AlienFTM

Depends on the role. Mine was a rebroadcast Ferret intended to park between RHQ and Sqn or RHQ and Formation and increase the range of one net for tactical or technical reasons. Both sides of the rebro needed lots of grunt, hence two times 353. When our CVR(T)s first got Clansman for Larkspur, the Scorpions and Scimitars each got two times 353 but after a couple of years it was decided that the configuration you describe was more flexible and cut down the expense of one of the 353s in every vehicle.

In my day infantry crewed and provided dismounts for their own APCs. The Light Dragoons Regimental Journal dropped through my letter-box yesterday. It describes how LD participated in the first Ex PRAIRIE THUNDER to replace MEDICINE MAN at BATUS and worked a fully hybrid BG with a squadron of heavy armour, one of recce/medium armour and two infantry companies in different roles (sorry I only briefly scanned the article - haven't read it properly yet and it hasn't sunk in so details are missing) instead of the traditional 50/50 heavy armour / infantry split with a few odds and ends bolted on. Apparently using LD to crew the IFVs and infantry to provide the dismounts worked very well and brought the soldiers together in a way that doesn't tend to happen. There's nothing new it seems.

The Five Oh (as it was known to us in the day: I so HATE the latter-day Americanization "Fifty Cal" even if that's what the Americans called it, we didn't; presumably it would be fundamentally wrong to write "Americanisation") was obsolescent and used only as a ranging gun on Chieftain until Barr & Stroud came up with a laser rangefinder. Only visits to the sandpits which have found a purpose for the weapon have kept the Five Oh from the scrap heap. We had a weird Three Oh mount to fire backwards from our Mark 1 Ferrets that looked like it ought to be a ground mount but obviously wasn't. Apart from a single trip to Hohne Ranges, it never left the troop cage. Come to that, the Three Oh itself only left the armoury the same one time and for cleaning.

I did the Osnabruck Triathlon in ... mmm ... 1984. After the swimming was the 9mm pistol shoot. Rather than combats, lightweights, boots, puttees, webbing, etc, we all wore tracksuits (after the shooting came the run: why dress up in between the swimming and the shooting?) and skeleton webbing (might even have been just a web belt and pouch). So we dressed forward onto the firing point keeping the weapon pointed downrange at all times. With a magazine of 10 rounds LOAD. READY. WATCH AND SHOOT. I brought the pistol up to the aim. The bloke on my left got his round a split second before me. A bee struck my neck and flew inside my T-shirt. Ouch. Engagement missed. Second round, same detail. After the second round I untucked the T-shirt and adjusted my position sufficiently that his hot empty cases didn't smack my neck and get stuck around my waist. I rushed the remaining shoots, double-tapping to try and gets the spare rounds off but any chance I had of a half-decent score was gone. (Tbf I was only there cos the other two guys in the office fancied either a run or a swim with a bit of pistol shooting thrown in and I didn't fancy manning the office by myself. Neither running nor swimming was my favourite pastime, but converting live rounds into empty cases is never wasted time. It was a lovely warm summer day out.)

Indeed. I do remember wearing them in the Durham ACF. Heart is determined to tell me I wore black polished anklets at Catterick, but head swears we only ever wore puttees. Don't remember handing anklets in when I headed off to Omagh and I certianly didn't have any when I got there.

In 1975 I was taught to fire SMG right-handed as my personal weapon in 1. RMP 2. RAC. In RAC I was taught to fire SLR right-handed as Alternative Personal Weapon (in RMP it was the 9 milly). Arrived in NI in February 1976 where I attended a Northern Ireland Reinforcement Training Team (NIRTT) course prior to being officially allowed on the streets. (These were the days when they were needing them, not feeding them, and I spent a week and a half on the streets beforehand cos they needed me. Bless.) At Ballykinler I was taught to fire both SLR and SMG left-handed, though the latter was with the caveat that it was only to be done wearing a respirator, since, whereas the SLR ejected its empty cases to the right, more or less at right-angles to the weapon, ejected its cases more or less backwards. Firing the SMG left-handed wearing a respirator, we learned to expect the not empty case to smack us in the face. Last day of the course I spent in Belfast attached to 42 Commando. When a bag of rounds was found on a roundabout nearby, the entire Commando stood to and staked it out. I was tasked with watching a terrace of houses around a left-hand corner and spent two hours kneeling left-handed around that corner waiting for a window to open and the lights to go out: a combat indicator. Never happened. Eventually the CO confessed that it was probably a set-up, sacrificing several thousand rounds of ammo in order to move an RPG unmolested on the other side of the area.

In 1975 I wore blancoed gaiters in training with the RMP. Any dress bar No 1s / No2s.

No, no the one on 09/09/09 when three Roman Legions, totalling nearly 20,000 men were ambushed and massacred by German tribesmen. 2 - 6 April 1945. 7 and 11 Armd Divs needed to cross the Teutoburgerwald prior to crossing the Dortmund-Ems Canal. See: http://www.btinternet.com/~ian.a.paterson/battles1945.htm#Teutoberger (sp)

Exactly. As one who might have been invited to the party (and I managed to pull off a great late April fool on the whole of C Squadron, whom I had believing their 6-week jolly to Oz was off because of the war and we were going), stuff the politicians, it was a war. Remember, you can tell when a politician is lying because his lips are moving. Is this getting political? Must I stop now or risk incurring the wrath of the moderators?

