I don't read a lot of fiction.
But I do read quite a lot of non-fiction. And one category I like to read
is the war memoir. I suppose there is a strong bias to the
World War II British memoir but I have memoirs from all nationalities
and periods that I can get my hands on. And recently I've been reading or rereading
a lot of British World War II stuff. And I think I might make a number of videos. I hope to be reading from Ken Tout his masterpiece "Tank!"
I've written to the publishers for permission to read from that. And I really hope they'll say yes, because
that is such a masterpiece. "Mailed Fist" is another one that I would
strongly recommend by John Foley. He was a Churchill tank commander
in World War II and a very good teller of anecdotes.
This is a very very funny book with lots of very funny anecdotes in it -
some amazing anecdotes. And we're clearly very lucky to
have Mr Foley, because five times in this book he describes occasions when he was very very very nearly killed. But today I'm going to be talking mainly about this book. "Troop Leader" by Bill Bellamy.
Now, Bill Bellamy was a troop leader. That is to say, he was
a commander of a troop of tanks. Typically that's 3 or 4 tanks. And in this case,
most of the time, it was 3 Cromwell tanks. Now the Cromwell tank was a cavalry tank. In World War II, the British had divided their tanks
into infantry tanks and cavalry tanks. They were of course infantry regiments and
cavalry regiments of old. And these regiments kept their
philosophies and their identities. And so they would refer to... There are some memoirs for instance, you can read the
entire thing and no-one is ever called a soldier. The various soldiers are instead referred to as lancers and hussars and fusiliers and grenadiers
and guardsmen and so forth. They've all got their regimental categorisations used instead of "soldier" or "tank crewman" or whatever. Anyway, cavalry tanks were used as
cavalry of old. And they still had the idea of
what cavalry was used for. It's for pursuing the enemy. It's for breaking through.
It's for surrounding the enemy. And it's for scouting.
And they even used the same vocabulary.
So of instance when you got out of your tank,
that was called dismounting. If your tank was knocked out and you were
on foot walking back to your friendly lines, You'd be refered to as dishorsed or unhorsed. So they were quite definitely a cavalry regiment
with a cavalry regiment's mentality. And it's interesting to read about him,
for instance going behind enemy lines, just 3 tanks going up a hill,
camouflaging the tanks and spending the day looking around
the countryside through the binoculars and radioing in whatever they had seen. They're scouting. Just like cavalry of old. So Cromwell was a fast tank and so it was
issued to cavalry units. I'm going to read you a couple of anecdotes.
Now the first of these is when they were going through Holland. Now they'd just been liberating bits of Holland. They recieved an ecstatic wellcome.
The streets were filled with people waving Union Flags and orange flags and the girls were throwing flowers and climbing on top
of the tanks and kissing all the crewmen. Quite amusingly, he says that they quickly found out that it was impossible to be selective
with who kissed you and so they found it's only better to duck. And something that is commonly reported
actually in memoirs is how embarrassed people are to receive
ecstatic welcomes. Because, when there was a column of
troops and tanks and vehicles moving through a town like that and the streets filled with people... That's because the town has already been liberated. The guys who did the hards and dangerous work
of liberating their town, they're not the guys, who are getting all the applause
and love and flowers and kisses and wine going through the town. So those guys were often
quite embarrassed to get this heroes' wellcome. And they didn't think: "Oh, actually we didn't
liberate you. We're not the heroes here." But anyway. So at this point in the war the Germans
are in fast retreat. And Bill Bellamy had not seen any
hostile Germans for some while. Though there's been very
fierce fighting in the past. But now he is feeling a little bit safer,
little bit more relaxed. It's a lovely sunny day, he's zooming
along in his tank, he's got wind in his hair.
It all seems very nice. And to his right there was a forty-foot embankment. And he's been sent to scout to see if a
particular bridge is usable. And he can't see the bridge because it's on
the other side of the embankment. Anyway, he looks behind him. He sees
that the other tanks are quite a bit further behind him.
Their tanks are slower. And he is zooming along and he notices the place where you can go through the embankment
up ahead of him. And so he goes through and Normally what he would do, is he would
get out of the tank and go up the embankment, have a look around
with his binoculars first. But you know: "We haven't seen any hostile Germans
for a while. That'll be fine." So he just says: "Right, driver,
turn the corner here. Let's have a look." And he goes through and he is looking
through his binoculars at the bridge which has been very thoroughly destroyed and he is just thinking: "Right I'm gonna
have to radio it that the bridge is out." And then he uses the slightly corny phrase -
"Suddenly, all hell was let loose." His tank is being his by something big. It's not a machine gun. It's something
much bigger than that. And he is so discombobulated that he is just: "DRIVER, REVERSE!" And they just fire their machine guns at random
as they zoom back through the embankment and they get
under cover again. "Is everyone alright? Is everyone alright?" "Yeah, we're all fine."
He gets out of the tank he runs up the embankment and he
looks through his binoculars and he sees - argh - he sees a German lorry with a quad anti-aircraft gun two centimetres thin, on the back of it, going off at break-neck speed. "Aah." He should have stayed there and duelled it out.
He would have won. His tank with its thick armour and the big gun
would easily have won against that thing. But... Nevermind. He goes back down to the tank and his crewmen are looking at the front
of the tank and they are saying: "Well, that's funny." "Here. Come and look at this."
