AlienFTM

Actually in recent weeks there has been a marked drop in armour / warfare-related stuff. Sure it will pick up again soon when the Ardennes Offensive anniversary comes around again.

Yeah and it's not Emmerdale Farm any more either.

The latter suggests this dates back at least to 2003, when Peter Reid was manager of Sunderland AFC. According to a Newcastle-supporting friend at the time, The Toon lost half their terrace songs when he left SAFC. Songs like, "Peter Reid peels bananas with his feet." Get the picture? And the former is actually military in origin. On the air, one never uses names, ranks, appointment etc in clear for OpSec and PerSec reasons. On my RAC Control Signaller Course in 1978, one night's homework was to learn many pages of so-called appointment indicators for a test the following day. Thus Sunray is the senior person in the location, be he a Lance Corporal vehicle commander of the brigade commander. Context was everything. There were hundreds of them, including for example: Foxhound - infantry Ironside - armour Goldfinger - pay Shelldrake - artillery Rickshaw - driver Pronto - radio Acorn - intelligence (from which grow mighty oaks) and pertinent to this thread, Seagull was (and I presume still is) the appointment indicator for an adjutant, because that is where the crap comes down from. But because it isn't rank-specific, it can also mean sergeant major, because at the company / squadron level, THAT is where the crap comes down from.

My gut feeling is that KB had been reached when I left in 1989 and they were rolling out a lot of the new design of Land Rover with KB plates. But as usual, I could be wrong.

[pedant:]Oh and BTW you are missing the words "all" and "how" from your signature block. [/pedant]

Gives me a flashback to November / December 1981. RMP in BAOR were struggling to cope with the increased IRA threat and I found myself commanding a Land Rover patrolling Paderborn and Sennelager on a Saturday when I had planned to pack up my privately-rented flat so that my new wife and I could move into Married Servicemen's Quarters I had taken over two days before (and booked leave). There was also the matter of the weekly shop at the Schloss Neuhaus NAAFI store. Wor Lass was less than impressed at me being dicked for this duty and gave me a shopping list for Sunday dinner at least. About 1400 we managed to patrol in the area of the NAAFI store and replen, then patrol over in Elsen Heide (and my new MSQ) and drop off the rations, then continue on our way. We were lucky the NAAFI stayed open because traditionally German shops closed at midday Saturday to commence the sacrosanct weekend. Tracks and heavies were banned from the roads from AD (after duties) Friday to FP (first parade) Monday and no shooting apart from during first Saturday of the month and during Advent when they had Langer Samstag - Long Saturday or what we would consider Normal Saturday. As 1600 came around, I had the driver head for the duty POL (Petrol Oil and Lubricants) Point to fill up as our SSM (Squadron Sergeant Major) had intimated that the duty would finish at 1600. As it happened, our own regiment was providing duty POL. As we finished refuelling, the VRC353 squawked and the controller at the RMP Pro Coy HQ in Sennelager asked in me in polite terms where I was. I told him. He told me to get our backsides back to his location now. We were briefed that a young girl had gone missing from the Schloss Neuhaus NAAFI and we were going to be helping RMP. We returned to the Schloss area (there was actually a Schloss - castle - in the grounds) and started searching, grounds, cellars, wherever. There was a stream ... We were eventually stood down and next day with the aid of a couple of mukkers, we started moving our kit from Paderborn to Elsen Heide. Early in the afternoon I was struck down with severe stomach pain (turned out to be gastritis) and rushed to the Krankenhaus under blues in Paderborn. (Didn't help there were whispers of an IRA bomb and even blues didn't clear the road. Wor Lass came to see me every day (not easy - she didn't drive) and I learned that tragically the young girl was the daughter of one of my squadron (Baz, wasn't he in your troop?). The entire regiment helped the search effort. There was a regimental scuba diving club: they scoured every stream in the area. 20 years later there had still never been so much as a sniff of a sighting (20th anniversary saw it featured on Crimewatch in 2001). The consensus was that she had been taken and brought up as somebody else's child (there was a significant Gypsy population in West Germany. Fingers ... pointed ... maybe ...) After about four days being starved in the Krankenhaus and fed the most awful bland food imaginable, I signed myself out. I was mortified at the scale of what I had missed, and because of the ensuing chaos few people outside my own troop had even missed me (though my mukkers had kindly moved my kit out of the old flat and into the MSQ for me). Earlier in the year, a bunfight was organised in the Squadron bar up in the attic of the single accommodation. The theme was science fiction. One of the wags (jokers, not WAGs) blagged an RMP blue light and turned the door of the Squadron bar into a Tardis - very clever. (See how cunningly I finally brought the post back on topic?) I had an orange rubber one-piece waterproof motorcycle jacket. I sprayed silver the green wellies I had bought for exercises in the wet but never worn, pulled on a pair of black neoprene NBC gloves (aka Marigolds ...) with cotton liners, astronaut helmet- shaped motorcycle helmet with a pair of polarised sunglasses as laser filters. It was generally agreed that had I not slipped away to see my fiancee at just the wrong moment I'd have walked the fancy dress competition. Back to December and there was organised a Christmas Eve bunfight and curry (the meal at any bunfight was always a curry) in the Squadron bar. I made excuses because I was on stomach pills - a brand new cure-all panacea for stomach problems called Gaviscon and still rather delicate. Between Christmas and New Year things were very quiet. It was too cold to work on the vehicles and risk dropping engine deck armour on frozen fingers, so the entire squadron gathered in the briefing room in the squadron office building. Eventually it got rather rowdy and the SSM pointed out that the side room off the Squadron bar landing had not been dug out and to go and do something useful. We bimbled across the the single accommodation and about 50 of us piled in. There was a container with the remnants of the stew. Best part of a week after the event, I was surprised when I touched it and found it warm. It was opened. It was half full of curry ... fermenting and warming itself. At this point I backed away, popped a Gaviscon and allowed the rabble to dispose while my stomach churned. All this from: I really must get a job that requires doing work ... or maybe not. ;o)

