Canadian Sherman II in 21AG

[gcrossley]

Thanks for the post Hanno, I was just looking through my old email messages, and found the following that you had sent me in May 2000.

"Although it would be nice if this was an original wartime tank, it surely is not. It is one of fifty M4A1E9's received through MDAP in 1951/52. Despite the 'field mod' appearance, I can assure you that the spaced-out suspension conversion was carried out in a US Tank Depot.
The Royal Netherlands Army's Sherman tanks were replaced by Centurion tanks during the 1953-1958 time frame (although some soldiered on until 1964 with an Sappers unit).
The Woensdrecht Sherman used to be located on a local army training ground (I have c.1970's pictures of it), until it was recovered from there and put up as a memorial.
The mention that one-third of the Sherman memorials are painted in FGH markings stems from the fact that there are six memorial Shermans in Holland, of which one is an original FGH tank and one other is marked as such."

The Sherman II listed, T149805, is from a Vehicle State of 28 March 1945. It does not appear on the list of vehicles turned in to the Demobilization Depot in Nijmegen in June, July, and November of 1945, so was presumable lost in action or otherwise written off between 28 March and 6 May.

The document does not state what troop it belonged to.

Looking through the remainder of our documents I found four numbers in the same general block identified as follows:

T149808 Sherman V
T149885 Sherman V
T149801 Sherman V DD
T149963 Sherman V DD

Interesting that a II would be only 3 digits away from a V.

We are really looking forward to our visit. I will post our planned itinerary somewhere on this forum in the near future. Perhaps we can meet up with some of you in our travels.

Gord