AlienFTM

There is a site on the outskirts of Bridgend. Not sure, may be whence there was a breakout near the end of the war. It had been a site for US D-Day troops, converted after they'd gone. I got a whisper from the tourist advice people while on holiday. Found the area, not marked. Just parked up. It was waste land where locals walked their dogs. It smelt like it, even if you avoided standing in anything. Crisscrossed the site for a couple of hours before finding the one remaining hut, sealed up tight to keep it from teenage vandals. Apparently some interesting grafitti, but you won't see it. And a false wall behind which they hid earth from a tunnel. Feel free to google it, there is stuff to see. I've seen it and the prospect of finding it again underwhelms me.

Google suggests that Pilgrims Progress is a regular exercise* which according to Hansard in 1981: This being the case, I'd expect little more in the way of vehicles than whatever passes for a Land Rover these days. I was Hunter force on Ex Trident in 1977, a Special Forces Escape and Evasion exercise in the Kielder area of Northumberland, out of Otterburn, so not a world different. We were out in CVR(T) because that's what the regiment had. But I'd suggest that's unusual. What to look out for? Small groups of servicemen (I'd not expect more than four in a group = a vehicle crew), but since they're instructors, more likely singles, acting furtively, trying not to be seen, maybe knocking on farmhouse doors begging for food and more importantly safe water, but if they're caught, a course fail because they'll have been warned that civvies are to be considered enemy. As potential instructors, they ought not to have to rely on civvies. Hunter Force out in the ulu moving fast and without a care about being covert cos they're playing at home. Just about covers it, I reckon. _____ * Edit: Akin to Summer Sales, Winter Woolies, Eternal Triangle, Able Archer** ** For a bad night's sleep, Google Exercise Able Archer 83. I know where I was, but I didn't know at the time how close I was to a bucket of sunshine.

Accept that if you are going to live for weeks in an armoured vehicle, living off Composite Rations, it's going to stink. Dreadfully. Live with it. If it was good enough for Gemini and Apollo astronauts, it's good enough for armoured vehicle crews.

I agree about the old style mirrors, almost letter-box shaped as I recall. We tended to replace them with Land Rover mirrors ... or any other mirror that gave a better rear view.

Sums it up. The military VHF band covered by Clansman (30-76MHz iirc) was best suited in its quarter wavelength to 2m of rod. Whatever 2m of Clansman rod you can get, will have been used so long as they fit together, because antenna rods were always like rocking horse droppings. Pass through a wood, lose your rods and if you don't have spares, the man at Q&M won't, so you'll have to resort to finding someone who's parked up and not put his rods away and "borrow" them. The TUAAM was designed to electronically tune 2m of rod to 1/4 wavelength for optimal output.

My money is on them coming from a British soldier's Individual Rations. In Composite Rations (for 4 or 10 men), we tended to get Cadbury's Dairy Milk or Tiffin; in Individual Rations you saw more variation. But whatever, they were evidently sourced from wherever, because we regularly saw Arabic script on them. And usually the brown chocolate was dry, oxidised white.

I remember the false neutral on a Saracen is savage, almost pushing the left knee into the shoulder, and a lot of hard work to correct on the move. To be avoided.

Tend to agree. We were still using three-ohs on Mark 1 Ferrets into the 1980s. I really cannot remember now, but this looks remarkably similar. All I do remember (and coincidentally I was just thinking about it a day or two back) we only ever fired them once in the three years I was in Command Troop (with Mark 1 Ferrets) and the power of the MG and the movement of the mount made it possible to create a cone of fire while engaging a point target, that went out of arc on both sides, eliciting stern words from the control tower.

The bow is all wrong, but otherwise it bears a remarkable resemblance to a DUKW to me. Maybe a related project?

In which case you may to look on Facebook for John Charles Webb Gillman. very close to the top of his page is a photo of him, my good friend "Bad News" Brown (who still has my cassette of Beethoven's Fifth - though at least he has the decency to remember ) and a young lad with big sandy blond hair stood in front of a sand-coloured carrier in 1985 ... nearly 30 years ago.

I suspect that there are people on here who knew Colonel John Gillman, late of 15th/19th The King's Royal Hussars and probably Light Dragoons (after my time). I know he was big on the restoration scene (he was restoring a Saladin in his spare time while we were stationed in Paderborn in the late 70s). I last saw him in the Officers' Mess, RAC Centre Bovington about ten years ago when the new building was opened. I regret that I have just received the following notification from the Regimental Association: No details of funerals or condolences as yet. If anyone here needs any more information as it becomes available, please PM me through this website so that I get an e-mail, as my visits here are somewhat restricted these days.

By the late 70s, the Mark 1 Ferret was a workhorse for a number of roles akin to this: Rebroadcast Liaison Officer In a non-wartime establishment (ie if the Cold War went hot we might have got one) 15/19H did not have an FAC per se, though Command Troop did have manpack radio sets intended for use by an FAC. If the FAC needed to get into a position to direct aircraft, a Mark 1 Ferret would be ideal.

Dr Johnson wrote his dictionary in the 18th Century. There are those (q.v. Mallinson, Light Dragoons the Making of a Regiment) who posit that Dr Johnson was not necessarily using the word "indifferently" in an archaic manner when writing his definition of a Dragoon, but in fact using the more modern usage based on the poor performance in their early years of the 13th Regiment of Dragoons see wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_Hussars He defined a Dragoon something along the lines of "a soldier who fights indifferently whether on foot or on horseback."

No, I was wrong. It was in Tidworth with the Para Sqn rear party, back to depot down the road at Ludgershall, then off to Omagh with 16/5L, handed over to 1RTR, then only briefly with 15/19H before going back to depot (in NI).

