Operation Infatuate II: Sherman tanks at Westkapelle

[Jakko Westerbeke]

Originally Posted by David Herbert

Thank you for the link to the archive. Those are great photos.

I found them more or less by chance — on another site, I came across a few of those photos of a bulldozer being dug out, and the captions there mentioned the company name. I then Googled that and found this site.

Originally Posted by David Herbert

The photos show that they removed the engine from the dozer that they dug up, presumably to reduce weight. it would have had to be removed anyway for rebuild.

That’s what I was thinking too. All that sand can’t have been conducive to the engine working I suspect the bulldozer was simply left where it stood and buried under the sand of the new sea dyke that was built. Parts of that were made using a suction dredger, which sprays a mixture of water and sand to where the sand is wanted, so it would not be a problem at all to bury a vehicle that happens to be in the way.

BTW, the reason I said that I think this is the one that stood in the water by itself is because of the houses visible in the photos of it being recovered. Though I haven’t tried matching them to any houses that still exist (maybe I should give that a try …), my knowledge of the lay of the land leads me to suspect it must be close to where the photo shows the drowned bulldozer with ruins on the right-hand side of the picture.