AlienFTM

Googling in the UK for +brighton +"John Thayre" suggests that he was 1978-79 Sussex Open Champion. The search results suggest it was at Bar Billiards, but the page returned does not give me any confirmation.

When DRAC invited me to Bovvy last year, the gadgy voicing over the tanks on display told me the reason Christie suspension fell out of use was because, for some fundamental reason, it would only work at speeds up to about 30 mph (and this website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A24732245 tells me the Cromwell's Meteor engine was limited to keep its top speed down to 32 mph).

My aunt served during the war. It wasn't until she died that I clicked that she and I had served in the same Corps, RAPC. She was based at Regimental Pay Office Leicester and M. E. Clifton-James was her boss. Small world.

I watched that last night. I had hoped to catch a glimpse of my 15/19H forebears, but sadly all the wartime film they showed featured the Armoured Farmers (3RTR), our colleagues in 11 Armd Div. I liked the spin at the end. Comet's coming into service was delayed by the Ardennes Offensive so the regiments had to climb out of the shiny new Comets they were boresighting and firing, climb back into their recently-discarded Shermans and head for the front. They crossed the Rhine at the end of March and on the Berlin Victory Parade were eclipsed by the Russians' secret new IS3 which rendered them obsolete after just 47 days' service. I understand that the Army of the Irish Republic (as opposed to the Irish Republican Army) continued to use Comets until 1985. Finally we got our tank design right, but too late. Interestingly it's my understanding that also unveiled on that victory parade was the Centurion. And I was intrigued to see when they removed the side armour that one or more of the suspension units had been damaged and replaced in the field ... with struts from a Centaur!

I have never asked myself the question "When did the blackout end?" before and I could easily google it if I could be bothered, but ISTR that the Home Guard was disbanded at the end of 1944, which suggests to me that maybe the blackout likewise. The fact that the jeep has blackout lines and non-blackout lights suggests to me that this pic might be an early 1945 pic. No reasons, just gut feeling. I do remember my mother saying that getting about in the blackout was incredibly dangerous because drivers could not really see well enough. I'd guess that come the end of the blackout there was more urgency to fit proper headlights than to paint out the white edge markings. But that's all IMO. As for UEO, my guess (entirely out of thin air) is that maybe it stands for Un-Exploded Ordnance - subsequently referred to and abbreviated in numerous different ways. I'd bet that bomb disposal people did not really fancy the prospect of driving onto the bomb they have come to deal with and made damn sure they had good lights. But I know nothing.

(Looks for a "shocked and stunned" emoticon.)

We came back from our UN tour of Cyprus in March 77. On our last weekend there our troop ate out. Little did I know I was incubating a stomach bug. Back to Tidworth and I found myself banged straight on guard, which also involved reporting to the Guard Room at lunch time to be trained in the art of fire fighting since our guard duty included Fire Picquet. In the event of a fire, while everybody else waited for the Fire Brigade, the Fire Picquet doubled to the Guard Room, collected a red horseless chariot full of hoses and attachments, galloped off to the fire pulling the fire cart behind us and fought the fire (in theory). During lunch the bug finished incubating and I went to the Squadron Sergeant Major to report Special Sick (you are normally only allowed to report sick at Sick Parade, first thing in the morning). He was just putting his phone down, being told that Tpr Alien was absent from Fire Picquet Parade. He believed I was reporting sick because I was making an excuse for missing Fire Picquet. Eventually he organised me transport and I was taken to the Medical Reception Station at the other end of the garrison. There was nobody in to declare me sick, so they told me to report sick in the morning. When I informed the SSM of this he replied, "So you are okay to do Guard tonight. Get out of my sight." I dragged myself to Guard Mount at 1800 where the Guard Commander, NCO I/C Marching Reliefs (his 2IC) and the whole guard agreed I was too sick to stag on. They put me to bed and covered my stag between them. Thoroughly decent blokes. Next morning I reported sick. When I returned to the block, the SSM asked how sick I was. When I told him I was being admitted and was only here to collect a small pack with necessities, he went white. So it came to pass that I was one of the last in-patients at Tidworth MRS. I had all the nurses (and a medical Brigadier who happened to be passing) to myself. A few days later they let me out and I returned to camp to find it strangely deserted. I had recently left a sabre troop to become Squadron Leader's driver. The squadron had gone out on exercise without me. My old (but fresh-out-of-Sandhurst) Troop Leader had upset my old driver once too often and in a fit of pique, Jock allegedly buried his SMG in the middle of Salisbury Plain wherever they had parked up that night. Come the nightly AABB check of Arms and Ammo, Binos and Bodies, Rommel had to explain why he was one (his own) SMG down. It turned out the whole squadron was out digging up Salisbury Plain in search of this SMG. The Commanding Officer was less than happy. He suggested to Rommel that if he didn't want to suffer the ignominy of a court martial, maybe he ought to resign his commission. Rommel refused. He presumed to know damn well that Jock had done away with his SMG and flatly refused. The CO did now want to court martial him and somehow Rommel got away with it. Then insult, injury, etc, the regiment was notified of Rommel's promotion from 2Lt to Lt. There was much ire that an officer was promoted for losing his SMG. Of course I cannot confirm that Jock buried the SMG: I was not there. But as far as I know, the SMG is still there ... somewhere. The SSM was so wrought with guilt that I believe he removed my name from the duties list, since it never came around again on that tour. Until we got a new SSM. I'd have gotten away with it if it wasn't for a pesky Trooper in our squadron failing to turn up for Guard Mounting one weekend and I got rubber-dicked to cover it. The Guard Commander promised he'd let the SSM know I'd most generously stood in for the absentee. Which was a bummer, cos now the new SSM knew I ought was missing from the duties list.

