The Sherman was faster, easier to fix. You could ship it across an ocean and have it fighting the same afternoon it rolled off the transport. But the Churchill could take a hit that would have brewed up a Sherman three times over, and its gun could kill German tanks at ranges the Shermans couldn’t touch.
So, what happened when you put them together? That’s the story. two tanks, two completely different philosophies, one war, and a general named Bernard Montgomery, who understood that neither of them could win it alone, who built his entire invasion force around that understanding, who fought his own war office to keep both tanks in the field when the bureaucrats wanted to scrap one and standardize on the other.
But before any of that could work, before the partnership, before Montgomery’s strategy, before any of it, there was a catastrophe on a beach in France that nearly killed the Churchill program dead. August 19th, 1942, DEP. And here’s the thing about DEP that almost nobody explains properly. The beach wasn’t sand.
Forget every image you have of Normandy. Those wide golden flats where landing crafts slide up and vehicles roll off onto firm ground. Deep’s beach was ch flint shingle. Billions of smooth rounded stones, some the size of golf balls, some the size of your fist, banked into a steep slope running from the waterline up to a concrete prominard and seaw wall.
beautiful in peacetime photographs, pale gray and blue white, polished by centuries of channel tides. On that August morning, they became the graveyard of the Churchill tanks reputation. The 14th Canadian Army Tank Regiment, the Calgary Regiment, went in with 58 Churchills, mostly MK3s armed with six pounder guns, plus a handful of earlier Marks and three experimental Oak Flamethrower conversions.
This was the Churchill’s combat debut. First time the tank would face enemy fire in any real numbers. It lasted minutes. When the first Churchills rolled off their landing craft ramps onto that shingle, the tracks couldn’t grip. Those smooth rounded stones acted like ball bearings beneath the steel links, shifting and sliding instead of compacting the way soil or sand would.
Worse, the loose pebbles got kicked up into the suspension assemblies, jammed between the track links, and sheared the track pins clean off. tanks that threw a track on that sliding unstable slope simply couldn’t be recovered under fire. Of the 29 Churchills that actually made it to shore, many landing craft were sunk or forced back.
The majority were immobilized on that shingle bank within minutes. Maybe 15 clawed their way up to the sea wall. Two or three broke through into the town beyond, where narrow streets and anti-tank obstacles stopped them almost immediately. Not a single Churchill was re-embarked. Every tank that landed at DEP was lost. The Calgary regiment lost 24 officers and 157 other ranks killed, wounded or captured.
Across the entire raid, 97 Canadians were killed, 586 wounded who made it back to England, and 1946 taken prisoner. Total Allied casualties exceeded 3,600 from a force of roughly 6,000. German propaganda photographers had a field day. Rows of Churchills sitting helpless on that miserable shingle, knocked out, abandoned. The tank that bore the prime minister’s own name looking like a very expensive failure.
Within weeks, serious voices in the War Office and the Ministry of Supply were asking whether the Churchill was worth continuing at all. Slow, mechanically troubled in its early marks, and now publicly humiliated in its first real fight. The Churchill was dangerously close to cancellation. But the men who mattered most weren’t looking at the photographs.
They were reading the afteraction reports and the conclusions were unmistakable. The tanks hadn’t failed because they were bad tanks. They’d failed because they’d been asked to do something no one had prepared them for. Cross terrain that negated their strengths without any engineering solution to compensate. That lesson filed away, studied, eventually acted upon would come back.
And that’s when things got interesting because the question that saved the Churchill wasn’t why did this tank fail. It was what do we need to build so that next time it doesn’t. Someone’s grandfather, and I say someone’s because stories like this live in families all over Britain, trained on churchills in Northern Ireland in 1941 or 1942.
There’s a story about a churchill coming around a corner on Belfast cobblestones and simply not being able to stop. The tracks had no more purchase on those wet smooth cobbles than they’d later have on the shingle at DP and 40 tons of infantry tank slid with terrible inevitability straight through the front of a shop.
Nobody was killed, but the image is vivid, half comic, half prophetic. The cobblestones were telling the same story the shingle would tell a year later. On smooth, hard surfaces, the Churchill struggled, but on mud, on broken ground, on steep hills that would leave other tanks spinning uselessly at the bottom.
