Interesting pictures
 

REME_personnel_cutting_suspension_components_from_ a_Sherman_tank_at_a_vehicle_salvage_dump_in_Norman dy,_1_August_1944__B8408

The_remains_of_Sherman_tanks_and_carriers_waiting_ to_be_broken_up_at_a_British_vehicle_dump_in_Norma ndy,_1_August_1944__B8394

Wrecked_Sherman_tanks_and_carriers_being_broken_up _at_a_British_salvage_dump_in_Normandy,_1_August_1 944__B8409

Fantastic Photos....
 

....any more ????

Must have been a high demand for the flat sided armour plating from the UC as they all seem to have been stripped.....

Last photo of the SHerman turned upside down : LANDRECY II ....... REME spared no effort to recover specific parts.....

Bob C.

The carrier in the last photo is a welded hull by the looks of it.

Some of those carriers give a definitive meaning to the word 'cannibalised'. They haven't simply been picked clean, they've been seriously gnawed at.

David

First Sherman is a DD and the photo looks staged as there is nothing to remove from the bogie where he is cutting!

More DDs and M4A2s with the rear plates cut out in the second pic. The rads are still in, seems quite involved for simple salvage.

Solitary Churchill VII in the third pic.

I knew a wartime RCEME NCO and later officer, who ran a similar salvage operation. He was a decent guy, and he shared with me that he sometimes refused to let his men enter the burnt tanks. Too many reminders of the cost of warfare when men were trapped. He did mention that finding boot soles burnt to the pedals was a memory that bothered him 50yrs after the fact.

But, give the Allied war machine credit for having modular construction methods, that allowed them to interchange parts so easily.

I wonder how many of those cut up tanks became gun embrasure armour plates on defrocked Priests?

That's what sprung to my mind, too....

Here's a similar picture I posted in the thread Kangaroo AWD site near Bayeux, France. It shows that a Priest Kangaroo, using reused armour, was reused itself after being put out of action.

http://www.mapleleafup.net/forums/at...5&d=1089057872 http://www.mapleleafup.net/forums/at...5&d=1089228718