Flame Thrower: Memoir of a Crocodile Tank Commander, D-Day to the Rhine

‘One of the most vivid battle stories of the Second World War’ SIR BASIL LIDDELL HARTThe only memoir by a Churchill Crocodile tank commander.This Spitfire Publishers 2022 edition features a new introduction by the author.Normandy, June 1944. Tank commander Andrew Wilson, a twenty-year-old lieutenant, is in charge of a troop of three British Churchill Crocodile flame-throwing tanks. The fearsome Crocodile was one of ‘Hobart’s Funnies’ – top secret armoured vehicles designed to punch a hole through Hitler’s Atlantic Wall defences during D-Day. But there was nothing remotely humorous about the Crocodile. This terror-weapon reduced German fortifications to raging infernos of clinging liquid fire in seconds, incinerating its occupants. It was truly a horrific weapon. The flame projector, firing a crude form of napalm, was also a powerful psychological weapon, so feared by the Germans that many surrendered after the first ranging shots. Andrew Wilson, MC, vividly describes battling across 1,800 miles of enemy-held territory, the vicious street-to-street fighting, the constant risk of ambush from anti-tank panzerfausts and 88s, Tiger and Panther tanks. From Noyers Ridge and the Falaise Gap through to the final confrontation at the Rhine, here is a first-hand account of tank warfare at its deadliest.ABOUT THE AUTHORAndrew Wilson, MC, was an English journalist and writer whose career spanned the Daily Express, the BBC World Service to his long-term home at The Observer. Born in Herne Bay, Kent he volunteered on his 18th birthday and served in the Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment) becoming a captain commanding a troop of Churchill Crocodile flame-throwing tanks from D-Day through France, Holland and into Germany. After the war he read PPE at Oxford University and embarked on his almost 40-year journalism career. He wrote several books including his first-hand account of his experiences as a tank commander, Flame Thrower, and as co-translator of Helmut Pabst’s Eastern Front memoir, The Outermost Frontier: A German Soldier in the Russian Campaign (‘A masterpiece’ The Observer). He was awarded a PhD in military history from the Catholic University of Leuven in 2009. He died in 2020 aged 97. Read more