Britain Wrote It Off — Then Its HIDDEN Gearbox Took It Up A Slope The Germans Thought IMPASSABLE!

The twenty-eighth of February, 1943, northern Tunisia. Trooper Mitton has been in the driver's seat of the Churchill tank Adventure since ten in the morning, every hatch shut for eight hours, when a round black hole appears in his visor: the muzzle of an 88 millimeter gun, dug in no more than thirty yards off. The German commander facing him had already decided that no tank could climb the slope Mitton has just driven up. And the tank he is driving is one its own country has given up on. So what got it up that slope? Not its armor, and not its gun. The answer sits behind the engine, at the very rear of the hull: a steel box with three differentials inside. The story of the one in the middle starts at a meeting in London on 17 November 1939, where Dr. Henry Edward Merritt, forty years old, the son of a West Ham harness maker who came to tanks from a life spent on gears, asked a modest question about a howitzer. Put the gearbox he worked out in neutral, and nearly 40 tons of tank swings round on the spot without ever leaving its own footprint. Getting there cost dearly. Vauxhall Motors of Luton, a car maker that had never built a tank, got the job, and the verdict on the two pilot tanks was two words: "very unreliable." The worst fault was the steering, Merritt's own gearbox. On 15 January 1942, 42 percent of every Churchill in British service was out of action at the same time, and of the first thousand built, about 700 were rebuilt. In October 1942 the tank board's most secret verdict came down: "obsolescent and going out of production." Winston Churchill himself joked to Field Marshal Jan Smuts that the tank had been given his name "when they found out it was no damn good." Then came Tunisia. Near El Arousa, two Churchills leading their squadron reached the high ground behind a farm and broke the German attack in that sector, and the German battle-group commander signaled his headquarters that he had been hit by "a MAD tank battalion," which had come over ground he believed no armor could cross. On 24 April 1943 a six-pounder round from a Churchill jammed the turret ring of a Tiger, and its crew climbed out and left. Tiger 131 was the first Tiger the Western Allies took in one piece, and today it is one of only two Tigers in the world that still run. Its steering unit is described in reference works as "Henschel's development of the British Merritt Brown type." Britain fitted Merritt's mechanism to about 5,600 Churchills, 4,000 Cromwells and every Comet built afterward. From the first Churchill leaving Luton in June 1941 to the last Chieftains in 1995, that makes 54 years in which British tanks steered the way Merritt had worked out. This is the story of the box behind the engine, and of what a turn really costs. CHAPTERS 00:00 Thirty Yards from an 88 03:02 A Question About a Howitzer 08:57 Measuring a Skid 12:43 Inside the Box 22:02 Off the Drawing Board 28:53 Impassable to Armor 32:25 The Tiger's Gearbox 40:57 Climb, Then Turn 43:23 Two Gearboxes 47:10 An Exercise for the Reader If someone in your family drove, crewed or repaired a Churchill, or served with the North Irish Horse, the 51st Royal Tank Regiment or the 142nd Regiment Royal Armoured Corps in Tunisia, tell their story in the comments. They are exactly the people this film is about. SOURCES AND CREDITS Archival film and photographs, in the public domain unless credited below: Imperial War Museums (British official photographs of both world wars, Crown copyright expired), The National Archives, UK (Terence Cuneo, Ministry of Information), U.S. National Archives (U.S. Army Signal Corps photographs, series 111-SC; U.S. Air Force photographs, series 342-FH; U.S. Army films, series 111-ADC and 111-M, including the British official film "The Battle of the Ancre"), U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, Library and Archives Canada, Nationaal Archief / Anefo (CC0), Prelinger Archives ("Machinist and Tool Maker", 1942), Universal Newsreel, U.S. Patent 2,377,354 (H. E. Merritt), and further public-domain photographs via Wikimedia Commons. Library and Archives Canada, C-017295 (CC BY 2.0). Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-362-2211-12 / CC-BY-SA 3.0. Mil.ru, CC BY 4.0. Thumbnail portrait: Winston Churchill, 1940, Cecil Beaton (Ministry of Information; Imperial War Museums MH 26392). Technical drawings and animation: Design Under Fire. The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement. #WW2 #ChurchillTank #Documentary