I don't know what your problem is. At a kit check, when the Kit, First Aid, was checked, all anybody cared about were scissors and eye-bath since everything else was by its very nature expendable. ;o) On exercise we were issued morphine on a scale of one ampoule per crew, for which the commander was responsible. In our regiment, every night (and after any significant movement) everybody did a physical check of Arms and Ammo, Binos and Bodies and reported up the chain of command the simple message, "Alpha Alpha Bravo Bravo correct." Thus anybody who had lost his weapon knew when he last had it and by referring back to the Locstats (Location States) would know how far he had to go looking for it. (The term "Binos" included all G1098 kit on signature and the morphine ampoule.)

Your post includes the search parameters "within quotes". However, I don't know if you actually included the quotes in your search. If not, the search engine may very well interpret "-51" (without quotes!) as "Specifically exclude any result which includes the string 51. Unless I am searching for a single word, I practically always stick a plus before every word I want to find (which is, of course, every word) and enclose words which have to be together in quotes (with a + in front of course to demand that this string be found in my results). If you are slack with your search strings, the search engine may return any page which contains any one or more of the strings you want, rather than all of them.

ISTR reading that it was due to the robust censorship we learned early in the war when there was a paranoia about German spies (nuns wearing army boots).

When you start your computer do you get the following error message? Starting Windows Sorry, couldn't resist.

I suppose it's on its way to the training area?

Those of us dinosaurs who predate the universality of the PC prefer to do it in text anyway, thus: ;o) This is my favourite: (_8o()) No prizes for guessing.

Correct. It was something that caught out Otto Skorzeny's Panzerbrigade 150 fifth columnists. Jeep with the canvas up? Suspicious. Americans NEVER had the canvas up. Jeep with more than three occupants? Suspicious. Got more than three people to carry? Take two Jeeps. Jeep with only one occupant who dares to talk? Suspicious. Skorzeny's Commandos were not all as multilingual as he would have liked, so he had to share out the good English speakers quite thinly. Jeep whose occupant speaks with a less-than-typical American accent? Suspicious. But it was a bitch if the occupant was from for example Louisiana with a Cajun accent and said St Louis as St Lewis. (This one was partly the reason Paras used the battlecry "Whoa Mohammed" which was difficult for any German to say without sounding like a German. According to http://www.army.mod.uk/para/history/arnhem.htm , it was coined by 2 Para in North Africa, when an Arab used the term to slow his donkey.)

Is that the one for which they created a memorial by the roadside where it happened, and recently the LD felt it necessary to remove the memorial because of renewed tension and it's now in Leazes Park, Newcastle IIRC, next to HHQ? Did you mean pre-diesel CVR(T)s? AIUI the Americans actually place diesel tanks all around the ammo store in an Abrams because the diesel doesn't ignite and inhibits secondary detonations of the ammo.

It worked fine for me about 1/2 an hour ago.

Wave it goodbye and start again.

After my time, I'm afraid. The cans remind me of the Staff User Headgear but it wasn't adjusted using velcro. And it had a boom mike. Certainly not on our kit list to 1982 and I was Regimental Signals Storeman aside from real work duties around that time, so I saw all the kit. I can think of no purpose whatsoever for this headgear in a Recce Regt.

Hear hear.

