Cruiser Tank Mk VI Crusader

The Crusader was the fullest expression of the British cruiser tank idea: armour that behaved like cavalry, racing through gaps and running down the enemy’s soft rear areas, while the slow infantry tanks did the siege work. Designed by Nuffield Mechanizations & Aero as the A15 and rushed into production off the drawing board in 1940, it inherited the long, low hull and Christie suspension of the earlier A13 cruisers — and, fatefully, their engine.

That engine was the Nuffield Liberty: a 27-litre V-12 derived from an American aircraft engine designed in 1917. Derated to about 340 hp, it made the Crusader genuinely fast for its day — but its cooling fans, water pump and oil systems had never been meant for a tank hull full of desert sand, and the consequences would follow the Crusader through its whole career.

On about 20 tonnes, the Crusader carried up to 49–51 mm of frontal armour and stood barely 2.24 m tall — a small, fast target with the low silhouette British cruiser doctrine prized. The Christie suspension gave it a smooth high-speed ride across the desert, and with the governor removed crews coaxed it well past the official ~43 km/h.

The armament told the story of British tank guns in miniature. Early marks mounted the 2-pounder (40 mm) — good penetration for 1941, but with no high-explosive shell against anti-tank guns, the weapon that actually killed most Crusaders. From mid-1942 the Mk III brought a proper 6-pounder (57 mm), at the cost of squeezing the turret crew from three men to two.

The Crusader’s first two years were spent carrying the 2-pounder, a 40 mm gun that was a perfectly respectable anti-tank weapon in 1940 and had one catastrophic gap: in practice no high-explosive round was issued for it. A Crusader could shoot at a German tank. It could do almost nothing to a German anti-tank gun.

That is not a detail — it is the mechanism by which British armour was destroyed in the desert. German practice was to hold the panzers back behind a screen of towed guns, including the 88 mm, and let the British armour come on. A tank with high-explosive ammunition can stop and shell a gun position; a tank with only armour-piercing shot can only charge it or retreat. The 2-pounder made the German method work.

Its other defining trait was mechanical fragility, and the fault was specific rather than general. The Crusader used a Nuffield Liberty engine — an aero engine design dating from the First World War — and its cooling fan drive was the notorious weak point: the fan belts and drive shafts failed repeatedly, and an engine that loses its cooling in the Western Desert does not last long.

Add the sand, which found its way into everything and wore out air cleaners and running gear at a rate nobody had designed for, and the result was a tank that regularly arrived at the battlefield in smaller numbers than it had left camp with. British units in 1941–42 routinely lost more Crusaders to breakdown than to German fire, and a tank that is being repaired is, tactically, a tank that has been destroyed.

The Crusader went into action in June 1941 during Operation Battleaxe, and five months later gave its name to the offensive that relieved Tobruk: Operation Crusader, November 1941, some of the wildest swirling tank fighting of the entire war. Through 1942 it was the backbone of the British armoured brigades — at Gazala, in the retreat to the Alamein line, and in the great October battle that turned the campaign.

Its speed was real and the crews used it hard; the sight of a Crusader squadron moving fast across open desert was, by every account, magnificent. The problem was arriving: overheating Liberty engines and fragile water pumps meant that in the early battles as many Crusaders fell out with mechanical failure as to enemy fire — a flaw sand and haste never let the workshops fully cure.

Tank for tank, the Crusader could dance around a Panzer III — but the desert war was not fought tank for tank. German battlegroups fought guns and armour together, wheeling their anti-tank screens forward and letting British armour come onto them, and a regiment that could not shell a gun position had no answer but to charge it. British losses in 1941–42 came overwhelmingly from that pattern rather than from tank-versus-tank combat.

The arrival of the 6-pounder Mk III in time for Second El Alamein restored some of the balance, and by then the Crusaders fought alongside American Grants and Shermans that carried the high-explosive punch they lacked. After the Tunisian campaign ended in May 1943, the Crusader’s front-line career was over — outclassed as a gun tank, but far from finished as a hull.

Roughly 5,300 Crusaders were built by a production group led by Nuffield — one of the largest British tank runs of the war. The three gun marks (Mk I and II with the 2-pounder, Mk III with the 6-pounder) were followed by a second life in supporting roles: the Crusader III AA series with twin or triple 20 mm Oerlikons for anti-aircraft defence, gun tractors for the 17-pounder, observation posts, recovery vehicles and bulldozers.

Those conversions served on well after the gun tanks were withdrawn — Crusader AA tanks and tractors landed in Normandy in 1944, three years after the type’s desert debut. The cruiser line itself continued through the Cavalier and Centaur to the Cromwell, which finally married the cruiser formula to an engine worthy of it.

When the American tanks arrived — the Grant, then the Sherman — the Crusader’s career as a gun tank ended quickly, and the chassis went on to do the things it was actually good at. Its speed and reliability-when-maintained made it a decent anti-aircraft tank, a gun tractor for the 17-pounder, an armoured recovery vehicle and a bulldozer.

That is the honest summary of the design: a fast, well-shaped hull with a suspension that worked, carrying a gun that could not do half its job and an engine installation that could not be relied on. Around 5,300 were built, which is a great many vehicles to commit to a specification that had been overtaken before the first one reached Egypt.

The Crusader is the desert war in steel: dashing, improvised, brave and flawed. It looked faster than anything else on the battlefield and often was; it also broke down more, hit less hard than its enemies’ guns, and asked its crews to make up the difference — which, from Operation Crusader to Alamein, they repeatedly did.

Its real legacy is double. It taught British tank design, at painful cost, that reliability and a dual-purpose gun mattered more than paper speed — lessons the Cromwell and Comet absorbed. And it held the line in Africa through the hardest eighteen months, when there was nothing better to hold it with.

• Peter Chamberlain & Chris Ellis, British and American Tanks of World War Two (Arms & Armour Press).
• David Fletcher, Crusader Cruiser Tank 1939–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).