- 7/6/2025
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00:00The M4 Sherman tank was born out of the urgent need to produce an allied tank to rival the
00:29mighty panzers of the German army. In a triumph of industrial mass production, more Shermans would
00:37be made than every type of German tank put together. Using archive film and color reconstructions,
00:45Battle Stations tells the story of the Sherman tank. Fast and reliable, but with a fundamental
00:52weakness. Its armor was no match for the high velocity German guns the tanks would come up against.
00:59Our armor was not even maybe half the thickness of the German tanks. Their guns,
01:09the rounds they fired could just go right through just like butter.
01:14The Germans had their own nickname for the Sherman.
01:17They called them Ronsons. The advert of the day for the Ronson lighter was one flick and it lights.
01:26But the Shermans would make a vital contribution towards the allied victory in Normandy.
01:31And after some of the toughest tank battles of World War II, they led the breakout that destroyed the German army in the west.
01:39The tank is not an instrument which is developed to save lives. It's an instrument which is developed to kill.
01:52Kill or be killed. Kill or be killed was the motto. Kill or be killed.
02:08Kill or be killed. Kill or be killed. Kill or be killed.
02:12Tanks were first used by the British in the First World War to break the stalemate of the Western Front.
02:18Heavy, cumbersome monsters they often broke down.
02:24In the interwar years, light tanks became popular because of their speed and mobility.
02:29But they had only thin armour and a small calibre gun.
02:40In the 1930s, the Germans began to develop heavier tanks with thicker armour and bigger guns,
02:46along with a whole new theory of mobile mechanised warfare.
02:59In May 1940, Hitler launched a blitzkrieg, lightning war, against France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
03:14Nine fast-moving panzer divisions supported by infantry broke through in the Ardennes forest,
03:19crossed the river Meuse and routed the allied armies, all within ten days.
03:29Blitzkrieg is historical shorthand for fast mobile operations by tanks and mechanised infantry.
03:39Many armies experimented with it, but it was the Germans who brought it to perfection.
03:45It's as much psychological as it is physical, making the enemy feel defeated, as well as actually beating him in the field.
03:54Meanwhile, in the United States, the army was in a poor state.
03:58Tiny in numbers and equipped with only a few hundred ancient tanks from World War I.
04:07Now, almost every tank in the US arsenal became obsolete overnight.
04:14Although still neutral, American industry began speedily to adapt for war,
04:19starting the transformation into what would be called the arsenal of democracy.
04:28the military was in the military.
04:29The military was in the military.
04:29To achieve the high level of tank production needed to catch up,
04:33the automobile industry was asked to offer up its management,
04:37manpower and mass production expertise for war production.
04:41The president of the Chrysler Corporation, Katie Keller, responded to the call and mobilised Detroit for war.
04:56Keller recommended building a new tank factory.
04:58The military was in the military.
05:00Within a month, quiet Michigan cornfields had become a factory producing tanks,
05:05known as the Detroit Arsenal.
05:07The military was in the military.
05:14Soon, streaming off the production line was the M3 medium tank.
05:18But the army planners wanted a new, better tank to try to match the German panzers.
05:27Chrysler staff and military engineers began work on a new engine.
05:31A team of designers came up with plans for a tank with a turret-mounted 75-millimeter gun.
05:48This meant designing a new heavy turret, capable of a 360-degree traverse.
05:53This new tank had a similar chassis and mechanical layout as the M3.
06:06It had two and a half inch thick steel armour plating.
06:14It would weigh 33 tons when fully armed and equipped.
06:17Trials of the new tank at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland were a great success.
06:29The tank was manoeuvrable, reliable, and with a top speed of 26 miles per hour, fast.
06:43In October 1941, this new tank went into production.
06:46Officially, it was known as the M4.
06:50But it would most often be called the Sherman.
06:57In late 1942, the first Shermans went into service to the British Army as well as the American.
07:06I just loved it.
07:07The Sherman tank was a 33-ton monster.
07:11The first sight of the Sherman, there it was, a huge tank.
07:18There's a lot of room in it.
07:21A veritable Rolls-Royce, really, compared with what we've been used to.
07:26I was very impressed with the way they had the five Chrysler engines.
07:34The way they were all made to drive onto one common shaft.
