Sunday 24 April 2016

Combine harvester of the fields of death

For some reason, my most popular post earlier this year was  "Men with silly hats in tiny tanks." Either people really like pictures of tanks, or they really like silly LOLpics. To find out which, I'm going to post a non-silly tank pic and see how many people click. If many, I'll know you're here for the charismatic megafauna of the battlefield (© Charlie Stoss). If few, more LOLs needed.
A Sherman Crab flail tank in front of burning buildings in Arnhem, 14 April 1945. Made by: No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit. © Imperial War Museum (BU 3515).
The M4 Sherman hasn't got a very impressive reputation, but it was produced in impressive numbers (more Shermans rolled off US production lines than the total number of tanks manufactured by the British and Germans combined in the whole of the Second World War). And you have to admit that the mine-clearing variant, implacably beating a path through minefields and barbed wire entanglements with heavy chains on a rotating drum, looked pretty impressive in a strangely medieval way.

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