“Also Swedish! Also to Lithuania! " - someone will be indignant, remembering the very recent reports of our media that armored units of the US Army, equipped with tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, arrived in Latvian and Estonian ports. "And there, they say, NATO will catch up … and now the Swedes too!" But no, it's not about that. And the fact that the small Baltic countries at all times desperately needed … at least some kind of weapon, which would be supplied to them by a not very strong neighbor! After all, a strong neighbor for a small country with an ambitious leader is a terrible headache. So all the time it seems that you will be captured and "enslaved", and it seems that the experience of history also says that this is possible. But … all this is just a lack of intelligence and imagination. Since the best defense for such countries is politics, not tanks and foreign infantry fighting vehicles. But … not everyone understands this!
This is how the first Swedish fm / 25 BA looked like. Pay attention to the original machine gun embrasure arrangement. At least some of my own decision …
Interestingly, they did not understand it in the past either. Buy weapons from the USSR? It is quite logical, but no - it is scary to become dependent on a formidable neighbor. England and France have good, but expensive, because these countries are leaders. Or, for all their leadership, they don't have what they need. This happens all the time on the market. And then only one remains … Sweden, which really wants to join the tank club and supply its armored vehicles for export. Nobody takes it.
Armored car fm / 25 on a country road.
And then they did it really interesting. Almost like the same Baltic states, although, in fact, the Swedes are also … Balts, at least in part. It's just that when in the early twenties of the twentieth century the Swedes decided to attend to the creation of their own armored forces, they had no experience. We turned for help to our German colleagues, whom the Swedes regularly supplied with their metal throughout the war. So, in 1921, as a result of Swedish-German cooperation, a light tank "Stridvagen" m / 21 appeared. Also, the Swedes decided to create their own armored cars, but only the Germans were not involved for this.
The 1931 model is an "armored truck".
First, they decided to go and see what was better, as a result of which in 1924-1925 a whole group of Swedish military engineers traveled abroad, including the plant of the Czechoslovakian company Skoda. They liked what they saw there and was embodied in metal. That is why the first Swedish BA fm / 25 and fm / 26 turned out to be so "standard" - in fact, they were copies of European cars. The fm / 28, the futuristic design of the BA, has become something more original;
Here it is fm / 28. It is interesting that for the first time I saw him in childhood on the cover of the magazine "Science and Technology" in the 1930s, inherited from my uncle who died at the front. For a long time he considered this "miracle" a model of technical thought.
But … to the Swedes themselves, these armored vehicles seemed too heavy and expensive, and they were satisfied with a very simple m / 31 machine with a 37-mm cannon on a pedestal in an armored body. However, they wanted to sell armored vehicles, and it was then that armored vehicles of the Landsverk company appeared. Here, somehow, the engineers of this company managed to find the appearance and design of an armored vehicle that would meet market demands and the requirements of the time. As a result, from 1933 to 1935, Landswerk sold 18 L-181 armored vehicles to Lithuania and the Netherlands, and then from 1935 to 1939 such countries as Denmark, Ireland, Estonia and the Netherlands were sold, according to various sources, from 28 to 41 armored vehicles L-180 at an average price of about 100,000 kroons per vehicle. So Sweden not only became a member of the "tank club", but to some extent was able to influence the development trends of world tank building, or rather armored vehicles.
It is interesting that when I published the magazine "Tankomaster", I wanted to get the plans for the fm / 28. I wrote a letter to … the Swedish Ministry of Defense and I received a reply - tracing copies of his drawings and two magazines of some local BTT lovers' society describing its history in Swedish. This is how it looks in the Swedish Army Museum in Stockholm.
And this is how we see this BA in the photo of those years.
As for the Baltic states, the first BA appeared in the Republic of Lithuania on May 31, 1919. It was a Fiat-Izhora armored car captured in a battle with the Red Army and armed with two machine guns in two towers. Then, in 1920, she received four more German Daimler armored vehicles. These BAs were reduced to an armored detachment, which distinguished itself in battles with the Poles, who at that time captured the Vilnius region. Then the same armored detachment, already renamed the armored division, took part in the liberation of the Klaipeda region from … parts of the French expeditionary forces with the aim of joining it to Lithuania. That is, these armored cars had to fight against the “red”, and against the “red-white”, and even the “red-white-blue”.
Armored car "Savanoris" of the Lithuanian army, which was captured from the Germans.