I joined Command in BAOR in the Autumn of 1977. That was a cold winter (weren't they all?). One of the ACV commanders owned a bright yellow Mark 1 Escort. The throttle cable snapped. He set the carb to a fast idle and drove to work changing speed simply by changing up and down. One morning, too cold to work on the Saracens, we all piled into the Escort and drove round and round the ice-covered race track that was the back square between B and C Squadron hangars and the various QMs' blocks on one side and Command Troop, A Sqn and the colocated R Sigs Task Force signals troop hangars and the officers mess on the other. It was on a slope and as I say thick with ice. But Jock was having great fun spinning this constant-velocity Escort, while the rest of us started to turn our hair white. We decided maybe it wasn't too cold to work on the Sarries after all (when we were allowed out for NAAFI break).

I bought tickets for about six. Bomber was the first person to out Sue as my fiancee of four days, despite her desperate attempts to change the subject lol.

SS-GB by Len Deighton? Or a meringue?

I don't think so. Most of 15/19H must have gone to the Westfalenhalle, Dortmund between 16 and 20 Feb to see The Wall. Baz and I were two. My fiancee of four days was there too. For months thereafter, as I walked the corridor from my room through the accommodation, The Wall balsted from each room in turn, sadly never in synch.

To the Germans, immediate counterattack has always been an SOP. To the Allies, "Expect an immediate German counterattack" therefore became an SOP.

There was a scene in the film, The Wall, where, sat bored at his desk, "Pink" writes himself some poetry which the teacher sees, reads to the class them gives him a good smacking. Very clever to use the lyrics from "Money" (DSOTM). And if you have ever seen "Classic Albums - DSOTM" from the BBC, Rick Wright explains how they reused some code ... I mean music (sorry - reuse of code is a mantra to programmers) ... from Zabriskie Point in DSOTM. He then sits and plays it at a standard grand piano. It is quite clear that had he not become a rock demigod, he could have been the 20th century's Tschaikovsky. Basically they were a bunch of true, extremely talented musicians rather than the typical actress/singer/model/dancer we get these days.

Don't tell him, Pike!

As has been said, I can see a lot of mileage in having a manpack in the front where there is no operator or if the commander is, for example, an FOO who needs to get out and advance tactically into an OP and take a radio with him. On the other hand, it might also be appropriate to mount a WATER jerry can there for ease of access. It's bad enough sitting on the petrol tanks without then having cans in the cab. When we first got Clansman, the establishment for an Armd Recce Regt for for no more literally than a handful of VHF manpacks (I should know - I was Regimental Signals Storeman for a year or two. The Regimental Signals Store was literally outside the main entrance to the cookhouse, so I went to the QM's Clothing Storeman and blagged a brown technican's coat so that I didn't need walk across the regimental square, get changed for lunch, walk back, eat, walk across to change back then get back to work). If we needed to work dismounted we unreeled a few hundred metres of Don 10 and plugged in a remote handset. By the time we left, there was talking of slashing the establishment of UK/VRC353s by replacing one in each Scorpion with a 351/2. Working in two-car sections, I'd guess they'd dismount the 351/2 from one vehicle change frequency, bimble off into the ulu and rebroadcast that frequency through the other car's 351/2 and out into the net via the 353. So manpacks were something I was lucky to see and I cannot speak from experience in this case. FWIW, there was a similar, larger mount on the back of a Sultan. It was the perfect size to mount an industry-size Calor Gas (or Camping Gas or whatever) bottle used to run giant heaters to keep the penthouse warm in the depths of a BAOR winter. Don't want the dear officers to get cold feet while we are fighting a battle, do we? Since you ask, AFAIK it was meant to mount a canister of bleach slurry, to be used during NBC decontamination.

Cavorted on. The thing about boy sailors climbing the rigging ended in tragedy a few years ago when one fell to his death. IIRC H&S promptly outlawed it.

