The 'Wasteful' British Canal Defence Light That Blinded Entire German Battalions скачать в хорошем качестве

The 'Wasteful' British Canal Defence Light That Blinded Entire German Battalions

The Canal Defence Light was Britain's most ambitious secret weapon of World War 2 — a 13-million-candlepower strobing searchlight crammed inside an armoured tank turret. Designed to blind entire German formations during night assaults, the CDL could have transformed warfare after dark. Instead, it sat unused while thousands of Allied soldiers died in night attacks the CDL was built to dominate. Why? Because the weapon was so secret that the commanders who could have deployed it didn't even know it existed. In this video, we explore the engineering genius of Marcel Mitzakis, the technical specifications that made the CDL nearly impossible to disable, and the few combat actions where it finally proved its worth — including hunting German frogmen at Remagen. We also compare British visible-light doctrine against German infrared night-fighting technology and examine what the Soviet disaster at Seelow Heights reveals about battlefield illumination. 635 tanks. Thousands of trained crew. Four years of development. A combat record of barely a dozen nights. This is the story of British engineering at its most ingenious — and military secrecy at its most self-defeating. — SOURCES & FURTHER READING • US General Board Study No. 52: "Armored Special Equipment" (1946) • Tank Encyclopedia: Canal Defence Light (CDL) Tanks • Wikipedia: Canal Defence Light • REME Museum: The Canal Defence Light • R.P. Hunnicutt, "Sherman: A History of the American Medium Tank" • The Tank Museum, Bovington — Tank Chats #14: CDL • US Army Corps of Engineers: Battle of the Remagen Bridgehead