In 1940, Straussler solved the problem by devising the flotation screen – a device which folded and was made of waterproofed canvas. Also, such floats made a tank too wide to launch from an off-shore landing craft, making their use in amphibious landings impractical. In practice, there would be severe difficulties in transporting enough floats, even collapsed ones, to move a large unit of tanks across a body of water. The system was unsatisfactory in other ways, due mainly to the unwieldy bulk of the floats that were big enough to float a tank – these were each roughly the size of the tank itself. Valentine DD tank with screen lowered and gun pointing towards the rear of the vehicle Trials conducted by the British War Office showed that such a tank, propelled by an outboard motor, 'swam' reasonably well.
In Britain, the Hungarian-born engineer Nicholas Straussler developed collapsible floats for Vickers-Armstrong that could be mounted on either side of a light tank to make it amphibious.
The alternative was to use flotation devices that the tank discarded as soon as it landed–the approach adopted by the Japanese with their Type 2 Ka-Mi and Type 3 Ka-Chi amphibious tanks. Heavier vehicles, such as the experimental, British AT1* had to be so large that the design was impractical. Designs that could float unaided were generally small and light with thin armour, such as the Soviet T-37. Development continued during the interwar period.Īs tanks are heavy for their size, providing them with enough buoyancy was a difficult engineering problem. Patent 2,390,747, issued 1945Īmphibious tanks were devised during the First World War, a floating version of the British Mark IX tank was being tested in November 1918, just as the war ended. Diagram of a flotation screen fitted to a Tetrarch tank, taken from Straussler's patent, U.S.
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