German Crews Couldn't Understand What Was Killing Them

Описание: German Crews Couldn't Understand What Was Killing Them

May 27th, 1942. The desert south of Gazala, Libya. Panzers from the 15th Panzer Division spotted British armor at twelve hundred meters and moved to engage. Standard tactics. Close to five hundred meters where German guns could penetrate reliably. They never got there. Shells started hitting from ranges where British guns had always been useless. The first Panzer III exploded. Then a second. Then a third. Veteran crews who had owned this desert for eighteen months were screaming on their radios about batteries destroying them from the horizon. They couldn't understand what was killing them. What was killing them was the ugliest tank in the world.
My name is Arthur Winslow. I'm ninety-four years old. I served with the Royal Tank Regiment, Eighth Army, and I crewed one of those ugly machines at Gazala. The Americans called it the Iron Cathedral. We called it the three-story disaster. The Soviets called it a coffin for seven brothers. The Germans, before that morning, called it a splendid target. They stopped laughing on May 27th. What I want to tell you this afternoon is how a ten-foot-tall, riveted, obsolete, hull-gunned embarrassment of a tank saved the Eighth Army from annihilation and bled Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps of machines he could never replace. Nobody wanted to fight in this thing. We did it anyway. And it changed the arithmetic of the desert overnight.
I was nineteen when I enlisted in 1940. From Dorchester. My father ran a printing shop and wanted me to take it over. I told him I'd be back in a year. Took five. By the time I reached Egypt in late '41 I'd trained on Crusaders and Valentines and thought I knew what a tank was. I didn't know anything. Nobody did until they got to the desert.
While we were dying out there, the Americans were solving a problem three thousand miles away. I only learned the details after the war, from books and reunions and conversations with men who knew more than I did. But the shape of it was this: after France fell in 1940, the Americans knew they needed a medium tank with a seventy-five-millimeter gun. Not because of the caliber. Because of what the ammunition could do. A seventy-five could fire armor-piercing rounds to kill tanks and high-explosive rounds to destroy gun positions and infantry. One gun, two jobs. Our two-pounder couldn't do both. We had nothing for infantry. Nothing for gun nests. Just a gun that bounced off armor and a prayer that you'd close the distance before they killed you.