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Tanks Around the Block.
“The British tank regiments came first”, said Tom Grisdale. “They were all up on Ludshott Common – it was just a sea of mud.” Jim Clark remembers these being light tank regiments, with ‘Matildas’ he thinks. But it is the Canadians who the villagers remember most vividly.
“The first lot of Canadians came without tanks – we thought that was bad enough, but then we had Canadians plus tanks”, said Joyce Stevens, echoing the feelings of many residents at the time. The squadrons which were parked in the village and in Lindford had to drive through the village to take part in exercises on Ludshott, Frensham and Thursley Commons. Katie Warner remembers: “It was nothing to go up and find a line of tanks all down the High Street, some of them with their tracks off being repaired.”
Pat Lewis recalls driving tanks from Headley to Aldershot when they had to do repairs, and going through the lanes to Farnham. “They specialised in tanks at Aldershot, while Bordon was more for the other vehicles”, he said. Katie Warner recalls: “They widened our roads for us considerably – especially Mill Lane – it’s difficult to imagine it now, but it used to have quite high banks each side going down the hill. But when two tanks met on the hill, nobody was going to stop and go back – and so they each carved into the bank.” She remembers the resulting mud at the top of Mill Lane, by the chestnut tree. It was so bad that when her six year-old son slipped and fell there on their way to church, she had to take him straight home to clean him up, and missed the service.
“If you look around the area now you’ll find concrete in the oddest spots”, she continues, “maybe in somebody’s garden – and there’s a bit along the Liphook Road just outside Littlecote, where they used to turn to go into the field, in what is now Hilland Estate. Where they were turning on this same spot all the time, they scooped out the road blocking the ditch – so they had to put in this big slab of concrete which allowed them to turn more easily.”
Concrete slabs put down to assist tank movements can still be seen in many other parts of the village: for example, at the sharp corner of Churt Road at Hearn Vale, by the scout hut up Beech Hill Road, at various places along Headley Hill Road (see photo), and at the entrance to Headley Fields. According to David Whittle, parts of Carlton Road (as far as the dip) and Seymour Road were made up for tanks to go along and there was a Tank Repair Shed in the middle of Ludshott Common. “Just inside the fence of the school grounds at Openfields, there’s concrete still under the grass”, Jim Clark says. “They tried to break it up afterwards, but it must be nearly three foot thick – they couldn’t touch it, so they just put earth over it – and of course if you get a hot summer now, that grass all dies off first.”
“There was a tank shed by where the scout hut is now”, Mary Fawcett recalls, “with several tanks parked near it, and there was always a guard standing there, day and night.” There were also tank parks laid down opposite Ludshott Common along the Grayshott straight, according to Pat Lewis. At each of these, up to three tanks would run in onto concrete slabs arranged in a ‘trifurcated’ pattern, hidden under the trees which were there at the time. From these parks the tanks had only to cross Grayshott Road to get to the training area on the Common. This at least saved them from having to drive through the village.
Many residents remember the incident when a tank ran into the side of a house in Arford. The house (see photo), since demolished during post-war development, stood at the narrowest part of Arford Road just down from the junction with Long Cross Hill. It had been built with a rounded corner, and according to Katie Warner, “they had a go at that rounded corner more than once.” Betty Parker, who lived close by, said that the husband of the lady living there was away in the Navy at the time. “She was Irish, and flew out of doors demanding a guard until it was repaired. He stayed on duty outside there with a rifle at night for several weeks.” Sue Allden, who supplied the photograph of the house, recalls the lady telling the tank driver he “couldn’t drive a wheelbarrow.”
Joyce Stevens (née Suter) remembers that the tanks “kicked up at the back when they started off”, and more than once demolished different parts of their garden wall in the High Street. She still has one of the forms from the Canadian Claims Commission, proposing to pay £10 for “damage to stone wall by unidentified C.M.V.” on 19th November 1943 (see copy p.29). In fact the bill from Johnson & Sons of Liphook for repairing the wall came to £12, so the Suters were £2 out of pocket on this occasion.
Harvey Theobald recalls that their C.O. had ordered that any crew damaging walls, etc, would be responsible for repairing same within 48 hours. “The walls near the entrance to ‘A’ Squadron tank park and the narrow bridge at Lindford came in for a lot of special attention. Most of our tank crews soon became very proficient as stone masons!”
