M2 armament, limited to one 12.7 mm and two 7.62mm machine guns were also recognized as completely inadequate, the army clearly needed a qualitatively new machine. On April 15, 1938, a meeting was held on the further development of the tank program, at which it was formulated that the M2 light tanks in service with a maximum armor thickness of 15.8 mm are vulnerable to heavy machine gun fire at distances of 700 meters, and in the near future the development of machine guns can increase this distance to 900m. The development that led to the creation of the M3 began in 1938, when the experience of the Spanish Civil War showed that the development of small arms made light armored vehicles extremely vulnerable even to conventional infantry weapons, not to mention specialized anti-tank weapons. It was on the basis of its design that the American T5 tank was created in 1933-1934, which became the ancestor of the entire line of serial US light tanks. The history of the “Stewart” begins from the British tank ” Vickers 6-ton”, one of the most common tanks in the world in the interwar period. After the war, obsolete by that time, but still numerous “Stuarts” were sold to many other countries, in some of which they were in service until the 1990s. In World War II, “Stuart” was actively used by US troops, and also in significant quantities supplied under the Lend-Lease program to Great Britain, the USSR, China, the Free French troops and the NOAU. A total of 23,685 tanks of this type were built, making the Stuart the most numerous light tank in the history of world tank building. “Stuart” was mass-produced from March 1941 to June 1944, being repeatedly upgraded during production. The M3 was created in 1938-1941 on the basis of the M2 light tank.
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