Crusader III vs Tiger, Tunisia 1943: a WW2 documentary about the secret British modification that took one man out of the Crusader's turret so it could carry the 6-pounder, the gun that holed Tigers. In the winter of 1943 a British 6-pounder put a shot clean through a Tiger's side at 600 yards. The Crusader III carried that gun into battle, and its commander paid for it: he had to find the enemy, load the gun and work the radio himself, in a turret with room for only two.

We follow the tank from the Nuffield drawing boards in Birmingham, through Operation Battleaxe and El Alamein, to the valleys of northern Tunisia. Soldier-poet Keith Douglas of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry led a troop of Crusader IIIs at Alamein and described the two-man turret in his memoir. The Robaa ambush of 31 January 1943, recorded round by round in a US intelligence bulletin, shows what the 6-pounder needed to stop a Tiger. The story ends at The Tank Museum, Bovington, where a Crusader III and Tiger 131, taken after a Churchill's 6-pounder jammed its turret, stand under one roof.

A story of British cruiser tanks, the North Africa campaign and the Tiger I in Tunisia, and of the price of a bigger gun in a small turret. WW2 tank history, told from the record.

Chapters:
0:00 Two Men in the Turret
1:11 Tunis, November 1942
2:23 Birmingham, 1941: A Turret That Could Not Grow
4:32 Battleaxe and the Hidden Gun
5:57 The Tiger Arrives: Robaa, 31 January 1943
8:17 Keith Douglas at El Alamein
9:56 600 Yards and the Side
11:49 Wadi Zem Zem
12:40 Looking for the Kill
14:49 Point 174 and Tiger 131
15:49 One Roof at Bovington
16:35 The Gun or the Man

Sources:
The Tank Museum, "Crusader III" (T126272): development, crew, service to May 1943. https://tankmuseum.org/tank-nuts/tank...
The Tank Museum, "First Tiger I knocked out by the British": the Robaa ambush, 17th/21st Lancers. https://tankmuseum.org/article/first-...
US War Department, Tactical and Technical Trends No. 30 (July 1943), "Attack Against German Heavy Tank": the round-by-round account. https://www.lonesentry.com/articles/t...
The Tank Museum, "A Twist in the Tale": the revised capture of Tiger 131. https://tankmuseum.org/article/a_twis...
Keith Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem (Editions Poetry London, 1946)

⚠️ No documented engagement in which a Crusader III knocked out a Tiger was found; the recorded 6-pounder Tiger kills in Tunisia were by towed anti-tank guns and Churchills.
⚠️ First complete penetration: 600 yd in the printed TTT scan, 800 yd in web copies. Tiger 131: 21 April (Djebel Djaffa) vs 24 April 1943 (Point 174); unit credited varies (48th RTR, others).
⚠️ Keith Douglas's words are paraphrased from Alamein to Zem Zem, not quoted.

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