The ‘Final’ British Cruiser Tank That Finally Outgunned The Panther Six Weeks Before VE Day –  Hw

February 20, 1945. A railway siding in Brussels. Crews of the 23rd Hussars stood looking at the new tanks that had just been unloaded. They had spent months in Shermans. They had watched friends burn inside them. They had learned what happened when a 75-mm gun met a Panther’s front plate at 600 yards. These tanks were different.

Lower, heavier in the turret. A long fat barrel with a counterweight at the muzzle. The Brigade War Diary recorded the moment plainly. According to the 29th Armoured Brigade War Diary, the men were pleased to get the Comet. Criticized the lack of a sloped glacis, but felt honored to be the first Armoured Brigade equipped with the new tanks.

Six weeks later, those crews would cross the Rhine. Six weeks after that, the war in Europe would be over. The Comet had arrived in time to prove a point and almost nothing else. This is the story of the tank that finally gave Britain a cruiser equal to the Panther. The tank that one Armoured Division took from the Rhine to the Baltic.

The tank that arrived six weeks before a V-E Day, fired in anger for 40 days, and then shaped every British main battle tank that came after it. For five years, British tank crews fought with guns that could not kill what they faced. The Crusader’s two-pounder was outmatched in the desert. The Cromwell’s 75-mm could break a Panzer IV, but not a Panther.

The Sherman Firefly carried a 17-pounder, but it was an improvisation. An American hull with a British gun crammed into a turret never designed for it. The crew was cut to four. The cartridge was so long the loader struggled. And the Firefly was always a minority weapon. One per troop of four tanks. Meanwhile, Germany fielded the Panther Ausf.

G with 80 mm of glacis armor sloped at 55°. Line of sight thickness, roughly 140 mm. The Tiger I carried an 88-mm gun that could kill a Sherman at 2,000 yards. British Armoured doctrine was built around speed and exploitation, but you cannot exploit if you cannot kill the enemy when you reach him. In May 1943, engineers at Vickers admitted defeat on a separate problem.

Their high-velocity 75-mm gun, intended for the Cromwell, was too large for the Cromwell’s 57-in turret ring. The General Staff issued a new specification, designation A34. Requirement, a cruiser tank carrying a high-velocity 76.2-mm gun in a properly designed turret. Not bolted on, not improvised, designed in.

Leyland Motors became the design parent. Henry Spurrier III oversaw the work. The first wooden mock-up was complete by September 1943. The first mild steel prototypes were running in February 1944. And the heart of the design was a gun that did not officially exist. The Comet’s main armament was called the 77-mm high-velocity.

It was not 77-mm, it was 76.2-mm, identical to the 17-pounder, identical to the American 76- mm gun, identical to the old British 3-in 20-cwt anti-aircraft gun. The Tank Museum’s curators have explained the reason directly. The number was a logistical fiction invented to stop ammunition mix-ups between four different 76.2-mm guns whose rounds would not interchange.

The official designation was Ordnance Quick Firing 77-mm Mark II. Vickers built it by taking the high-velocity 75-mm barrel concept, re-boring it to 76.2, and mating it to a shorter, fatter cartridge case derived from the 3-in 20-cwt. It fired the same projectiles as the 17-pounder, but the cartridge was 30% smaller.

That meant a smaller breech, less recoil, and a gun that fit a 64-in turret ring with a five-man crew still inside it. With armor-piercing capped ballistic capped ammunition, the 77-HV achieved roughly 126 mm of penetration at 1,000 m. The Panther’s 75-mm KwK 42 managed 111 at the same range. The Tiger 88-mm KwK 36 100 with armor-piercing discarding sabot issued in limited quantities from late 1944, the 77 HV reached 165 mm at 1,000 m.

That was more than the Panther’s tungsten cord armor-piercing composite rigid round at the same distance. A 33-ton cruiser tank now had genuine parity with one of the most feared German guns of the war. The full vehicle came in at 33.2 metric tons combat loaded. 7.66 m long with the gun forward, 3.07 wide.

The Rolls-Royce Meteor Mark III V12 derived from the Merlin aero engine produced 600 horsepower at 2,550 revolutions per minute. Power to weight, 18.3 horsepower per ton. The transmission was the Merritt-Brown five-speed. Top speed was governed to 32.4 mph, deliberately limited to extend the running gear’s life under the heavier weight.

