Sherman Crab Flail Tank

Born in the desert

When Rommel took Tobruk in June 1942, the British and Allied forces began a massive retreat back over the Egyptian frontier, hoping to reach Cairo and Alexandria before the Germans did. Among them was a British workshop unit (No.4 Ordnance Workshop) that had been based, until this time, at Buq-Buq near the coast, and which had with it a very strange vehicle. Carried in the back of a Canadian Ford lorry was another Ford chassis, shortened somewhat although still retaining the engine, transmission and rear axle. At each end of the axle, where the wheels might have been, were drums, from which hung lengths of wire rope and chain - it was, in effect, the original anti-mine flail. In action the shortened chassis would be suspended from the front of the regular lorry like a jib, but facing back to front so that the flail drums were at the forward end where they beat the ground to explode mines in the path of the vehicle.

The officer responsible for this piece of work was Major Norman Berry, then Assistant Director of Ordnance Stores (ADOS) at HQ XIII Corps. A year earlier, in September 1941, Berry had been ordered to Pretoria to examine a South African proposal for a mine-sweeping flail device described as a threshing machine. He was introduced to a Captain Abraham du Toit and shown a short colour film of the contraption in action. It appealed to Berry and he suggested that work should begin at once, preferably at a desert workshop where secrecy could be maintained, but this was overruled. Instead du Toit, as the inventor, was to go to Great Britain and pursue his work there. Berry went back to the desert; du Toit departed for London on 14 October 1941 with details of what General Claude Auchinleck described as an Anti-Tank Mine Springing Device.

Berry found this all very frustrating. He was sure the concept could be made to work, but he heard nothing more. He pestered everyone he could find. Visiting officers from Britain, particularly those with a technical background, were his favourite targets, but nobody had so much as heard of du Toit, never mind a threshing machine that would destroy mines. Berry's decision to continue the experimental work unofficially was interrupted by Rommel's latest attack, and when No.4 Workshop arrived in the Alamein area they were simply too busy patching up damaged tanks to do any more with the threshing machine. Rather than write the project off, Berry found a South African unit (21st Field Company, South African Construction Company) with manpower to spare and handed it over to them.