now I know this is another Sherman and we've done a lot of Sherman's already
but it is a very special tank not only that it's fairly new to the collection
so it's worth doing anyway it's an m4 a4 what in Britain was known
as a Sherman five and although we've already done it as the Sherman Firefly
because that's from the same hull this is the actual original gun tank it was the
type of American tank most widely used by British soldiers towards the end of
the war and that's one of the main reasons for doing it otherwise to look
at it's just another Sherman with the welded hull the original vertical volute
suspension and the same turret with a 75 millimeter gun but what really sets this
tank apart is the engine it's one of the reasons why the tank is a good bit
longer it's actually 11 inches longer than any other Sherman and therefore
you've got more space in the suspension it was done because the engine itself is
a lot larger than the engines fitted to the other Sherman's
the engine in this case is what's known as the Chrysler a 57 multi-bank and it
actually consists if you look at it closely of five six cylinder engines all
clustered around a central crankcase so in other words you've got thirty
cylinders so there's thirty plugs need changing all clustered around this
central crankcase when it was first built it would develop about two or
450 horsepower actually which wasn't bad it wasn't quite up to British Standards
but it was quite enough for a tank of this size otherwise it's basically an
ordinary Sherman but the engine is something to notice something to to
study later they were fitted with them collective carburetors near the top so
they're easy the service and collective water pumps but the one we've
got in the museum which I'll see in this program has got the carburetors spread
around with each block of each set of six cylinders so you gonna really have
to use your eyes to bring them all together if you like but it's quite an
interesting tank all the same petrol of course they didn't have diesel in these
things it was a petrol engine a few of them we issued to the United States Army
but only for training in American service it was generally not terribly
popular and they more or less decided not to use it as a fighting tank so they
did the very next best thing they gave it to the Brits and in Britain it was
adored once they sorted out the problem with the engine
trained the mechanics to service it they found it was reliable powerful and apart
from having to change to lift the engine out every time you wanted to change a
plug it was really quite reliable so that's really the secret of this tank it
was only ever used by British forces or later we supplied them to the Chinese
who used them as well but they were used for everybody except the Americans who
were never anything to do with them and you can understand why they had the Ford
v8 which was a much better engine but the tank has been built in this way and
the only reason they did it was because there was such a demand for the
Continental radials as aircraft engines at this time that they decided to get
everybody to build an engine of their own and this was done in the case of
Chrysler originally with the m3 a4 version of the Li which was quite a
rarity they've only built hundred 25 them but no sooner had they got
production underway with delay than the m4 Sherman came along so they decided to
switch over and make a motive bank version of that quite an effective
later on but a lot of trouble to begin with a lot of trouble training engineers
and getting a reliable engine to work quite effective otherwise that looked at
normally it's just another Sherman the only thing I would point out to you
these applique armor panels on the side they have welded over the places inside
the tank where there are vulnerable things like
ammunition storage so they weld it over to make the MD sort of internal
ammunition a bit less vulnerable and you'll find them here
Iran tele on the turret in this case normally you had two on the front of the
turret on the cheek pieces they're not on which suggests that the turret from
this tank probably came from somewhere else but never mind that now then what
matters is that they're here on the side of the house where you need them and the
basic tank is still more or less like any other Sherman but they did operate
very reliably the other thing they had was a new form of oil gear Traverse
mechanism the original Westinghouse was quite good but it wasn't very accurate
the old gear was tremendously accurate it meant you could train the turret on
any target quickly and easily and it would stop we wanted it to so it made
the Gunners job a lot easier and yet they were another characteristic of the
Sherman v which is this version it's in the markings of guards armored division
which used them of course quite a lot in fact they were used by other regiments
as well in the British Army so they are quite a popular tank or they were in
their day and barring the fact you had to lift out the engine as I say to do
maintenance on it the rest of it was fairly
straightforward and that's what made this tank such an effective machine so
this is it the m4a4 with the wider suspension but it's an ordinary gun tank
not a Firefly which is what the longer can anyway you'd tell it at once but
that's why they did it this one has the full crew
five three in the turret and two in the how the how the sheen gun is missing
from this vehicle but that isn't the difficult things slide one in place and
that's how the tank is put together okay now if you enjoyed that the film regular
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