Ex Spearpoint / Crusader 1980. (Remember it well, Baz? Did you keep hold of the card issued to 2 US Armored Division, "Hell on Wheels" telling them not to drink, gamble or otherwise fraternise with the Brits and their community or they'd end up embarrassed? On ARRSE there is a thread, querying whether the card ever existed: probably the Urban Myths thread. I well remember you saying you had seen one; wondered if you actually had one.) 15/19H and the whole of 3 Armd Div were to umpire the rest of 1 Br Corps and deployed early on Ex Javelin to practise the methods to be used. Orange forces on Spearpoint comprised 2 US Armored Div (deployed by Op Reforger, flying out of camps in Texas, activating pre-positioned dry-clad vehicles and driving straight into the battle) and a German Panzer Regiment. On the last but one day, it all turned nasty in the middle of Hildesheim as the Americans and the Germans literally came to blows. GOC 1 Br Corps promptly called EndEx a day early and 1, 2 and 4 Armd Divs all turned and headed for home. The ex was held in their area, as real as it could be, so of course they had no distance to go to return home. 3 Armd Div on the other hand was out of area (our TOO was geographically separate from the rest of the Corps area and we had travelled up by train, a week early as I have already pointed out). The trains to carry the Panzers back to Paderborn had been booked months in advance and there was no way that Deutsche Bundesbahn were going to revise all sorts of schedules, so we had the pleasure of another night under canvas. The 3 Armd Div leaguer areas were spread over a large area. Rather than try to man a complete Divisional Command Net over large distances (which would have required a lot of rebroadcast work to keep everyone in radio contact), the decision was made that each HQ would run Don 10 to the next HQ, forming a huge circle of wire and we worked over wires. I was volunteered with another bloke to run out about 5km of Don 10 from RHQ 15/19H to the next HQ. It was quite an effort. We were lucky that we could follow the course of some overhead cables for most of the distance so the vegetation had been cut right back. The ground was still rough though. The good news was that having reached the next HQ, wired up and tested, everything worked, and they very kindly gave us a lift in a Land Rover back to our own location, where a Jirga * was underway. It was a good job we had brand new Clansman, which made wiring up and configuring radios to run over wire a whole lot easier than Larkspur had been * Jirga: an Indian term for a meeting. 15/19H forebears had spent a lot of time through their history in India: terms like this were commonplace. It cropped up in the news recently where a high-level heads-of-government meeting was held in Pakistan. In the cavalry it was more usually called a smoker, an excuse to get drunk.

Last year such an IED took the legs off a CR2 driver. Mind five times 155mm rounds chained together would penetrate anything. If it didn't they'd only use more.

ISTR Sultan worked something like that. We always had penthouses out the back though, so it was no great issue .

I just went googling for: +bf +109 +coaxial +cannon I got a lot of hits. The first that caught my eye led me to: http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=7874 This thread talks an awful lot of techie stuff that suggests they know what they are talking about. It also lists a few other aircraft that had a cannon that fired coaxially through the propellor. None of my search results suggested it was urban myth. In fact amending the search string to: +bf +109 +coaxial +cannon +"urban myth" reveals just five hits, none of which looks like it relates to the Bf109. (I searched for Bf109 rather than Me109, because, although obviously built by Messerschmidt, the 109 (and 110) predated the standard whereby the two characters indicated the manufacturer, instead indicating that they were built at the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke, the Bavarian Aeroplane Factory). I figured that this would give me a better proportion of people who knew what they were talking about.

I am sure they would have thought of it rapidly, but let's face in in June 1940 we were still (barely) in Europe, the Germans spent the next weeks tidying up France and only then started seriously on England. But they only had a couple of months before Hitler's magpie- or butterfly- (take your pick) like mind had switched elsewhere. Maybe if the generals had convinced him not to invade Russia (I cannot remember the reference work, but I am sure he was already making plans for next years trip to Russia by the end of the Battle of Britain), in 1941 we'd have seen some serious changes. Drop tanks, FW190s, so much could have been different if they'd kept at it.

Correct. I too went checking to see if any Stug 4's had crept in. They all have Saukopf (Boar's head) mantlets, but to be honest I have no idea what the presence or absence of Saukopf mantlets proves. It's a Panther. Pretty sure it's an A (second of three production versions, D, A and G: I have explained the sequence before now). It has a driver's vision slit (black shadow on the top right (as we look at it) of the glacis plate under the standing man's foot) so it cannot be a G, where the driver relied on a periscope to inprove the strength of the glacis plate. I cannot see a shadow for a machine gun slit on the co-driver's side of the glacis plate, which would have marked it out as a D. I therefore assume the MG34 is mounted on a later ball mounting inside a bulge in the glacis plate. By default I am therefore happy it is a Panther A.