> Greyhound is the British WWII name for the M8. The M20 actually never
> received a
> British name. The US, as far as I know, did not have any nickname for
> them.
Using the name does make life a lot simpler. I find it very unhelpful
when someone posts a message to the list saying I need an XXX for my
M3. Unless I dive into all my books I do not have a clue whether this
is a truck, self propelled gun, scout car, half track or a tank if it
is something for an armoured vehicle I may be able to help them. There
is a variant of Jeep that is called an M20!
It comes back to the old theory that the Americans never had a penchant
for naming vehicles the way the English have. From what I have been
able to find out; this mostly came about with tanks because Winston
Churchill got very frustrated with the bland and hard to remember War
Office numbering sequence for these vehicles, that was in use. It was
not a good career move to upset Winston.
For those who haven't come across them,
"Cruiser Tank Mk IV, A 13 Mk II" never appears to have been named and
was the sort of nomenclature that annoyed Churchill,
"Cruiser Tank Mk VI, A 15 was named "Crusader"
"Heavy Tank Mk IV, A 22 was named "Churchill" (do you think someone may
have been trying to massage his ego?).
It was the English that bestowed names onto the majority of US military
vehicles; such as "Sherman" onto the M4 Medium, "Grant/Lee" (depends on
turret type) onto the M3 Medium and "Stuart" onto the M3/M5 series
Light.
Someone decided that tanks would be named after US Generals, armoured
cars after dogs.
In the case of the Stuart, the crews called them "Honeys" because they
had never had such a reliable easy to maintain vehicle as this. It is
not hard to see why they used names when an M3 could be a
medium or a light tank in the same unit.
They also bestowed the name "Mustang" onto the P-51
fighter and so on, more I think because their planes have names
rather than numbers and naming the American products allowed them to
fit into the English system. "Spitfires" and "Hurricanes" saved the
"Battle of Britain". Who knows the call up numbers for these planes off
the top of their head?
Whether or not you use the name is probably your own "personnal
country of origin" thing, but I do find it curious when I see the
English names converted to American spellings eg.,
Stuart becomes Stewart,
Greyhound to Grayhound,
just doesn't look right somehow!
You will note that nowadays, the American military allocates their own
names. For some reason, I think
mainly because the American system has such a reliance on the "M"
number, these names have not become popular. Examples: M1 Abrams tank,
M2/M3 Bradley. One notable exception has been the Hummer, the offical
designation is just so unwieldy that who other
than a parts clerk calls them HMWWVV (I don't think I have the correct
number of "M"'s, "W"'s and "V"'s in there)?
As to the lack of a name for the M20 Light Armored 6x6 Utility Car, I
am guessing the English did not use a significant enough number of
them (if any at all) and did not bestow a name? One curious thing is
that there appears to be no name for the M3 Scout Car, despite
extensive use by Commonwealth countries; they are commonly known in
Australia as a "White Scout Car".
Regards
Doug
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Armoured Vehicles Collector
_______
_/_(_o_)_\_ ____
_/|___|_|___|\_ /____\
/ [___] [___] \ Douglas Greville _/[o]___\_
/\_ [o] [o] _/\ Broken Hill __/=_|____|_=\__
|w||___________||w| N.S.W. /__\__________/__\
|w|\u u/|w| Australia |w| \ / |w|
|w| \_________/ |w| |w|$ \______/ $|w|
[w] [w] [w] [w]
M8 Ferret
dgrev@ruralnet.net.au
Web Armour site at: http://Fast.to/DG
(http://members.xoom.com/dgrev/index.html)
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