Hello everyone. I was watching this video https://youtu.be/4PgnDNzps6s (1) and towards the end I heard that the vehicles were tested for 65 miles plus mocked tank exercises before being sent to the front line.
Then I realized that when it is matter of life or death due to production errors, especially on the frontline (where one cannot replace losses so quickly), testing should be mandatory.
Nevertheless there were countries involved that, for the little that I know, had not so much resources (one of this being time) to do this. For example germany had shortage of fuel almost constantly, or Russians went through periods of heavy pressure and had to through everything against the enemy, maybe with little time for testing.
So my question is: was military equipment, especially the critical ones (machine guns, trucks, tanks, airplanes, etc..., maybe not bombs), tested after production in every country or for some countries in some periods the only test was on the front?
(1) after having watched the documentary 'factory of the world' I thought that in the modern chinese factory the operations were mostly manual so I wanted to compare it with some factory pre 1950 to see if the assembly lines looked different. I was surprised by the amount of automation through machines tools already present at the time of the m3 Lee assembly.
Even the US did not conduct significant testing of every single vehicle they produced. (Given the hundreds of thousands of major end items, this would be unreasonable).
As a general rule, the US would produce a prototype vehicle (With a T-designation), test it a bit, work out the significant bugs, produce a pre-production pilot vehicle (M-series), test that a bit, do some fine-tuning, then as major production has started, the pilots would be sent for troop trials for extended testing, modifications discovered as necessary here would usually be incorporated into the production line as discovered, and retrofits put back on earlier ones. For example, the first 500 M18 Hellcats produced all needed to be sent back to the factory for issues with the power train, the next 300 or so could be repaired in the field, and the rest had all the major modifications added on the production line.
Although I have no doubt (but, in fairness, nothing in writing to prove) that every major end item went through a basic functions check before being shipped to the field, both time and resources would argue against putting wear on a vehicle before it saw combat. The US did, however, randomly select vehicles from the production line and send them to Ordnance and the AGF Boards for endurance testing in order to make sure that quality control from the factory was maintained.
There were always exceptions, usually determined by desperation or politics. The US, for example, ordered a number of vehicles which initially seemed fine according to the testing agencies and were ordered by the thousand, but by the time it got to the using arms, they put the kaibosh on them as being useless in practice. Examples which come to mind are the M5 tank destroyer, the M4(76) Quickfix tank, and the M7 Medium tank. All of which, fortunately, were cancelled before too many were built. (Although in the case of the M7, not so fast that they cancelled production of the factory which was to build them). T23 Medium tank, they built a number of before cancellation. However, Army Ground Forces as adamant that despite the push from other agencies, they did not "view with favor the idea of making any combat zone a testing agency." Their position was that any vehicle which went to the troops would reliably do what it claimed to do, even if it meant perhaps a lesser theoretical capability.
Other nations saw a similar problem. Covenanter and Cromwell were cases of tanks in the UK which were disastrous when initially built. Covenanter, however, they continued to build while they tried to figure out the problems, simply because the British Army needed something vaguely useful rather than nothing at all, while Cromwell was able to undergo a long testing process before major production.
The other famous example is Panther, which was ordered into production before they had time for any significant testing, leading to a disastrous first showing at Kursk