But by the beginning of the 30s. all these "daimlers" were no longer suitable for a new war, and the command of the Lithuanian army tried to replace them. From the officers of the armored division, stationed since 1930 in the city of Radviliskis, several officers were sent abroad in order to study the latest samples for purchase. By this time, that is, in the first half of the 30s, three-axle vehicles with a 6x4 chassis with two control posts, as well as a small-caliber cannon installed in a rotating turret, were considered the most promising BA. And it turned out that in England there were practically no armored cars of such a scheme: "Crossley", "Guy", "Lanchester" had the required chassis, but did not have a cannon, and all other countries either did not have them at all, or, as in France, a cannon the turret was too weak, that is, the same as that of the Renault FT-17 tank. It is clear that Soviet technology was not considered for political reasons.
Landsverk L-180
This is only Sweden alone, where the three-axle Landswerk 181, with a 20-mm automatic rapid-firing Oerlikon cannon in the turret and two machine guns, went into production at the AB Landswerk plant in the city of Landskrona since 1933, the Lithuanians as a partner and came up. Well, and to the Swedes from "Landsverk" any customer was simply a gift from God, since they did not want to order their own military new machines!
Armored car L-180 of the Swedish army.
At the time of placing the order from Lithuania, the armored car was still a novelty. It was known about the company that it cooperates with the Krupp concern. Since the Versailles Treaty of Germany prohibited the development of armored vehicles, the Germans found a way to ban it, and created new tanks and BAs abroad - in the USSR, Sweden and in some other countries. So, in "Landswerk 181" there was a significant number of components and assemblies from the German army truck "Mercedes-Benz" G3a with a six-cylinder 65 hp engine.
Armored car L-181 of the Netherlands army.
The Lithuanian military demanded to strengthen the Landsverk's chassis, install a rear control post and replace the wheels with special, all-rubber tires. Reverse was included in the transmission so that the car could go in reverse without slowing down. Also, in order to improve its cross-country ability in off-road conditions, it was possible to put on overroll tracks on its wheels and block the differentials of the rear driving axles. The new chassis has received the Mercedes-Benz designation G3a / p.
Armored car "Landsverk" L-185.
The armored hull had a shape characteristic of the Landsverk BA series with a rotating turret. Armor thickness: turret forehead - 16 mm, side - from 5 to 9 mm. Three doors were made in the hull for the entry and exit of the crew, and two more on the sides of the tower and a hatch on its roof. So it was not at all difficult for the crew to leave the damaged armored car under any circumstances. The barrels of the machine guns, the housings of the front and rear lights were enclosed in casings made of armored steel, the wheel hubs also covered the disks made of armor. The armored car's ammunition consisted of: 300 rounds for an automatic cannon, 1500 rounds for each 7, 92-mm machine gun. The commander of the car and its turret gunner could use periscopic devices for observation, the drivers of the front and rear posts could observe the highway through thick glass blocks.
The weight with all five crew members, full ammunition and a 120-liter fuel tank full of fuel was 6, 2 tons. The cruising range was 300 km. On a good Swedish road, this armored car developed a very decent speed of up to 70 km / h.
The Lithuanian government had to pay 600 thousand Swedish kronor for six armored vehicles to the firm "AV Landsverk". But Lithuania nevertheless paid a lower amount, since the company was unable to fulfill the order within the agreed time frame. Then it turned out that the armor was not what was ordered, and the design of the clutch taken from a one and a half ton truck no longer corresponded to the increased weight of the armored car and therefore it very often fails on them.
L-181 in Lithuanian army paintwork. Original, isn't it?
The most interesting thing is that in Lithuania new cars were immediately repainted. As if there was no other occupation for the Lithuanian military, or it was considered the most important. They did not like the one-color protective Swedish one, and they came up with an original three-color camouflage. Well, very original! The emblem of the Lithuanian army - "Gediminas Pillars" - was decided to be applied with white paint on the sides behind the doors and on the rear armor plate of the hull.
Until 1939, all these BAs were included in the specified armored battalion. At the beginning of the next year, the 2nd and 3rd cavalry regiments were given two new armored cars.
The most interesting thing began when Lithuania became part of the USSR. Somewhere these BAs … "evaporated". They are not on the lists of the 19th territorial corps of the Red Army, to which units of the former Lithuanian army were brought together in 1940. Nor are they in the photographs of the German Bundesarchive, which are full of wrecked Soviet armored vehicles thrown along the side of the road. Obviously, the Swedish armored vehicles were taken to the USSR before the start of the war, which is why they did not participate in battles with the Germans. But the Wehrmacht used "Landsverki" against the Red Army at the beginning of the war. But these were cars captured in Holland and Denmark. There were no Lithuanian "landswerks" among them.
