Cromwell At Gold Beach
 

Saw this picture the other day. Cromwell coming from Gold Beach , with deep wading kit. Tank No. T 121766 W , followed by a Sherman.

a fine machine :D

22nd Armoured Brigade. 7th AD :thup2:

F198307?
 

Hi,

I have this as belonging to Regiment 4th Armoured "Skorpion", 2nd Polish Armoured Division. Used in Italy 1944.

cheers

Kevin

I have an original caption/copy of photo from Reuters. It is "A Cromwell tank leads a British Army column from the 4th County of London Yeomanry 7th AD inland from Gold Beach"

Cromwell, Firefly, Cromwell.

Lance, Kevin was referring to your Humber.

Ahh gotcha, I should have paid more attention, sorry Kevin thought we were discussing the piccie....the number on mine is actually not the correct F number, the numbers that I ran according to the stats for HSC's, mine should be F199036 (which someone else has on their HSC, because it was a license plate/registration number they had for theirs)

1. From what I've found the serial numbers work like this: Chassis numbers and ‘F’ numbers appear to be linked. Chassis numbers started out at 8530000, The last four digits are the vehicle build number. So our HSC would be vehicle 1039. (Chassis number 8531039) this is added to the base ‘F’ Number of F195100. (this was the prototype vehicle from 42) This therefore gives an ‘F’ number of F196139. This appears to apply to the first contract and is verified by Bovington records. Second contract vehicles I am not sure of yet. they have F numbers in a block of 25's.

My chassis number is 8533936, so my vehicle is build number 3936 with the base F number of F195100 + 3936 =F199036.

The pic is taken at Ver-sur-Mer, at the intersection of the D514 and the "Herbage des Pres". I am sure Geoff Leese can tell you more.

But, who coloured this original BW picture? Pretty terrible if you ask me. I guess the "artist" didn't spot the triple 20mm Crusader in the field as he just painted it as green as the grass next to it!
Did Reuters colour the pic and than claim copyright? Here is the pic from the IWM collection:

http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib...at=photographs

source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205201965

Caption: A Cromwell Mk V tank of 4th County of London Yeomanry, 22nd Armoured Brigade, 7th Armoured Division, leads a column of armour and soft-skin vehicles inland from Gold Beach, Normandy, 7 June 1944.

The lead tank was knocked out at Villers Bocage.

well spotted Adrian.