AlienFTM

You're telling me I started a rumour about a German tank turret on Warcop ranges? OOooOOH! Pull up a sandbag. The following night our course stood guard over the firing point. Extracted from A Tracked Armoured Car (not yet in print) - names changed for logical continuity and some $%*%^$%£$ing swearing desensitised.

I did my Crewman Gunner Scorpion B3 Live Firing at Warcop in February 1976. My first shoot was at slow speed because the instructor wanted to get us all familiar with the noise, recoil, etc. He brought me onto his chosen target and asked what I could see. "Looks to me for all the world like a Tiger 1 turret on its side." "Yes, that's what we are going to engage." However, he assured us that at the time most of the targets were 6' by 4' by 6" rectangles of steel armour plate removed from the carrier Ark Royal (either following an upgrade or a decommissioning).

Scorpion. IIRC, on the floor just in front of the turret. Driver doesn't need one: he's sat next to a 4.2 litre Jaguar engine. Air conditioning from the NBC pack. Hot running water from the BV. Cold running water from the tank behind the radio sets (my driver absolutely refused to drink water from this tank and discouraged us, his turret crew, from drinking from it on the grounds that the Scorpion had recently belonged to 1 RTR and he had no idea what might be festering in the water tank. Radio 1 (come to think of it, a full range of medium wave radio, including, while in Cyprus, the Med's answer to Radio Luxemburg, The Voice of Peace, apparently out of Lebanon) on the C13. All mod cons.

Not surprised those lads in the last but one picture have fingers in ears: it looks like they are about to be struck by a comet.

Why? Do the children of that area playing in the street bite even harder then?

About 1980 I was transferring radio equipment from the RSO store down to Command Troop hangars, loading UK/PRC351/2s, batteries and ancillaries into the back of the 2 I/C's FFR Land Rover. One of the batteries slipped from my grip as I lifted it over the tailgate. For those who have never handled one, it was about the shape, size and weight of a housebrick. With lightning reflexes good enough always to catch a falling knife and not cut myself, I went for it. Unfortunately I got my left index finger between battery and bumper. Cue split finger, much pain emanating from finger and $£$&$&%£ing swearing like the Trooper I'd been for the last four and a half years. I left the Land Rover in the capable hands of my oppo and walked across the regimental square to the Medical Centre. All the sick people having reported at 0800 (did you know you are only allowed to go sick at 0800 in the army? Any other time and you must report Special Sick) and been sent on their way, the Regimental Medical Officer had left the building. Manning the centre was a Regimental Medical Assistant. "Ooh that's a nice one. It's okay, I am trained to do stitches. Come through to the Treatment Room." He prepared a suture. "Where's the local anaesthetic then?" I asked. "Local anaesthetic? An RAC Crewman and you want local anaesthetic for a stitch in the finger? Are you a wuss or what?" "Wuss." "Tough. There is nobody to give you a local anaesthetic: you'd need to go to the Dental Centre or the Medical Reception Station cos RMOs don't get to play with anaesthetic." (I came across this a few years later when my infant daughter split her temple.) "So, put your hand on the treatment table and brace yourself." They heard the scream down at the vehicle park. "Come back in a week and I'll remove the stitch." I was on exercise the following week: that's why I was loading kit. Fast forward one week. Somewhere in a farmyard in the 1 (Br) Corps area of BAOR. Unusually, Command Troop were colocated with HQ Squadron. I sought out the HQ Sqn SSM. "Sir, can you organise a Land Rover to take me to the nearest medical facility so I can get this stitch removed?" "Let's have a look. I'll remove that for you." I removed the leather condom from my finger and showed him. "I'll get some scissors." I politely told him to go away in short sharp and jerky movements, observing a regimental pause of 2 - 3. I would do it myself. I went off the Zero Charlie, the Int / NBC Sultan and locked myself behind 1.5" of aluminium armour so as not to be disturbed during this delicate surgical procedure. I dug out a modelling knife blade from my wallet. I slit the stitch, then I dug out a pair of Clansman Repair Toolkit snipe-nosed pliers (well I was Regimental Signals Storeman in camp, so of course I had issued myself a toolkit. Nobody else got one: it said STORE on the door, not ISSUE). I got the knot of the stitch in the pliers and braced myself, closed my eyes and pulled ever so gently, dreading a return of the pain. I opened one eye to see how far I'd removed the stitch, to find the pliers six inches from the wound and the dead stitch completely removed. Wuss? Me? I guess so.

