Ohhh-TAY!

Here's the tank that's been giving everybody conniptions.

Sanger finally found the thing and popped a bunch of links in, but technically didn't solve the whatziss 'cuz he never mentioned The Name.

From Rod Thorson: Looks something like one of the Marmon-Herrington USMC eval tanks, but some details are puzzling.

That's because it *is* a Marmon-Herrington. A Marmon-Herrington CTMS 1TBI, to be precise. The reason Rod's puzzled is because M-H produced four variants on the same piece of crap hull:

--CTMS 1TBI had a three-man crew and was armed with a 37 mm gun and two or three M1919 .30 caliber machineguns.

--MTLS 1GI4 had a four man crew and was armed with two 37 mm guns and four machineguns, probably on the theory that if the first popgun didn't stop the enemy, the second would. Yeah...

--CTLS 4TA(Y) and CTLS 4TAC had two-man crews and were armed solely with two or three machine-guns. 4TA(Y) had its turret offset to the left, the 4TAC had it offset to the right. My theory is that there was a fold in the blueprint that got unfolded during manufacture.

The M-H series were originally designed and manufactured for export to the Dutch East Indies. However, after the first 28 of a planned run of six hundred -- man, they *had* to have been cheap -- were delivered, Japan decided that the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere (aka Everything East of the Suez Canal and West of Whidbey Island) needed some oil reserves to round out the portfolio and the subsequent invasion of the East Indies made additional tank deliveries somewhat problematic. Seven CTLS 4TA(Y)s ultimately made it into combat, halting the Japanese onslaught for about a half an hour -- it took that long for them to stop laughing.

The US Army grabbed most of the M-Hs which were stranded stateside and used them for driver training, while the Marines actually attempted to use them during a couple of combined-arms exercises. The exercise participants concluded the M-H would be more useful as turreted pillboxes than combat vehicles.

A scad of them were exported to Guatemala, which still hasn't forgiven us.

Anyway, just to prove that I didn't PhotoShop the beast, I stuck Sanger's links (unbollixed) and some newspaper clippings in Flash Traffic...