AlienFTM

From the Battersea Power Station website: http://www.batterseapowerstation.org.uk/floyd.html Mason's "Inside Out" says pretty much the same. It doesn't mean the Red Tops didn't have a field day reporting EE Lightnings shooting it down. According to http://www.thunder-and-lightnings.co.uk/lightning/history.html (as I suspected): So in December 1976, the odds were long in favour of Jaguars and against Lightnings doing the job anyway.

Now that is fascinating! That said, I was surprised to find a fairly-intact Jagdpanther at the IWM last month. And even more surprised to see that it had been knocked out in combat: a nice group of two shots just inches apart penetrating the crew compartment and another in the engine compartment. The holes looked bigger than 75mm so my guess is it was outflanked by a troop of Comets.

TBH I think I'd rather be in a Saracen. Steel armour not aluminium; Boat-shaped hull to better deflect mine blast; six wheels but easily capable of running on fewer if one or more is taken out by a mine. Wheels: cheaper and easier to maintain than tracks. Any more for any more? And why?

Yeah I just wasn't being all-inclusive, mate.

Three Panzer Armies. From memory 5 Panzer Army on one flank, 6 SS Panzer Army on point - obviously and & 7 Panzer Army on the other flank. But I could be wrong.

I got Nick Mason's autobiog last Christmas and I don't remember his description of bringing down the flying pig involving the RAF at all. But I could be wrong. (For those not in the know: The cover of Pink Floyd - Animals features a giant pig floating above Battersea Power Station. They thought it would be a good publicity stunt to tether a pig-shaped ballon to Battersea Power station and take pics. They were of course highly responsible and ensured that there was a sniper to bring it down if it broke free. It didn't, but the photographer got waylaid. The following day when they went for a re-shoot, the photographer turned up but they hadn't rebooked the sniper. Guess what?)

Exploded the pic. Negativised to sharpen the writing, rotated and expanded. There follows info about the pic, barely readable. Photo appears to have been taken 7/3/45 - nearly three weeks before the previous date, presumably when it was published.

The top picture is a perfect example of why I have kept banging on (if you'll pardon the pun) about tank crews painting out white stars / crosses etc which make perfect aiming points: two good hits on the white star.

I am sure there is somebody on this forum lives somewhere near you Baz: I suspect he did a write-up on this year's War on the Line. When I was there a couple of years ago, I drove up Weardale heading for the lead mine at Killhope and took a detour into one of the villages to find an immacualately-kept Weardale Railway (or something). Except it was like the grave. ISTR they had a cash crisis for a couple of weeks and just my luck ...

I can see some 2,000 motor vehicles on parade, including midgets (I think), scout cars, motor-cycles and six-wheeled trucks. Oh and three army planes roaring over the parade ground. Hope this helps.

Camouflage is about a series of "S"s, shape, shine, shadow, silhouette, etc. It is quite normal for military vehicles to cover obvious shapes and shiny things (wheel arches, light clusters and windscreens) with hessian before putting a cam net over the top. It has been discussed before but I cannot find which thread ATM.

I have been looking at accessing Sky through me phone (remote record etc). Yesterday I learned that you can download these progammes to yer PC. The average thing that we'd be interested in lasts 43 minutes.

Time Team? No it was Robinson Crusoe left Friday ... ;o)

Christmas is upon us, which means we'll be getting the video of I believe in Father Christmas: What a profound last line in the song. Even more so when tied to the video and considering it was released in 1975. I have found this website: http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=4121 Where a lot of people discuss their feelings and interpretations. It isnt until about halfway down that somebody makes reference to the images comprising the last few frames of the video. We see (from memory - I see the video is on YouTube from the Google search I ran to get here) a troop of T55s in the desert; an attack aircraft dropping what passed then for a smart bomb; a section of infantrymen; a B52 carpet bombing some jungle. I bet Arabs and Jews had some great Christmases in the 1970s. But then they weren't Christians so they wouldn't care. Edited because HMVF cannot handle an embed link to YouTube. But my ears are now attuning to to Christmas as it loops in my head.

