Tank Chats #41 Sherman Firefly | The Tank Museum

well we're gonna look now at the Sherman m4a4 which is actually in this case a Sherman Firefly just to give you another view of what the Sherman's look like now the first thing you need to know that the Firefly is the least at least the m4a4 version is that the hull is longer than it was on the m4a1 therefore you'll find a bigger gap between the different bogeys notice how they're spaced out and the reason for that is that they put a huge Chrysler multi-bank engine in the back of this tank which made it longer now the Chrysler multi-bank is actually worth looking at in its own right it consists of six cylinder Chrysler car engines five of them all clustered around a central plank case so you've got a thirty plug engine that it sounds dreadful but it works very well apparently the engine was so reliable that the British rather like the m4a4 and took most of them as far as use was concerned so from that point of view it's it's very interesting tank another thing to look at is the nature of the suspension itself being a developed version of the Sherman it's now got the returned roller on a separate bracket the back of each suspension unit and the sort of spring arrangement on the top to hold the track up when it's going over each suspension unit so that's a characteristic of all the mid production Sherman's only the early ones had that funny arrangement of the returned roller on top of the thing now the m4a4 SI was the standard version of the Sherman used by the British it's got a welded hull as you can see quite distinct from the castell of the m4a1 and they found that at the front the welding tended to be one vulnerable point where the actual plates are joined together that's the weak spot and it meant that if the tank was hit it tended to be hit and on a weld and it didn't do it any good but the real characteristic of Firefly is the gap the original 75 millimeter has been taken out and it's been replaced by a 17 pounder anti-tank gun it was quite a difficult business they said that it wouldn't fit but they managed to shoehorn the gun in in fact it's put in lying on its side soda who's got the difficult business of handling big rounds of ammunition only has to turn rather than lift the ammunition up and force it in the back so that's one characteristic for Firefly is this huge gap they still had three men in the turret although it was a difficult Terra to move around him and the loader who would be on the left of the gun was provided with his own hatch because they found that otherwise the load that could only get out by going under the gun which in an emergency wasn't really possible so the commander and the gamma are sitting on the right of the gun on this side of the turret in other words which is typical American practice the British had always put the crews in the territory was the opposite way round we that's how they did this other characteristics of a Firefly are the fact that the crew member they did away with was the hull machine gunner who sat down here and you'll see that his machine gun position has been blanked off and the gun itself of the area where the gun stuck out they put a welded patch over to protect it and that's another characteristic of a Firefly because they decided they need the space here for ammunition they took 15 rounds of ammunition and to give you some idea of how awkward it was you couldn't just pass the ammunition back to the gamma in the turret you actually had to lift it out through the hatch above the machine gunners head here if he was in there and then passed it in down to the top of the turret so you only did it out of action to restore the ammunition you just used the ready use ammunition in the first place when the tank was firing the other characteristic of the Firefly is that they found the recoil of the gun which they had to modify quite a bit again to fit still went all the way to the back of the turret so what they did was cut a hole in the back of the turret and weld a metal box on which you can sometimes see and that box contains the radio so loader who's also the radio operator and a British tank has access to it through the back of the turret to the hole which they've cut funnily enough a hole it's set off cutting the back of the turret is rather crudely done and they always looked rather rough and ready but you know not supposed to see that's all going on inside then that box on the back of the turret is where the 19 set would go or in theory a 508 set if it was an American Hughes tank that's the Firefly it's a very effective tank they found actually that this tank with the longer gun could actually take on tigers and Panthers and knock them out mind you didn't have that very thick Armour that you'd like as well it had to get the first shot in and destroy the enemy tank before the enemy tank fired of it just to make it a bit more exciting for them but that gun and the something the Germans noticed at once was the tank with the longer gun and you can see how the gun sticks out ahead of the tank they didn't really like having the gun stick out in front of the tank the theory was that every time you went over a hill or something like that you ran the chance and stick in the gun into the ground it's not everyone light so up until this time most guns have been within the front of the hull of the tank quite short that the fire flights stuck out at the front rather obviously now the Germans noticed this and it meant that they made the fire fly their first victim if they were attacking a column of Tanks because these are the tanks that are a danger to them these are the tanks that could take out virtually anything the Germans had in their armory if it got the first shot in so the trick was to put it out of action first if you could and they were rationed for two reasons one is that the tank although it fired a high-explosive round fired in such a range is to be useless so that they like to mix the fireflies with ordinary Sherman's because the 75-millimeter gang in ordinary Sherman files a high-explosive round which was actually very useful so they tried to do that so the Germans cause realized that the tank the longer gun was the danger and we tended to camouflage the front end of the barrel to disguise it at least for the glance if you look closely you could see it was there but it gave them a bit of an edge and the gun is still too actually mounted with a machine gun they managed to get it in so the actual turret is very cramped inside it's got three men in it as a say but there's not a lot of room to move the gun takes up an inordinate amount of space within the turret and that doesn't really help but the Firefly was the outstanding tank of the Second World War as far as Britain and probably United States up to a point was concerned because it could take out the heavier German tanks which none of our other tanks could so from that point of view it's well worth studying and it's quite distinctive you

Channel: The Tank Museum

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Keywords: sherman firefly, tank chats, firefly tank, tank museum, sherman tank, sherman firefly documentary, tank chats firefly, the tank museum, tank, firefly, firefly sherman, m4 sherman firefly, tank chat, tank chats sherman, tank chats #41, sherman firefly tank, sherman tank firefly, british firefly tank, bovington tank museum, tank talk, tank chats sherman firefly, tank chats sturmgeschütz, m4 firefly, sherman, tank chats 41

Id: Ifxmd-uMU5Y

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2017