I was 15/19H (as was Bazz, also a member here). RAC Para Sqn, 16/5L and 15/19H were all based at Aliwal Bks, Tidworth (then Hants, now Wilts) in the 1970s and we both spent 1976-7 there. It's a pretty safe bet that this vehicle was there at that time and handed over / taken over as units moved around the Arms Plot. If you can post anything you have, Bazz or I may be able to pass comment. But don't hold your breath. I don't get as much time to browse here as I used to. ;o)

I think you've got it pretty much right. It not be right to blame the RAF Regiment (who am I to say) but it's absolutely fair, because, well, they were RAF Regiment and an easy target. Story goes that at the CFE reduction talks, the soviets worked out a class of tanks (iirc, it was a long time ago, tanks with gun calibre 75-105mm) that would allow them to sling obsolete T62s while NATO would be obliged to lose front line 105mm gun tanks. By the simple expedient of suddenly declaring Scorpion to be a tank and not a recce vehicle, it could be withdrawn, the same hulls fitted with 30mm cannon (outside the scope of CFE), functionally identical to Scimitars and reusing a redundant set of hulls and another redundant set of turrets.

Apropos not a lot. Shortly after this (I could check. Wiki is your firend) 10th Hussars amalgamated with 11th Hussars to become The Royal Hussars. At the end of the Cold War, RH amalgamated with 14th/20th The King's Hussars to become the King's Royal Hussars (not to be confused with 15th/19th The King's Royal Hussars, formed after the Great War by the amalgamation of 15th and 19th Hussars and amalgamated again after the Cold War to become The Light Dragoons). Not many years after this vehicle's service with the Carabiniers and the Greys, the two regiments amalgamated to be Royal Scots Dragoon Guards.

There you go. every day is a training day. I'd give you a Like, but apparently not on HMVF.

Absolutely nothing to give from an expert view, but I'd guess it's some sort of ballistic cap off a 75mm or greater round. A ballistically - efficient round will not be efficient in penetrating armour, so that by the Second World War you'd see anti-tank rounds that were Armour - piercing, Capped, Ballistic - Capped. The payload had a flat surface to efficiently transfer energy from round to target and a cap that would protect the round from breaking up on the armour, with a further ballistic cap to make it fly better, further faster and more accurately. However, an APCBC round would be solid shot with no explosive content, so I don't think it would have been of any use blowing up the wreck. No help at all. I know the Luftwaffe converted Stukas to tank-busters by adding ever-greater-calibre guns under the fuselage. I am sure someone can confirm to me that Beaus never went through the same concept and the aircraft in question might have been such a tank-buster?

I am in Southampton. I lived on CVR(T), etc for seven years. I can do the talk (every time I visit Bovvy I do the tour guide thing for the people I go with). My company are very hot on Give-Back (tomorrow and Friday I am a school host for our annual Primary Schools Xplore IT event), so I don't see a problem getting time off in school time. Shame I haven't got a tank to show your students round.

SSB, Single Side Band, as opposed to Universal Serial bus. Otherwise, at first glance, what he said. I may well be wrong (you could look it up). Single side Band: Most of the radio signal is noise. With VHF, squelch can tune this out. Not so with HF. So, imagining the signal as a modulated sine wave, by eliminating the bottom half of the signal and mangling the top half to boost the signal to noise (mentally I have a vision of something akin to deriving the RMS value of a sine wave). AM was also available for backwards compatibility with Larkspur and foreign sets (though istr the NORMAL setting on Larkspur was in fact Phase Modulation). Or a meringue? Edit: if this reads badly, sorry I got interrupted by work. How rude.

I completed Basic Training at Catterick in 1975, did a radio course in the December (as did all the potential RAC Crewmen) then we split into Gunnery (Chieftain and Scorpion) or D&M (Chieftain and Scorpion). The potential RAC Soldiers did not do the radio course: they went straight to Land Rover and HGV. We were still accommodated as an intake even thought we were on any of five courses, so I was able to chat with those on D&M courses. One mucker was doing Scorpion D&M. One evening he told us he'd been let loose on the A1. He was flagged down by a Police patrol car and given a talking to. "Listen sonny, I am not going to stand before the magistrate and tell him that I patrolling the A1 when I was passed by a tank. You've got away with it this time. Don't do it again."

Noisy is what rings a bell if I am honest (and you'll pardon the pun).

In the early 70s, Army were told they might have CVR(T) or Clansman, not both. We got CVR(T). We fitted Larkspur, which took some ingenuity, I seem to recall there was not enough room for two A-set power supplies on the turret shelf, so one got a (very) long cable and went under the gunner's seat. Fast forward to the end of the 70s. We were now looking at Clansman to replace Larkspur and Sultan to replace Saracen ACV. My memory (could be at fault: it's 35 years ago) is that we got Sultan in late 79 and fitted Larkspur until Clansman came along a few months later, early in 1980. As a Command Troop Control Signaller, we were very slick at putting radios in and out: it was a part of our day job. I remember passing comment that it would have been nice to get Clansman at same time as Sultan. But here is the catch. I remember the Regimental Signals Sergeant telling us that there was some incompatibility that actually prevented us from fitting Clansman to Saracen. I don't remember if he ever expanded on this: we just had to suck it up and fit radios to our Sultans twice. Not a lot of help to you I am afraid.

Not helped by crews thinning the paint with different solvents (water meant the paint wasn't wet-proof; petrol worked fine but was in dreadfully short supply) and by different amounts. My advice is not to lose sleep over it. I think it was a Tigers in Action book I reviewed for Army Rumour Service late last year had a good chapter on this subject.