07:37Most of the American equipment was much better than ours.
07:45They seemed to have the industrial muscle to produce these things.
07:49I thought he was going to be able to do the job very well against the enemy.
07:57Each Sherman was operated by a crew of five.
08:00The driver sat in the left bow.
08:06As a driver, the Sherman, you've got an enormous gearbox on the right.
08:11It's got the same pedals as most vehicles.
08:16It's got an accelerator.
08:19It's got a clutch. It hasn't got a brake.
08:21Instead of the steering, you've got two sticks, like joysticks.
08:25And by pulling on the right, the tank will then veer to the right.
08:29Pulling on the left, it will go to the left.
08:31If you pull both together, it stops.
08:38Of course, a lot of often you had to drive with your periscope when you were buttoned up.
08:43And that wasn't easy, but of course you learned how to do that.
08:48When not in combat, the driver and co-driver could also drive by looking out from above the hatch.
08:57The rest of the crew worked from the turret.
09:01Well, there were three people in the turret and I would think it was about a diameter of five foot.
09:09We were very close to each other, put it that way.
09:11And the only thing between the loader and the gunner was the breach of the gun.
09:16The gunners didn't have a lot of room because he'd got the gun by his left side
09:20and his sight was all through periscope.
09:25The tank commander says where to go, what to do.
09:31I always preferred to have my head out.
09:35I couldn't bear looking through these tiny little periscopes.
09:39In addition to the main 75mm gun, the Sherman had a .30 calibre machine gun at the front
09:48and a .50 calibre anti-aircraft gun on the turret.
09:51Shells for the main gun could be either armour-piercing, known as AP, or high-explosive, HE.
10:02If the commander saw a target, he'd swing me around.
10:08I'd turn a traverse onto a target he gave me, you see.
10:11He'd say, traverse right, and give me the target if it was visible.
10:14You could traverse 360 degrees if there wasn't anybody in the way.
10:19And our traverse was beautiful. It was faster than hell.
10:22He'd say, action AP or action HE.
10:26So the loader would either load an armour-piercing shell or a high-explosive shell.
10:30And then when I got the target, I had to adjust the range.
10:37And then you fired and you hoped you hit the target.
10:38The Sherman was well suited to fast-moving offensive armoured warfare.
10:55But now it had to prove itself in the test of battle.
10:58The Sherman tank became home for its crew, who had to work and live close together, often for days at a time.
11:19We had great comradery between members of the crew.
11:25We had to learn to rely on each other.
11:32And that gave us this wonderful esprit de corps.
11:37You slept together, you ate together, you fought together, you know.
11:41It's just a unit and you heard all one another's problems from home, you know.
11:47If a letter came and there was something wrong, they usually used to tell you their problems.
11:51And you're trying to learn the other person's job too, because sometimes if something happened,
11:58the vehicle was broken down or somebody got injured, wounded, killed, you may have to take over the other person's job.
12:08And each evening the crew would dig in to camp down for the night.
12:12If you were lucky, you could dig a hole and run the tank over and sleep underneath it.
12:20And you had a sort of communal bed.
12:22I mean, you didn't take your clothes off, you took your boots off.
12:26And you all five got in together.
12:28In time, each crew built up an almost intimate relationship with their tank.
12:36We named our tanks after our favorite girlfriends.
12:39It was something you sort of loved.
12:42By 1943, the Detroit Arsenal was in full production.
12:5610,000 workers worked in three shifts, 24 hours a day, six days a week.
13:04Each tank required 4,537 separate parts.
13:08In total, 11 different factories and hundreds of subcontractors would help manufacture the Sherman tank.
13:22By the end of the war, 48,000 Shermans had rolled off the production lines,
13:28double the number of all the German tanks produced in the war.
13:32The Sherman would become the universal Allied tank of World War II.
13:38But the Sherman's had a fatal flaw.
13:49Their main gun did not have the power of the German panzers,
13:52and the Sherman's had thinner armor than their German rivals.
13:59Small arms fire made virtually no impact on the Sherman's armor.
14:03And the crew were well protected from general battlefield fire.
14:14But a hit from a German high-velocity gun could easily penetrate the Sherman's thin armor.
14:19The crew had only seconds to get out before the fuel or the ammunition went up.