That was a different machine entirely. The Churchill was an infantry tank designed from day one to advance at walking pace alongside foot soldiers, absorbing punishment that would destroy anything lighter. Its front armor was substantially thicker than anything the Sherman carried. Thick enough that the standard German 5 cm anti-tank gun, the weapon that could punch through a Sherman’s front plate at typical combat ranges, simply bounced off the Churchill’s hull.
The tank topped out at barely 15 mph on a good road. Cross country it lumbered, but it was built low and long with tracks running nearly the entire length of the hull, spreading its weight across an enormous ground contact area. That engineering gave the Churchill a climbing ability that bordered on absurd gradients approaching 30° slopes that looked impossible terrain that would leave a Sherman stuck at the bottom wondering what just happened.
The Sherman was everything the Churchill wasn’t deliberately. It was America’s answer to a completely different question. How do you build a tank that a continental industrial base can produce by the tens of thousands? That mechanics with basic training can keep running, that ships across an ocean and fights immediately. Faster, simpler, available in quantities Britain’s war economy could never match.
Its 75 mm gun was a genuine dualpurpose weapon. Decent armor-piercing round against enemy tanks. excellent high explosive round against infantry positions, buildings, and soft targets. The Churchill’s six pounder was a specialist anti-tank instrument that initially lacked any useful high explosive shell at all.
The Sherman’s 75 mm could do a bit of everything tolerably well, but the Sherman paid for that versatility with thinner armor and a taller, narrower profile that made it less stable on slopes and more vulnerable in the close-range fights that infantry support demanded. A Sherman caught in the open by a well-sighted German anti-tank gun was in serious trouble.
A Churchill advancing into that same fire could absorb hits that would have killed a Sherman crew and keep rolling forward. This wasn’t a rivalry. It was a marriage, and Montgomery was about to become the man who officiated it. The Churchill got its chance at redemption in the hills of Tunisia, winter and spring of 1942 into 1943.
And it seized that chance in a way that changed how the British Army and Montgomery specifically thought about armor for the rest of the war. units including the 51st Royal Tank Regiment and the North Irish Horse brought their Churchills into action around Longtop Hill and Hunts Gap. The rugged jebbles of Northern Tunisia, where Axis forces held strong defensive positions on high ground, dominating the valleys and passes below.
The German defenders had cited their anti-tank guns to cover the obvious approaches, roads, valley floors, because conventional wisdom said tanks couldn’t climb those steep, rocky North African hills. Anti-tank crews sat behind their weapons, watching the low ground, confident that the high ground behind them was safe.
The Churchills climbed them anyway. Picture this from a German anti-tank gunner’s perspective. You’re positioned on a hillside covering a valley road, exactly where you’ve been told to be. You’ve been briefed that enemy tanks will come along that road. You’ve watched your sector for days, maybe weeks. You know the ranges. You know the angles.
And then you hear engine noise, not from the valley below, but from the slope above and to your left. a slope your officers told you was impossible to armor. You turn and there’s a Churchill grinding over the crest, turret already traversing toward your position. 40 tons of tank on terrain that wasn’t supposed to be possible.
The psychological shock alone broke positions before the six pounder even fired. In engagement after engagement around Longtop Hill, Churchills of the North Irish horse ground their way up escarments the Germans had written off as impossible to armor, appearing on flanks and ridgeel lines where no defender had expected to see a tank.
The technique was deliberate. Commanders had studied the terrain beforehand and identified routes that looked suicidal on a map, but which the Churchill’s long track footprint and low center of gravity could actually manage. They’d send infantry scouts up first to confirm the ground was solid enough. Then the Churchills would go, engines screaming at full power, tracks biting into the rocky soil, the entire hull pitched at an angle that made the crews inside feel like the tank was about to tip backwards and roll down the hill.
Sometimes a tank stalled. Sometimes one threw a track on a rock outcrop and had to be recovered after the fight. But enough of them made it. always enough to change the geometry of the battle entirely. German positions cighted to cover flat approaches suddenly found themselves being engaged from above or from the side.
Anti-tank guns that had been carefully positioned to kill Shermans and Valentines on the valley floor were now facing armor coming from behind from angles their gun shields couldn’t traverse to meet. And when those guns did manage to get a roundoff against the Church Hills, the results only deepened the shock. The standard German 5cm anti-tank gun, the weapon that could punch through a Sherman’s front plate at typical combat ranges, hit the Churchill’s front armor and bounced.