Sue Allden says the wall by the road shown in her photograph of Arford was “continually being knocked down by tanks”, and confirms the report in a contemporary Parish Magazine which mentions the 1914-18 War Memorial being hit and damaged by an army vehicle. The Memorial was subsequently moved back from the road after the war to its present position, in order to protect it from traffic. Pat Lewis remembers how he once hooked a woman off her bicycle – though not in Headley: “I had a recovery tank, with plenty of room, but I misjudged the width, and at the side of the tank there were booms which hit her. She and the bike went over, but thank God there was road works going on, and she landed in a pile of sand there.” No wonder veterans tell the tale that the last vehicle in a tank convoy was always the regimental paymaster, who paid out for damage caused along the way.
Vehicle Identification.
Each tank carried a squadron sign and tank number painted on the turret for identification. “I remember the squadron signs”, says Jim Clark. “There were squares, circles, diamonds and triangles on the turret – and the squares were parked up here in Openfields. I can remember in the evenings, we were by the Holly Bush when all the tanks were coming back up from Bordon, and we looked to see which ones came down our road and which went elsewhere – and when we saw the ones with the squares on we said, ‘They’re our lot’, and sure enough they turned down our way.” According to convention in both the British and the Canadian army, the diamonds signified HQ Squadron, and the triangles, squares and circles belonged to A, B and C Squadrons respectively.
Other official identification marks included the Formation and Tactical signs on the front and rear of each vehicle. The Formation sign for the Canadians was a maple leaf superimposed on a rectangle of the relevant Division’s colour – green for the 4th, and maroon for the 5th Armoured Division, and so on. The Tactical (or ‘Tac’) sign was a number denoting the ‘seniority’ of the regiment within the Brigade. Conventionally for tanks, this was normally ‘51’, ‘52’ or ‘53’. Thus, for example, the Foot Guards, as senior regiment in the 4th Brigade (see Appendix III), had a Tac Sign of ‘51’, while the Garrys, second in the 2nd Brigade, would display ‘52’. Reconnaissance (‘Recce’) regiments, such as the South Albertas became after they left Headley, displayed ‘45’. Other numbering systems existed – for example it can be seen that the ‘Tac’ sign of the Calgarys at Dieppe was ‘175’.
Tanks were also given names according to a convention which varied from unit to unit. Sometimes they were chosen to start with a letter relevant to the Regiment’s name: for example all tanks of the Foot Guards carried names beginning with the letter ‘F’ (Marcel Fortier’s tank was ‘Fitzroy’); whereas in the Straths and certain other regiments, the names began with the letter of the squadron: A, B or C.
But identification marks shown in photographs, even where the censor has let it through, are not always to be trusted. Pat Lewis recalls: “Wherever we were stationed, we were involved in ‘away activities’, loaded on tank landing craft, doing fake runs here and there – up to Wales, up to Scotland and then back. We didn’t realise at first, but the ‘Scam’ was on as well – we were taken down the road and they’d tell us to change the lettering on the tank, or something. We’d think, ‘What stupid thing’s this? We’ve just done that’. But it was all trying to screw up the German intelligence.”
Whereas the Calgarys arrived with British ‘Matilda’ and then ‘Churchill’ tanks, all subsequent Canadian regiments here used the American M3 ‘Grant’, M4 ‘Sherman’ or Canadian ‘Ram’ types. The Grants were relatively old-fashioned, and noted for having their main gun ‘sponson-mounted’ in the body of the tank rather than in the turret (see photo). This gave them a very limited angle of fire unless you turned the whole tank, and they were eventually replaced by Shermans which did not suffer from this problem. The Sherman became the main battle-horse of the Canadians during the Normandy campaign, and was usually powered by dependable twin Diesel engines. See Grant and Sherman specifications in Appendix IV.
However, the Ram was probably the tank seen most in Headley (see photos). It was a Canadian manufactured version of the Sherman, of all-welded construction, powered by an aeroplane engine running on 100% octane petrol, and is said to have taken its name from the ram on the family crest of General Worthington, the ‘father’ of Canadian armoured forces. These tanks were relatively fast, but only did 1 mile per gallon with a maximum range of some 100 miles, and also required a great deal of maintenance on their engines. Their protective armour was not very heavy – the Garrys discovered on visiting the Linney Ranges in Wales that a shot from their 2 pounder main armament would go right through them. They were used for training and eventually replaced by ‘real’ Shermans for operational armoured work, but the changeover was not complete until April 1944 – just 2 months before D-Day.

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