Blondie has been the subject of much speculation over the years but I think it is in fact a Firefly from 4th CLY. It appears to be on the RN 175 just outside Villers Bocage.
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Note the shadow on the barrel of 'Blondie' is some distance from the tree trunk. This indicates the tree is further away than it looks.

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Now the following photo seems to show two trees, one either side of the gun barrel. Common sense tells us that if the trees were as close as they appear then the turret could not traverse into the gap between them. Obviously the rear tree is reasonably close up to the barrel and therefore the front tree must be further in front. The effect appears to be the compression you get when you use a telephoto lens to take a photo.
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Thanks to Yann for most of the information and getting the excellent copy of the German newsreel footage.

At first it appeared to me that they cannot be the same Sherman due to the apparent different location of the handle on the turret:



but after closer examination of my Sherman resources, which are not exhaustive but I do have the original version of Hunnicut's book on the Sherman, I have been unable to find a single photo of a Sherman VC, nor any other Sherman, that had a grab handle on the front right top corner of the turret, as the RN 175 Firefly appears to have. I am 99% sure that it is just a matter of perspective and that the grab handle is actually centrally-located, as on "Blondie". I will continue to look through my Sherman resources because there were myriads of detail changes and differences based on the time and location of manufacture of Shermans.

thanks for your work on this, Mike.

Sam Wren
Abilene, República de Texas

"Nosotros la gente que les dimos autoridad, igual, se lo podemos quitar" Ozomatli

Is the lighter colour rectangle on the side of the radio box,
Which I have only seen on the CLY tanks in VB.
with a white 1,2,3 or 4 in each troop (Allakeefek had a white '4' on what looks like a black rectangle.)



& I think each troop had a different colour (or two colours split,one above the other).
I'm sure they were separate metal plates too.
Cheers Elliott