G I Jane
Sonnet puts her British on before a Mach VIII Cromwell. She must deliver an item from the Imperial War Museum to the V&A so I pick her up for lunch and accompany her to the pick-up. I'm pretty interested in the V-2 rocket in the main gallery and a staple of Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" which I famously quit with 40 pages to go. What the hell is Pynchon about? I still wonder. Any case, I wandered the Imperial for the first time during the Orenstein family's European Hot Rocks trip in 1980. I distinctly recall the toy soldiers and etc. Moe was pretty keen on the battle stuff too- and why not? Guns and steel is cool at any age. In the museum shop I purchase Shoah, which tells the Holocaust through first-person witness.
The Cromwell, BTW, was the fastest British tank to serve in WW2, with a top speed of about 40 mph. - fast for its time. Thanks to its Christie parentage the Cromwell was also agile on the battlefield, blasting away without a care in the world. The dual purpose 75 mm main gun fired the same ammunition as the US 75 mm gun and therefore it had around the same HE and armour-piercing capabilities as the 75 mm equipped Sherman tank. The Cromwell's armour ranged from 8 mm to 76 mm thick overall but the maximum thickness was later increased to 102 mm with appliqué armour plates which were welded on. This armour compared well with that of the Sherman although the Cromwell did not share the Sherman’s sloped glacis plate. The Cromwell crews in North-West Europe succeeded in the Cromwell with superior speed, manoeuvrability and reliability outflanking the heavier and more sluggish German tanks; however, the Cromwell was still not a match for the best German armour and British tank design would go through another stage, the Comet tank, before going ahead in the tank development race with the Centurio tank. Ah, such blissful times and times of bliss.
Sonnet gives a late evening tour of Haute Couture at the V&A with our friends Tony and Susan; afterwards we have a fun dinner and to bed at mid-night. Both of us feeling a bit flattened today following a boozy night (me) and five hours rest (us).