I have to confess I looked at the VRN and thought "04FD: nothing unusual there for a Scimitar" but only after the answer did I notice how low the second number pair was, so I guess you are right and suppose it was one of the last (of the main tranche of) Scorpions. Round of applause to those who got it right.

Yes I have heard of those being used. Being Recce we didn't have or need mortars when we could drop 76mm shells 5km away so we never saw the O rings. I suppose Support Troop might have had mortars but I only spent a week in what was then Surveillance Troop (the support troop of its day) without vehicles or weapons after an Arms Plot move, before moving on to Command Troop; the regiment (and the whole division) came on strength of BAOR a couple of months later.

Trouble is dress regulations used to say trousers ALWAYS tucked into puttees. ALWAYS enforced in training establishments; NEVER enforced elsewhere. During the Cold War, stout elastic bands were common as muck, being used to hold bundles together (NBC kit is the one that always sticks in my mind). Nobody I knew in the 70s or 80s saw or used twists; elastic bands were universal. It was only later that the PRI (President of the Regimental Institute) shop (the regimental shop that sold non-issue goods like regimental and stable belts, profits going to the regimental fund) started to stock twists. I have a vague idea that when I visited the Light Dragoons on an Old Comrades weekend a few years ago, twists are now issued and therefore officially sanctioned.

It was a war. Look at UN Resolutions about 50 to 54. One of them states that an act of war is an implicit declaration of war and no declaration of war is necessary for a state of war to exist. Another states that a military occupation of another country's territory is an act of war. The Argies therefore implicitly initiated a war by committing an act of war. Let there be no doubt whatsoever.

From wiki: Speed maximum: 1,600 m/s (5,200 ft/s) 5,760 km/h (3,580 mph) at impact: 800 m/s (2,600 ft/s) 2,880 km/h (1,790 mph) 2600fps is slightly less than Mach 2.5.

If you are deeply into German boots, keep an eye out for Panzerstiefel, tank crew boots for winter wear. They are short jackboots (well, short compared to jackboots, but still at least as high as CH) with a sheepskin lining. Pull-on, tick; comfy, tick; warm, tick. Job's a good'n.

Stop me if I have told this one before. I did my RAC Control Signaller AFV Class 1 course at the Radio Wing, Bovington in the summer of 1978 (it was the last Larkspur Con Sig Course). Since Bovvy is the home of the Royal Armoured Corps, there was an antenna farm on the roof of the Radio Wing that allowed Bovvy to talk to units all around the world. Early in the course our instructor (a sergeant in the Royal Hussars) told us the following story. There had recently been an RAC Signals Instructor course run there. One candidate was tasked to prepare and deliver a lesson on the A43 ground to air man pack radio. He went through all the blurb and as he came to the end of his demonstration, he pointed out the BEACON setting. "Switch the set to this mode and the set will act as a beacon to guide aircraft to you." He continued with the lesson. Five minutes later there was a roar as a fast jet passed over the Radio Wing at zero feet. The candidate, barely pausing, went on, "... and that's how the BEACON works." Followed a second later by a crash as the antenna farm, displaced by the backdraught, came down on the Radio Wing roof. It turned out that this instructor candidate had a mukker flying Phantoms out of Yeovilton. He had airtime to fill so he agreed to a mock attack on the Radio Wing. The candidate got a bollocking but passed his Instruction Practical module.

Four-foot rods as shown are spot on for Larkspur. Clansman used one metre rods (which apart from length were virtually identical). Rods came in three sections, top, middle and bottom and each screwed into the next. On a VHF set, only two sections were required, either top/middle or middle bottom (which was very robust and gave little flexion, but rods were always in short supply and you used what you could steal - I mean get) to give 8 feet (2m Clansman) of antenna, electronically optimised for length by the ATU. You could use 8 feet (2m) with an HF set and allow the ATU to tune it, but 12 feet (3m) was more efficient). 12 feet was a lot of rod and when flying that much rod, it was normal to insert a sloper between rods and antenna base to allow the antenna to slope. (A vertical antenna was more important with VHF as polarisation of the propagated wave mattered. Because you never needed more than 8 feet of rod, sloping wasn't necessary anyway.) I am open to correction here. We had Saracens and Larkspur which we replaced with Sultans and Clansman about 1979. However I do recall that we did not change both vehicles and radios at the same time. In the back of my mind, Clansman was not compatible with the Saracen ACV, we got Sultan before Clansman and fitted Larkspur radios for one season, then the following year we converted our Sultans to Clansman at the same time as the rest of the regiment's various CVR(T)s.

