Sir,—My attention was drawn to the photograph on page five of the last issue (HI vol.9, no.1, Spring 2001), which accompanied the short article ‘The British Offer to End Partition, June 1940’. As noted in the caption, it was one of three tanks used by the defence forces during the Emergency.
The vehicle is a Swedish-built Landsverk L-60 light tank, a model which was found to meet the requirements established in 1933 by a board of inquiry composed of the director of the Armoured Car Corps, Maj. A.T. Lawlor, and the OC of the Cavalry Workshops, Comdt. J.V. Lawless. Their choice reflected sound judgement, given that the L-60 was one of the most advanced designs of the 1930s, displaying features that would become standard for the tank designs of the Second World War, such as welded construction, angled armoured plates to increase protection, and torsion bar suspension. The first of two L-60s arrived at the North Wall, Dublin, on 22 November 1934, and was driven to the Curragh, where it became part of the 2nd Armoured Squadron. This unit contained the defence forces’ first tank, a single Vickers medium tank Mark ‘D’ (often erroneously referred to as a Mark ‘C’) which had been purchased from Britain in 1929, so that altogether they made up the three tanks used by the defence forces during the war years.
However, on 1 August 1941, this number was reduced to two when, during an exercise to test anti-tank obstacles constructed by the Corps of Engineers, the Vickers Mark ‘D’ was damaged beyond repair—an encouraging outcome for the engineers at any rate! Indeed, during the Emergency the defence forces’ tanks were used primarily to aid the infantry in anti-tank training, as related by one of the participating officers:
We spent a whole month on the road—we were like Duffy’s Circus, ‘one night and one night only’. We went to all those places and we demonstrated to the Infantry boys that if they dug slit trenches properly, a tank could run over them and they’d be quite safe.
The L-60 light tanks were retired sometime in the mid-1950s and, so far as I know, remain at Plunkett Barracks awaiting restoration.
—Yours etc.,
PAUL V. WALSH
Pennsylvania