AlienFTM

Well I did the IWM last week. Wor Lass, who was seriously ill last year, did not find the walk from Waterloo station arduous. (We found Lambeth North tube station about half the distance on the way back, carried on to Waterloo, missed a turn, walked under the tracks and around three sides of the station. Eventually got on the Northern Line tube ... heading south instead of north and got off again at Lambeth North to turn around and go back. Grrr!) I spent three hours mooching, stayed interested throughout and didn't see half of the museum. (The leaflet suggested you'd need 3 - 4 hours to see the whole thing. Obviously this is not geared to people who are interested.) The flocks of school-children were only rowdy when they were allowed into the museum shop to buy bric-a-brac. Some very moving exhibits. I found an SLR that had been hit by a high-velocity full-bore round - probably 7.62mm) that had nearly severed the barrel. A lifeboat in which two men had survived for 70-odd days after their ship was sunk. And of course the VC awarded to Charles Ernest Garforth, 15H in 1915. Try Googling for him and read what he did to win it. And they try to tell us horsed cavalry were rendered obsolete by the race to the Channel in the autumn of 1914.

PMSL. No but seriously. ISTR once reading that for a period in the 60s tank crews had to paint their tanks DBG for inspection, then dispersed OD and Black for exercise. What a joy that must have been.

I am so disappointed. I saw this thread and was immediately transported back to Tyneham Gap and B Squadron 15/19H gunnery ranges and camp in 1977. As Squadron Leader's Land Rover driver, I didn't get to convert any live rounds into empty cases (at least I don't remember: he had this habit of turning to me and saying, "Come on, Trooper Alien, let's have a cabby.") I did get to help with the ammo bashing though: removing 76mm HESH rounds from their packing cases, carrying them to Scorpions and bringing back empty cases. One day the detail was for 3-vehicle troops to go down the battle run, opened for the first time in donkeys' years through the abandoned village of Tyneham. The Boss had me remove the canvas from our Land Rover so that Instructors, Gunnery (IGs) and various other hangers-on (literally in this case I suppose) could follow behind the troops and observe their gunnery skills - the object of the whole week after all. Driving across fields where the CVR(T) in front of us was literally the first vehicle through in decades, the Boss got excited at fields of mushrooms, each maybe a foot across, and every time we stopped he had me out collecting them and gently placing them in the back of the rover. Of all the pictures I took in the cavalry, the one reel that didn't get lost when my late mother's house was cleared shows a troop (I seem to remember Fred was gunning Baz: wasn't he in Third with you? Or was he in First?) in such a field. The three vehicle were not entirely straight, since they were not on a formal firing point and although I was safely behind the trunnions of the vehicle I was beside in accordance with range safety rules, I was forward of the next one and desperately keen to get a picture of a round coming out of the barrel (in a cheap Kodak FFS). I remember hearing Fred shouting "FIRING NOW" and working the shutter in time, but it didn't work. What do I find? Mushroom ventilators. Hah!

Looks like a wartime pic to me: censor has had a good go at the beret badge of the man on the right, though possibly not good enough as it likes RA to me. Maybe it's the Royal Artillery Concert Party? (Thinks Windsor Davies, "Lovely pair of shoulders lad. Show them off, show them off.")

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination

"Bomber" by Len Deighton is a work of fiction but it is superbly researched. He describes how Lancaster crews, having got as high as aerodynamics would take them, would drop the airbrakes briefly, which caused them to lurch another few feet higher. After a slack handful of these manoeuvres, they'd be that little bit higher than the rest of the stream, which got to take the brunt of the flak. But they handled like bricks.

Once, stationed in BAOR with 15th/19th The King's Royal Hussars, a birthday card arrived from my mother (actually it happened every year but let's not split hairs). On the back of the envelope, it read something like, "Sorry for the unfortunate choice of wording inside." When I opened it, she had addressed it, "To my gay hussar." It didn't go on public view ...

Blooming Nora it's 18 months since I posted that: http://www.hmvf.co.uk/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=38&topic=1207.15 I didn't realise I'd been a member that long!!!

Allan Mallinson writes some interesting words about Cambrai in "Light Dragoons". If you check the map, you find that among the furthest advance at the Cambrai breakout were 13th Hussars, which was exactly according to plan. Sadly, because everybody had expected the tank to roll up everything, no allowance had been made in the plans to actually get the horsed cavalry through the gap and they were unable to exploit to the full. Mallinson rightly goes on to describe Cambrai as the death knell for horsed cavalry, even in light of their successes at Cambrai.

According to Brickhill's definitive "Dambusters", aircraft taking off with Grand Slams could clearly be seen to have their wings bending under the load.

