- 18 hours ago
Bomb, the Canadian Sherman that the Germans could not seem to knock out, survived 11 months of Normandy, Belgium, Holland, and Germany by a mix of courage, field repairs, and hard-won battlefield experience. The tank rolled off Juno Beach with the Sherbrooke Fusilier Regiment, then fought through Authie, Bouron, Caen, Falaise, the Seine, and the final push into Germany with the same core crew and a string of commanders who were wounded along the way.
This military history documentary follows the Sherman tank Bomb from D-Day to VE Day, showing how a Montreal driver, an Alberta gunner, and a British Columbia loader kept the machine in the fight. The story looks at Panzer IVs, 88 mm guns, Panzerfaust attacks, improvised armor, and the dangerous job of a tank commander who had to stand exposed in the turret hatch to see the battlefield.
If you enjoy WW2 stories, Canadian war stories, tank combat, and narrated battlefield history, this is a powerful listen. It is ideal for viewers searching for Sherbrooke Fusilier Regiment history, Sherman tank documentary, Normandy campaign analysis, and World War 2 military history with a focus on courage, survival, and crew coordination.
This military history documentary follows the Sherman tank Bomb from D-Day to VE Day, showing how a Montreal driver, an Alberta gunner, and a British Columbia loader kept the machine in the fight. The story looks at Panzer IVs, 88 mm guns, Panzerfaust attacks, improvised armor, and the dangerous job of a tank commander who had to stand exposed in the turret hatch to see the battlefield.
If you enjoy WW2 stories, Canadian war stories, tank combat, and narrated battlefield history, this is a powerful listen. It is ideal for viewers searching for Sherbrooke Fusilier Regiment history, Sherman tank documentary, Normandy campaign analysis, and World War 2 military history with a focus on courage, survival, and crew coordination.
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00August 17th, 1944, Feles, Normandy.
00:05In the center of a town reduced to rubble stands a school behind a thick stone wall,
00:10and behind that wall are some 60 soldiers of the 12th SS Panzer Division, the Hitlerjugend.
00:18Most of them are teenagers.
00:20They have decided they are not leaving.
00:22In the street outside sits a Sherman tank with one word painted on its hull, BOMB.
00:29At the steering levers is a lance corporal from Montreal named Rudy Moreau.
00:35He drove this tank off a landing craft on D-Day, and he is still driving it.
00:40Above him in the turret are the gunner, Trooper Rudolph from Claresholm, Alberta, and the
00:46loader, Trooper Jack Hall, who left his family's orchard in Creston, British Columbia, to enlist.
00:52Infantry of Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal, a Montreal battalion, are working their way toward that
00:59wall.
00:59And somewhere in the ruins, a German soldier raises a Panzerfaust, a one-shot rocket launcher
01:06that can punch through the armor of almost any Allied tank in Normandy.
01:11He is close.
01:13He fires.
01:15The rocket hits BOMB's turret.
01:17Now, I want you to notice exactly where it hit, because this is the first clue in the
01:23whole story.
01:25The rocket did not strike the turret armor.
01:28It struck a length of spare track that had been welded onto the outside of the turret.
01:35Steel the factory never put there.
01:37Steel the technical staff behind the lines disapproved of.
01:41The one piece of steel on that tank that wasn't supposed to be there.
01:47The blast spent itself on the track.
01:50No significant damage.
01:52BOMB stayed in the fight.
01:53And before dawn, the school was finished.
01:57Hold on to that piece of track.
01:59We are coming back to it.
02:00BOMB belonged to B Squadron of the Sherbrooke Fusilier Regiment, a volunteer regiment from
02:07Quebec's eastern townships.
02:10It landed on D-Day.
02:12It was still in action on the day the war in Europe ended.
02:16Eleven months.
02:18Four countries.
02:19Roughly two and a half thousand miles.
02:22In all that time, the Germans hit it.
02:26With shells.
02:27With a rocket.
02:29With a round from a Panzer IV.
02:32Five different men would command this tank before the war was over.
02:36And yet, according to the men who served in it, BOMB was never knocked out of action and
02:42never sent back for major repairs.
02:44It never missed a day.
02:46So, here is the question this whole story turns on.
02:51Why?
02:52Why could the Hitlerjugend, the 88s, and the Panzerfausts hit this one Canadian Sherman
02:58again and again and never put it out of the war?
03:02The easy answer is luck.
03:04By the end, you'll see why luck is the one answer that doesn't hold.
03:09If what the Canadians in this tank did matters to you, a subscribe helps these stories reach
03:15more people.
03:16To understand that piece of track, we have to go back to the beach.
03:20June 6th, 1944.
03:24Juneau Beach near Béniers-sur-Mer.
03:26The Sherbrooke Fusiliers come ashore behind the assault waves, onto a beach so jammed with
03:32vehicles that it takes hours to get off it.
03:35Moreau drives bomb down the ramp and onto the sand.
03:39The tank was built by General Motors in Flint, Michigan.
03:43It carries a British Army number.
03:45Its crew are Canadians, and its name comes from their cap badge, a grenade.
03:51In B Squadron, every tank's name begins with B.
03:56This one is bomb.
03:58Five men inside.
03:59In the commander's hatch, Sergeant Harold Futter.
04:03Moreau driving.
04:04Beside him, the co-driver, Trooper James Fletcher, known as Red.
04:09Rudolph on the gun, haul loading.