14:32If you got hit, you were really in great shape to just go up like a match.
14:36You had to get out of there as quick as possible.
14:48The memory of a Sherman going up still haunts many tankmen.
14:53The sight of black smoke, I mean really black smoke, with rounds bursting off inside.
15:02It was a terrifying sight.
15:04It would burn very quickly for a very short while.
15:09As that died down, the heat generated from it would then start exploding the ammunition stored within it.
15:17If you got a turret hit, a shell could come in and ricochet around inside, which the people within it had nowhere to go.
15:33So that was messy.
15:38There was meat, a bit of flecks of meat, all the way round the inside of this turret.
15:43And we didn't look any farther. We thought, oh my, what have we got into?
15:55I was only 22 years old, and it was quite exciting and glamorous, I suppose.
16:03One always thought, well, it's not going to happen to us.
16:05I mean, bad luck on those guys, but it's not going to happen to us.
16:13Tank designers traditionally juggled the tank's three main characteristics, mobility, firepower and protection.
16:21Some tanks, like the famous German Tiger, emphasised firepower and protection.
16:27In contrast, the Sherman went for mobility. It was very mobile, and it was very good cross-country.
16:34British and American planners working on the invasion of Europe realised the need for armour to precede the infantry ashore and to clear the many waiting obstacles.
16:49A series of what became known as Hobart's Funnies, after the British general who designed them, were produced.
16:55These included swimming tanks with floating skirts around them, to go into the beaches in the first wave.
17:07When they hit the beach, they threw off the canvas floats.
17:14Flail tanks to clear minefields.
17:16Bulldozer tanks to clear the path forwards.
17:26Most of these tank adaptations proved successful.
17:32Others were less reliable.
17:34Dawn, 6th of June, 1944.
17:51D-Day, the invasion of Europe.
17:54The swimming tanks were the first to hit the beaches at 8 hour minus 5 minutes, to clear the defences for the infantry.
18:04But the seas were rough, and on Omaha Beach, many of the tanks went to the bottom.
18:22On the British and Canadian beaches, Hobart's Funnies fared much better,
18:26and made a decisive contribution to the victory that followed.
18:34The Allies had breached Hitler's supposedly impregnable Atlantic War.
18:48In the days that followed, huge numbers of tanks and men were brought ashore.
18:56But once the Germans had properly recovered,
18:59a fierce battle ensued, known as the Battle of the Hedgerows,
19:03after the characteristic feature of the Normandy countryside.
19:09Deep, sunken roads, high hedgerows, dense woods and orchards,
19:15all proved a problem to the tanks and were ideal for defenders to hide behind.
19:20So, surprisingly, our intelligence, I don't know why, they did not brief us at all about the hedgerows.
19:29We had to learn the hard way.
19:33I never visualized a hedgerow would be as big as they are.
19:36You know, looking at the hedgerow, maybe at two or three feet high,
19:39these were some like eight, ten, twelve feet high.
19:41I never knew what you're going to find around behind the next hedgerow or the next corner.
19:48The Germans were throwing men and supplies into the battle.
20:04Two tough elite SS Panzer divisions were sent from the Russian front to confront the Allies
20:10around Caen.
20:23By the end of June, about a million men faced each other across the battle lines in Normandy.
20:29The British and Canadians kept up the pressure around the city of Caen.
20:37But the result was stalemate.
20:40The weapon the Allies most feared was the 88mm German anti-aircraft and anti-tank gun.
20:52If a German 88 at say 500 to 1000 yards could zero in on a Sherman tank, even at that range,
21:08he could penetrate without any difficulty.
21:11They were vastly superior. The Long Barrel 75 and the 88 were vastly superior to anything we had.
21:21No doubt at all about that.
21:24In the killing fields of Normandy, the Shermans would soon face their biggest challenge.
21:29Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery was the commander of land forces in Normandy.
21:40It's hard to be clear exactly what Montgomery expected from Normandy.
21:45Because after the war, he said that everything had gone exactly according to plan.
21:49And in fact, it's clear that it didn't.
21:52But he certainly did have a general concept of operations.
21:55And that was to use the British around the Norman city of Caen to attract German armour.
22:01And this would give the Americans the opportunity to break out on the other side of Normandy in the West.
22:07There were going to be several battles to establish the conditions for the breakout from Normandy.
