Only not in the Fulda Gap but in Kuwait and Iraq, and the tanks belonged to Saddam, not Stalin. The A-10 was scheduled for retirement-for the first of several times-when the battle against Soviet T-55, T-62 and T-72 tanks that it had been designed to fight finally erupted.
The Warthog, as the attack airplane came to be known, finally had its day when it was a 19-year-old virgin with a mustache and, yes, warts, about to be put out to pasture. It seemed fated for a life as the awkward stepchild of its F-plane playmates, the pointy-nose F-15 and F-16, eventually to be joined by the rapacious F-22 and voracious, obese F-35. In 1972 the Fairchild Republic A-10 came out of the big aluminum womb ugly, misbegotten and ignored. Some reports of the evaluation state the tank became stuck after fifty feet, thus ending its evaluation.The A-10 Warthog Is the Military's Most Beloved Plane. One prototype was completed in February 1918 and was evaluated between March and May 1918 at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Its riveted armour plating was between six and fifteen millimetres thick. 30 caliber Browning machine gun was carried in a ball mount on each hull side. The vehicle's main armament was a 2.95" (75 mm) mountain howitzer mounted low in the front. Both front wheels were driven by individual power units which consisted of a Doble 2 cylinder 75 hp steam engine and Doble kerosene fired boiler. A small skid plate or tail was attached to this roller to assist in trench-crossing. At the rear was a four foot diameter roller wheel to be used for steering. These wheels were made out of several sheets of pressed steel and were not specially manufactured, being of the type used on Holt agricultural machinery of the period. It had two large eight feet diameter wheels with three feet wide treads, located at the front on each side of the substructure. The Steam Wheel Tank was designed on the basis of the early "Big Wheel" Landship concepts put forward by Sir William John Kelly from Great Britain in 1915 and also resembles the German Treffas Wagen of 1917.
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