Bugger...

Archer of 241 Btty, 61st AT Regt (51st HD), skidded off the road, Ardennes, Jan 16th, 1945.

 

Remembering the 1945 Empire State Building plane crash

 

"BUMPER" EXERCISE

H14327 - Object description
Original wartime caption: "Churchill" Mk. IV Infantry tank being detrained.

"BUMPER" EXERCISE

H14328 - Object description
Original wartime caption: The result of a faulty guidance - a Churchill Mk. IV falls from a truck. The Royal Armoured Corps will soon have it on its truck again however.

 

October 1944. Sergeant Jackson's AVRE from 617 Assault Squadron, RE attempting to cross the bridge it had just laid across the Loobeek on the road between Overloon and Venray.

Bugger...

The second shot is the same spot now.

 

That's no AVRE, that's an Churchill AVLB, it looks like the CL40 bridge broke!

Interestingly, if that's the place I think it is, it's mentioned in Forbes 6th Armoured book, when the locals went a bit mad, and filled the river with stones, to enable the lead troop to cross and continue pursuit of the Germans. IF you look to the right of the picture, you see a stone dam.

 

My head hurts, Bugger.

 

Still from a piece of film. He survived (his landing).

 

"You're bloody for it when the M.T. Sarn't turns up !"

 

One man's joy is another man's sorrow

Soviet sappers erect a bridge over a Tiger I tank that broke the previous one. March 1944.

 

Simple plan to save time ….. drive off the ford into a deeper part of the stream, wash the mud off the carrier and reverse out:


Didn’t quite go according to simple plan. Glum faces all round.

 

Sadly don't have the pictures, but: during the war we lived in Wool, near Bovington Camp, HQ of the RTC. The branch railway to Bovy, as we calledit, had been dismantled before ww2 (not a good move) so the tanks had to come over the Frome bridge, which had only been built for horse drawn coaches. There was many a 'bugger' when the silly bugger driving the tank crashed through the wall of the bridge. I don't think any ended up in the river.

 

Soft road shoulder ....






April 1945. Two tanks of the Fort Garry Horse became victim of the marshy peat ground in Paterswolde (a southern suburb of Groningen). The Firefly, in the foreground of the second picture, attempted to pull out the Sherman [or vice, versa], but suffered the same fate and also sank in the bog. The story went for years that one of the tanks never had been retrieved and sank entirely in the peat bog. With just a little digging, a fully intact Sherman tank would emerge [a false story!].

 

Woulda coulda shoulda
Biferno October 1943