Inside The British Cromwell Tank With James Holland

[Music] [Applause] hello i'm james holland and in this series exclusively for history hit i'm looking at allied fighting vehicles of the second world war and today it's the a27m cromwell [Music] [Music] the cromwell is a british tank that first saw action during the battle of normandy in june 1944 it's the development from the a15 crusader which then changed into the cavalier and then the centaur for a lot of people the difference between a cavalier center and cromwell is really hard to spot but it is massively different different engine slightly different size and just a much more polished and efficient beast it's got a 75 millimeter quick firing main gun and two bisa 7.92 machine guns it's the lowest of all major tanks by the end of the war in terms of profile which was a huge huge advantage it's nearly six and a half meters long three meters wide and just under two and a half meters high it weighs 27 and a half tons and it packs a mean punch as well it's got lots of really really good features to it and it was really quick this tank could go over 40 miles an hour if it really needed to which is some speed for a 27 tonne beast like this wow that that is just amazing that's absolutely amazing it's so fast it's so much faster than any other tank that i've been at [Applause] this is a really really good all-round tank it's a fast tank it's incredibly maneuverable it can turn on a sixpence and that gives you a kind of sort of flexibility which many many other tanks don't have and although british tanks in the second world war have had a pretty bad press i reckon this one's not bad at all [Music] [Music] [Music] joining me today to talk about this really very special tank is tobin jones who oversaw the complete restoration of it hi um tobin this is this is a pretty special tank isn't it because there aren't any others yeah the cromwells and the cromwell derivatives are very rare today they do you just don't see them um most of them were used up either in the war or after the war they were sold as a scrap and so they don't survive this particular tank was converted into what they call a charioteer which was essentially a way for the government to try and generate foreign funds at the end of the war right um and sell their old worn out tanks if you like um to basically any foreigner who'd give us some foreign currency for it right um and one of the things they did was they wanted to get a much bigger gun into the um the cruiser tanks right and so they went for a 20 pound of gun and the only way you can fit a 20 pounder gun onto a tank that's this size is to put a much bigger turret on and a much bigger turret ring so a lot of of cutting and shutting basically and they ended up with what the um the government afterwards um called not a second chance turret because although it looked impressive it's actually very thin armor and this particular one was sold out to finland right and the fins had quite a few of them as part of their defense force and that's why it survived right it ended up being dumped in a forest in finland along with a number of other tanks and was just left and eventually it was bought by enthusiasts and returned back to this country and you've completely restored it how long has it taken to do that oh a long time um a good two years um but we've had to convert it back to the cromwell specifications so essentially finding a turret which came off the firing ranges it was completely refurbished all new top armor that's all been re-cut um a new turret ring which has been manufactured for this particular vehicle um a great deal of work um but but it's worth it you can see the the vehicle here today yeah no no it looks absolutely incredible uh and the the cromwell it has an interesting kind of development process doesn't it because the the sort of bottom half of it is is very similar to the crusader or the earlier kind of fast tank and britain has this kind of a different approach to tanks from others because they have infantry tanks they have light tanks and then and the light tanks are there for reconnaissance work you've got the infantry tanks to work with the infantry and they're slow and cumbersome but very thickly armored and yeah and you know the churchill tank is the development of that and then you have cruiser tanks which is what other people call medium tanks which are there for really for exploitation and this is the old sort of cavalry role isn't it absolutely the idea was that it was an all-rounder tank it needed to be reasonably well armored carrier a good punch in the form of the gun and be powerful enough to move quickly to exploit breakthroughs in the lines yes um and uh and this was the standard cruiser tank so um what happened um essentially was that the crusader which was itself a development of the a13 tank right um which was not very successful for hundreds of reasons but was a better attempt at getting that all around balance yeah and if you look at historically at tank development in all of the countries it's always been the difficulty of finding this balance between firepower maneuverability speed um armor weight all that kind of stuff because every time you put armor on something it makes it means it's heavier which means it needs more powerful engine which means more powerful chassis broader chassis absolutely and one of the other things which gets forgotten in that equation is also being able to produce them because so many of these tanks were were designed um during peace time right and