Grizzly Firefly

[David Herbert]

Has anyone managed to get inside to see if this Grizzly has the full Firefly conversion or is just a Firefly turret and gun sitting on a standard Grizzly hull. The Firefly conversion entailed an almost complete rearrangement of the hull stowage and deletion of the hull gunner to make room for 17pdr stowage, hence the welding of a plate over the bow 30cal hole. The turret basket was heavily butchered with a massive structure of steel joists to provide a mounting for the elevation mechanism.

As Hanno says, by the end of 1943 the production of Shermans in the US has built up to the point where the desperate need had subsided and so Canadian production got cut back more and more, leaving Sextons as the only output as they were of no interest to the Americans despite being much better designed than Priests.

I have seen no evidence that any Grizzlies actually saw combat but one Skink (the anti aircraft version) was sent for trials in action. As the Germans had few planes in action by then this trial did not prove much and the Skink project died. However the Grizzlies did provide a modern tank to train with in Canada.

David