low reliability, which meant that they used it for largely secondary roles)
What slope? I hear this allot yet in all the images you look at the front hull looks distinctly lacking in significant slope, there's some, but it looks considerably shallower then even a Sherman. Admittedly I haven't taken a protractor to one, but just eyeballing it tells you it's no T-34.
. So, not an equal to the standards of the era, but a medium tank worthy of its name, yes; and somewhat superior to the Type 3 Chi-Nu too, since the latter had vertical plates and an awkward field gun which had to be fired with a firing string.
Anyway all that said how many of these where used in battle by Italy? Oh none you say? Really if you want to try and bring random prototypes into this then things start looking even worse because all the other people around them had grossly superior designs they never fielded in numbers.
In the end, Italy wasn't and could not be a major tank nation, absolutely; its industry was inadequate,
Which is of course why they produced basically nothing really competitive from 1940 on, not even prototypes really.
and even when it designed tanks that could be at least effective those couldn't be produced in quantity,
Rather a given seeing as they couldn't even produce the crappy ones in quantity.
However, it cannot be claimed that all Italian tank designs were completely ineffective or inadequate.
Every time they rolled out a vehicle it ended up being outclassed by what was around it to a compounding and increasing degree as the war progressed.
Ironically, both the Semovente da 75/18 and the P40 appeared in Girls und Panzer, so if instead of retelling old myths we looked at them a bit closer we could see that the truth, while close, was a bit different than we usually believe...
Well the first one is still pretty crap it's gun is bad, it's not very mobile, and it has crap protection so that does nothing to dispel anything. The P40 was probably a bit worse then a Sherman from 1942... going into service in 1944. The P40 could have been good if Italy had concurrently invented a time machine, but as it was it was obsolescent the moment it began production.
The truth is Italian tanks were bad, sometimes common knowledge is common because it's true. You've told me nothing I didn't already know I in fact at one point went looking through the entire (limited) scope of Italian tanks at quite a bit of length in a vain attempt to see if I could compose a team for Anizo that wouldn't be ROFLSTOMPED by other schools using even like 1943 era equipment. I figured I'd need prototype spam to have a chance, but in the end I couldn't find ANYTHING more advanced then 'back of dirty napkin' stage that would give them a chance against anyone expect the Japanese school, assuming those guys didn't prototype spam because if they did they'd actually win handily.
When your best ever prototype is worse then a Sherman and your top end tank Destroyer is somewhat worse then a Stug III you're reputation for having awful armor is entirely deserved.
Just to add to this wall of text but didn't both Japan and Italy design tanks based around the terrain in their home countries/climates? I know the Japanese tanks for sure where designed to operate in mountainous and jungle regions where heavier tanks would get bogged down and infantry would be far more useful, hence a lot of 'infantry tank' designs with low velocity guns and thin armour that moved just fast enough to keep up with the infantry.
Wow, that cockpit took effort. I play DCS and own the F/A-18C module and can recognize everything in its proper place. Even what is on the MPDs is legitimate with the sole exception that the radar would NOT be scanning and radiating while there is weight on wheels. And as an aside, yes the DCS F/A-18C does have a Top Gun skin available for it.
Just leaving this here to say that if you come here on the day that Pekora graduates just to say something about 'Harsher in Hindsight' or 'aging like milk', please consider for your sake that it may be a sign that you need to leave Danbooru for good. Maybe take some time off the internet altogether.