so mass production wasn't something that was really planned [Music] and looking at it you know you look at the tracks here this is very similar to the t-34 isn't it um yeah there are quite a few similarities in that they've got christie type suspension which allowed you to move quickly um the the double wheels um and also to a degree but more so on this you've got a double skinned um wall here because the suspension so this is actually quite solid and thick isn't it yeah this is about an inch and a bit thick um before you get through to the suspension and then then you've got another wall before you're into the so you've got sort of three inches of armor or something that's right which makes it nice and strongly armoured from the side and this all looks quite simple and uncomplicated you can take the wheel off quite easily can you um yes so long as you're strong um it's a young man's game and and yeah you can take them off all of this stuff is relatively interchangeable um and easy to work on uh and this i noticed that sort of the hatch this is very different from other tanks isn't it heavy look at that whoa yes these hatches are a story unto themselves in that the early marks of centaur and cromwell started off with hatches that were up on the top here right um and were nice and strong but the problem was that if the turret was anywhere other than straight the gunner could sorry the driver couldn't get out so although they had an intermediate type with a section of hatch that could be lifted out and pulled into the turret sorry into the the driver's compartment to allow you to get out it's really a bit second best right and so they then came up with this idea of the the corner door which looks a little bit heath robinson mind your head but it actually works really really well um even a big bloke like me um the first time i went into one i thought my stomach would stick in it my stomach went in without a problem it tends to get you on the chest but they were smaller guys in those days yeah that's only true but it's also a very strong door so it gives a good solution yeah no no it looks good and coming around the front here you've got you've got a mirror i've never seen a mirror on a tank before yeah you've got a driving mirror because obviously if you're moving to and from um the um your scenes of action you're going to be driving on the road this is actually bent down at the moment but that would normally be in that position right and then the driver can see and uh can see what's behind him it's actually quite a valuable thing to have um and also i can see that the driver is on the right which of course is consistent with british driving absolutely situation yep absolutely he's got this vision hatch here which is open at the moment um this it locks inside but this then closes and you can look through a tiny little um door it's quite a thing isn't it i mean look at that oh yeah it um it would stop around coming through it's substantial a moving round toby i mean the most striking thing about it is the turret design which is is i mean it's not so very different from the tiger in terms of the shape and and the look of it but then you've got these whopping great bolts on it yeah well not a welded turret no the essentially this um turret design started in about 1940-41 and at that stage we didn't have the ability to be casting one-piece turrets which is which is what would have been ideal so instead they built up a um a rather odd box shape which fitted inside and so it was all built out of mild steel except for the top plate which is three-quarter inch armor plate for some obscure reason the bottom plate is 20 millimeters thick which must have been a very odd size in imperial england in the second world war um and then when they've made that box they then literally bolt on the armor plate these big slabs onto the outside and interestingly where those bolts come through they've actually threaded the armor and so they thread it through and then they put these armored nuts on and then they weld them on so that they don't pop off um it's a bit of a palava it's a lot of a pallava but having said that if you don't have that ability to cast or weld large heavy structures it's the best way to do it and you've got stowage here stowage on the sides and then the big engine at the back so um should we get up and have a look at it oh hang on a minute let's just have a look at the rear of this so this is um this is the exhaust yeah this is the thing actually which is quite high yeah this is actually a thing called a normandy cowl right and so when we first went into normandy these didn't exist and um the exhaust fumes just come up through this grill here if tanks were moving about there's quite a visible flame that comes up out of there but also a lot of of smoke and so it was quickly realized that if you come up with something like this which threw the flames back down and just damped them and so they were rapidly made popped onto the tanks and hence normandy cow and these um these are smoke screen devices so what you would have done is pop a couple of smoke bombs electrically triggered smoke bombs into there you pop it up you would wire them from this box here right if you pull that up you connect the wires into there and then when the driver was ready or the commander instructed the driver to he would press a button and it would fire these uh smoke smoke bombs behind you it would all be pushed out by the um the exhaust and you would create an enormous smoke screen and you can either reverse