Object of the Week: Churchill Crocodile

While volunteering at the D-Day story in my third year, I got to spend a lot of time on LCT 7074, their landing craft outdoors. On board are two tanks, an American Sherman “Grizzly” and a British Churchill Crocodile (which I will refer to as the Croc from now on). The Churchill tanks (full designation “Tank, Infantry, Mk IV (A22) Churchill”) are my favourite tanks of the war and all time, so of course I was overjoyed to spend time with one.

Figure 1: The front of the Croc with the flame projector on the hull. (Author photo, 2025).

The Croc is one of Hobart’s “funnies”, a set of tank variants designed for the D-Day landings and they’re all interesting in their own right but I have not the space to go into them here. In place of the hull machine gun is a flame projector fed via a pipe under the tank to a rear universal joint which would connect to a trailer of liquid fuel.

Figure 2: A look at the rear engine decking on universal joint for the trailer. (Author photo, 2025).

The Croc on display is a variant of the Mk VII Churchill and it is painted as a tank in the 79th Armoured Division, which did take part on D-Day, though this exact tank was not a member of it. Armed with an Ordinance Quick-Fire (QF) 75mm gun in the turret, the flame projector in the hull was capable of firing jets of flame up to 110m in front of it and could fire for up to 80 seconds, either continuous or in bursts.

Figure 3: A Croc firing its flame projector. (Imperial War Museum). Having one preserved is extremely rare, with only around 1,000 being produced, making it very special to have one saved at the D-Day Story.

Berengar Needham is currently a student on the MA Museum Studies program at the University of Leicester.