Hello and welcome to an extra episode of the World War II podcast.

As many of you know I bang on about supporting me via Patreon at the start of each episode.

Those small donations help me to pay for the hosting, the

software and help me find the time to dedicate to putting the show together.

So after two years of plugging away I've finally reached my first funding goal on

Patreon at 250 dollars a month now I've reached this goal I'm going to upgrade my hosting package

allowing me to potentially post more and longer podcasts. As a thank you to

everyone for their support and a big thank you to all those

patrons who give me a dollar or two each month here is an extra podcast that I've recorded. I've chatted to Craig

more before he runs the website tank hunter.com and contributes to tank Encyclopedia.com. Craig recently took part in a dig to

recover one of the very few Covenanter tanks which had been buried in Surrey in the UK. So Craig, thanks for joining me. It's perhaps not the best well known of tanks and it comes out of the cruiser tank program of the late 1930s. I wonder if a good starting point would be to define what was the role of the of the cruiser tank?

It was like cavalry. It was a fast tank. It would go up, find the enemy, shoot at them and then move. Part of its protection was its ability to move. Part of its protection was its ability to move fast and not be targeted by the enemy.

And compare this with the other concept in British, early British armour was to the infantry tank which was a slow moving heavily armored

tank that could keep pace with the infantry like the Matilda the Churchill I mean the Matilda's

top speed was around about 16 miles per hour.

The Coventer that came out, it had 31 miles an hour.

It was fast. I mean the pans of the three that was its main enemy only had roughly

20 miles per hour. So this was a fast tank. This was a cavalry tank, it could find stuff, it could get out of trouble quickly,

try and go around the back of enemy positions.

It was a radical change. The Soviets had the same with the BT

tanks, they're fast tanks. They use the same Christie style suspension which enabled them to have a high top speed.

It was the old British tradition of having heavy artillery and infantry and then you have the cavalry.

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