You believe or this is a certified fact?
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I can’t find any information stating that Ireland used M61 APHE on them and a (presumably unreliable Tank Encyclopedia article said they ordered “1,000 rounds of armour piercing, 2,000 rounds of high explosive and 500 rounds of smoke shells were ordered separately for the 75mm gun.”
I don’t believe this would be the most reliable article but it’s the only one I found regarding the ammunition.
Cited article: Churchill Mk.VI in Irish Service - Tank Encyclopedia
Where do you think they got the AP rounds from? America had produced a lot of 75mm M61A1 shells by that time and I don’t see any reason why Ireland wouldn’t be able to get the shells needed. Even then they could’ve been ex-British stock and it still would’ve been APHE since we had them
I mean you have a point but I think it’s most likely that they only got solid shot
In 1944 all British units were purely using M61 APHE and that continued until the end of the war. It seems more likely that this being a post-war Churchill they’d be using surplus M61 APHE from British stocks.
So we’d need to find primary Irish sources to confirm.
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I mean I can hop the border at basically any time and head to Collon to have a look. It’s 2.5 hours but…
Merlin makes everything better so why not?
+1 Would be funny to add so the Churchill gets a little bit faster would it be worth it who knows but a little faster heavy tank cannot be that bad…
Aircraft engines can never perform anywhere near their air performance on ground, and it was extremely common to convert aircraft engines into tank engines.
The Brits made a tank engine of the Merlin too, and it was the Meteor. Used in the Cromwell, Challenger, Comet, Centurion, Conqueror etc. Producing between 550-810hp.
I don’t know how skilled the Irish engineers were at converting aircraft engines in 1955, but given the size of the engine bay and the whole ordeal. I would be surprised if they managed to get anything over 600hp.
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The idea for using aircraft engine for tanks for WW2 was there where a build up of engines that where spent (they to got a usable life span) but usable or failed to hit there necessary benchmarks so put into the storage yard. A lot of tanks used aircraft engines or former aircraft engines (redesigned but blood related) however aircraft engines tend to have issues in the area of torque and consume a lot of fuel even for that era or engine. Reason why post war people quickly built proper engines that provided the desired power and torque outputs for tanks and work vehicles you also can use less pure fuels.
FYI the T-34 engine was a former modified aircraft engine USSR attempted many Diesel fueled aircraft this tech would be adapted. (Soviet oil refinement was less advanced then the West or Germany plus there oil was more fit for Diesel. Bonus was Germany had difficulty exploiting captured Gasoline as it was poor “low octane rating” only better then Italian Gasoline.)