04:14Remember those five, because only three of them will still be in this tank on the last
04:19day.
04:20Two and a half years earlier, the Sherbrooke Fusiliers had still been an infantry regiment.
04:26They learned tanks in Canada and in England.
04:29Until this day, the regiment had never been in action.
04:33They push inland.
04:35That night, with the squadron halted a few miles from the sea, the Germans take their
04:41first shot at bomb.
04:43A German anti-tank gun fires on it out of the dark.
04:47It misses.
04:49A British flail tank, a Sherman fitted with spinning chains to beat a path through minefields,
04:56fires back and destroys the gun.
04:58The first shot ever fired at bomb went wide, and a tank from another army finished the argument.
05:07If you wanted to believe this tank was simply lucky, you could start right here.
05:12But hold that thought loosely.
05:15Luck explains one missed shot.
05:17It does not explain eleven months.
05:20And here's a second question to carry with you.
05:23If bomb was never knocked out, why did it need five different commanders?
05:30This tank kept its driver, its gunner, and its loader to the very end.
05:36The man standing in the turret hatch was another story.
05:41Because the next morning, June 7th, the Sherbrooke Fusiliers moved south with the North Nova
05:47Scotia Highlanders, heading for the airfield at Carpiquet.
05:51The Canadian planners believed the ground ahead was held by the remnants of two battered
05:56German divisions.
05:58They were wrong.
06:00Air reconnaissance had missed an entire Panzer Grenadier Regiment, with a battalion of Panzer
06:05IVs behind it.
06:07Its commander, a 33-year-old SS colonel named Kurt Meyer, had climbed the tower of an old abbey,
06:14the Abbey d'Ardennes, and was watching the Canadian column come down the road.
06:20His soldiers were mostly seventeen and eighteen.
06:23Like the Sherbrooke's, they had never been in battle.
06:27Unlike the Sherbrooke's, their officers had learned their trade in Russia.
06:31He did not strike at once.
06:33He let the column come on, past Burin, into Othi, until its flanks were open and its artillery
06:40was out of range.
06:41By nightfall, twenty-one Sherbrooke tanks would be destroyed in those fields.
06:47Bomb was on the left flank, in the middle of it.
06:50And what Rudolf did with his gun in the next few hours was the first thing the Hitlerjugend
06:56ever learned about this tank.
06:58June 7th, 1944.
07:00A little before eight in the morning.
07:02The advanced guard of the 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade rolls south out of Les Buissons.
07:09In front, the Sherbrooke Fusiliers' reconnaissance troop in light Stuart tanks.
07:15Behind them, the Shermans, with men of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders riding on the engine decks.
07:21On the left, B Squadron carries the North Nova's B Company.
07:27Somewhere in that squadron, Rudy Moreau is driving bomb toward the first real battle of
07:34his life.
07:35The Stuarts go straight down the road.
07:38One account says they simply disappeared.
07:41German reports say they got as far as the village of Foncville before panzers destroyed them.
07:48Nobody in the column knows that yet.
07:51At first, everything goes right.
07:53Bourin falls before noon.
07:56Authy is reported taken by one o'clock.
07:59The commander of the vanguard, Major Learment of the North Nova's, pushes on and radios back
08:05a warning.
08:06Enemy armor, 800 yards east of Authy.
08:10Up in the Abbey Tower, Kurt Meyer has seen enough.
08:14He orders his 3rd Battalion to attack, and he sends the tanks in ahead of the infantry.
08:20At around half past one, the Panzer IVs come in on the Canadian flank.
08:26Now listen carefully to what the records say about Bomb in the next few hours, because it
08:32is very little and it is enough.
08:35Bomb's crew was credited with two German tanks.
08:38Think about what that took.
08:41Rudolf, a trooper from a prairie town south of Calgary, on his first day of war, laying
08:47a 75mm gun on a Panzer IV crewed by men who had been trained by veterans of the Eastern Front.
08:55Hall feeding him rounds.
08:57Futter in the hatch, calling the targets.
09:00Moreau keeping the tank where the gun could work.
09:04Twice, Rudolf's shot was the one that landed first.
09:08That is the first thing the Hitlerjugend learned about this tank.
09:11It shot back.
09:14But I'm not going to pretend the day went well.
09:17It did not.
09:18In Authy, the North Nova's commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Petsch, sees that
09:25his flanks are open and his guns can't reach him.
09:29He decides to pull back to the high ground north of the village.
09:33Before two platoons can get out, the Germans are on them.
09:37Tanks and infantry overrun the men in Authy and the company beyond it.
09:42Late in the afternoon, Buren is lost, too.
09:45The North Nova Scotia Highlanders lost 84 men killed that day.
09:50A hundred and twenty-eight were taken prisoner.
09:53Some of those prisoners were murdered at the Abbey d'Ardenne, under the tower where Meyer had stood.
09:59A Canadian court would one day put him on trial for it.
10:03Major Lerman was among the captured.
10:06Later, he and two other officers would escape from the train,
10:09carrying them into Germany, and make their way back to the army.
10:13The Sherbrooke Fusiliers had 21 tanks destroyed, and seven more damaged.
10:19Twenty-six of their men were dead.
10:21In B Squadron, most of the tanks that had driven out beside Baum that morning were wrecked or
10:26crippled by nightfall. Baum was one of the few still fit to fight.
10:32And here is where the Canadians did something Meyer had not planned for.
