How One Sherman Crew Knocked Out a King Tiger By Hitting the Same Spot 4 Times
A 75mm Sherman gun couldn't penetrate a King Tiger's armor — so how did one British crew disable one in under two minutes? During Operation Goodwood on July 18, 1944, a single Sherman from the Irish Guards engaged a King Tiger hull-down near Cagny across open wheat fields south of Caen. The crew put four rounds into the same spot on the turret ring, exploiting how repeated impacts on face-hardened armor create progressive spalling and structural failure — something no penetration table accounted for. When the turret jammed, the Sherman's driver rammed the 68-ton German tank at full speed, shearing its track and forcing the crew to bail out. The lieutenant then commandeered an orphaned Firefly and used its seventeen-pounder to knock out three more German vehicles before dusk. This video breaks down the metallurgy of why concentrated hits defeated armor that single rounds couldn't scratch, the tactical nightmare Goodwood became when carpet bombing failed to eliminate the German anti-tank belt, and the deeper strategic story of the King Tiger program — a weapon born from the T-34 shock of 1941 that consumed resources Germany couldn't afford. Drawing on Irish Guards war diaries, British ordnance evaluations, German FMS reports, and Trent Park transcripts, the full picture reveals how a tank built to be invincible was undone by gunnery precision, mechanical reliability, and industrial math the Reich could never answer. #WW2 #WorldWar2 #History #Tanks #OperationGoodwood SOURCES Ian Daglish - Operation Goodwood: Over the Battlefield - 2005 David Fletcher - Sherman Firefly - 2008 (Osprey New Vanguard) Thomas L. Jentz & Hilary Louis Doyle - Tiger I & II: Combat Tactics - 1997 Thomas L. Jentz - Germany's Tiger Tanks: Tiger I and II: Combat Tactics - 2001 (Schiffer) War Office Report WO 185/374 - Trials Against Captured Tiger I Armour Sections - 1944 (The National Archives, Kew) Fritz Bayerlein - FMS Report A-902: Panzer Lehr Division in Normandy - 1946 (U.S. Army Historical Division) Friedrich von Mellenthin - Panzer Battles - 1956 Sönke Neitzel - Tapping Hitler's Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations, 1942–45 - 2007 R.P. Hunnicutt - Sherman: A History of the American Medium Tank - 1978 Irish Guards War Diary, July 1944 - The National Archives, WO 171 series CMH Pub 104-13 - The Lorraine Campaign (U.S. Army Green Book series) National Archives RG 407 - After Action Reports, European Theater of Operations
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