Crews reported the experience of hearing round after round strike their tank and fail to penetrate. a metallic clang, a vibration through the hull, and nothing. Just the sound of a weapon that couldn’t hurt them. That sound bred a fierce confidence in the vehicle and a fierce loyalty to it that would last through the rest of the war.
At typical Tunisian engagement distances, the Churchill six-pounder could defeat the frontal armor of the Panza 3 and Panza 4, the backbone of German armored strength in the theater at ranges where those same tanks guns struggled to get through the Churchill’s front plate. A lopsided exchange that favored the Churchill enormously.
This was the complimentary relationship made tangible in North African dust. The six-pounder Churchill killed tanks. The Sherman’s 75 mm killed everything else. Two different weapons for two different jobs and each one essential. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who would command the 21st Army Group for the assault on Normandy, watched these reports with the close attention of a man already planning the biggest amphibious invasion in history.
He’d seen what the Sherman could do, the speed, the reliability, the sheer numbers that American production made possible. And now he was seeing what the Churchill could do in terrain where the Sherman couldn’t follow. The Jebels of Tunisia were proving something that the cobblestones of Belfast and the shingle of Deep had only hinted at.
The Churchill wasn’t a failed Sherman. It was a different instrument entirely, and Montgomery was already composing the orchestral arrangement that would use both in France. Which brings us to the fight nobody makes films about, but which mattered just as much as any battle. the fight inside the War Office.
By late 1943, Montgomery had been named commander of the 21st Army Group, the force that would assault Normandy. He was many things, abrasive, vain, theatrically confident, maddeningly certain he was right about everything. He was also the kind of commander who controlled the composition of his forces down to a level of detail that drove staff officers to distraction.
and he walked straight into a bureaucratic war that had been raging since before DEP. The war office wanted standardization. There was pressure to standardize on the Sherman which was available in far greater numbers thanks to American production and lend lease and to retire the Churchill as an unnecessary complication in the logistics chain.
The argument had a brutal logic to it. Why maintain two completely separate families of tank? Churchills with their different engines, different tracks, different ammunition, different maintenance manuals when you could just fill every regiment with Shermans and call it done. Montgomery’s answer was precise and immovable because they can’t do the same job.
His most consequential decision was a directive that Churchill tanks armed with six pounder guns be retained on strength alongside Sherman equipped formations until the 17 pounder gun, the weapon that could defeat any German tank in service became available in sufficient quantities to re-equip those units. He understood that the six-p pounder Churchill gave his infantry divisions an anti-tank capability the Sherman’s 75 mm couldn’t match.
The ability to kill a Panza 4 or a Stug 3 from the front at ranges where the Sherman’s round might bounce off. The six pounder was a pure tank killer. The Sherman’s 75 mm was a jack of all trades. In the infantry support role, where Churchills would advance at walking pace alongside soldiers assaulting fortified positions, that anti-tank punch was the difference between stopping a German counterattack with armor and being overrun by it.
Losing those Churchills before the 17 pounder was ready would leave a gap in anti-tank performance that no number of Shermans could fill. The logistics officers protested. The supply chain people winced. Montgomery didn’t budge. He knew the difference between administrative convenience and tactical necessity.
And he picked necessity every single time. Think about what that tells us. The most important British general of the war didn’t want one perfect tank that could do everything. He wanted a partnership. He built the 21st Army Group’s order of battle around it. armored divisions, the mobile striking force, got Shermans, and in reconnaissance regiments, Cromwells.
These were the exploitation units meant to punch through gaps in the enemy line and race into the operational depth beyond, cutting supply lines, seizing bridges, spreading chaos. But the infantry divisions that did the grinding close-range fighting of breaking into a defensive position in the first place, they got independent tank brigades.
The sixth guard’s tank brigade, the 31st tank brigade, the 34th tank brigade equipped with Churchills, heavy armor for the hard fighting up front, speed and numbers for the exploitation that followed. two instruments, one orchestra. Montgomery was the conductor. And there was another piece to this story because the man who would turn the DEP disaster into the most creative armored engineering of the entire war was about to get his chance.
And that might have been just as important as the tank pairing itself. Major General Sir Percy Hobart was by 1940 one of the finest armored warfare theorists alive and simultaneously one of the most unemployable officers in the British army. He’d commanded the mobile division in Egypt, the formation that became the seventh armored division, the desert rats, and built it into a force that revolutionized desert warfare doctrine.
