London's refurbished Holy Roller tank revealed, set for Victoria Park return
It fought its way from a D-Day invasion beach through Europe to V-E Day, surviving 14 battles.
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It fought its way from a D-Day invasion beach through Europe to V-E Day, surviving 14 battles.
It even made it home after the fighting ended, one of only two such warhorses preserved in Canada.
Tuesday, London’s signature Second World War monument — a Sherman tank known as the Holy Roller — will begin another epic journey, a homecoming as it returns to its place of honour in Victoria Park from Fanshawe College, where it has been restored by volunteers over the past year.
More than 8,000 hours of work went into the rebuild, which cost more than $160,000, Gary Cambridge, who headed the volunteer team, said as the wraps came off the restoration job Monday.
Time and the elements had taken a toll on the Sherman III tank, which was part of the invasion force of the 6th Armoured Regiment (1st Hussars) that landed at Juno Beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944. But the only pieces of the tank that had to be replaced during its facelift were its wheels and the track they ride on, which had to be brought in from Europe, Cambridge said.
“We were lucky to find those, because Sherman tanks seem to be popular in restoration right now around the world,” he said.
The team also installed an electric motor, allowing the Holy Roller to move by its own power during Monday’s restoration reveal.
Taking part in the restoration was one of the biggest honours of his life, said Steve Sergeant, one of the volunteers who worked on the project.
“One of the reasons that I did volunteer for the job was knowing that it’s going to be at Victoria Park, and my daughters can come down to the park and see this because it’s not going to go anywhere for a very long time, generations even,” he said.
The most difficult part of the project was taking the tank apart, a process that took about eight months, Sergeant said. “Everything was rusted but once we actually got it apart, (the) reassemble was much, much easier. It’s quite a transformation.”
But the process also revealed some hidden gems.
Among them was a British two-pence coin, minted in 1797, that volunteers believe must’ve been a lucky coin belonging to one of the crew members who fought in the tank during the Second World War.
Somewhere along the way, the coin dropped too far into the tank to retrieve and it stayed there through battle after battle.
“The only reason we can think somebody would be carrying that around with them, from that era, would be if somebody gave it to them as a as a lucky piece,” said Ian Haley, a former lieutenant colonel and commanding officer with the 1st Hussars reserve armoured regiment based in London and Sarnia.
“Somebody would have given it to one of the crew when they were in the U.K. And they carried it with them. It must have worked because, despite being hit several times by enemy fire, no one was ever killed in the Holy Roller.”
The coin will go on display at the 1st Hussars Museum at 1 Dundas St.
After decades years of sitting outside in the park, the tank needed a full restoration inside and out, and in 2021 volunteers began disassembling and repairing parts, and sandblasting and repainting the body.
“It’s been two years of a lot of work, and a lot of research. It looks much like it would have looked in World War Two,” Haley said.
During the rebuild, volunteers found the coin, tools and ammunition casings.
“A lot of that would have been under the turret. People would drop things and when they go under the turret, they stay there. When we moved the tank, things got shaken and moved,” Haley said
More than 50 students from different Fanshawe programs, including welding and auto body repair, also took part and helped with the tank restoration work, while broadcasting students documented each step of the restoration.
“Dedicated volunteers and partners rallying around this project have not only preserved a tank, they have preserved an important part of Canadian history for future generations, spreading awareness of the sacrifices of the past,” said Peter Devlin, Fanshawe’s president.
The tank’s wartime journey began with an 11-kilometre advance from Juno Beach into Nazi-occupied France on D-Day, and ended in northwestern Europe as the Canadians and other Allies pushed the Germans back across the continent. The tank survived through to Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945, and was returned to Canada after the war.
For decades it has stood in Victoria Park, once the site of a British military garrison and home to other military monuments including the city’s cenotaph, its Boer War monument and cannons captured during the Crimean War.
The last survivor of the Holy Roller’s D-Day crew died in 2020 at 97.
The tank’s journey back to a new platform at Victoria Park from the college, a distance of about 6.5 kilometres, will start early Tuesday with the tank expected to arrive about noon. A flatbed truck will be used to haul the Holy Roller back to its downtown home.
Central Avenue, which borders the park, will be closed starting at 7 a.m. to assemble a crane, a job expected to take about four hours alone to complete, which will lift the tank and set it on its new base in the park.
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