22:14Battles to wear down the Germans and to pin down their armour.
22:22Hundreds of British Sherman tanks assembled across the Orne River for Monty's big assault on July the 18th, codenamed Goodwood.
22:30The assault began with a massive air bombardment at dawn by British and American heavy bombers.
22:42It was one of the biggest ground support air raids of the war.
22:46The first thing that happened was this enormous air armada came over.
22:52One had never seen anything or could imagine anything quite like it.
22:57Hundreds and hundreds of bombers.
23:01Not very high.
23:03You could see them all clearly, all the markings.
23:06You could almost see the crews in them.
23:09And this tremendous carpet bombing.
23:14One thought absolutely invincible.
23:20One of the lads remarked, well I'd sooner be this side than on there, where that lot's going.
23:34We can't lose.
23:35There'll be nothing left.
23:37We should probably be in Germany in two days.
23:39This is what we were told.
23:40We'd probably be on the way to Germany in a matter of weeks.
23:43The aerial bombardment stunned the German defenders.
23:59Sixty-tonne Tiger tanks had been thrown into the air like matchboxes.
24:03At 8.30 a.m. the British Shermans began to roll forward through the dust and the smoke.
24:17And they had to move.
24:23For a few miles, they advanced almost without interruption.
24:27There was nothing, no resistance.
24:30There were some Germans knocking around.
24:32But they were shell-shocked very much.
24:35A lot of them were wounded.
24:37We stopped and attended to some wounded, put morphine in them and that sort of thing.
24:43And just carried on in fine fettle.
24:47We thought, well, this is marvellous.
24:49We're just going to sail on forever.
24:53After a few hours, the British were in open country.
24:56But as the Germans began to recover, the British tanks became easy targets.
25:01We got into some open ground, which we had to move across it very fast.
25:10Waiting for the British tanks were not only the dreaded 88s,
25:13but also well-hidden German panzers,
25:16with heavier armour and bigger guns than the Shermans.
25:31I was looking across at my left.
25:33I saw the tank over on the left.
25:34And all of a sudden, this just erupted into a mass of flames.
25:40And I can remember, I can remember one of the crew,
25:44up on the top of the turret, covered in flames.
25:48And he either jumped off or he fell off.
25:53Through the periscope, you could see vehicles dropping out.
25:56The one that was beside you would suddenly slow up and disappear.
26:01And our losses were quite considerable.
26:07Well, it was obvious that things weren't going as well as could be expected.
26:15It seemed that plumes of smoke were going up
26:19from the wide horizon, the wide view that you had.
26:26Everywhere you looked, something was burning.
26:31Well, we'd advanced about five, six miles.
26:36And we finished up in this meadow.
26:42James Donovan and his crew were ordered to wait for backup tanks
26:45to arrive on their left.
26:47We sat there.
26:50We'd been there at least two hours,
26:52saying, well, you know, I wonder where they got to.
26:54We didn't know what was happening.
26:55But it was all quiet, so we had no great worries.
27:01I was looking through the periscope,
27:03and I saw two tanks moving up about 100 yards in front of us.
27:09You could just see the tops of the tanks as they moved behind the hedge.
27:13One of the crew commanders of the tank was combing his hair.
27:19Nice blonde hair he had as well.
27:22We were that near to see, I could see the colour of his hair.
27:25And it was only when he leant forward and put his field out on that I realised it was Germans.
27:35They must have seen us at the same moment.
27:38Within seconds, the first one of the two German tanks crashed through the hedge.
27:45Driver, reverse.
27:47Gunner, traverse right.
27:48And our gunner was right on him as we were reversing.
27:52Fire!
27:58And as our gunner fired, I watched the tracer come off the front of the tank
28:05and shoot up into the sky, and I thought, oh, good God, what chance have we got with that?
28:10His turret came round and lined up with us, and bang, that was it.
28:25There was a lot of noise, but it's hard to say what the noise actually was now.
28:30Then the order came over the intercom, bail out.
28:34Crew, bail out!
28:35Bail out!
28:37Bail out!
28:38The two of us in the front went through the escape hatch in the floor.
28:48And the others came out through the turret.
28:50And the crew commander, he said, right, let's run and get away to get a bit of cover.