Promoted to major general in 1937, forced into retirement by 1940 because he simply could not stop antagonizing everyone around him. Brilliant, visionary, and absolutely impossible to work with. He clashed with superiors, alienated colleagues, and seemed to view diplomacy as a character flaw. He ended up as a lance corporal in the home guard.
A major general pulling volunteer shifts with a rifle. Then Duncan Sans, Winston Churchill’s son-in-law, encountered Hobart in the Home Guard and reported the situation to the prime minister. Churchill, the man, was appalled that one of Britain’s foremost tank experts was guarding village crossroads. He wrote forcefully to the war office demanding Hobart be employed.
By 1941, Hobart was back commanding the 11th Armored Division. And on the 11th of March 1943, less than 7 months after DEP, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brookke, gave Hobart the 79th Armored Division with an extraordinary mandate. developed specialized armored vehicles and tactics to overcome the exact obstacles that had defeated the allies on that shingle beach.
The lessons of DEP tanks can’t cross obstacles, can’t grip beaches, can’t breach sea walls, were now literally the 79th Division’s mission brief. Hobart’s impossible personality came packaged with exactly the kind of ruthless engineering imagination the invasion needed and the vehicles his division produced would become integral to the force structure that Montgomery was building for Normandy.
What followed was one of the most intensive and secretive development programs of the war. Everything was classified. Crews were told nothing about the invasion, only that they were testing new equipment and that they would not discuss their work with anyone. Not family, not friends, not soldiers from other units.
The men of the 79th trained with prototype vehicles that broke down constantly, that caught fire during demonstrations that occasionally tried to kill their own crews in ways their designers hadn’t anticipated. The crews themselves didn’t love the nickname funnies. They were training for the most dangerous job in the invasion, and people were calling their vehicles funny.
But Hobart’s intensity was infectious. He drove from training ground to training ground, watching every exercise, demanding to know why a drill took 3 minutes when it should take two, why a vehicle bogged when it shouldn’t have, why a crew hesitated when hesitation on a real beach would mean death. He was maddening. He was also right.
And the men knew he was right, which is why they followed him. The vehicles that emerged from this program were extraordinary. The Churchill Avre replaced the main gun with a petard spigot mortar that threw a 40 lb demolition charge nicknamed the flying dust bin. At close range, it could shatter a concrete bunker wall or sea wall with a single shot.
Not elegant, devastating. The Churchill crocodile replaced the hull machine gun with a flame projector connected by armored pipe to a towed fuel trailer capable of sending a jet of liquid fire more than a 100 yards. The Churchill ARK was stripped of its turret and fitted with ramp structures. The tank drove into a ditch or up against a wall and literally became a bridge that other vehicles crossed over.
And the bobin carried a roll of reinforced matting that unrolled ahead of the tank over soft ground or shingle, giving following vehicles a stable surface to drive on. That last one, the bobin. Think about it. The direct answer to the beach at DEP. Built on the tank that Deep supposedly killed. The specialized Churchills were integrated into the assault plan for every British and Canadian beach on D-Day.
They would land with or ahead of the first wave, clearing the path for everything that followed. They were offered to the Americans as well. The Americans declined most of them accepting only the DD swimming Shermans and passing on the AVRE, the Crocodiles, the Bobbins, the ARKs, and the other specialist vehicles. Montgomery couldn’t force an Allied nation to accept equipment.
He could only offer. The Americans said no. The consequences of that decision are written in blood on the sand at Omaha. But that’s getting ahead. First, the men inside these machines. There’s a man alive today, or his children are because his father came ashore in a petard tank on D-Day. A Churchill Avre loaded with that absurdl looking spigot mortar rolling off a landing craft into the surf on one of the British beaches.
On the morning of June 6th, 1944, the Avre crews had a job that was almost suicidally dangerous. Drive directly at a fortified position, get close enough to fire the Patard, effective at ranges measured in dozens of yards rather than hundreds, and put a 40 lb charge through a concrete wall while every German gun in the sector was trying to kill you.
The crew couldn’t reload the patard from inside the tank. Someone had to open the hatch, stand up in the middle of a firefight, and manually reload the mortar from outside. In the training, this drill had been practiced until it was muscle memory. On June 6th, muscle memory was the only thing standing between those men and death.
Think about that for a second. opening a hatch on a Normandy beach with machine gun fire and mortar rounds and artillery falling all around you to reload a weapon by hand. The Avre crews who did this on D-Day knew exactly what they were volunteering for. And a son exists because one of those crews survived. A family exists because a Churchill Avre did its job on a beach that the Calgary regiment’s Churchills couldn’t even cross 22 months earlier at DEP.