10:38At six in the evening, the battle group finally had artillery behind it, and with shells falling on
10:45Buren, the surviving Sherbrooke tanks went back in and took the village back.
10:51Think about who did that. The survivors.
10:56Men whose regiment had been torn apart since lunchtime, turned around and drove back into
11:02the village where it had happened. They could not hold Buren through the night.
11:07At dusk, what was left of the battle group fell back to Les Buissons, and the brigade dug in there
11:14like a fortress. Meyer's orders that day had been to reach the beaches.
11:20He never did. Not that day, and not in the weeks that followed.
11:25Moreau drove Baum back with the survivors. One day of battle, two panzers credited, and nothing on record
11:35had touched it. That night, the Sherbrookes reported 31 German tanks destroyed. Meyer's own estimate of
11:43his tank losses was about six. The truth is somewhere in between, and historians still argue about where.
11:50I'm giving you both numbers because you deserve both. Inexperienced crews in smoke and confusion
11:58count the same burning panzer two and three times. Veterans writing memoirs count their own losses low.
12:07So what does June 7th tell us about our question? It rules something out. 21 Shermans died in those fields.
12:17Same American design, same 75mm gun, same armor that a Panzer IV could go through at normal fighting ranges.
12:26If the answer were in the steel that left the factory, those tanks would have come home too.
12:33Whatever kept Baum alive was not built in Michigan. Was it the shooting then? Two panzers on the first day
12:42is a strong start. But a good gunner only protects you from what he can see. In the weeks that
12:48followed,
12:49the Sherbrookes learned that much of what killed tanks in Normandy was never seen at all. An 88 dug in
12:56behind a hedge. A shell that arrives before the sound of the shot. For a month, the Canadians and the
13:03Hitler
13:03Ugand faced each other across the same few miles northwest of Caen. Bouront, Hautey, the Abbey.
13:11Baum and its five men were still together. Through all of it, the Germans held the Abbey, and from its
13:17tower they could watch the Canadian lines. On July 8th, the Canadians went back for Bouront and Hautey in
13:25the Abbey itself, and the Sherbrookes went with them. That is the day the first German shell on record
13:31found Baum. An 88, armor-piercing, straight at the turret. It did the tank no real harm. What it did
13:39in the turret hatch is the reason Baum would need five commanders. July 8th, 1944, northwest of Caen.
13:48For a month, the Germans have been digging in around Bouront. The village the Sherbrookes won and lost on
13:55June 7th. This morning the Highland Light Infantry of Canada is going to take it back, and the Sherbrooke
14:02Fusiliers are going in with the attacking battalions. The operation is called Charnwood. Its target is Caen
14:11itself. In Baum, Moreau is at the levers. Rudolph is on the gun, Hall beside it, Red Fletcher in the
14:20co-driver's seat. And in the commander's position, where he has been since the beach, is Sergeant Harold Futter.
14:28Somewhere ahead, a German 88mm anti-tank gun has Baum in its sight. The gunner is aiming an armor-piercing
14:38round
14:38at the turret. The 88 is the gun every Allied tank crew in Normandy feared most. At the ranges the
14:46Germans
14:47like to fight at, it went through a Sherman from any angle. He fires. The round does not hit the
14:54armor.
14:55It hits the breech of the heavy machine gun mounted on the turret roof, right beside the commander's hatch.
15:02Here is what the regimental record says happened next.
15:08The blast wounded Sergeant Futter. It wounded Trooper Fletcher. It cut the electrical leads to
15:15the wireless set. And that is all it did. The tank itself was not seriously damaged.
15:22Now I want you to work something out with me, because the record doesn't say it outright.
15:28How does a blast on the outside of a turret wound the man who commands from inside it? It doesn't.
15:36Not unless he is standing up. Futter must have been up in the hatch, head and shoulders above the steel.
15:44That was how tank commanders fought in Normandy. Canadian, British, American, and German alike.
15:51From inside a closed Sherman, the commander looks at the world through small periscopes and narrow glass.
15:58He can't see the muzzle flash in the hedge. He can't see the infantryman with the rocket in the ditch.
16:05He can't hear the infantry shouting at him. So he opens the hatch and stands up. And for as long
16:12as the
16:12fight lasts, he is the eyes of five men. Hold on to that phrase. The eyes of five men. Because
16:21this is
16:22the second clue, and it changes the way you should look at everything that follows. A tank that can see
16:28the
16:29danger first can get out of its way. Or kill it first. A tank that is blind dies. But the
16:37only way
16:37a Sherman could really see was to put a man where the armor wasn't. Every German sniper in Normandy
16:44knew where that man stood. So the first German shell on record to find bomb did what it could. It
16:52couldn't kill the tank. It took its eyes. And for a moment, with the wireless leads cut, its voice as
16:59well. You asked, at the start, why a tank that was never knocked out would need five commanders.
17:06Now you have the first piece of that answer. Think about Moreau in that moment. He sits low in the
17:13front of the hull, looking out through a periscope. His orders come through his headset from the man
17:19above and behind him. Now the man above him is wounded, the man beside him is wounded, and the radio
17:25that connects them to the rest of the squadron is cut off. The record does not tell us what he
17:31did in
17:32the next minute. It tells us how it ended. The wounded went back. Bomb did not. That day the Canadians
17:40took
17:41Baran around noon, after some of the hardest fighting the Highland Light Infantry ever saw. South of the
17:48village, a German counterattack with tanks was broken up by Sherbrooke Shermans and anti-tank guns.
