Posts Tagged: 1952
Reports in French on the Swedish trials of the AMX 13
Various reports in French from the Swedish trials of the AMX 13. These are just translations of the corresponding Swedish reports, but I thought they’d be more interesting to French people than to Swedish people, so the French version it is.
Archive reference: SE/KrA/0062/D/01/016:H/F I, various volumes from 1952
TK 105-9 construction program
This letter (dated 1952-09-27) from Bofors to KAFT describes a proposed construction program for a 105 mm L/67 rifled tank gun, fed by two 7-round autoloader drums and placed in a heavily armored turret intended to be mounted in a 35-ton tank currently being under development at KAFT (project EMIL, of course). The letter mentions that 12 and 15 cm L/40 smoothbore guns are also possible alternatives but no further details are provided. There’s a list of blueprints for these guns but they are (as usual) missing from the archives because apparently the bureaucrats at the time hated historians.
Archive reference: SE/KrA/0062/D/01/016:H/F I/28
Akv 1949 prototype construction program
These two documents, originating at Bofors in March and December of 1952 respectively, describe the plans for developing a working prototype of the 15 cm self-propelled artillery piece that was originally proposed in 1949, variously called 15 cm kv fm/49, akv 1949 and VK 152 S 49 (the latter being the internal Bofors designation). Initially, three alternatives for the track assembly and drive train are proposed: one using the existing drive train from the strv m/42 (Volvo A8B engine uprated to 450 HP and VL 420 gearbox), one a purely experimental project based on a Sherman’s gearbox and drive train, and one possible “merge” with the drive train and gearbox of a future tank being developed by KAFT (which is obviously project EMIL, but it was very much a paper project at this point).
The decision described in these documents is to go with the strv m/42 option, but this must’ve been changed to the third alternative at some point because eventually what ended up happening was that the project EMIL chassis and engine were used.
Archive reference: SE/KrA/0062/D/01/016:H/F I/28
Delivery specification for ikv 72
This is a delivery specification/data sheet for ikv 72 (known as “tankett m/49” during its development). Includes an armor scheme – not that the armor is of any significant thickness, only intended to protect against regular rifle-caliber rounds.
Archive reference: SE/KrA/0062/D/01/016:H/F I/28
Project EMIL: a summary
This is a report of the then-current status of the EMIL project (also known as krv, kranvagn, project 6400, etc), dated 1952-10-15. Over the course of some hundred pages or so (although not all of the original pages seem to be in the archive I found it in) it covers in great detail what a tank like EMIL needs to do and why it needs to do it.
Archive reference: SE/KrA/0266/002/01:H/F I/19
Note that this report was originally classified top secret (“of great importance for the security of the realm”); the reason it’s in an archive volume dated 1958 is because its classification status was reduced to “regular secret” at that point; top secret and regular secret archives are kept separately.