How the Churchill Tank Earned the Name "Mountain Goat"

Introduction

Leaving their Valentine tanks behind, on October 1941, the North Irish Horse moved from Ulster to Wiltshire, England. During December the Regiment, now commanded by Lt-Colonel (later Major-General Sir) David Dawnay, was re-equipped with Churchill tanks, aboard later versions of which the Regiment went into battle in North Africa and Italy.

While training on nearby Salisbury Plain (and later on Dartmoor) so much time was spent climbing up steeper and steeper slopes, almost to the point where our tanks would almost topple over backwards. Many of us crewing Churchills wondered why, particularly while the British Army was a doing battle over the virtually flat terrain of the Western Desert. We found out later that the Squadron and Troop Leaders had been urged on by Lt. Colonel David Dawnay who had “marked, learnt and inwardly digested” the British After Battle report on the Dieppe Raid.

The purpose of this article is not to relate what so much has been written about ‘Operation Jubilee’ and the lessons learned at the cost of so many lives, rather the opposite. Despite Hitler, after Dieppe, commenting: "This is the first time the British have had the courtesy to cross the sea to offer the enemy a complete sample of their new weapons," one lesson that could have been learned by the Germans was not. Despite the many difficulties facing the Churchill tanks in their first action fifteen of them managed to negotiate the chert beach to successfully climb up and over the sea-wall on to the promenade.

A post-battle German report, a copy of which came into British hands, contained nothing that was positive about the Churchills. Simply put, their assessment was that it was out-dated and "offers nothing worthy of consideration by technical personnel, nor has it any new constructive features either in the metallurgical field, or in the field of weapon technology." However, the Wehrmacht did carry out tests with a Panzer to ascertain its climbing ability. As written by David Fletcher in his book ‘Mr. Churchill’s Tank’: "This showed that on beaches with a slope between 15 and 20 degrees the German tank could manage quite well but where the slope increased to between 30 and 40 degrees the tank started to slip then dug itself in until the tracks ceased to function." That the Panzer "dug itself in” is indicative that the beach at the location chosen for the tests did not replicate that at Dieppe.

The Germans failed to learn a lesson that was presented to them on a plate, especially as the Churchills, by climbing over the seawall, had shown that could scale slopes greater than thirty degrees. It was a fatal mistake and a lesson that continued to be ignored up to the war's end. Time after time, the Churchill climbed up to where the Germans thought no tank could possibly go.

Turn to the next page