17:55Authy fell in the afternoon. And that night, Meyer's men were driven out of the Abbey d'Ardennes.
18:02Remember the tower? The one Meyer climbed on June 7th to watch the Canadian column come down the road?
18:09After a month, it belonged to the Canadians. The next day, Sherbrooke tanks rolled into the
18:15northern half of Caen. Caen had been an objective for D-Day itself. It had taken 33 days to get
18:22there.
18:23Bomb had new men inside within days. The new commander was Lieutenant Paul Arras,
18:30from Victoria, British Columbia. A new co-driver came in beside Moreau,
18:35Trooper Ken Giroux, from Burns Lake in the British Columbia interior. Jack Hall took on the wireless
18:44set as well as loading the gun. And something else changed. Bomb's call sign was repainted from 22 to 21.
18:54It had become the troop leader's tank. The one carrying the officer. The one the other three tanks in the
19:02troop followed. From now on, the officer in Bomb's hatch would decide where the whole troop went.
19:11So where does that leave our question? You might think you have it now. The tank survived because a
19:18man stood in the open and took the danger on himself. Futter was the first. He would not be the
19:27last.
19:28But that explains only half of it. A commander standing up can see the 88 before it fires.
19:36Sometimes. He cannot stop the round once it's on its way. And on July 8th, the round was not aimed
19:45at
19:46butter. It was aimed at the tank. It just happened to strike the one spot where it couldn't get through.
19:54That's luck again. And luck does not stretch across 11 months.
20:02Late in July, south of Caen, near Borgebus ridge, the Germans got a clean shot. A Panzer IV put a
20:1075mm round
20:12into bomb. Not into a machine gun mount this time. Into the hull. And all five men, Moreau and Rudolf
20:22and Hall among them, came out of the hatches and into the open, waiting for the second shot that usually
20:29follows the first. What they found when they finally looked at the hull is the reason this story is not
20:37about luck. Five men are out of the tank and in the open. And they wait. You need to understand
20:45what
20:46they are waiting for. A Sherman that has just been hit is a bad place to be. Its ammunition is
20:54stowed
20:55all around the crew. And once a round gets inside, fire can take the whole tank in seconds. Crews learned
21:03to
21:03get out first and think afterwards. And a German gunner who has hit a Sherman once will very often
21:12fire again to finish it or to catch the crew as they climb out. So they wait for the second
21:20shot.
21:21It never comes. Nobody wrote down why. Maybe the Panzer IV lost sight of them. Maybe it was hit itself.
21:32Maybe its commander saw a Sherman that wasn't burning and decided to find a better target.
21:38The record is silent. What it does record is what the five men did next. They went back to the
21:47tank.
21:48Think about that for a second. Every instinct a man has is telling him that the steel box in front
21:56of him
21:56is exactly where the Germans are aiming. It has just been hit. It could be hit again the moment he
22:04climbs
22:04inside. And Moreau, the driver, has to drop back into his seat at the front of the hull and bring
22:11the tank
22:12back to life. Before they did, they looked at where the round had struck. Here it is, the third clue.
22:21And this is the one that turns the whole story. The Panzer IV's round had hit a spare road wheel
22:29hanging on the outside of Baum's hull. One of the heavy steel wheels the tank runs on carried as a
22:36spare
22:37and mounted where a German round would have to go through it first. The crew judged the damage
22:43insignificant. They climbed back in and Baum went on fighting. Now go back to Feles, to the very first scene.
22:52A Panzerfaust rocket striking a length of spare track welded onto Baum's turret. And now put it beside this
23:01road wheel. That is not luck twice. That is a decision. And somebody made it. Across the Allied armies in
23:10Normandy,
23:11tank crews had started hanging extra steel on their Shermans. Lengths of spare track on the front and the
23:18turret. Spare road wheels on the hull. Stowage boxes. Anything that might put one more layer between a
23:28German round and the men inside. The crews and their officers believed in it. The technical staff in the
23:36rear echelons disapproved. And I want to be straight with you here. Baum's crew did not invent this.
23:43British crews did it. American crews did it. Who thought of it first doesn't matter. What matters is
23:50that on Baum, somebody decided the technical staff were wrong. And the steel went on. And twice that summer,
23:58it was the steel the Germans hit. Remember what June 7th taught us. Twenty-one Shermans died in one
24:06afternoon. Shermans just like Baum. The men who survived that afternoon had seen exactly what factory
24:14armor was worth against a Panzer IV. A month later, a Panzer IV hit Baum. And the round found a
24:22road wheel
24:22instead of a man. So now you have three pieces. A crew that shot back. A commander who stood in
24:30the open
24:31to be its eyes. And extra steel that somebody chose to put exactly where the Germans would aim. Notice what
24:40all three have in common. Not one of them came from the factory in Michigan. Every one of them came
24:47from
24:47the men. Baum had a gun to use as well. In the fighting for Verrieres Ridge, the long low-rise
24:55south of Caen that cost the Canadians so heavily that July, Rudolph knocked out two more German tanks.
25:03That made four. Four Panzers in seven weeks. From a trooper who had never fired a shot in battle before
25:11June. On July 25th, the Black Watch, a Montreal regiment, went up that slope and was all but destroyed.