back into it or you can slide off around the side of it but it will get you out [Music] [Music] so should we clamber up let's number up [Music] and tobin a bit like the t-34 the turret's quite a long way forward isn't it which means you've got this big long stretch at the back for the engine yes that's right you need to have the turret there to fit everything in back here because you've got the engine which in this case is a meteor engine um effectively a rolls-royce merlin engine from the same as the spitfire and the mustang but without a supercharger um and a different oil scavenge system um yeah i mean the story of that is amazing isn't it because they're using these liberty engines these built yep aero engines sort of adapted yep sort of downgraded and and they're not getting enough of them they're not quite good enough and and they're just not quite fit for purpose they're not as they're not as powerful as was required um the tanks had got heavier um and the the poor old liberty at about 350 top 390 horsepower was not going to be developed any further the meteor on the other hand was a really competent engine at 500 to 550 horsepower and in fact by the end of the war they were pushing 600 650 horsepower makes a big difference to the performance of the vehicle also more reliable um but the problem with it the problem with the with the um the meter is effectively is 80 percent of merlin rolls-royce merlin and of course to start off with rolls-royce the priority is the raf because the priority for britain and the war is the air effort over the land effort yeah a lot large part of the war yeah so you've got you know you've got the mosquito you've got the spitfire you've got you know you've got the lancaster bomber you know there's so much demand for merlin engines but to start off with everyone thinks well this is great the meat is a fantastic engine but the priorities with the raf and so there's just not enough of them correct which is one of the reasons why you know there's three times as many shermans in normandy in 1944 as there are cromwells it's not because they can't manufacture the cromwell itself because they don't have enough engines and it's not until 1944 that meadows start taking on the mantle of producing these meteors under licence and suddenly you've got a lot more of them i think also the success of the engine as an aero engine also worked for the tanks because right particularly and it's not terribly well known but at the start of the production a lot of the parts came from crashed um airplanes and so they've got engines where perhaps they'd been slightly shock loaded right um so they wouldn't reuse the crankshaft but providing the um the the crankcase was all in good order they would reuse it and a lot of merlin parts turn up on meteor engines even today so it did allow them to reuse the parts and of course production too particularly by 1944 we have really got into our step by then and so we were churning out enough parts to be able to put them into tanks yep i mean how is i mean i can see all these these back plates are all sort of just bolted in i mean is it comparatively straightforward to get to the engine or is it a fiddle not particularly i mean you can see here if we if you lift that compared to the sherman the sherman is incredibly easy to get to isn't it yes so looking in here we're looking at the the water header tank yes you can just about see the radiators on each side the meter's back there the meteors back here i don't think this is like no we're locked there yeah um the fountain i can see the kind of v12 yep the fan drives are here and again a very very clever cooling system where rolls-royce had put a lot of work into making sure that the correct amount of air was sucked through um from the uh the fighting compartment and the sides and pushed through those um uh radiators to keep this engine cool and in many ways it what the work they did was um quite historic because they managed to get all of the cooling done with about 65 horsepower which was so much less than had been done in the past yeah and again made the engine more efficient yeah that's i mean that's quite clever isn't it but i mean in terms of sort of practicality and maintenance in the field which is always so important i mean i mean having worked on this for two years i mean how easy would it be to to work on this in the field do you think um if you had the equipment that was available to the the forces then really quite easy so long as you've got something to lift the engines in and out and and even then in those days there were certain things they would fix in situ and others they would just say let's pull that engine out and pop a new one in from a crate [Music] we're told this has got lots of similar features to other tanks but but it also feels quite different not partly because of the um the silver paint but you know here we've got the number 19 set you know which is standard for for british tanks correct but one of the things that strikes me here is you know this is the commander's position here where i'm i'm sort of squatting down and there's this stand which is quite good and you can see it kind of sort of folds up if you need it to but you can stand on that and perch out of the out of the out of the cupola one two three four five six seven eight periscopes yeah i mean one of the problems that you have as a tank commander is of course is that you've got to put you know to see you've got to have your head out the turret and of course that's that makes you very vulnerable