![]() Just imagine yourself in a rough sea with waves up to 9 feet high! And yes there was a water pump to pump out the water under the tank but at one point the water pump simply couldn’t keep up. So, you are probably asking yourself: “surely the tanks were water sealed?” The answer is yes but… it didn’t stop the water to come through the bolt holes inside the canvas screen, often with more or less a foot of water splashing against the DD tank. As you can imagine it was crucial that the canvas screen top didn’t collapse, or they were done. ![]() In reality the crew stayed out of the tank to continuously put pressure with their backs against the canvas screen! Why? To hopefully prevent it from bowing in due to the waves and under-water pressure. During that time, the rest of the crew would stay out of the tank as long as possible, just in case it sank! So, the idea was this: he would be looking ashore as they were navigating hoping to find the landmark he had been told to aim for. Needless to say, that to be able to steer a 32-ton Sherman tank in rough water was a combination of skill and luck! Theoretically, the tank commander would stand on the outside, he had a long tiller, which operated the ball and socket propellers at the back of the tank, to presumably enable him to steer…in theory. An additional soldier was at the front of the hull to fire his machine-gun. The crew consisted of a commander, a driver, two men in the turret, the loader and the gunner. His greatest success story, for which the Royal Commission gave him an award after the war, was the famous DD tank. Nicholas Straussler, a Hungarian who had moved over to England in the late 1930s was the one who invented the DD Tank flotation system used by the Allies on D-Day in Normandy.īack in the 30s, he was one of those people who was inventing things all the time, kind of a clever twisted genius! Now who came up with the idea of the DD Tank? That was the task of the DD Amphibious tanks, a success at Utah beach, a failure at Omaha beach. What they needed were big guns, additional to the artillery, that could blast holes in whatever defences were on the coastline of Omaha and Utah beach. Having those DD tanks shoot straight back at them would surely have been a motivator for the enemy and a saviour for the soldiers! The engineers and infantry would be very vulnerable when they landed on the shore as the enemy would fire upon them. The first target of those enemy gun emplacements would have been the officers, medics, engineers and infantry unless there was a more interesting target for the enemy to shoot at! The Atlantic Wall had gun emplacements all along the coastline In Normandy, usually 75mm or 88mm and inland 105mm up to 240mm guns. In theory, of course, that was the objective. The second being for the DD tanks to be able to “swim” autonomously, hit the beach, drop its canvas screen and fire straight away on the enemy positions. Taking that in consideration, the main challenge was to find a way of deploying the DD tanks out, send them in with the first wave of engineers & infantry while making sure they were not together on the same ship!Īchieving this was the first of the two crucial tasks on D-Day! If you had a dozen DD tanks loaded on an LCT, let's not forget that the LCT needed only one direct precise hit from an enemy gun to sink, and the Germans as far as being precise, were! If that had happened, that squadron of DD tanks would have been lost! The main challenge was to get the DD tanks as near as possible to the beach as quickly as possible while making sure they wouldn’t sink with their crew! Duplex Drive Amphibious Tank D-Day Challenge - Omaha Beach
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