25:19Through all of it, Lieutenant Eris was up in the hatch, leading the troop, doing exactly what Futter had
25:26done. Being the eyes. Remember that while the steel protected the tank, nothing at all protected the man
25:35above it. And here is where the story turns against us again. Because extra steel on a hull has one
25:42weakness, and every tank crew knew it. It only helps against what comes at you from the side or the
25:48front.
25:49It does nothing against what falls from the sky. And it does nothing against a mistake made by your own
25:56side. By early August, the Canadians were driving south toward Falaise, and the Allied air forces were
26:03being thrown in to blast away through the German lines. Heavy bombers, hundreds at a time, dropping on
26:10German positions a short distance ahead of the Canadian tanks. It was a new way of fighting, and when it
26:16worked, it was overwhelming. But the margin between the German positions and the Canadian ones was narrow,
26:23and the bombers found their targets by colored smoke and flares. The Canadians marked their own positions
26:29with yellow. Hold on to that color. On August 14, 1944, B Squadron of the Sherbrooke Fusiliers was in
26:38position south of Kong for the next great push, codenamed tractable. Moreau was at the levers. Rudolph,
26:46Hall, and Giroux were where they always were. In the afternoon, the sky to the north filled with heavy
26:54bombers. Some of them were Canadian. The Royal Canadian Air Force's own bomber group flew in that
27:02raid. And that afternoon, bombs began falling among the tanks of B Squadron. Bomb was damaged. Three days
27:12later, it was in the streets of Falaise, with a panzerfaust coming at it. How a tank hit by its
27:19own
27:20side's bombs got there is the next piece of the answer. The first bombs land where they are supposed
27:27to, on the German positions ahead. Then some of the bombers begin dropping short. Their bombs fall among
27:36Canadian and Polish troops waiting behind the start line, in quarries, in fields, among the vehicles,
27:45among the tanks of B Squadron. And the Canadians on the ground do exactly what they were trained to do.
27:52They light yellow flares and yellow smoke to tell the aircraft above them,
27:58we are friendly, do not bomb here. What nobody on the ground knew was that bomber command's pathfinders
28:06were marking their targets that day with yellow as well. So the more yellow smoke the Canadians put up,
28:13the more it looked to the crews overhead like the place to drop. Sit with that for a moment. The
28:20men
28:21were doing everything right, and every flare they lit brought more bombs down on their own heads.
28:29Somewhere in that, bomb was damaged. The records don't agree on exactly how. What we know is that three
28:37days later it was fighting in the streets of Falaise. This is the fourth piece of the answer, and it
28:44is
28:44the one nobody films. Bomb was never sent back to the workshops for major repairs. Not once in 11 months.
28:52When something broke, the men who served in it said the repairs were made on the spot, in the field,
28:59close enough to the fighting that the tank never missed a day. Ask yourself why that matters so much.
29:06A damaged tank that goes back down the line is gone for days or weeks. Its crew may be handed
29:13another
29:13tank, or split up to fill holes in other crews. The tank itself may come back to a different regiment
29:19altogether. Every trip to the rear is a chance for the partnership between these men and this machine
29:25to end. Bomb's crew kept that partnership alive by keeping the tank out of the workshops. And a driver
29:33who has been with one tank since the beach knows it the way a farmer knows his tractor. How the
29:38engine
29:39sounds when it's healthy and when it's not. How it takes a slope. How much the clutch will forgive.
29:48That driver was Moreau. Which brings us back to where we began. August 17, 1944. Falaise. The town is the
29:59hinge of the whole Normandy campaign. To the south and east, two German armies are trying to get out of
30:06the
30:07closing pocket. And the Canadians are coming down from the north to shut it.
30:11The Fusiliers Mont-Royal, from Montreal, get the job of clearing the last Germans out of the town.
30:19Two years earlier, this same battalion had been cut to pieces on the beach at Dieppe. They had rebuilt it
30:26almost from nothing. Now its riflemen are working toward a walled school full of Hitlerjugend. And
30:34Bomb is in the street with them. You know what happens next. The Panzerfaust. The rocket striking
30:41the turret. But listen to it again, now that you know what you know. The Panzerfaust was the German
30:48infantry's answer to allied tanks. A tube. A rocket. One man. It didn't need an 88 dug in on a
30:56ridge. Or a Panzer IV. It needed a man behind a wall, close enough to hear the engine. From here
31:04to the
31:04end of the war, in every town and every hedge, that was what would be waiting for bomb. And the
31:11first
31:11time it came, the rocket hit the spare track on the turret. The steel the technical staff didn't want
31:17there. It took the blast. The turret behind it didn't. The Fusiliers Mont-Royal went on fighting for
31:26that school into the night. It caught fire. German aircraft bombed the town while the fight was still
31:32on, hitting attackers and defenders alike. Resistance ended at two in the morning. A Montreal battalion
31:40that had been destroyed at Dieppe had taken the last stronghold in Feles. Three days after its own
31:46side's bombs, Bomb was in the middle of that. That is what on-the-spot repair means. No transporter.
31:54No workshop. No new crew. After Feles, the Germans broke for the Seine, and the Canadians went after
32:03them. Now the enemy Bomb faced was not a gun. It was the road. Day after day of driving, on
32:13an engine
32:13and a transmission that had been working without rest since June. On the move toward the river, Bomb's
32:21clutch burnt out. For a driver, there is almost nothing worse. The clutch is what connects the
32:28engine to the tracks. Without it, 30 tons of steel is just sitting there. This was the moment when a
32:36tank goes onto a transporter and disappears to the rear. Bomb arrived at the staging area late.