the moment you put your head down and close the hatches you're effectively blind but not quite so much in the cromwell where actually the visibility and the number of periscopes far exceeds any other tank i've been in that's right well this is a later cupola but it's still a wartime cooper and the original ones had two periscopes which had all the problems that you mentioned whereas with this one you can actually turn the cupella you can pick which of the scopes you actually want to look out through technically they call them episcopes not periscopes because they only move in one direction um but um it's it's a really handy piece of kit for the commander here we've got the great big breech block and next to it you've got the coaxial um visa machine gun so two machine guns in in this tank lots of little features and little containers all over the place i mean you know what so what's what's going on in here well this this box basically is your supply of visa ammunition or your main supply of beasts or ammunition um for the the the main besa gun um and uh so we stack in there i'm not sure six seven eight nine cans of ammunition right there's room for another two down on the whole wall um to your left and and these are all the ready use ammunition you've got these rather odd looking three cans yes behind you yeah and there that's water supply for this amazing look at that it's got a little tap so you just feel that you fill it up here yeah take it out yep fill it up and then if you're a bit thirsty you can just turn off this tap and out it comes and you've got to remember that these guys they they set off in the morning in the tank and they were doing their job which might be fighting or it might just be sitting watching yeah getting ready but they're stuck inside the tank and it's hot and it's it's it's horrible basically and so they are going to get thirsty and it means they've got plenty of water there's all sorts of other things we've got a spare striker um tin here this gives you a spare firing mechanism that fits on the back of the bridge block in case you have a mouth malfunction there are um the wire cutters that fit in there right a thing called the helsin lamp that fits there which is the world's worst torch right they're actually very valuable now and very sought after but it just gave you basically a hand torch for carrying out running repairs i mean tobin a bit of thought has been put into this hasn't it yeah yeah um and again it's it's easy to slag it off as being a small space to work in which it is without a shadow of a doubt but they have given a lot of thought to make it as usable as they possibly can yeah and behind you tobin sort of down but just behind the driver's seat there's what looks like a little motor yes that's what they call a tiny tim um and it's essentially a little charging engine um the best equivalent would be to say it's like a modern small lawnmower engine right but it's attached to a generator and it's also electrically started so you press a button it fires up and if you were sitting for any length of time with the radios on rather than the batteries going flat you can charge them up using just the tiny tin that's amazing yeah and i think and one other thing just briefly to mention is that um not what's not fitted here at the moment is the recoil guard and so there would normally be a fairly large assembly here which would effectively divide you and i yeah and it was just to stop when the gun recoils backwards to stop any crew members getting their body behind it yeah yeah yeah well you do but interestingly my understanding is that it was the first piece that was taken off and thrown away on um most cromwells oh really well it gets in the way um but it might do but it also prevents i suppose you know if you're careful but heat of battle and all the rest of it that coming back i mean i think i think they spent a lot of time moving about and being obstructed by it and not that long in combat so they felt it was a trade-off well i think it's pretty impressive [Music] well tobin i've got to say i am mightily impressed with the speed and maneuverability of this it's really quite a nippy vehicle you can you can do a lot with it yeah you absolutely can and i think it's often sort of under-appreciated what an advantage that is because i mean you know obviously this is not competing with a tiger or pamphlet in terms of armor or and says in terms of gun size but what people notice in that kind of last 11 months of the war in in northwest europe is that he who hits first tends to come out on top regardless of the gun yes you know and and what this low profile gives you is that ability to kind of you know creep up hit behind a hedgerow maneuver and also if someone then sees you then you can get the hell out of there really really quickly it's that overall combination of firepower armor maneuverability um size all the things which you need if you're going to actually survive on the battlefield and i think it's a nice package it's it we'd started to get our act together in terms of the tanks we were producing and this did the job this was this was a very good medium tank yeah um and you can see that we followed the idea of it right the way through till after the war so it must have been pretty good well one of the criticisms of the allies in the second world war is that they were too slow too stodgy to kind of sort of you know cumbersome in their approach but actually if you think about this you know immediately after i mean this this absolutely held