Don't claim to be an RA expert. I have long tried to reconcile Hemer / Menden and am sure I associate it with both 50 Missile and 5 Heavy from my site guard days in the late 70s.

Wasn't the 105 pack howitzer the standard weapon of the RA Field Regiments (were there Light Regiments in say the early 70s?) prior to the introduction of ... of whatever came next?

I was going to suggest that since Whole Fleet Management seems to have worked to HMG's satisfaction wrt CR2, I could well imagine them pulling the same stunt with Scimitars so that users get one to play with odd day / even day / day without a Y in it / year divides by 1700 / etc etc. There are 104 new latest upgrade Scimitars in the sandpit (taken by the LD BG this year). The rest will be decimated because people won't need them for real. Cynical? Bitter and twisted? Moi?

There are some interesting prototypes / hybrids at Bovvy: Chieftains with plain aluminium hulls as proof of concept for the Chobham shape, different power packs, engines, hulls etc. To know EXACTLY what's in the pic, a closer-up might help because there are so many possibilities.

How much does 90 gallons of petrol weigh?

I was stationed in Tidworth 1976 - 77. I recall one murky day walking past a STV unit setting up for a shoot for Spearhead outside (that was a loose term in Tidworth - you could walk right through all the barracks in a row in those days) one of the barracks nearer to town. (Aliwal, ours, was last before the Plain - or first since they were named alphabetically.) I really don't think it was Assaye, the infantry barracks next door to us (with a battalion of Angle Irons) and it certainly wasn't Bhurtpore, armour, next to them (3RTR I think cos 4/7DG had moved on). Memory suggests it was way down, like Jellalabad way but it was over 30 years ago. Come to think of it, I can no longer remember ANY of the other barrack names. Nurse! Is it time for me pills yet?

Not surprised. Even with Swingfire ATGMs in the 70s, nobody went anywhere near the firing point except under armour. See my thread from long ago about a rogue Swingfire at Otterburn that would totalled me in a car park 200m behind the firing point had I not gone to collect lunch.

2. A (vehicle: I presume ... indicates an unidentifiable word) of 1 Platoon standing under water (some ...) war/battle 1940-41. I thought maybe the Winter War with Finland but it's the wrong winter.

Interesting word here is CADRE. It and that the UIN (Unit Imprest Number or familiarly Unit Identity Number), A2459D, ends in D suggest to me that the vehicle may have been preplaced. I have no idea about the Royal Army Ordnance Corps OrBat for 1986, but I do know that on 31 December 1982, 2 Armd Div was withdrawn from the BAOR front line to UK reserve leaving a small stub in place, to be reactivated in the event of trouble. My guess is that 13 Ord Coy may have been designated as a BAOR reinforcement unit (checking the UIN A2495A may well reveal that this is 13 Ord Coy) and that A2459D was the stub in place in BAOR. If I am correct (there is no reason why I should be - it's a guess), this would suggest that for the six years 86 - 92, this vehicle had a quiet life before BAOR contracted at the end of the Cold War ("theatre drawdown").