32:44Late. Not missing. It went into the Forêt de la Londres, the thick woods above the Seine,
32:52where the Germans were holding the crossings open for their retreating army. And in that fighting,
32:58near El Boeuf, Lieutenant Iris was wounded, the second commander of Bomb to be hit. The tank had its
33:05gunner, its loader, its driver. It had lost its eyes again. The third man to climb into that hatch
33:14was Lieutenant John Neal from Oshawa, Ontario. Remember his name. Of all the men who commanded Bomb,
33:22he is the one who would earn the military cross. So look at what you have now. A crew that
33:29shot back,
33:30commanders who stood in the open, steel the experts didn't want, and men who kept their tank out of the
33:39rear, even with its clutch burnt out. But all of that was defense, staying alive. And a tank that only
33:47stays alive doesn't win anything. In February, in the mud of Germany, Neal and Moreau would find out
33:55that the safest place for Bomb was not behind its armor at all. It was somewhere much more dangerous.
34:03February 26th, 1945. The Rhineland, Germany. Half past four in the morning, and it is raining. Cold rain
34:13on ground that has already turned to mud. The sky over the start line is glowing. Searchlights behind
34:21the Canadian lines are playing on the low clouds, bouncing light back down onto the fields so the
34:28columns can see where they're going. The army called it artificial moonlight. Operation Veritable has
34:35been grinding through this country for nearly three weeks. In Bomb's turret hatch stands Lieutenant John
34:42Neal. Below him, at the levers, Rudy Moreau, who drove this tank off a landing craft at Juneau Beach
34:50more than eight months ago. Rudolph on the gun. Hall on the wireless and the ammunition. Jero beside the
34:58driver. Behind Bomb and the other three tanks of Neal's troop comes a column of kangaroos. Armored carriers
35:06full of Canadian infantry. The operation is called Blockbuster. Its target is the high ground, beyond the road
35:15between Kalkar and Udem, the last ridge before the Hochwald forest and the Rhine. Three battalions of
35:23the 6th brigade are going in mounted, in kangaroos, and the Sherbrooke fusiliers' three squadrons are leading
35:31them. Behind the barrage, moving at tank pace, to get here, Bomb had come a long way since the Seine.
35:39Through Belgium, into the fighting at the Antwerp Turnhout Canal and the Scheldt. Through a winter
35:46in which the Sherbrooke's were loaned out to whoever needed tanks, British divisions, the Irish Guards,
35:53even the American 82nd Airborne. Over those months, Bomb got new engines and new tracks. It never left the
36:02regiment, and its crew never left it. Now watch what happens when the column moves. German artillery
36:10and mortars open up. Smoke drifts across the fields, so the artificial moonlight turns to grey soup.
36:19Vehicles are hit. Men are hit. And the kangaroos carrying the infantry begin to bog down in the mud and
36:28fall behind. This is not my description. It is the list the army recorded when it came to decorate Neil.
36:36Darkness. Smoke. Mud. Artillery and mortar fire. Vehicle and personnel casualties. Lagging infantry.
36:46And then one more phrase. Just about everything against him.
36:53Stop here for a moment. Because this is the kind of situation that wrecked the Sherbrooke's on June 7th.
37:00Tanks out in front. Infantry cut off from them. The enemy able to see them and shell them.
37:07Every instinct says stop. Wait for the infantry. Don't go on alone. But a column that stops in mud
37:16under artillery fire is a column the enemy gets to shoot at for as long as he likes. Neil did
37:24not stop.
37:25He took bomb and one other tank and he dashed forward, through the smoke and the mud and the
37:32shell fire, to the objective itself. Two Shermans, alone, on the piece of ground the whole column had
37:40been sent to take. And they held it. This was the troop leader's tank. Neil did not send someone else
37:49forward. He went himself. Now here is the part the citation doesn't say, because citations are written
37:56about officers. Neil gave the order. But the man who actually got 30 tons of Sherman through that mud,
38:06in the dark, in the smoke, without bogging down like the carriers behind him, was the driver. Rudy Moreau.
38:15Eight months of knowing exactly how much this engine and this clutch would take.
38:22Everything he had learned since the beach went into that run. Up on the objective,
38:28Rudolph and the gunner of the other tank had to keep the Germans off with whatever they could put out.
38:35One account says the two Shermans held there under heavy fire for about 20 minutes, until the kangaroos
38:42struggled up out of the mud and the infantry piled out around them. And then the last phrase of the
38:50citation, the one I want you to hear slowly. Because Neil and his two tanks were already there,
38:56the column was able to consolidate without appreciable loss. Without appreciable loss.
39:03In darkness, smoke, mud, and shell fire, with the infantry lagging, the column that should have been
39:10cut to pieces in the open arrived on ground that two Canadian tanks were already holding for it.