And the crocodile, there’s a story, the kind that gets told quietly with a certain gravity about a Churchill crocodile crew whose warning shots caused hardened German positions to surrender. Not the main blast, the warning. A brief tongue of flame across open ground, just enough to show the defenders what was coming.
And battleh hardardened German soldiers who had held their positions through artillery bombardments and infantry assaults threw down their weapons and came out with their hands up. The psychological impact of the crocodile was so extreme that German command eventually issued orders that crocodile crews should be shot upon capture.
which tells you everything you need to know about how effective the weapon was and how much danger those crews knowingly accepted every time they went into action. And still, when confronted with that jet of fire, men chose surrender over incineration. That’s not a weapon effect you measure in penetration figures.
That’s primal terror. And it saved lives on both sides. Because a position that surrenders is a position that doesn’t need to be destroyed with everyone in it. On D-Day itself, June 6th, 1944, the contrast was stark, and it vindicated everything Montgomery had planned. On gold, Juno, and soared beaches, Hobart’s funnies landed alongside the assault infantry.
A VR blew open seaw walls and bunkers. Crocodiles suppressed fortified positions. Bobbins laid paths across soft ground and treacherous shingle. Arks bridged ditches and obstacles. The specialized Churchills worked in direct partnership with the Sherman equipped formations that followed them through the gaps they’d created.
Churchills broke the defenses open. Shermans poured through exactly the way Montgomery designed it. Two instruments playing their assigned parts in an arrangement one man had been composing since the lessons of DP first demanded an answer. On Omaha Beach, the Americans went in without the funnies.
They had DD Shermans, swimming tanks, most of which sank in heavy seas before reaching shore. They had raw courage in abundance. What they didn’t have were the specialized engineering vehicles that could clear the obstacles, bridge the gaps, and suppress the bunkers that were killing men by the hundred in the surf.
The casualties at Omaha, the bloodiest of the five invasion beaches by a considerable margin, speak for themselves. Nobody can say with certainty that Hobart’s funnies would have prevented those losses. But the British and Canadian beaches where the Funnies operated were secured faster and with significantly fewer casualties relative to the strength of the defenses.
Montgomery had bet on the partnership. The partnership delivered. So here’s where we end up. A tank that couldn’t grip the rocks at DP that nearly got cancelled as a failure that sat stranded on a shingle beach while German photographers snapped pictures for propaganda leaflets. That same chassis improved, adapted, re-imagined by a brilliant, difficult general named Hobart and made integral to the force structure of another brilliant, difficult general named Montgomery, cracked open the Atlantic wall on D-Day.
It did this alongside Shermans, not instead of them. The Churchills absorbed the punishment, breached the defenses, climbed the terrain the Shermans couldn’t reach, and terrified German defenders into surrender with weapons that hadn’t existed 2 years before. The Shermans exploited the gaps, raced inland, and brought the speed and numbers that the Churchill could never provide.
Montgomery built his entire force structure around this partnership. He fought the war office to keep six pounder Churchills in service when the standardizers wanted to scrap them. He ensured that the funnies were part of every British and Canadian assault wave on D-Day. He offered them to the Americans.
He did all of this because he understood something that the spec sheet obsessives and the one tank to rule them all advocates never quite grasped. No single machine wins a war. combinations do. Partnerships do. And the men inside the machines, the crews who climbed impossible hills in Tunisia, who drove through shops in Belfast, who opened hatches under fire on Normandy beaches to reload a mortar by hand, who sent a tongue of flame across no man’s land and watched their enemies choose life over resistance.
Those men were the reason any of it worked at all. For every family with a grandfather who crewed a churchill, grinding up impossible slopes, crawling through the bokeage, projecting fire that ended fights before they started. And for every family with a grandfather who crewed a Sherman, racing through gaps the Churchills had opened, outflanking positions the infantry tanks had pinned, carrying the fight forward at a speed the Churchill couldn’t match.
The truth is the same. Your grandfather’s machine wasn’t fighting alone. It was half of something deliberate, something planned at the highest level of command, something that Montgomery designed on purpose because he understood what these two tanks could do together that neither could do a part.
Neither the Churchill nor the Sherman won the war alone. Together, with the men inside them, they did. Subscribe for more stories like