Reminds me of the time the great Polish Air Force ace went to give a lecture in a girls' school. "Ja we were flying at 10,000 feet when we were jumped by a gaggle of German Fokkers." Cue much tittering among the girls. Headmistress butts in, "Girls, let me remind you that a Fokker was a German aeroplane." She turns to the Pole and asks, "Please continue." "Ja anyway ... well these Fokkers were in Messerschmidts."

... and Polish Lancers versus Panzers in 1939.

Reminds me of (Brickhill's?) Reach For The Sky, the seminal book looking at the career of Douglas Bader. Having lost his legs and learned to walk again, he set about learning to drive again (well depicted in the film). Two points of note. 1. (Not relevant but included for interest). He lost his right leg above the knee and his left below the knee. This meant that the extra control in his left leg was better suited to working an accelerator while the right was capable of smacking a clutch. He therefore had his local garage swap accelerator and clutch on his MG (IIRC). By the time the mechanic had delivered it back to him converted, his hair was practically white after the drive. 2. Having observed that a tax disc showed a more than passing likeness to the then current label on a bottle of Guinness (AFAIK this label remained in use until the mid-70s when I was working behind the bar of a working-men's club), he replaced his tax disc with said Guinness label and it was never picked up on, even though (as also portrayed in the film) he was not popular with any local constabulary and was forever being stopped by them.

ISTR its name came from: P = amphibious T = tank 76 = calibre of main armament in mm (though I now have a nagging doubt that its gun might have been 73mm in calibre ... grrr. I certainly STR there was a BMP variant with a 73mm gun, possibly BMP1976). All Commie kit was thus named by NATO (usually bearing no relation to what they called it). Last year we had a Russian gap year student and I used to give him a lift. If I talked to him about, for example, a BRDM2, he just looked blankly at me. Once you learn all these, recognition gets rather easier. Still used to bug me when asked to identify whether for example a BTR60 family vehicle was a BTR60PA or BTR60PB. A year or two back I was sent a series of pictures from Afghanistan in which the US commentator described the subject vehicle as a BMP. It was a tracked vehicle so it most certainly was not a BMP. I had to stop and think about it because the BTR50 series was tracked and the BTR60 series was eight-wheeled. Eventually I taught myself that you cannot have five road wheels on a wheeled vehicle, so BTR50 must be tracked (but ISTR it had seven road wheels per side) but you can have six road wheels, so BTR60 must be wheeled (even though ISTR it had eight road wheels. And it gets no easier as senility creeps in.

ISTR on CVR(T) there was a lever on the side of a sight to rotate when the active IR headlights were switched on to lower an IR filter into the eyepiece. The active IR lights were on their way out when I first served on CVR(T) in 1976, because by then we were using first generation passive IR night sights mounted on infantry weapons (and a gihuge one mounted coaxially on CVR(T) on the gunner's side of the main armament). And because the Commies were also using active IR, which meant that lighting up our own active IR was like using white light if they were looking back at us using their IR filters. These days everything is passive IR (for the reason I just stated).

According to Peter Elstob in his "Hitler's Last Offensive", an account of the Ardennes Offensive, there were three conditional states: SNAFU (already covered) FUMTU (Fouled Up More Than Usual) TARFU (Things Are Really Fouled Up) Obviously since then, somebody invented FUBAR. Here's some more: NFI: No Flipping Interest. NAAFI: No Ambition And Flip-all Interest. I believe in this thread (I may be wrong - ask if you haven't) you have seen SWALK, CHIP, FISH and NORWICH. My favourite is SWSTKTBTT. Okay it doesn't make a good acronym, but it is certainly descriptive: Sealed With Spit To Keep The Blooming Thing Together.

So long as you retain (Open square brackets) quote ... through to the first (Close square brackets) and the /quote in square brackets on the end, it will display correctly. Where there are quotes within quotes, remember that the sets of delimiters pair up, outside open quotes with outside close quotes and ditto inside quotes. When all else fails, you can strip out everything, just leaving the text to be quoted, then click on the "quote" icon (last but one BBC tag above the message window) then put your addition outside of the quote marks. This will not show who posted the original being quoted, but it will format correctly. If you are in doubt, remember to click Preview rather than Post to verfiy you have done it correctly.

Soviet equivalent of Scorpion. A very fast, amphibious light tank. ISTR it was out of service by the time I left 15/19H in 1982. Though obviously not as fast as Scorpion, listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's fastest tank, even though we all know it's a tracked armoured car.

Not enough. Like I said earlier in the thread, we were issued with three of these by mistake by the vehicle depot at Moenchenstrapback in late 1977 and I don't think we ever got one of them over 20mph. Yet I cannot believe the APCRA was so much heavier than the ACV which never felt like it was dawdling.

The Scorpions in the middle pic would never have been able to copy PT76 - they don't even have float screens any more.