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Originally Posted by Jakko Westerbeke
Interesting, a Stuart VI in that last picture, you don’t see that many photos of those in Commonwealth service, AFAIK.
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The scale of issue for Canadian armoured regiments, like the Sherbrooke Fusilier Regiment (27th Canadian Armoured Regiment) was a recce troop of as many as 11 Stuarts. They were seldom photographed because they were kept quite busy and not as numerous as the Shermans!
Two mentions in the latest regimental history bear repeating. In the race from Falaise to the Seine River, the SFR recce troop were packet escorts. Command wanted to keep the steel tracked tracks off the undamaged roads, and ordered the columns to skirt along field edges and forest tracks. With few maps, the Stuarts shepherded the tanks from one form-up point to the next. The other was very late in the war when the road network up on the North Sea Coast was too soft and narrow for Shermans. Recce troop with attachments lifted a company-minus sized infantry force onto their objective.