The hull was fully welded, a major advance over the Cromwell’s mixed construction. Glacis armor was 32 mm at a shallow angle. The driver’s visor plate vertical was 76 mm. The turret front, 102 mm with a cast section incorporating the mantlet. The suspension was the last Christie type ever fitted to a British cruiser with vertical coil springs, bellcrank linkages, and four track return rollers added per side.

Tracks were 18 in wide, 4 in wider than the Cromwell’s. The crew was five, commander, gunner, and loader in the turret, driver and hull gunner in front. Turret traverse was electric, a Metadyne system, 360° in roughly 15 seconds. Production was deliberately scattered across four firms. Leyland built 610, English Electric 276, John Fowler of Leeds, 150.

Metropolitan Cammell, 150. Total, 1,186. The original requirement was for 3,000. Orders were cut as the Centurion came closer to service. If you’re enjoying this deep dive into British engineering, hit subscribe. It costs nothing, and it tells the algorithm to show this content to other people who care about the details.

Now, the combat record. The Comet was supposed to enter service in the summer of 1944. It did not. Defect rectification, suspension reinforcement, ammunition stowage changes, and the addition of metal idler wheels delayed pilot acceptance from March 1944 to the autumn. The first production tank rolled out of Leyland in October.

By December, 31 Comets were in France, ready to re-equip the 29th Armoured Brigade of the 11th Armoured Division. Then, on December 16th, 1944, the Battle of the Bulge began. The Brigade was rushed back to its old Shermans, hastily whitewashed, and held the Meuse between Namur and Givet. On December 24th to 26th, they stopped Kampfgruppe Bohm of the 2nd Panzer Division near Dinant.

Conversion to Comets resumed only in mid-January 1945. The division was not declared fully ready until late February. No Comet saw operational combat before late March. The 11th Armoured Division crossed the Rhine at Wesel on March 27th, 1945. Three regiments carried the Comet. 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, 23rd Hussars, 2nd Fife and Forfar Yeomanry.

They were the only fully Comet equipped division in the British Army before VE Day. The advance was fast by any measure of 1945. April 1st, heavy fighting in the Teutoburg Forest against fanatical instructors from the Hanover NCO school. April 2nd and 3rd, the division pushed onto Osnabrück. April 5th, the Weser.

April 7th, Comets of the 2nd Fife and 4th of Yeomanry crossed the Weser at Petershagen. Photographed by an Imperial War Museum cameraman in images that survived today. April 15th, two squadrons of the 23rd Hussars were among the first British troops into the gates of Bergen-Belsen. April 18th, the Elbe. May 2nd, the ultimate pursuit to Lübeck.

May 8th, VE Day. The 23rd Hussars stood on the Baltic coast. Of every engagement fought by Comet crews in those 40 days, one stands above the rest. It is also the only fully documented case of a Comet killing a tiger. On the night of April 11th to 12th, 1945, the 1st Commando Brigade and 4 King’s Shropshire Light Infantry seized a bridgehead over the River Aller near Essel.

On the morning of April 12th, 3rd Royal Tank Regiment Comets were rafted across by the Royal Engineers. A squadron’s lead troop under Lieutenant Johnny Langdon encountered a Tiger I commanded by Unteroffizier Erich Fransen, a survivor of the disbanded Panzer Demonstration School at Fallingbostel range, approximately 600 m. Langdon fired first.

His round did not penetrate. He reversed into the trees. Fransen’s 88-mm then hit a second Comet three times. The crew bailed out. The tank was a write-off, the first documented Comet lost to enemy armor. The next morning, April 13th, Sergeant Harding’s Comet led the squadron forward. Fransen’s tiger sat in the road. As the tiger traversed onto Harding, Harding maneuvered to the flank.

At approximately 100 m, his 77-mm penetrated the tiger’s hull side. The tiger caught fire. Fransen’s crew bailed out and survived. According to the Tank Museum, Fransen later remarked he was impressed the British did not machine gun his men as they ran. This is the only firmly documented Tiger I killed by a Comet in the Second World War.

It was won by maneuver into a flank shot. That is exactly how the textbook said it should be done. The honest combat picture matters. There is no specific named dated Comet versus Panther engagement in the standard literature. Most Panthers met by 11th Armoured Division in late April were destroyed by 6th Airborne Division and 5th United States Armoured Division.

