A Tale of Tank Suspensions

Now hear this!

Tank designs during WW2 are incredible varied and have completely different looks depending
on the nation that created them. Part of this was fruit of the 1930's, where most vehicles designs
took their root in. Let's take a look at a very functional yet vitally important part of tank design,
and how it differed depending on the nation and how some ended up with the same conclusion
during the war through some parallel evolution!

A fair number of early tanks in WW1 or The Great War as it was known, chose an extremely
simple method of suspension, none whatsoever. Given the fastest of these precursor tanks was
about 8 mph, and/or some of the most ‘successful’ designs were light tanks, they could get away
with this. Some used simple leaf or coil springs to afford some standoff between them and the
ground, but during the in-between years, engineers realized that to increase the speed of tanks
and also increase the weight, they'd have to design simple yet effective suspensions that could
handle the unique stresses of an armored vehicle, namely copious amounts of weight from armor,
and good travel/range of motion for rough conditions all while proven reliable in harsh and
combat conditions. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of disagreement about how this goal should
be reached.

Christie Suspension

No tale of tank suspensions could be complete without a nod to one of its pioneers, John Walter
Christie. A long time inventor with a storied track record of being hard to work with, one of his
ground breaking designs was made while under contract to the US Ordnance board, the M1928
prototype tank chassis. One major sticking point was the cost, $382,000 which was in those days
a veritable fortune, the equivalent of 5 1/2 million dollars today. Despite this fortune provided to
him, it was five years before he produced a functioning prototype. While final design he
submitted had the first fruits of his later iconic "Christie Suspension", it also had thin armor, not
a lot of room inside, and could only mount a light cannon. The Ordnance board intrinsically
disagreed with Christie's design, holding that armor and firepower were more important than
mobility. The design was given to the Calvary, and they too took a pass on it as they wanted to
make it an armored car, a viewpoint Christie vehemently was against. After being rejected by the
US government, he clandestinely (and arguably illegally as he hadn't been granted permission to
sell his designs abroad) sold two models to the Soviet Union, who gleefully took to the design
and modified it into the BT series of tanks. Later refinements to this suspension would yield the
T-34, which kept the same basic suspension and added thicker sloped armor all round.
Christie Suspension, the coil springs store energy and provide the roadwheel travel

While widely considered a huge success, the Christie suspension in the T-34 wasn't without
criticism, the large coil springs required for the suspension had to be accommodated inside the
tank, leading to a tank the suffered from very poor interior layout and wasn't very roomy. This
indirectly contributed to a major design flaw, ammunition storage was in boxes at the base do the
turret, and led to frequent vehicle fires, often explosively so. This was compounded by poor (and
small) hatch placement and resulted in high crew casualty rates. Also, the Christie suspension
was ill suited to more than a medium tanks weight; and the inherent slack in the tracks meant that
pin breakage and track loss from ballistic impact or even dirt getting caught was a common
problem for Soviet tankers. This was especially true when turning, compounded by poor quality
metallurgy in the tracks and pins themselves.

VVSS and HVSS Suspension

On the other side, most US vehicles shared a common suspension, one that hailed from light
tanks designed in the 1930's. The Vertical Volute Spring Suspension (VVSS) was a highly
successful design that was shared among many of the common chassis used by US Armored
vehicles. The core of this design was the Volute spring, which is a conical spiral design that
offered good range of motion, and was very compact compared to coil or leaf springs. It was
found to be robust, reliable, afforded good travel on the suspension arms, and didn't require
additional space inside the vehicle. One "flaw" in the design could be considered that when
combined with the drive shaft running the length of the tank in a tunnel to the forward
transmission and final drive, in order to get good clearance for the turret and basket it meant
these vehicles stood quite tall.

Later in the war, a slightly modified version was made, the Horizontal Volute Suspension
System. This variation changed the orientation of the spring and make it slightly shorter without
compromising performance. Most recognizable to the average person as part of the M4A3E8
Sherman, it made changing road wheels easier and also increased travel space between the
wheels.
HVSS suspension assembly

Torsion Bar Suspension

But what of the Germans? Their early war tank designs such as the Panzer II used a conventional
leaf spring suspension, similar to that of a heavy truck.

Panzer II, note the leaf spring suspension

However, it was quickly discovered that this solution wouldn't work for heavier designs, a
prerequisite for more armor or larger caliber guns. The Panzer III design was one of the early
tanks to pioneer the use of Torsion bars for suspension, a design feature that was kept on the
Panzer IV and later German tanks.

Panzer III's suspension

Torsion bars use a twisting rotational force on a long bar of steel to provide a "spring" action
which is robust, reliable, and also fairly easy to service depending on the design (interleaved
road wheels not so much because they trapped the inward row behind the outside, forcing
removal of the outer road wheels to fix an inner issue). While they typically take up some space
inside by running crosswise along the bottom of the tank, it also allowed for a fairly low overall
profile on the suspension and tracks. This design was found robust in the field, and also capable
of scaling well to support greater weight, a fact the German gleefully incorporated into their ever
increasing size and weight of armored vehicles. Even the nearly 70 ton weight of the Tiger II
used a variant of the torsion bar suspension, with interleaved road wheels to help spread out this
heavy load on the ground better. Unfortunately they also had a tendency to collect dirt and mud
in the road wheels, leading to issues.

Tiger II's interleaved roadwheel torsion bar suspension

Even the Americans eventually got into the Torsion bar world, found on the M18 Hellcat, and
also on the M24 Chaffee and M26 Pershing. It was lower profile, effective, simple, repairable,
and scaled well. Crews given these new vehicles weren't exactly happy with it to start though,
they thought that having a "German" looking suspension could provoke incidents of friendly fire,
and accordingly drew larger invasion stars to make sure they weren't misidentified, or even took
matters into their own hands.
M18 Hellcat taken up near the front to familiarize troops with the "German" looking torsion bar
suspension and muzzle brake

That is all.