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kanyiko β Cromwell Tank
#antwerp #belgium #cromwell #monument #royalarmy #tank #worldwartwo #ww2 #wwii
Published: 2017-02-06 20:25:39 +0000 UTC; Views: 1300; Favourites: 48; Downloads: 11
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Description
Antwerp (Belgium), February 2nd 2017Even though she no longer resides on her original spot, Cromwell tank T121813 has stood on guard for some 70 years now, ever since she was first inaugurated in 1947 as a monument to the liberation of Antwerp, which took place on September 4th 1944.
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Comments: 29
Beautiful tank. Great pic and thank you for sharing this.
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Wow... this is awesome! 
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She was only recently restored - it took the Army three years to fully restore her!
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That's awesome! I love it when old vehicles get a proper restoration!
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... Still worshiped! ... I see flowers! ...
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They were marked as having been laid by the Jewish community of the City of Antwerp. Β They were badly affected by the Nazi occupation.
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... Abomination has noΒ abridgment! ....
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I played this tank quite a bit in World of Tanks - her greatest attribute was speed. Β Light gun and armor made it impossible to slug it out with nearly any other tank.
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Her high-speed concept (for a tank) very much inspired the entire post-war generation of tanks in Western Europe. Β Not only were the Centurion and Challenger tanks based on the concept of the Cromwell and Comet, but also the West-German Leopard drew inspiration from it.
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A lovely monument!
These glorious bastards are way OP in the game World of Tanks! Β I love that game, but man, I love exploding a Cromwell!
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They're not half as bad as a Sherman exploding, from what I heard... >.>
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They were more or less the British equivalent to the US Sherman tank, although these were powered by a V12 Rolls-Royce Meteor engine (a downrated version of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine of Spitfire fame) rather than a radial engine like the Sherman.
However, the Cromwell lacked the capability of being uparmed like the Sherman - they generally had 75-mm guns, which were incapable of slugging it out with the German Panther, Tiger or King Tiger. Β As a result, Royal Army units generally were mixed units, consisting of Cromwells and the up-armed Sherman Firefly (uparmed British variant of the Sherman, fitted with a British 17-pdr anti-tank gun instead of its regular 75-mm gun); or later the A34 Comet, a development of the Cromwell hull but uparmed with a 77-mm high-velocity anti-tank gun in a new turret.
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It's still a awesome tank, in my opinion.Β
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That it certainly is!
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It seems to have been visually restored. Vehicles which stay outside are usually not so clean and pretty
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She was restored twice in her history as a monument - once in 1971, at which point she was removed from her original location in the middle of the Antwerp - Brussels express way to a plinth to its side; and a second time between 2011 and 2014, at which point she was removed from the second location to her current location opposite the Antwerp Expo Center.
The second restoration was a very thorough one, as she had started showing severe corrosion. Β Of course, by that time she had already stood out in the elements for some 65 years, so it wasn't entirely unexpected...
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