The Comet’s record against the Panther is general, not specific, and the November 1944 trial conducted by the 2nd Fife and Forfar Yeomanry firing the 77 mm armour-piercing capped ballistic capped round at a captured Panther found that the round did not reliably penetrate the Panther glacis. With armour-piercing discarding sabot, the Comet had genuine superiority.

With standard ammunition against the Panther’s frontal arc, it was comparable, not crushing. Total Comet losses in action, 26 tanks. The number is small because the war was short by then. Comparison forces clarity. Against the Sherman Firefly, the Comet was the better all-round vehicle. Same projectile, but the Firefly was an improvisation. The Firefly hit harder.

The Comet was faster, lower, kept its five-man crew, and was designed around its gun rather than crammed onto an existing hull. Against the American M4A3E8 Easy Eight, the Comet’s 77 HV out-penetrated the United States 76 mm gun by roughly 18% at all ranges. The Easy Eight had wider tracks, lower ground pressure, and better cross-country mobility.

The Comet was faster on roads with a better power-to-weight ratio. They were the two best Allied medium tanks of 1945. Against the Tiger I, the Comet was faster, more reliable, equally armed at long range with armour-piercing discarding sabot, and superior in every operational metric except frontal armour.

Against its own predecessor, the Cromwell, the Comet improved firepower by roughly 50%, increased turret front armour from 76 to 102 mm, and replaced bolted construction with welded. About 60% of components were modified. Only the engine, the gearbox, and the basic suspension philosophy carried over. The Comet served the British Army of the Rhine until 1957.

It served the Hong Kong Garrison until 1960. It trained Royal Armoured Corps crews and Yeomanry reservists until 1969. South Africa bought 26 in 1953. Cuba bought 15 in December 1958, weeks before Castro entered Havana. Finland bought 41 in 1959 and 60. Ireland bought eight. Burma bought roughly 25 and ceremonially fielded them on Armed Forces Day as recently as March 27, 2021. Two myths follow the Comet around.

The first is Korea. The Comet did not fight in Korea. The claim originates from a miscaptioned Imperial War Museum photograph of a tank labeled as moving toward the front line in Korea. The 4th and 7th Royal Tank Regiment regimental history confirms that the squadron sent to Korea took Churchills and Churchill crocodiles.

The Comet-equipped squadron stayed at Set Kong in Hong Kong. British armor in Korea was Centurions, 8th Hussars, 5th Dragoon Guards, 1st Royal Tank Regiment, and Churchills, 7th Royal Tank Regiment. The second is the Bay of Pigs. Cuban Comets had been retired or abandoned before 1961. Cuban armor at Playa Girón was T-34/85 and IS-2M, not Comet.

The Centurion, the tank that became the most successful Western design of the post-war era, was already in prototype trials when the Comet entered combat. The Centurion specification was issued in July 1943, the same season as the A34. The Centurion inherited the Rolls-Royce Meteor engine. It inherited the Merritt Brown derived transmission concept.

It inherited the philosophy of a high-velocity gun in a low-profile turret on a heavy cruiser hull. The lineage runs Cromwell-Comet-Centurion. The Comet is the bridge. So, return to the railway siding in Brussels, February 20, 1945. The crews of the 23rd Hussars looking at their new tanks, the Sherman they had spent the previous summer dying in, the Comet they would take from Weasel to Lubeck.

The Imperial War Museum has written that the Comet was certainly the best British tank of the war, but only saw action in the last weeks of hostilities. That is the honest verdict. It did not win the war. It did not arrive in time to change a campaign. It killed only one documented Tiger. It lost 26 of its own.

But for one armored division in the final 40 days of the war in Europe, it gave British tank crews something they had not had since 1939, a cruiser tank that was the equal of the German tank facing it. The 77 mm high velocity gun was a logistical lie that delivered honest firepower. The hull was a Cromwell that had been told to grow up.

The Christie suspension was on its last appearance in British service. The crew was five men in a turret designed around their gun, not their gun crammed in around them. British engineering had taken five years to catch up. It caught up with six weeks of war remaining, and every Centurion, every Conqueror, every Chieftain, and every Challenger that came afterwards carried something of that 33-ton cruiser named for a celestial body that finally outgunned the Panther just as the night was ending.

QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.