Episode 39 - The Valentine That Fought Hitler's Panzers

On this special Valentine’s Day episode of Rum Ration, retired infantry officers Colin Robinson and Rejoy Chatterjee celebrate a different kind of “Valentine”: the Infantry Tank Mk. III. They start with the martial origins of February 14th, from Saint Valentine’s defiance on behalf of soldiers to wartime traditions that kept troops connected to home. Then the story shifts to steel and diesel as Dunkirk’s disaster forces Britain to lean on Canada, a country with no tank-building tradition, to produce a finished design at speed.At CPR’s Angus Shops in Montréal, 3,500 workers assemble 40,000 parts into the Canadian Valentine, swapping in a GM 6-71 diesel and a Browning machine gun while wrestling with early production growing pains and design changes like cast armour. The twist: most Canadian Valentines ship to the USSR via brutal Arctic convoys, where Soviet crews praise the tank, improvise solutions, and fight on. The episode closes with the Archer variant and the remarkable journey of Montréal-built Tank #838—lost in 1944, recovered decades later, and preserved today in Ottawa. Support the Podcast - If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your friends. And as always...Cheers to history! 🥂