Cromwell Recce

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"Neccessity hath no law."

– Oliver Cromwell, the twat.

Ol' Flatface

The Cromwell Tank also known as the A27M was a cruiser tank of the British forces during World War 2, and of course appears here as a unit for British forces in Flames of War. It was one of their highest performing homegrown armored vehicles during the war, with good armor, and a 75mm gun. The Cromwell was a solid base that led to the development of numerous variants throughout the war. It was the fastest British tank of the war, able to hit 40MPH (64km/h), though some tanks were powered down due to stresses on the drive.

Late War

These are the stats lad.

IRL

Making my way downtown, cruising fast, making my way through the crowd...

The Cromwell was designed from the ground up to be a replacement for the increasingly obsolete Crusader. Designed to carry both a modern 75mm high-velocity gun and possess better defenses against similar weapons. Bridging the gap between the heavy and ponderous Churchill and the fast yet weak Crusader. The Cromwell was to be initially fitted with the weak Liberty Engine, but the wizards at Rolls-Royce designed the Meteor Engine, basically creating a land version of the Rolls-Royce Merlin.

This engine was used in the A27M, known as the Cromwell III, (not to be confused with the later Cromwell III variant.) This tank would have been fitted with a high-velocity dual-purpose 75mm cannon, capable of taking on German armor at the time. However, the high-velocity version of the gun couldn't fit within the turret, so a lower velocity 57mm dual-purpose gun was used instead until the turret could be redesigned. This took so long, that by the time they were able to redesign the Cromwell to accomodate a 17-pdr (the Comet), the war in Europe was already in its final stages.

Funnily enough, the engineers at Vickers noticed that the American 75mm shell used with the Early Shermans could fit within the existing 6-pdr (57mm), so long as they modified the breach and bore out the gun. While this modification lasted for the rest of the war (only one division ever got the Comet, and 17-pdrs/70somethings were instead mounted on dedicated tank destroyers; one of which, the Challenger, was an experimental design based on the Cromwell, with an even worse turret), the 75 ROQF was still more of a "generalist" gun that had "okay" HE performance and an AP shell that could only penetrate German heavies up close, and even then only on the flanks.

In 1944, the Cromwell fought alongside its counterpart the Sherman in the D-day invasion, where a total of 7 Tiger tanks were confirmed destroyed in the race inland. The Cromwell was Fast with a capital "F", capable of reaching 40 mph (61 Kilometers per hour), with one report of a group of 3 Cromwells getting surprised and leaping a 20ft canal in order to gain a better position.