Tank Specialists

We all became special in the jobs that we were doing. But the thing was that we had the Churchill tank at the time, and that wasn't the tank that we had to use. It was a lumbering giant that had a... I think... the gun they had on it was no match for anything the Germans had. We started off with a two pound shell. Eventually we got, we heard that we were getting the Sherman tank. We got the, also the Sherman tank only had a three pound shell. But it was a good tank and we knew that we could use that tank, and... going into action that we can stand up against the Germans. We were five people in the tank: driver, co-driver, gunner, radio operator, and the crew commander. And we could interchange. That was what our training was, that we could take over the driving. The radio operator was different because at that time we used morse code, there was no, we only had a small intercom between the various tanks, the other tanks in the troop. So the radio operator was essential. The gunner was essential because it was him who fired the gun and did the calculations what had to be done. So, we had to know the other person's job. Once somebody got hurt or something, then we had to see that we could replace them right away, until replacements came up.