You're telling me! In 1981 15/19H went out on a recce exercise with 9/12L as the enemy. Surveillance Troops in their Spartans with ZB298 Ground Surveillance Radar did not deploy. One of our Scorpions was on its last leg and immediately after the exercise was to be replaced and sent to be Scorpoled. (The modification programme for Chieftain was called Bargepole, whereby individual tanks were taken out of service overhauled (essentially rebuilt) with all the latest modifications applied. When the process was applied to Scorpions, it was Scorpole). The new Scorpion had arrived but not yet been brought into use. On the same day, Chalky, the commander, took ill and was CasEvaced and his Scorpion died. His replacement not yet being available, Surveillance Troop kindly lent us a Spartan. As designated second-line commander, I swapped places with Chalky's gunner and we made do with a crew of two, commander and driver, for the duration. At some point during the exercise, the Spartan broke down. We were sat by the side of a winding country road for hours awaiting REME assistance. By the time we were mobile again, the battle had moved miles ahead of us. I hadn't had a real drive of a CVR(T) since 1976 when I took my driving test apart from moving in and out of hangars. I had a superb drive. My driver / commander could not say the same. He now knew what his commander meant when he had a go at him for driving aggressively: I had given him a good lesson in aggressive driving. Great drive. Nearly as good as a Ferret.

Surprised Baz hasn't been in here yet. When we became buddies immediately after our Omagh tour in 1976, he told me how he'd been inflicted with a section LMG and had used his initiative to load ALL his trace rounds into the first mags out of the box. His theory was that he'd hosepipe the target using pure trace the target was dead, then continue to hosepipe through the remaining mags of ball until they were all gone. Then if anybody queried whether the mags had been loaded four ball one trace in accordance with the Geneva Convention, he'd challenge them to prove they weren't. If I remember, I am sure I have an LMG team trophy from the 15/19H Regimental SAM about 1979: tonight I might just take a picture if I can find it.

The Stolly must have been brand new? ISTR watching The Troubleshooters in the late 1960s, a UKTV series about the Mogul Oil Company and their rivals Zenith. It was IMHO advanced for its day. The episode I always remember is the action man borrowing a Stolly, so brand new it was touted as the next big thing in the industry, and wading through swamps in it. Which makes its coming into service about the time of Aden. Put it this way: as a result I always thought of Stollies as new when we used them in BAOR in the late 1970s. Or a meringue? I suppose I could go and Google it, but then I couldn't impress you with the dimmest darkest recesses of my memory, full of junk.

Well they won't be attacking Winchester then. Sat here in Hursley on the outskirts, our Software Development Laboratory has an O2 mast on top of D Block, right above my head. I recently heard about Vodafone coming to gave a demonstration. As the two guys walked in, the security guard joked, "I hope you don't want to call out your on mobile phone. There is no coverage in Hursley." The two stopped in their tracks and looked at one another, "Can I borrow your landline?" He called HQ Vodafone. "Hello it's Bert. Alf and I are about to give a demo in a few minutes but we have no coverage. Can you boost the output from the Crawley transmitter to 100% for the rest of the day? Thanks." Apparently all the Vodafone users (there aren't many: we all know there is no coverage) got good reception that day.

... and a Balkenkreuz? History of the Balkenkreuz applied to German (mainly armoured) vehicles of the Second World War. In the Polish Campaign, the Panzerdivisions marked their (very dark) Panzergrau vehicles with white crosses akin to the white stars used by the Allies after Normandy. When they realised that a white cross on a dark background made an excellent aiming mark for AT gunners, they painted out the white cross with black, leaving the Balkenkreuz as we generally think of it, in the same way tank commanders painted out their white stars, preferring to risk attack by their own fighter-bombers rather than German tank and AT gunners. And in the 1970s NATO finally painted out the yellow bridge classification (in gloss yellow) in a much subtler grey. Then when the Balkenkruez was painted onto a pale surface (desert yellow for example), the white would be edged with another fine line of black. Simple really.