And he looks at the front of the tank and he says: "Well, that's funny." Because, he sees that the 2 cm anti-aircraft gun shells are just sticking in the front of his tank like so many arrows in a target. He describes them as looking as though they were
spot-welded on. They'd stuck their points into the armour and
there they were sticking out, in that sort of way, you know, that shells don't. And he thinks: "That's really funny."
And a motorcyclist after a while from the Light Aid Detachment is summoned and he turns up and he looks at it and says: "Well, that's funny." They later seek out their regimental quartermaster
and he looks at it and says: "Well, that's funny. What's the T-number of this tank?" "What's the serial number of this tank?" "... it's not listed... Oh! Right. Yes." "You shouldn't be using this tank." "It's not a battle tank. It's not armoured.
It's a training tank." It turns out, that instead of the three inches
of hardened steel at the front, they had one or two inches of non-hardened
steel at the front of their tank. Which explained why it was so much
faster than all the other tanks. Oh yeah. That would explain that, wouldn't it. And he was given the simple order to go to the depot and pick himself out
a proper battle tank. Now you may think that it's a pretty
extraordinary anecdote already, but I think perhaps more extraordinary is the punchline to the anecdote. Which is that very quickly, all his crew protested. His crewmen said: "No no no no. No." "We've come all the way through France and Belgium," "through so many dangers. So many of our
colleagues have been knocked out." "We haven't - any of us - suffered a scratch." "This is our lucky tank." And they refused to swap for and actual proper battle tank. They kept their lucky tank. And they did all survive the war. So there you go.
I suppose it was their lucky tank. Evidence for this is something that
happened of another occasion, also going through Holland. What they were supposed to do is fan out
and prowl the countryside in that, you know, sort of big, roaming
we-are-cavalry-galloping-through-the-fields way. But something that rather spoiled this,
was that they would then come to drainage-ditches and canals and they would
have to all then line up and go single file across the bridge
and then they could fan out again and become cavalry tanks romping along the countryside with
their tracks vroom vroom vroom. And they went roughly in line through a hedge and found themselves in amongst
an awful lot of Germans. There were German infantry and there were -
rather disconcertingly - Four 88-millimetre Flak guns in the field. Now an 88-millimetre Flak gun - these were
the guns which had knocked out hundreds of tanks in Operation Goodwood
not that long ago. One of these could - and famously could - put
a hole straight through the armour of a Cromwell tank. They were in tremendous danger. They were just firing their guns at random. He lent out of the turret and fired the smoke canisters and just went: "Left! Hard left!
Go go go go go!" And they're at their top-speed. veered left, turned around and went crushing
back through the hedge. At this point, there were bullets pinging off them, the German infantry were firing everything
they'd got at them. There were Panzerschrecks going past them and 88-millimetre guns zooming past them. When they first entered the field, Two of the anti-aircraft guns were pointing
still straight into the sky. But two of them: "Achtung! Liebfraumilch!" were already in the active moving towards them. He uses the expression "This rousing reception lent us wings." Yeah. So he'd gone hard left, in fact he goes
crashing back through the hedge again. But of course he is going around in
a great big arc, and that means that the bridge they crossed
to get here is now hundreds of yards over to their left. And don't really want to go across the enemy's
front to get to it. So he just says: "Okay." And he uses the word 'steeplechase'. There you go -
still thinking like a horseman. "We're going to jump the canal!" He says there was luckily a little bit of a ramp. And he says just: "Go over it!" and they jump the canal and in mid-air
he remembers to shout: "Remember to declutch!" And when they hit the ground -
the driver was a very good driver - he declutched and so when they hit the ground the wheels were not connected to the engine
and they freewheeled for a bit Bzh on the ground and then
they were able to let the clutch off, reconnect the engine
and vroom, roar off. He then looked round behind him
and a 100 yards behind him the next tank has also somehow miraculously
not been hit by anything and it's about to make its jump.
Unfortunately, the driver in that tank wasn't quite so good and didn't remember to declutch.
So he takes off lands on the field on the other side, bang in a screaming
fit of protesting gears and the whole tank then pitches right up onto its nose and all the gubbins, all the boxes, all the bedrolls,
all the spare ammunition cans and fuel that was stored on the back of the tank is then catapulted in a graceful parabola across the field. But then it comes back onto its wheels again and amazingly, the tracks have not broken and they
were able to get away. The third tank was known to be a slower tank and so they were somewhat worried for it. It takes off and instead of landing on
the flat on the other side of the canal, it lands on the edge of the canal. And teeters there for a while with his tracks
flailing like crazy, and gouging great bits of the bank off and
manages to haul itself up and off. And they all get away. Some time later, when that field had been cleared and
they were able in safety to go forwards, They measured, and found that they had jumped
over twenty feet of water. So there you go: even in the World War II tank, if it's a fast tank like a Cromwell,
cavalry tank, you can, when you're being shot at and things are desperate enough, you can jump a canal. Subs by IvanRezny
I do love lindybeige he is really entertaining in his stories
Soon in WoT : Alternative hull, training Cromwell. -30% armour all around, +10Km/h top speed, +10% acceleration
Thanks for posting I quite enjoyed that :)
That was a really good video with some really fun anecdote
That was fabulous. "Achtung Liebfraumilch!"