Cromwell Tank

The Cromwell is a British cruiser tank of the Second World War, named after the English Civil War military and political leader Oliver Cromwell in keeping with the British practice of that period of naming tanks after historical commanders, and it entered service in time to fight in the Normandy campaign following the June 1944 invasion. Built around a powerful and reliable Rolls-Royce Meteor engine, the Cromwell combined reasonable armor with a top speed of around 40 miles per hour, making it the fastest British tank fielded during the war, and it was used primarily to equip the armored reconnaissance regiments of the Royal Armoured Corps, where its speed and low profile suited the scouting and screening role these units performed. Early Cromwells carried a 6-pounder anti-tank gun, later replaced in most vehicles by a dual-purpose 75mm gun, a compromise adopted because a more powerful high-velocity gun then in development proved too large to fit the tank's turret. Roughly 3,066 Cromwells were built from 1943 onward, alongside nearly a thousand of the closely related Centaur variant.