29:03We had to run to get to the cornfield and dive in the corner,
29:08till we could sort ourselves out.
29:13Several squadrons of British Shermans were almost wiped out.
29:17That evening, they counted the cost.
29:20I climbed out from the turret and stood on top of the turret,
29:25and there were nine tanks.
29:31You didn't believe it.
29:33I mean, normally you got out and, in the morning,
29:36you looked out on the same view, would give you something like 50, 55.
29:46But with the arrival of two more British tank divisions,
29:49sheer force of numbers enabled the Shermans slowly to win many of their objectives.
30:01The trickle of German prisoners captured became a flood.
30:04These shattered men were from some of the finest units of the German army.
30:09A victory of sorts had been won, but it was still far from the hoped-for breakout.
30:14A victory of sorts had been won, but it was still far from the hoped-for breakout.
30:19A victory of sorts had been won, but it was still far from the hoped-for breakout.
30:31By the last week of July 1944, the American First Army had the men and the materials ready, and were positioned to break out.
30:49On the 25th of July, a new American offensive was launched, Operation Cobra.
31:10We heard that there was a big push on, and we were told to get ready to go, we were going to move forward.
31:16So, we knew that things had started.
31:19Large numbers of American troops attacked greatly weakened German forces.
31:37The infantry of Seven Corps led the offensive.
31:57Later that day, the Shermans were ordered into action.
32:00The Germans held on for a couple of days, but were no match for the overwhelming numbers of Americans.
32:15Dazed by the speed of the advance, the defenders began to surrender in ever greater numbers.
32:21Reusing old beach obstacles and welding them onto the front of the Shermans, the tanks now had a new weapon.
32:38We went down to the beach and took a lot of the stuff that was in the water,
32:42and cut it up and used that as material to make those fork things that were done on the front of a tank to dig into a hedgerow and help tear it apart.
32:53A tank would hit the hedgerow with some speed, maybe five, ten miles an hour, we'll say, and he would just burst through the thing.
33:02Carrying the trees and shrubs and everything with him, I saw them used and they were very effective.
33:14The Americans at last broke out into good open countryside, where the Shermans could be used to real advantage.
33:22It's a great feeling to get rid of those hedgerows and get out in the open again, where you can move, especially with tanks.
33:28You really see that wide open space.
33:34The momentum of the advance began to build.
33:37This thing has busted wide open, exclaimed one American commander.
33:44At the end of July, General Patton was appointed commander of the new US Third Army.
33:50His mission? To lead the breakout in the West.
33:52He imbued his troops as mean as he seems to have been to them, with a sense of, we can.
34:03George S. Patton, known as Old Blood and Guts, had a ferocious reputation for taking the offensive, earned in North Africa and Sicily, and he had a ruthless ability to push his men to the limit.
34:15We respected him because he demanded the utmost from his troops.
34:24Within days, Patton's men were racing into Brittany.
34:28His theory was that the enemy is just as exhausted as we are, probably a little more terrified because they're on the run.
34:41You realize that once you've got the enemy off balance, it's like a wrestler. Good Lord, move in for the kill, man.
34:48As the breakout from Normandy gathered pace, one by one the French towns fell to the Allies.
35:00San Marlo, Rennes, and then turning east towards Le Mans and Paris.
35:12We kept capturing a lot of towns at the breakout, and I can't remember all the towns we went through.
35:23Patton's Third Army raced forwards, meeting virtually no opposition.
35:28The columns of Sherman tanks advancing several miles each day.
35:31Well, his strategy was always to burst through the enemy, just go hell-bent for election.
35:41Just get behind them and raise all kinds of ruckus in the back country.
35:50For the Americans and the British, the crowds began to come out to welcome the conquering heroes.
35:55People really welcomed us, going through these towns, villages.
36:05You know, they threw flowers, they gave us cognac, if they had any.
36:09Of course, we took it all we could get.
36:11Sometimes you couldn't move. Roads were damned with people.
36:19So overwhelmed with joy that at last they were liberated.
36:28We had a couple of girls came up and kissed us and put flowers around their neck.
36:34You know, really welcomed us as real heroes, which I think we were to them.
36:39At last, all was going well for the Allies.
36:48But the Germans had one last trick to play.
36:59The German commander, Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge, reported it's a madhouse here.