Oh and for what it's worth. If you have read Vulcan 607, this may be familiar: http://www.neam.co.uk/wingate.html It describes in far greater detail the events covered in the prologue of that book (Flt.Lt Jim Vinale was Nav plotter on XM610 on 7 January 1971 and also crewed the designated bomber on Black Buck 1 which had to abort shortly after take-off due to a failed cockpit seal rubber, leaving XM607 to fly the mission). The story of XM610 is exceedingly familiar to me, as I was in school in Seaham on 7 January 1971 and walked into a classroom at end of lesson to see a pillar of smoke where it had ploughed into a field in the 200 yards between the village of Wingate and its primary school. The previous class were all sat dumbstruck, having watched the parachutes descend.

Last night I finished reviewing a book Storming The Falklands by Tony Banks, ex 2 Para for Arrse. His Falklands War is only half the story. Gets fed up, leaves, makes a good living for himself. Realises that PTSD is a real problem for most of the Falklands veterans on both sides and decides to do something about it. His Falklands loot consists of a regimental trumpet lifted from a POW in Stanley. He manages to track down the original owner and a meeting is arranged to return it. Whilst in Argentina, he discovers that his host was manning a triple-A battery at the end of the runway when XM607 appears out of nowhere and disgorges 21 buckets of death on the runway. No it didn't stop the Argies from repairing the runway sufficiently to allow C130s to fly in with ordnance, but they didn't sleep again for fear that another Vulcan would appear out of the darkness. I was also surprised how how true my joking description of how we won the war turned out to be true. I have always maintained that the Argies just kept running away from the Gurkhas and their kukris. According to this book, the Argies were indeed even more scared of the Gurkhas than the Paras and the Guards. Falklanders recall how they only had to mention Gurkhas to get the Argies trembling. Horror stories of Gurkhas slaughtering an entire platoon of Argy regulars silently in their sleep seem to have become lore both in the Falklands and Argentina.

I wore puttees with DMS Boots (I don't know if they were worn with other boots prior to DMS, and after DMS they were redundant). DMS boots had a line of stitches either side of the lace holes. The thick end of the triangle as described above (was there a line of stitching on the puttee? I could go home and look at the pair that has sat in a drawer for a quarter of a century but I really cannot be bothered. If there is a stitch line on the puttee, this is what lined up) was meant to line up with these stitches. This left the point of the triangle just short of the ankle bone. As described, find out on your own ankle where to start the puttee so that the thick part finishes in the correct place. Secure it by wrapping the thin band round the ankle as many times as it takes until there is just a short length left. When the short band passes the point of the triangle for the last time, fold it down through 90 degrees then wrap the tail neatly round and round the body of the thin band until it is entirely consumed (ensuring any loose end is tucked out of sight). Smart as a carrot, bags of support for the ankle and comfortable, but even after years of practice, the only short cut is to butcher the puttee to save loops (Istr people also putting velcro on to save the final tying loops, but frankly it didn't work. I very quickly gave up "customising" items of uniform and went with it as issued). During training, it was normal between periods to change uniform into the appropriate dress (combats, PT, field training, overalls, barrack dress, Number 2s, overalls, etc). If the troop / intake / section / whatever you care to call it was slack at uniform changing between lessons, it was not unheard of when the Permanent Staff got fed up of waiting to invite the intake to a Change Parade at 1800 hours outside the block. First uniform would be given, then with the parade assembled, you'd be sent away to change into another uniform and fall back in in three minutes. Puttees were a disaster on Change Parade: undo, roll off, change uniform, roll back on, tie. The PS could just stand there for hours if necessary ordering uniform changes until the intake got a grip and changed uniform in the allotted time. It usually got the message across.

I have stopped and thought about this for mmm a couple of seconds. If memory serves, a vertical length of angle iron was welded to the front (of the turret?) to protect the commander from decapitation wires. There might also have been cages over the light clusters, etc. But it's 36 years ago now and I only got intimate with NI Ferrets on a couple of occasions at night so don't quote me.

That sounds right to me. I suspect L37 was also fitted to Scimitar while L43 was fitted to Scorpion. I always wondered why two so-similar vehicles fitted different models of GPMG. Edit: and istr the L43 also had a cone-shaped flash hider.

Sadly wiki is not my friend today. It doesn't tell me when Stolly came out of service. My recollection is that our Armd Recce Regt lost our Stollies about the same time as Clansman came in (1980 in 3 Armd Div iirc).

There was a story did the rounds after the Falklands (quite possibly apocryphal) about a guards battalion liberating a rather nice black Merc from the Argies and managing to get it back to their barracks in the smoke. Day after return, CO says to his driver, "Corporal Snooks, take the Merc round to the dealership in Park Lane and get it serviced. I'll charge it to the Commanding Officer's Public Fund." Driver heads off to Park Lane, drops it off and agrees to collect it a 1600 hours (or 4 pm as the Reception Manager called it). At 1600 hours, Cpl Snooks fronts up at Service Reception and asks about the CO's Merc. "Sorry, which Merc?" "The black staff car." "No, I need a little more." "The CO's staff car. I brought it in this morning." "Oh that one. You mean the one that according to the chassis number the Argentine Army never paid for, so in fact it still belongs to Mercedes and you've brought it back for us? Thank you very much." "Damn."