During WWII's Normandy Campaign the inability of Allied tanks to compete against their German foes, primarily in terms of armored protection and armamanent, was and remains today a fairly well known story. Nevertheless, what is often forgotten is that by the summer of 1944 the British had found a simple, relatively cost effective solution to the problems posed by hard hitting German AFV's (Armored Fighting Vehicles).
What the British had discovered was that if they took a 17-pounder L/55 anti-tank gun and employed tungsten armor-piercing rounds powered by a higher than normal amount of
A slew of new pictures of the often forgotten dark side of the Dunkirk rescue operation, taken by a German soldier after the battle, provide chilling evidence of the scope of the disaster suffered by Allied forces following the German invasion of Western Europe in May, 1940.
Within ten day of the German invasion, tanks from the 2nd Panzer Division had crossed the Somme River and reached the English Channel at Abbeville, completing the encirclement of approximately 1.7 million British, French, Dutch, and Belgian soldiers in an enormous pocket 120 miles long and 72 miles wide.