Must have been 1984 Wor Lass and I (and infant daughter) visited Braunlage in the Harz Mountains, site of the 1936 Winter Olympics. A couple of years previously 15/19H had become the first regular army unit ever to exercise with armoured vehicles in the Harz Mountains National Park, at times in visible line of sight of the Brocken Soviet listening post just over the IGB, so our Voice Procedure and drills had to be spot on to avoid a real intelligence leak. About February 1984 we took the cable car to the top of the mountain at Braunlage. The view from the top of the ski jump was breathtaking, not only because it was the top of the ski jump, but because the IGB was about 1500 metres away. As a serving soldier I was proscribed from entering a zone within 1km of the IGB as the Soviets would have decreed I was spying. From the top of the ski jump we could see where normal life stopped, then wire, then minefields then watch towers and nothing behing the IGB because anyone who lived closed enough had been moved away decades before. Truly this was the border with Communism embodied. Previously, we had seen it on maps during that earlier exercise. Roads in the BRD continued up to the IGB and simply stopped at the ploughed minefield. Other side of the wire, the maps showed that some of these roads continued as footpaths (where they were of use to the Commies) until eventually 5Km behind the IGB, the footpaths became candystripes (minor roads shown on the map as red and white stripes) and only many miles behind the IGB did they revert to the status they had been this side of the IGB. When I left the Army in 1989 (the Wall came down immediately after I left: clearly the Commies felt the danger was past) I was proscribed from visiting East Germany in perpetuity. In June 1996 we took the Grand Tour, this time in the company of our 12-year-old son. We remained impressed by the ski jump at Braunlage, but I felt this desperate urge to visit the former DDR, so we followed the map in the direction of the Brocken. In fact I missed what had been the border (a humpback bridge over a narrow road) because all trace of the DRR had been erased from history. We drove to the village below the Brocken. There were noticeable clear spaces which had once housed the Soviet Intelligence battalions who had manned the listening post, but when they left, they removed every last nut and bolt. What was left was a fairy-tale 1930s country village, picturesque beyond words. But ... they may have been Commies for 50 years but they had always been German. Every other house had turned its garden into a car park to accommodate tourists and visitors to the funicular railway up to the top of the Brocken. Every other house had been turned into a souvenir shop. You may think that that it would be dirt cheap being former a former-Communist village? No. Like I said, they were Germans. Capitalism was in the blood and they had 50 years to make up for. It cost an arm and a leg. When I queried the cost to take a family of four up the Brocken, I was greeted with, "You could walk, but it's (something ridiculous like) 22km and very steep ..." We didn't bother with the Brocken. Neither did we bother with any souvenirs. "BUT WHAT HAS ALL THIS GOT TO DO WITH FIELD KITCHENS?!?!?" I hear you ask. I had clocked it on the way over, so on the way back, I stopped just east of the old border and we bought a drink from a stall, centred upon ... a real I-am genuine exactly as per the plastic 1/35th scale construction kit (Tamiya? Revell? Can't remember) Gulaschkanone or Goulash Cannon. Not something I'd expected to find, and in immaculate condition.

Never seen this colour scheme before but I have to say I am not surprised. In the past I have banged on about the waste of time applying Micky Mouse Ear to a Jeep because there isn't enough side to the vehicle to make it worthwhile. The Bren Carrier fits in the same category IMO, with just a narrow side panel to cam. I saw this pic and immediately thought of how the barrels of (in particularly German) artillery pieces were painted with a similar sort of zigzag in a best effort to break up the obvious shape of a gun barrel. The camouflage therefore makes perfect sense to me.

1. I thought you were checking out the decolettage. I would have been. 2. Impressed by the next lass's weapon handling. Oops wrong forum. 3. The young lady on the extreme right, the one wearing the baggy green skin and looking like she is looking at you looking at that young lass's decolettage, it that Zero Alpha on the Domestic Command Net, She Who Must Be Obeyed by any chance?

I had heard he left Friday.

You're missing a treat mate. It must be the only prime time comedy soap. I recently learned that the Green Howards had acquired the nicknames The Dingles in light of coming from that area and sharing the same gene puddle (it isn't very deep).

Whenever I watch the video of ABITW (Christmas is coming so it'll be on the music channels representing 1979) I always wonder about what happened to those youngsters. DSOTM: get a DVD Classic Albums - The Making of DSOTM ( http://www.play.com/DVD/DVD/4-/120791/Classic-Albums-Pink-Floyd-Making-The-Dark-Side-Of-The-Moon/Product.html?cm_mmc=Ppcpm-_-Films-_-Classic+Artists-_-Classic+Albums+-+Pink+Floyd+-+Making+The+Dark+Side+Of+The+Moon&source=5061 ) and watch - it'll explain what it's all about. Yes: I recently bought Close to the Edge because I love "And You And I" for its music (not the lyrics - google it). I have seen "And You And I" described as the exact pinnacle of prog rock and I have heard reports of venue management asking the band as they arrived, "And what planet are we on today?"