its own in normandy but after normandy and then you've got the kind of the big breakout and the great swan across northern france over the river saying up into belgium i mean leading units with these are doing 75 miles a day you know 300 miles in five five six days something like that i mean that is really really going some and actually that's quicker than the germans achieved from germany to france the french coast uh the atlantic coast back in may 1940 at the height of the blitz creek and of course as we know the germans were kind of renowned for their speed and maneuver and all the rest of it so it just goes to show what can be done when you've got tanks like this yeah and in essence what we'd done is turn blitzkrieg round on to the germans and we were suddenly putting up together an all arms force which was quick and was designed for purpose and the germans could no more handle it than we could back in 1940. absolutely normandy was never a place for tanks like this to be fired well for any tanks to be fighting um and it was in that breakout and when it was rolling up effectively the third reich um and getting to the heart of matas that these vehicles absolutely came into their own yeah yeah just gave the whole of the british army you know a real speed and flexibility but there's another there's another thing that this tank can do which no no other tank can do and that was then during operation market garden and these uh were leading the way with 30 core as they were trying to open up that corridor towards nijmegen and arnold and the technique was to fan out either side of a bridge and then when they got to the bridge you know clear the either side and then kind of beetle across the bridge itself and then fan out again on the other side so what they've done is they've done this got across the bridge fanned out on one side and suddenly they find themselves in in the midst of a german anti-aircraft battery of the dreaded 88 which as you know can also be used as anti-tank guns so there's anything yikes you know we need to get out of this and on their flank is a is a narrow canal so they take a run at it and a whole troop jumps that come out yeah yeah this is a maneuverable and fast vehicle and you could do things like that and we think it's a cracking piece of kit and it's one that's been much underrated mainly because there haven't been an awful lot of them around but we're hoping to change that over the next couple of years or so well turban it's really good of you to bring this out and uh your restoration is amazing and it's been fantastic to be able to put it through its paces so thank you absolute pleasure and we must do it again [Music] [Music] well i've got to say i i'm pretty impressed with this i really am i mean british armour gets a really bad press in the second world war um but this has got you know it's got it's got pretty good ease of maintenance um and what tobin was saying was that you know you could do uh quite a lot of maintenance in the field pretty straightforwardly pretty quickly which is what you need speed and ease of maintenance inside it's by far the most comfortable of the four armored fighting vehicles that we've looked at and it's got the nicest features in it all the periscopes around the commander's cupola the little engine as well to inside to recharge the batteries um lots and lots of little features that have been really really well thought out i really really was impressed by that um it's got this wonderful low profile which i think is just such an advantage it really is you know you're still as a commander you're still reasonably high perched up at kind of two and a half meters off the ground but it does mean that you could go up to a hedge such as the one right behind us and sneak up with you know a certain amount of stealth there i like the simplicity of the track system and the wheels and the christie suspension that's really really good um armor is a bit thin i suppose but you know this is a medium tank it's 27 tons the gun is perfectly adequate for what it needs to be able to do but really it's the speed and maneuverability that really really counts and i just can't emphasize enough how important that is and i think it's one of the great assets of this particular tank but a lot of tanks which is underplayed and in terms of kind of speed of rotation of the turret it's about on par with the sherman um quicker than most of the german ones but in terms of maneuverability there is absolutely nothing to touch the cromwell tank and i've got to say i've been really really impressed with it so much so that i think this is one of the best tanks i've ever come across from the second world war i really do [Music] [Music] check out the history hit youtube where you can get great exclusive videos and a sneak peek at what's available on the world's best history channel history hit tv it's growing really fast we're thrilled to have you all aboard

Channel: History Hit

Views: 625,279

Keywords: james holland ww2, cromwell tank, inside the tanks, james holland, military tank, world of tanks, world war 2, top 5 tanks, british tanks, second world war, cromwell tank documentary, cromwell tank in action, cromwell tank driving, cromwell tank ww2, cromwell tank speed, tanks of ww2, tanks of world war 2, best tanks in the world, best tanks of ww2, british tanks ww2, james holland historian, james holland tanks, james holland wwii, history hit, history hits

Id: 9SMtD_0NeI0

Length: 30min 11sec (1811 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 14 2022