Observation. CVR(T) arrived in the early '70s with a hybrid radio harness to offer Clansman functionality with Larkspur equipment (because MOD could not afford to give CVR(T) to the Royal Armoured Corps and Clansman to the whole army), including for example Live I/C through the helmet boom mike. This allowed a working A-set in the left ear, pressel-activated; monitor B-set in the right ear and Live I/C also in the right ear (with no need for for pressel activation because it was live). This was the commander's normal working position. Gunner / operator would reverse A- and B-set on his junction box (work B and monitor A) IF there were two nets active. As a former Battlegroup HQ Control Signaller, unless the tactical situation required (for example being attached to an Infantry Combat Team) I always somehow managed to have BG Command Net on the B-set so I could get the bigger picture. In the sabre troops, Combat Team Command Net was always on the A-set (In FHQ, BG Command Net was on A and CT on B: in RHQ, Divisional Command Net on A and BG on B). Troop chatter nets were frowned upon but if a troop needed isolated comms for any reason, they could switch to an alternative CT Command Net frequency and work undisturbed. My point is that always on CVR(T) and always on Clansman, Live I/C was available in the right ear. For the majority of a period of seven years when in the field I had Live I/C with the wind whistling in my right ear (with or without sponge mike cover) as our Recce Regt hurtled back and forth across the North German Plain and the 1 (BR) Corps FLOT. I transferred out in 1982 and very shortly after posting to another unit, I was subjected to a hearing test which revealed that my hearing was reduced by 85% in my right ear. I was blissfully unaware of this, but have always used it as an excuse for not hearing anything my wife says. A couple of years later toward the end of that tour I was subjected to the same test again, which revealed that my hearing in my right ear was now at 100%. The only conclusion I have ever been able to draw is that the wind whistling over a boom mike into the right ear can cause long term (but mercifully reversible) damage to that ear. Make of this what you will.

That's because in some military document lies an instruction that written ordinal numbers to not exist in the military, thus 3 RTR, 39 Fd Regt RA, 7 RHA, 1 R Anglian and so on. We would also speak of Fourth Troop, but must write 4 Troop (4 Tp). In my old regiment it was exceptionally difficult because it was easy to write 15/19H as 15/19th (Hussars) and even the full title 15th/19th the King's Royal Hussars was butchered within military circles to 15/19 the King's Royal Hussars (you may search for our Facebook group under this name but you won't get in because it isn't open to the public) and worse, when spoken, the first ordinal gets dropped because it simply isn't easy to say fifteenth nineteenth without a pronounced stop in the middle and the second ordinal gets merged into the definite article following right behind. Thank goodness for the NATO standard abbreviation to 15/19H. Ordinal numbers in the military? Nightmare.

Just remember not to eat the liver.

Only a teeny-weeny bit off-topic. Yacht-racing in the Baltic out of Kiel was a popular pastime in BAOR. On my skipper's course we were taught that if we ever found an unmarked buoy, to check for a telephone and pick it up. Turns out the Swedish Navy's submarine fleet spent the Cold War waiting to rebel a Soviet seaborne invasion (and their coastline was heavily mined throughout the period for the same reason). In submarine terms, the Baltic is not especially deep, so they had no need for deep-submersible submarines. Immediate action on suffering a failure and being stuck incommunicado on the bottom was to launch a buoy and wait for someone to answer the phone and call out the emergency services. Coincidentally I was in the RAC at the time.

Sad loss of a fine man.

In the 60s? Do we know if Vulcans were still carrying buckets of sunshine at this time? I know I'd have run if I thought a nuke was about to make a hard landing on the runway. We all know it wouldn't go off but I wouldn't fancy any radiation leak. Better safe than sorry.

Funnily enough I saw a very similar thread on ARRSE just today discussing the differences between versions of one compass or another and the answer was that the early models were illuminated by Radium while the later ones were illuminated by Trilux. Oh and two times a half life of 1602 years is 3204 years.

Baz, is that the recently departed Russ Ellis next to you?

I thought it was Shrew - which actually fits in with Bazz's theory. But now you have said fieldmouse I suspect I am wrong as usual.

I'd put it a close second behind the Fairey Battle. A single-engined bomber with the same engine as a fighter? I don't think so. At least the Defiant got a short reprieve as a night fighter.