Thought about it. Resisted... Don Juan seems to see Cromwell as a sort of Tumbledown Dick variant. Largely pointless, and moving very little forward at all. Bugger. I'm so easily led.
Just thinking now how Harland & Wolff were taken off making battleworthy Churchills in order to build unbattleworthy Centaurs. Absolutely insane.
I mean, at the end of October 1942 the tank crisis was basically over, wasn't it? You had a tank in the Sherman that basically solved the needs of the armoured divisions for the rest of the war, and you also had a domestic tank in the Churchill that gave every promise of fulfilling the needs of the Tank Brigades until the end of the war. That was pretty much problem solved - they could have just kicked off their shoes and put their feet up. They also had the potential of freeing up loads of domestic industry for whatever purpose they wanted. And yet a year later you have Exercise Dracula and all the utterly pointless controversy that provoked, and everybody is plunged into a totally unnecessary and artificial crisis. It really is quite strange, when you think about it.
