Staff Sergeant 7641906 George James Lynch, 8 Armoured Workshop, REME (attached to 11th Armoured Division)
Pre-Enlistment
George James Lynch was, at the start of the Second World War, a railway fitter working for. He soon volunteered for the Auxiliary Fire Service in London, which saw him attend various call-outs related to German bombing raids. Not much is known about his time in the Auxiliary Fire Service, with the exception of when his service with them came to an end - which was only upon his enlistment in the Army.
Enlistment and War Service
George enlisted on 5th September 1940, just as the Battle of Britain was reaching it's climax. He was given the service number 7641906 and was enlisted in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (Engineering Branch). It would be here that he would learn how to do most of the basic skills that he would require for his later role in the REME. He started as a Fitter M.V. (Motor Vehicle) - cars, jeeps, vans, trucks and prime movers - qualifying 1st class on 18th June 1941. When he completed his training and qualified as Armoured Articifier M.V. on 1st September 1941, he was promoted to Acting (Unpaid) Staff Sergeant, with Staff Sergeant pay commencing on 22nd September 1941, just 21 days later. George would find himself on a 9-week retraining course at 9 AFVRTC from 14th January - 18th March 1942, where he qualified as "good". It was only a month later that he would find himself on the Armoured Vehicle Recovery Course, which ran from 22nd April - 12th May 1942, where he again qualified as "good". For a brief period, George was temporarily promoted to a Warrant Officer 2nd Class, but soon reverted back to the rank of Staff Sergeant. There is much debate about where he was posted when it came to any specific division during the run-up to D-Day, although family photographs indicate that he may have been posted to the 11th Armoured Division. This was only partially-confirmed by the appearance of a black bull in a rectangular shape on part of the M5 Recovery Half-Track that George was in command of. After a what could be described as "a very successful" period on M5 Half-Tracks, George was posted to command a Churchill ARV MkII, still remaining (rather oddly) with the 11th Armoured Division. The Churchill ARV would come in very handy when the 11th Armoured Division (specifically the 29th Armoured Brigade) had their Shermans and Sherman Fireflies replaced with A34 Comets - the Sherman coming in at 35.3 tonnes and the Comet coming in at 35.5 tonnes.
Although George recovered only two Comets, he recovered quite a number of Sherman and Sherman Fireflies, sometimes using the M5 Half-Track. But his rise to fame would be during his time on the Churchill ARV MkII. It would be with his crew that the role of the REME Tank Recovery Teams would be immortalised in film in the 1946 instructional film "Armoured Recovery".
George went on to state that the Sherman was fairly easy to recover and maintain, but his favourite recovery "job" was an A30 Challenger (turret holding a 17 pounder gun on a Cromwell chassis). There is a photograph of him sitting on the rear deck of the Challenger shortly after it had been recovered, dated 29th April 1945. George and his crew were spared the horrors of liberating the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, as he was involved in the recovery of a number of Armoured Vehicles in the area (which included a number of troop carriers). He would recover his first Comet after it fell victim to a StuG III (where a track had been destroyed and the vehicle subsequently abandoned). His second and final Comet recovered was a vehicle that had been knocked out by a Panzerfaust, resulting in the death of the entire crew. The crew were still in their positions inside the tank when George and his crew arrived to recover it. After the bodies of the crew had been removed from the vehicle and taken away for burial, George and his crew set about recovering the tank, starting with welding shut the hole in the armour where the Panzerfaust warhead had hit the turret. The rest of the "job" was as per the textbook, with the Comet being taken away on a drawbar, with the Comet's gun put in the barrel lock on the engine deck. The necessary repairs were made and the vehicle was put back into service within ten days, now brandishing the name "Phantom".