38M Toldi

The 38M Toldi was a Hungarian light tank, based on the Swedish Landsverk L-60 tank, but developed independently. It was named after the 14th century Hungarian knight Miklós Toldi.

38M Toldi
Command 38M Toldi I with antenna
TypeLight tank
Place of originKingdom of Hungary
Service history
Used byKingdom of Hungary
WarsWorld War II
Production history
Produced1939–1942
No. built202
VariantsToldi I, Toldi II, Toldi IIa, Toldi III
Specifications
MassToldi I: 8.5 t
Toldi IIa: 9.3 t
Length4.75 m (15 ft 7 in)
Width2.14 m (7 ft 0 in)
Height1.87 m (6 ft 2 in)
Crew3
ArmourToldi I: 20 mm maximum
Toldi II: 35 mm
Main
armament
20 mm gun (Toldi I and Toldi II)
40 mm gun (Toldi IIa and Toldi III)
Secondary
armament
1x 8 mm machine gun
EngineBüssing-NAG V8 7.9 litres
155 bhp
Suspensiontorsion bar
Operational
range
200 km (120 mi)
Maximum speed 47 km/h (29 mph) on road
Steering
system
clutch braking (all variants)

Production history

The 38M Toldi was produced and developed by Hungarian engineers after the army bought the license of the main base hull and turret from Swedish company AB Landsverk between 1939 and 1942. 202 were produced.

Variants
  • Toldi I (k.hk. A20) - first variant armed with a 20 mm Solothurn anti-tank rifle,[1] 80 made.
  • Toldi II (k.hk. B20) - variant with thicker front armour, 110 made.
  • Toldi IIa (k.hk. B40) - modification developed in 1942, armed with 40 mm gun - 80 tanks of earlier variant were rearmed this way.
  • Toldi III (k.hk. C40) - improved variant, only 12 made.

Combat history

Toldi tanks entered Hungarian service in 1940. They first saw action with the Hungarian Army against Yugoslavia in 1941.

These tanks were mostly used against the USSR between 1941 and 1944. Because of their light armour, armament and good communications equipment, they were mostly used for reconnaissance. The design was effective against Soviet light tanks widespread during the early stages of Operation Barbarossa, such as the obsolete T-26 and BT-5. However it was totally inadequate against the Soviet T-34 medium tanks encountered widespread during the later stages of the war on the Eastern Front.

Survivors

Two known surviving 38M Toldi tanks (one Toldi I and one Toldi IIa) are preserved on display at the Kubinka Tank Museum.

gollark: Fear Lemmmy's predictive algorithms.
gollark: Lemmmy has an accursed spreadsheet fed by even more accursed NBT crawler tools which somehow determine total storage use.
gollark: The documentation CANNOT be trusted, and I know, I used kbps.
gollark: And clearly must store 44MiB of audio data, or 46MB.
gollark: They don't distinguish between raw data and audio data.

References
  1. Zaloga, Steven J. (2018). The Anti-Tank Rifle. Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing. p. 22. ISBN 978-1-4728-1722-8.
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