Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
DD tank
Summary
DD or Duplex Drive tanks, nicknamed "Donald Duck tanks", were a type of amphibious swimming tank developed by the British during the Second World War. The phrase is mostly used for the Duplex Drive variant of the M4 Sherman medium tank, that was used by the Western Allies during and after the Normandy Landings in June 1944.
DD tanks worked by erecting a canvas 'flotation screen' around the tank, which enabled it to float in water. DD tanks would use propellers to move forward through water, then lower the flotation screens once they had reached land and fight as an ordinary tank.
The DD tanks were one of the many specialized assault vehicles, collectively known as Hobart's Funnies, devised to support the planned invasion of Europe.
Amphibious 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. Development continued during the interwar period.
As tanks are heavy for their size, providing them with enough buoyancy was a difficult engineering problem. Designs that could float unaided were generally small and light with thin armour, such as the Soviet T-37. Heavier vehicles, such as the experimental, British AT1* had to be so large that the design was impractical.
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. 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. Trials conducted by the British War Office showed that such a tank, propelled by an outboard motor, 'swam' reasonably well.
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. 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.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.