For those not au fait with Panther, the following needs clarifying: The Ausf G was the last model of Panther (Ausf D, A and G being used in service). Cuckoo was an early example of the Ausf G because of the late mods described. History of the Panther: Ausf A, B and C were pre-production variants. ("Hold on, you just said the Ausf was a service model!" I'll come back to that.) The early service model was D, recognised by an MG slit and a driver's slit in the glacis plate. The next model would have been E (in German, rhymes with hay) but even the Germans get confused by this and it written down as A and stayed that way). Then they decided on a major revision, the Panther Ausf F with Schmalturm (narrow turret which went on to form the design base for the Tiger 2) and revised, simplified roadwheel layout). It was then redesignated Panther 2, then dropped, with all the improvements used as a basis for the Tiger 2 (which is why it looks more like a Panther than a Tiger 1), though the roadwheel layout change was applied to late model Tiger 1s. The final evolution of the Panther was the G, which like all tanks continued to change slightly over time. The hull MG was now mounted in a blister mounting and the driver's vision slit eliminated in favour of periscopes in the roof. Late Ausf Gs were most easily identified by the mantlet chin to eliminate the mantlet shot trap ricocheting rounds down through the roof armour into the driver's compartment.

The current rebuild at Bovvy is only costing some £15 - 16M (I wonder how many bricks will be mine courtesy of my charitable donations?)

That's what you get for relying on memory when you reach a certain age. ;o)

As Great War Truck said, it's a lot less likely to happen with later vehicles because they will be constructed from better-produced metal.

Reminds me of an old man writing to his Republican son in Long Kesh. Son receives the letter and writes in reply, Before the father even receives the letter from his son, the RUC are banging on the door and they dig his entire garden in search of the arms cache. Father writes back to son, To which his son replies,

Learn to count in hexadecimal, then Rosemary is a mere 28 years old and I am still 34, the age (in decimal) when I left the army. The sad thing is that I will now be humming Edison Lighthouse's seminal work all day.

Why divvent yea larn ter talk England liyuk wot me be teeched when ah were a children??? Good old Pitmatic (try Google). Yer canna whack it.

You haven't had police digging up the back garden have you?

Mark, I have a horrible feeling you are referring to the US 11th Armored Division, whereas Baz is referring to 11 Armoured Division, with which our forebears in 15/19H travelled from Normandy to the Baltic in 1944 - 45, hence the name of the divisional history.

I think some of your problem comes down to the fact that any published wartime photo will have passed through the hands of a censor who will have scratched out exactly these markings for security reasons.

Nee working furries marra. Now get to work. I knew you knew: wanted to save others from confusion. ;o)

When DRAC invited me to the open day in June, the building work had severely condensed the displays but the quality of display was not noticeably worse than it ever was. ISTR the new building is due to open in February. I'd like to think DRAC will invite me to be there. I'll let you know. ;o)

Sturmgeschütz = Assault gun = turretless tank. Surprisingly the most numerous armoured vehicle of the war was the StuG, churned out by the gazillion, IIRC nearly half of vehicles issued to German tank units were StuGs. So successful were they that when the factory churning out PzKpw3 chassis was bombed out in 1943, that for a year they continued to churn them out, mounted on PzKpfw4 chassis. Lower profile and more importantly less of a drain on highly-machined parts like bearings on which to rotate a turret. Sturmgewehr = assault rifle, most noticeably the SG44, thanks to MOHAA * usually referred to as StG44. In CoD * ISTR it is referred to as MP44. Redesignated from the FG43 (Fallschirmjägergewehr = paratroop rifle), itself a derivative of the FG42, Hitler was fed up of rifles as wonder-weapons, wanting monster tanks and jet aircraft to win the war and banned the development of new rifles, so they called it a machine pistol, hence MP44 is a valid reference. The German assault rifles did use short rifle rounds, unlike their nearest Allied equivalents, the Bren and the BAR, which used full rifle rounds. Because the British have never had a service assault rifle prior to the SA80, we do not have the complication of long and short rounds. * first person WW2 computer games, for those who didn't know.

Which reminds me. CVR(T) and Ferret. One had Main Beam / Dipped / Side / Off / Convoy. The other had an extra Position, No Lights (at all). Was it CVR(T) or Ferret where you could suppress all lights?

What he said. The red paint on the wheel rim nuts was not AFAIK official, but because the wheels had split rims which would cause the wheel to explode with the pressure if these nuts were undone, the wheel-rim nuts were sometimes painted over in red. Certainly as a combat unit we always painted over them if the opportunity arose. Sadly, with my photo collection destroyed I have no way of verifying this. IMHO it's just another layer of bullshit.