used in the north, 64 American CDL tanks were brought back into use with their former crews. The US tanks were spread across the First, Third and Ninth armies. Bridge at Remagen The Allies used the CDLs to protect the Ludendorff Bridge after it was captured intact during the Battle of Remagen. The Germans used virtually every weapon at their disposal to try to destroy the bridge. This included sending frogmen, using Italian underwater breathing apparatus, to plant floating mines but they were discovered by US Army military police, who used Canal Defence Lights to locate and blind the swimmers. The armour of the CDLs made them more suitable for this task than conventional searchlights as, in some sectors, the East bank of the river was held by German forces who subjected the CDL tanks to considerable artillery and small-arms fire. The use of the system resembled its name, which had been intended to be spurious. Later, the battle moved eastwards and the CDLs were used to illuminate the bridges for the benefit of engineers carrying out maintenance. Conventional searchlights would have been more suitable, but none were available. The CDLs were eventually replaced by captured German searchlights. Operators The 11th Royal Tank Regiment was raised in January 1941 and designated for the CDL role in May 1941. The unit trained at Lowther Castle near Penrith, and was based at Brougham Hall, Cumberland. It spent 1942 and 1943 in the Middle East without seeing action, returning to the UK in April 1944. It landed in Normandy on 12 August 1944, seeing no action until 29 September 1944, when it was ordered to transfer all of its equipment to the 42nd and 49th Royal Tank Regiments, and was retrained to operate the American amphibious LVT-4, known by the British Army as the Buffalo Mark IV. In their turn, the 42nd and 49th Royal Tank Regiments were largely inactive for the remainder of the war and all three units were disbanded after the end of hostilities. Battalions of the American 9th Tank Group trained using the Grant variant of the CDL tank at Camp Bouse in the Arizona desert. In 1944, before deployment in the European Theatre of Operations, they continued training on the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, West Wales. Before dawn, at 06:00 on 18 November 1944, CDLs of the 357th Searchlight Battery, Royal Artillery provided hazy indirect light for the