Lend Lease Shermans

[kevinT]

From the Canadian Heritage Ditectorate of Movement files I came across these 2 Shermans within the Bill of Lading paperwork. Can anyone confirm which type these are?

US serials 3038372 and 3038388

Paperwork showing US serials as Lend Lease seems to be quite rare, US serials to British Census Numbers even more so.

Cheers

Kevin

[Hanno Spoelstra]

Interesting! Do I read "US Special Tank Shop"? Could does Shop refer to the "Shop Number", which Montreal Locomotive assigned to each tank they built?

It rings a bell with the "T10E1 Shop Tractor", an experimental American-built Canal Defence Light (CDL) on M4A1 Sherman tank hull.

This needs further looking into...


Source: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/i...ject/205070699

[David Herbert]

It's not a MLW shop number. They started at '1' for each vehicle type and carried on till the end of production. In general the Army census numbers were the shop number plus the first census number of that order but sometimes they got out of sequence but for Rams at least that was listed in the parts list.
The documents show both tanks as #275, with -1 and -2 suffixes. I have not seen that before and have no idea what it means. Possibly 275 was a project number and these were two prototypes ?

David

[tankbarrell]

If US registrations, they were both Lima M4A1's.

[Jakko Westerbeke]

Originally Posted by kevinT

Can anyone confirm which type these are?

US serials 3038372 and 3038388

This may help. Both fall into this block of 600 tanks:

M4A1	LIMA LW	29605	30204	600	3038135	3038734

(First field is the type, then the manufacturer, followed by the first and last chassis numbers, amount of tanks in the block, and first and last registration numbers.)