37:04Someone has to tell the Führer that if the Americans get through, they will be out of the woods.
37:13Hitler intervened directly to order four armoured columns to move from Caen for a counter-attack, intended to divide the Allied armies in two.
37:21It was launched on the night of the 6th of August.
37:30A fierce battle ensued.
37:35A fierce battle ensued.
37:36But the American line held until reinforcements arrived.
37:38a fierce battle ensued.
37:39But the American line held until reinforcements arrived.
38:08With the German line now perilously overextended, Eisenhower ordered Patton to wheel east and advance towards the Loire and Seine rivers, around the rear of the German armour still tied up south of Caen.
38:24Eisenhower then ordered Montgomery to attack from the Caen area southwards, towards Falaise.
38:33Now facing encirclement, the entire German army in Normandy had only one road as a means of escape, eastwards out of the closing net.
38:46The Germans could only move by night to avoid constant harassment by the Allied air forces.
38:53The Allies now had 19 German divisions trapped in the Falaise pocket.
39:08The Germans began to evacuate on the night of the 16th of August.
39:13Under continuous bombardment, they managed to get between 20,000 and 40,000 troops out.
39:20Over the next few days, the British, Canadian, Polish and American troops tightened the noose.
39:2950,000 Germans were taken prisoner.
39:32Most panzers and mechanised weapons were abandoned.
39:37When the Allies closed the gap, the scene inside the Falaise pocket was one of terrible carnage.
39:44It's difficult to describe, really.
39:47It's so horrific.
39:49Great stretches of roads, fields,
39:56blocked up, covered with knocked out vehicles,
40:03dead horses, bodies, absolute carnage.
40:08All heading one way, east, and all still and dead.
40:22You know, the Germans had a lot of horse-drawn equipment, artillery, whatever.
40:28Well, you never saw such a carnage of dead horses in your life,
40:32and the odour was just unbelievable.
40:38Ten thousand Germans were counted dead.
40:43Kluger, the German general, wrote a letter to Hitler saying that the war was as good as lost,
40:50and then committed suicide with the potassium-cyanide bill.
40:54We realised that the German army in France had virtually ceased to exist.
41:01I think that was the beginning of the end of the German occupation of France.
41:05But the story of the Normandy breakouts did not end there.
41:14General Patton crossed the River Seine and opened the gateway to Paris.
41:24With American tanks advancing across northern France, the German army faced a complete rout.
41:39On the 25th of August 1944, the German garrison in Paris surrendered.
41:44The commander there ignored Hitler's order to destroy the city first.
41:49Nobly, the Americans paused and allowed free French soldiers to liberate their capital city.
41:59The final victory parade in Paris marked a truly immense triumph.
42:03The battle of Normandy was decisive in the war in the west, and it was very important for the war as a whole.
42:15About 250,000 Germans were killed or captured in Normandy.
42:20But this has to be put in context.
42:22At much the same time, another 200,000 Germans were killed or captured by the Russians when they destroyed Army Group Centre on the Eastern Front.
42:32Either of these would have been a serious defeat in isolation.
42:35Put together, they put the German army under the sort of pressure that it couldn't possibly withstand.
42:41This was a victory for the men at the front, and for the production process at home.
42:51Enough Shermans had been produced to win through despite their weaknesses.
42:58I think we were very grateful for them.
43:01I mean, they were produced in such vast numbers.
43:05Goodness knows what we would have done without them.
43:11Okay, so we don't have anything better than the Sherman tank.
43:14But it's American, and we'll do with what we've got.
43:20We knew we had the arsenal of democracy.
43:23The pride was that Americans could do it.
43:25We could manufacture these tanks.
43:28And we were told they were good tanks, and they would help us win the war.
43:32And that was a good feeling.
43:34The Sherman tank had led the breakout and the victory that had crushed the German army in the West.
43:45Now the way was opened for an assault against Germany itself.
43:51Q there are a Transit acts at the blush.
43:53Who is in the streets.
43:58Then we were to introduce it to Ontario.
44:12Amazon .
44:13If our NTG aaKOM is very nice to make sure we can see tonight and make sure that theæŒæ›² will change its reputation.
44:15When Rotten Pro studios are ready to reach the World of Westernzenia elsewhere.
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