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Japanese Armored Cars

Armored Car Designations
Early		Recent
Model 25	Vickers	Type 87	Crossley
			Wolseley Sumida
		Type 90	Sumida P
		Type 91	So-Mo
		Type 92	Chiyoda QSW
Type 92	Osaka	Type 92	Osaka
Type 92	Naval	Type 93	Naval Sumida
		Type 93	Kokusan
Type 93		Type 93	So-mo
		Type 95	So-Ki

The proper designations of Imperiall Japanese Army armored cars is a bit of a jumble, and the only ones who are not confused are those who are not paying close attention. There were only a few models, they were produced in small numbers, and saw only limited combat service. The Japanese were under no obligation to share their official designations with with outside world, and evidently did not. During the Great East Asia War, US Army intelligence assessed designators for systems as they were encountered, but this was only "best available information" and not every car came to the US Army's attention. Curtis LeMay's bombers incinerated Japan in 1945, and in the process incinerated a substantial fraction of Japanese war records. Recent analysis and scholarship has produced results rather different from earlier efforts.

Japanese armored cars were frequently deployed without "official" model names, only model "numbers". These numbers were usually (but not always) designated with the four digit year of production, as opposed to the standard practice of a two digit production year abbreviation. If any nickname was applied at all, it was entirely informal, though these themselves eventually fell into common usage. Such "unofficial" model names were usually based upon either the arsenal where the majority of a specific armored car would have been produced, or the city in which the factory producing them was located.

The Hokoku and Aikoku designations have been confusing to foreigners who incorrectly used this donation terminology to describe models of Japanese vehicles. The Hokoku and Aikoku organizations each supplied several types of vehicles to the Japanese Navy and Army respectively through donations. The idea of supplying troops with an armored car for defense in a day when many marched unprotected, rode on horseback, or rode vulnerable in the beds of trucks may have been in the same spirit as sending care packages with body armor to troops overseas today.

Armored cars are designed for highway and favorable cross country reconnaissance. They cannot travel on the unfavorable terrain negotiable by tracked vehicles, but since they are completely wheeled, their running gear has much longer life. Armored cars are by design much more lightly armored than tanks. A total of about 1000 wheeled armored vehicles were produced in Japan.

At the end of the 1920s, the first Japanese armored vehicles were modifications of the English 50-strong wheeled armored vehicles “Crossley” (Sogois) with a characteristic hemispherical upper part of the tower, which were supplied to Japan in 1926-1927 and wore the standardized index “Type 87” (M2587).

By the mid-1930s, small Japanese companies began to manufacture their own armored cars, using both conventional locally-made commercial trucks and standardized three-axle vehicles. They had similar in design simple shells with armor thickness of 6-16 mm, with swiveling turrets and powerful machine-gun armament.

Their characteristic feature was the wide use of various devices for traveling on rails, which was especially important when conducting combat operations in backward and remote regions of Asia, mainly in China, where there were only railways, and the network of passable roads was completely absent. Such means included steel railway wheels, which for 10–15 minutes could be replaced with ordinary automobile wheels, or special tires with flanges, put on wheels with pneumatic or cast tires. To perform these operations, jacks were used to lift the armored vehicle above the ground. When driving on ordinary roads, these devices and wheels were stored in special covers or simply hung on the sidewalls of the hulls and served as additional protection for the crew.

Initially, the Sumida brand was worn by civilian trucks, assembled in 1928 by the automobile department of the Tokyo Shipyard. His first military product was the Sumida ARM or Type 87 armored vehicles with a cone-shaped tower and a hemispherical hatch, made on the chassis of a 1.5-ton Osaka truck with cast or pneumatic tires and outwardly similar to English Crossways vehicles.

For the Japanese army that fought in Manchuria, in 1930-1932, the company assembled Type 90 armored vehicles (M2590) and Type 92 armored vehicles on the Osaka three-axle chassis, as well as the 7-ton M2591 railway version, So-Mo, capable of moving on rails at a speed of 40 km / h.

In 1933, as a result of the merger of this division with the company DAT, Automotive Industry was formed, which took over the serial production of three-axle standardized army passenger cars and Sumida trucks.

Its priority was the Tower Type-93 or Aikoku (Aikoku) armored vehicles on the K93 light chassis, which were equipped with a typical 70-horsepower engine or a 100 hp 6-cylinder diesel engine, which was equipped with a reinforced transmission. In the case with armor thickness up to 16 mm there were six crew members, one 7.7-mm machine gun was installed in a high conical turret and up to five more machine guns could be placed in the case with loopholes.

The Sumida armored vehicles had a mass of 7.0-7.6 tons and reached a speed of 60 km / h on rails, while on the highway only 40 km / h. In parallel, in 1933 - 1937, similar to the armored vehicles under the brand name “Chiyoda” were collected by the company TGE.

In 1937, as a result of the merger of Automotive Industry and Kyodo Kokusan Dzidosya, which formed the new company Tokyo Automotive Industry, the Sumida brand gave way to the name Isudzu, while the production of armored vehicles was discontinued.

Japanese armored cars were not frequently encountered by the Western Allies. There are really two reasons for this. The first was a matter of sheer practicality, as armored cars could not (obviously) operate well outside well developed areas (except in the case of armored rail cars, which could traverse these slightly more easily, but even then a rail line was needed). The second was that most armored cars were deployed under control of the IJA' s cavalry divisions, and most cavalry units were deployed to mainland Asia and the Home Islands.

When Japanese armored cars were encountered by the Western Allies, they were most commonly found in places like the Singapore, Hong Kong, or Formosa/Taiwan where developed roads and cities existed making their use practical. A few may have even found their way into Indonesia, but this is extremely doubtful. As such, Japanese Armored Cars were primarily a Chinese problem - even the Soviets seem to have encountered them only rarely.

One interesting aspect of armored car deployment was that the Navy made extensive use of such vehicles for its own ground-linked activities, particularly the occupation of port cities and the maintenance of order therein. This was possible in large part because armored cars were not exclusively restricted to use by the Army, as in the case of tanks, at the beginning of the 1930s.

The only Japanese semi-tracked combat vehicle in the early 1940s was a Type 1 armored personnel carrier, or Ho-Kha (No-Na), manufactured by Hino, equipped with a 125 hp 6-cylinder air-cooled diesel engine speed gearbox, open body for 15 seats with armor thickness of 4 - 8 mm and a tracked drive with front driving sprocket and spring suspension of four support rollers.

No Japanese armored cars had been encountered in action against the Allies since the Solomon Islands campaign. The only models for which technical data were available were of the obsolete type used to carry money and securities in this country before the war.

Finally, it should be noted that, as a result of these shortages and confusion in terminology, some sources either neglect or completely fail to mention the Japanese armored car, and even then, only peripherally. As such, really very little is known about these vehicles, in terms of production and tactics, and most of what can be confirmed comes from period photography and the observations of foreigners. Doubtless, the Chinese had quite a bit more experience, but the situation in that country is such that this is a chapter of history not yet well explored.