39:17Now put every piece together, because this is the moment they finally fit. A German gun can only kill
39:25a tank it can see and reach. Rudolph's gun made it dangerous to be the German who saw bomb. The
39:32man in
39:33the hatch made sure bomb saw first, and paid for it, one commander after another. The steel hung on the
39:40outside took the hits that came anyway. And the repairs in the field kept the same men in the same
39:47tank long enough to learn all of it. But on February 26th, the last piece fell into place, and it
39:55is the
39:55one that turns the others around. Bomb did not survive by hiding behind its armor. It survived by not
40:03being where the Germans expected it to be. So many of the tanks that died in Normandy and the Rhineland
40:10were
40:11the ones that stopped, bogged, waited, sat in the open while the guns found the range. The safest place for
40:20this tank was the most dangerous place on the map. The objective. Neil got the military cross for that
40:29morning, and before February was out, he was wounded too. The third commander of bomb to be hit. The tank
40:38went on. Moreau, Rudolph, and Hall went on. The fourth man to take that hatch was a 30-year-old
40:46lieutenant
40:46from Nova Scotia, an orphan who had lost his little daughter to pneumonia while he was away training for
40:53this war. He would take bomb to the Rhine and into Holland, and he would be in command when bomb
41:00scored
41:00its fifth and last kill of the war, in a Dutch town called Deventer. What Deventer cost
41:08him is the next part of the story. April 10, 1945. Deventer, in the Eastern Netherlands.
41:16Its people have lived under German occupation for almost five years. Canadian infantry are clearing
41:23the city street by street, and the Sherbrooke Fusiliers are in the streets with them. In Baum's
41:30hatch is Lieutenant Walter White. Somewhere in that fighting, a German tank comes into Rudolph's sight,
41:37and Rudolph fires. It is Baum's fifth confirmed kill of the war. It will be the last. And somewhere in
41:46that same fighting, White climbs down from the tank. The record says he was dismounted when it happened.
41:53A shell bursts, and shrapnel tears into his right leg. The fourth commander of Baum. The fourth to be hit.
42:02Now let me tell you who this man was, because he matters to the end of this story. Walter White
42:08was
42:09thirty, a Nova Scotian raised by a foster family after he was orphaned. While he was away training,
42:16his little daughter Donna died of pneumonia. She was two. He came to the Sherbrooke's that winter as a
42:22troop commander in B squadron. After the war, he could still name every tank in his troop. Barbara,
42:31Be Good, Bohunk, and his own, Baum. Under White, Baum went through the Hochwald, reached the Rhine, and
42:42crossed back into Holland for the drive north. At Zutphen, a few days before Deventer, the regiment lost a
42:50sergeant the men called Atke. White named him in the account he left his family. He is buried at Allman,
42:58in Holland. So here is the pattern laid out plainly.
43:03Futter, wounded in July. Eris, wounded at the Seine. Neil, wounded in the Rhineland. White, wounded at
43:12Deventer. Four commanders. Four men taken out of the same hatch. And in all that time, the man at the
43:21levers never changed. Think about what that means for Moureux. Every few months since the beach, a new
43:30voice had come into his headset. Each time he had to learn how a new officer gave orders, how fast
43:38he
43:38wanted to move, when he wanted to stop. And each time, the driver, the gunner, and the loader were
43:45what held the tank together while the new man learned it. Now it was happening again. The fifth commander
43:52of Baum was Lieutenant Ernest Mingo, another Nova Scotian. He would be the last. And here is the
44:00thing I want you to understand about the last weeks of the war. They were not easy. Everyone could see
44:08the end coming. And that made every day more dangerous, not less, because nobody wanted to be
44:15the last one killed in a war that was already won. Baum went north with the Canadians, out of Holland
44:22and into the flat, wet country of northwest Germany, toward the port of Emden. The ceasefire in northwest
44:30Germany came at 8 o'clock on the morning of May 5, 1945. On the last day of fighting before
44:38it, Mingo
44:40and Baum's crew found themselves facing a German officer who would not stop. He kept sending his
44:46men forward, toward the Canadians, toward Baum, and they kept falling. Years later, Mingo described it
44:55to a Nova Scotian newspaper. The land between us, he said, was covered with dead German soldiers.
45:03Listen to what he said next, because it is the last German move in this whole story.
45:10He must have known the war was over, but he just kept sending them out, I guess trying to kill
45:16Canadians. That is what it had come to. Not an 88 on a ridge. Not a Panzer IV on the
45:25flank. Not the
45:27Hitlerjugend behind a school wall. Just one officer, on the last day, spending his own men against a
45:35Canadian line that would not move. And the line did not move. Baum held. Moreau, Rudolf, Hall, Jero,
45:46and Mingo, on the last day, did exactly what the crew had done on the first full day of its
45:53war,
45:53at Othie, when the Hitlerjugend came at them out of the abbey's shadow. They stayed, and they fought back.
46:02Think about the distance between those two days. On June 7th, 1944, a German colonel in a tower waited
46:10for a column of untested Canadians to come to him. Eleven months later, it was a German officer
46:17throwing men at Canadians who knew exactly what they were doing. And then the wireless in Baum's
46:23turret came alive with a message. The set Jack Hall had been working since July, since the day the 88
46:31cut its leads in wounded fudder. Mingo remembered the words. Unload. Clear guns. The war is over.
46:40Mingo heard it. So did every man in the tank. Unload. For eleven months, Hall's job had been the
46:48opposite. Lode. Six thousand rounds, more or less, had gone through his hands and out of Rudolf's gun.
46:57Now the order was to take the round out of the breach. Look at who was in Baum when that
47:02message
47:03came. Moreau, who had driven it off the landing craft. Rudolf, who had fired at the Hitlerjugend at
47:10Authy. Hall, from the family orchard in Creston. Jero, who had come in when Fletcher went out. And Mingo,
47:19the only one of its five commanders, the war did not wound. Eleven months. Two shells and a rocket that
47:28hit the tank. Four commanders that the war took out of the turret. And Baum was still there, still running,
47:36its guns still pointed at the enemy on the last day. But the story of Baum did not end on
47:43May 5th.
