Can You Make a Sherman Tank Float?
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2026
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s D-Day and the Allies are about to invade Nazi-occupied France. For the landings to succeed, American soldiers on Omaha Beach will have to break through some formidable coastal defences - Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. Sherman tanks will come in very handy - and the Allies have come up with a novel solution for getting them to the beach. These tanks will swim. Everyone from Winston Churchill down thought swimming tanks were a great idea… but were they?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:05.2 | Hey, everybody. |
| 0:06.1 | It's me, Debbie Kamal. |
| 0:07.4 | This season on my podcast, who's with me, I speak with actor, rapper, producer, David Diggs. |
| 0:14.0 | What doesn't he do? |
| 0:15.0 | The jump off for me was Hamilton, and it was the most popular thing in a very long time. |
| 0:21.2 | But it was still, for me, it was me and my friends making something dumb. |
| 0:25.0 | I'm a relatively shy person. |
| 0:26.7 | Play a lot of boisterous characters. |
| 0:28.0 | I'm really that way in life. |
| 0:30.0 | Listen to Who's With Me with Me with Demi Kmart Bell, wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 1:00.4 | Pushkin Pushkin D-Day has dawned Under grey brooding, on gray storm-tossed seas, thousands upon thousands of gray warships are descending on the French coast. Ahead lies a broad ribbon of yellow sand, |
| 1:09.3 | codenamed Omaha Beach by the Allied military planners. In happier times, |
| 1:15.1 | it was a magnet for vacationers. But now the gently sloping sands are strewn with explosive mines, |
| 1:23.0 | barbed wire, and fearsome metal obstacles, designed to rip apart any boat trying to land. |
| 1:30.6 | Verdant green hills rise behind the beach and hidden amongst their folds are trenches, machine |
| 1:37.0 | gun nests and cannon emplacements. |
| 1:40.7 | This is Hitler's Atlantic War, part of the 3,000-mile chain of fortifications built from the Spanish frontier to the Arctic tip of Norway. |
| 1:54.2 | The Nazis have sunk vast sums of money, billions, into the project, with just one aim aim to stop any Allied invasion dead in the serf. |
| 2:08.6 | The battleships offshore are hammering these fortifications with their big guns, but while the Germans are many things, |
| 2:16.6 | they're not stupid. |
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