47:44A month later, in a Dutch town, a photographer from the Canadian army lined the crew up beside their tank.
47:51And Rudy Moreau did one last thing to it that told the whole war in a single line. And after
47:59that,
47:59this tank that the Germans never knocked out came within a whisker of being destroyed by its own side.
48:06June 8th, 1945, near Zutphen, Holland. The war in Europe has been over for a month. A Canadian army
48:16photographer, Lieutenant Ken Bell, has come to take pictures of one particular Sherman. Bell had landed
48:23on D-Day himself, with a camera in his hands. Rudy Moreau picks up a piece of chalk and writes
48:30on the
48:30side of the tank. Rudolph and Hall stand and watch him. Three men who were inside Baum when it rolled
48:37down the ramp at Bernier. The words he writes are three of the simplest in this whole story. D plus
48:45365.
48:47One year since the beach. Moreau counted it in days, the way the army did, the way the crew had
48:54lived it.
48:55One day at a time, and not one of them missed. Around the tank, for the photographs, stand the
49:02men who had commanded it. Aris, from Victoria, a captain now. Neil, from Oshawa, with his military cross.
49:12White, from Gore, Nova Scotia, back with his regiment after Deventer. Mingo, the last of them.
49:19Only Futter is missing. The sergeant who took Baum off the beach and took the first shell meant for it.
49:26Look at that picture in your mind. Three of those officers were wounded, commanding Baum,
49:31and here they are, standing beside the tank the Germans never knocked out of the war.
49:38The army made a newsreel about Baum and its crew, and then a short film about their journey,
49:43called Green Fields Beyond. The caption the army wrote for one of Bell's photographs that June
49:49said it plainly. Baum had covered two and a half thousand miles and had stayed in action right up to
49:56V-E day. Its record interrupted only by minor repairs. And I owe you one honest note here. In Victoria
50:05Park,
50:05in London, Ontario, stands another Sherman, the first Hussars Holy Roller, which also landed on D-Day,
50:13and also made it to the end. Veterans Affairs Canada counts them as the two. Two Canadian Shermans,
50:21out of all that came ashore that June, from the first day to the last. What set Baum apart,
50:28in the words of its own men, was one phrase, it never missed a day. And then the army almost
50:36threw
50:36it away. When the regiment went home, its tanks were stripped and left behind. Baum ended up in a
50:44scrapyard in Belgium, waiting to be cut up for steel. Two shells, a rocket, the Hitlerjugend, and its own
50:52side's bombers had not finished it. A scrap dealer's torch very nearly did. Somebody went and got it.
51:00The Sherbrooke Fusiliers wanted their tank, and Baum was pulled out of that Belgian yard and shipped home
51:07to Canada. It got there months before Walter White did. For years it stood in a Sherbrooke park,
51:13the Champ de Mars. In 2011 it was restored and moved to the regiment's armory. White came home to Nova
51:22Scotia. He and his wife Ellen ran the general store in West Gore for 27 years. He was the first
51:30president
51:31of the local Legion branch. He had been decorated, but when reporters came to talk to him about the war,
51:37his family remembered that what he wanted to talk about was Baum and its crew. The Dutch family he had
51:45been billeted with never forgot him. Every year after the war, tulips came from Holland. He and Ellen
51:53are buried in Gore, and in the spring there are often tulips there. And Rudy Moreau? I have to be
52:01honest
52:02with you. The records I could find follow him to that piece of chalk near Zutphen, and no further.
52:08The same is true of Rudolph and of Jack Hall. They were not officers. No citation I could find
52:16carries their names. They were the three men who never left the tank. So let's go back to the question
52:24one last time. Why could the Germans never knock out this one Canadian Sherman? It wasn't
52:31the armor. Twenty-one tanks just like it died on its first full day of war. It wasn't luck, though
52:40luck had its moments. It was a gunner from the Alberta Prairie who shot back. It was five commanders
52:47who stood in an open hatch so the tank could see, and four of them paid for it. It was
52:54steel the experts
52:55didn't want, hung exactly where the Germans would aim. It was repairs made in the mud instead of the
53:02workshops, so the same men stayed in the same tank. It was a driver from Montreal who took it forward
53:10when every instinct said stop. And it was five men who, after a Panzer IV hit them and the second
53:18shot
53:19never came, walked back to the tank and climbed in. A tank built in Michigan, numbered by the British army,
53:27fighting under British doctrine, crewed by volunteers from a country of 11 million people, from Montreal,
53:35from the prairie, from a British Columbia orchard, from the villages of Nova Scotia. Nothing on that tank
53:42was Canadian except the men. And on the last day, a German officer was still sending men to kill them
53:49and could not. Today, Baum stands outside the armory on William Street in Sherbrooke,
53:55with a plaque for the regiment's dead. The chalk is long gone. The tank is still there. The Germans could
54:04hit Baum. What they could never do was get the Canadians inside it to stop climbing back in.
54:13Thank you for spending this time with Baum and its crew. If you think what the Canadians in that tank
54:20did deserves to be remembered, a like genuinely helps this story find more people. And if you'd like
54:27to hear more, we're here every week. And if your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the
54:34Second World War, I'd be honored to hear about him in the comments.
54:38For our honor, let's get out of here.