AlienFTM

If it's any consolation, I was once present at the site of where one of our troop's UN Ferrets had rolled off the edge of a narrow Cypriot track onto its side. (Pleased to report no casualties.) All UN vehicle were painted gloss white and had large flourescent blue UN stickers plastered all over after a softskin carrying Australian Civilian Police (AustCivPol) attached to the UN were napalmed on the road between Nicosia and Larnaca sometime around the time of the 1974 war. This Ferret's underside was quite clearly Olive Drab and no attempt had been made to paint the belly plate, though the wheel stations had been painted. Your choice: a thorough job or a realistic job?

Paint the other boob in a random black Dispersed Pattern and your man-boobs will disappear as if by magic.

Depends how authentic you want to be. Shower? After a week (two if no time arises on weekend 1), all pile into the back of a Landrover and head down to the nearest swimming pool. Remember to take a change of clothes. If you have a shrewd bargainer (Regimental Sergeants Major always are), negotiate a deal to use their shower. Otherwise, fork out for a swim session, have a throughly bliddy good shower before you enter the water (a good Forrest Gump in the traps beforehand will be particularly comfortable if you don't like Tardises), enjoy the seesion swimming then have another shower on the way out. Cleam clothes on, dirty clothes in bin bag and Roberto the Latin long distance lorry driver is yer mother's live-in lover. (Bob's yer uncle.) On the way back, try to avoid dusty roads which will leave you no cleaner than when you left. Live on Composite rations for the duration. For total authenticity, use a No 1 Petrol Cooker, but these render everything black and manky. A Calor Gas or similar double burner is an adequate and authentic alternative (the MBC bleach slurry decontaminant mount on the back door of a Sultan is a good size to carry a large gas bottle. Better yet, acquire a Boiling Vessel and drop the unopened tins in. Do not allow the tins to overheat and explode - they make a nasty mess of the inside of the BV, and an even nastier mess of a tank turret if the BV lid goes ... The BV has mythical status among RAC soldiers and alumni, so much so that CR2 must be better because it has always come with a BV, whereas the Americans have only recently realised what makes CR2 better than Abrams and retrofitted BVs to them. Being of such legendary status, however, they are about as common as rocking horse droppings. If you eat the entire daily ration of Compo provided (which requires that you be provided eggs where possible and a starchy foodstuff, either bread or potatoes, and water obviously), you will find the effect on your alimentary canal, as designed, is well balanced. But it is no mean feat to eat an entire day's supply of Compo in 24 hours AND fight a war. Lighting? A right-angled torch will light up your tent sufficiently to rummage around in your large pack. Alternatively, use no lighting, develop your night vision, learn to look out of the corner of your eye (where the rod / cone balance is less optimised for daytime) and walk around tactically. If someone shines a torch in your face, close one eye in an attempt to save the night vision and scream, "PUT THAT LIGHT OUT!" In a Hodgesque Dad's Army Way. While you are giving himm a hard time (after he has put his light out), ask him who he is so you can give him a good bollicking. If the reply is, "It's me," tell him, "There are 60 million 'me's in this country: which one are you?" You didn't ask about toilet facilities. Remember the eternal rhetorical RAC question, "Do cavalrymen sh!t in the woods?"

CVR(T) secondary recognition feature: Apart from Scorpion / Scimitar which have five equally spaced roadwheels, there is a three-inch gaps between roadwheels 2-3 and 3-4 accommodate the six-inch longer hulls. Not really much use in the field: if you are close enough to see 3" roadwheel gaps you are more than close enough to see the silhouette is neither Scorpion nor Scimitar.

Why aye man. Baycon rerls and rayza blaydes. (A phrase 3RTR use whenever they come across 15/19H and 3RTR after we were regularly colocated in the 1970s and 80s.) Remember also that Alien = Neil A backwards. Gift.

If you have problems with CVR(T) (and I knew some very tall people who served in CVR(T)), give up on the idea of anything Soviet RIGHT NOW. As I recently described, selection of Red Army conscripts consisted of "Let the Infantry choose as many of the smallest conscripts as they need." "Let the armoured troops choose next: they will choose as many of the smallest as they need." THEN they worry about tradesmen. The BMP-1 stands no more than about 5' high. I was at Bovvy weekend before last and I was able to look into the firing ports on their BMP-1 without bending or stretching. Inside, the seats are arranged down the longitudinal axis so that the troops look outward - so they can fire their AK47s through the firing ports. They must be VERY friendly. Likewise about 1983, as their AFV Recognition Instructor, I took a group of REME to a display of Soviet armour in Bielefeld. The T62 on display made me come over claustrophobic - and I had just completed seven years in CVR(T).

It was OEP220. And it did stand for Oil, Extreme Pressure. As UNFICYP Force Reserve Squadron Sep 76 - Mar 77 in Ferret Scout Cars, one of our outposts was a bungalow on the outskirts of Larnaca. Abandoned by its Turkish-Cypriot owners during the war, it was next door to a one-time colleague of Jacques Cousteau and just down the hill from the Austrian Contingent (AUSCON) we were in support of. With the Ferrets parked in the gravel driveway, stood on the turret roof we could see aircraft taxiing on the runway at Larnaca Airport. The people opposite owned an MGBGT V8. Registration number? EP220. What a coincidence. My lasting memory of the vehicle park in Nicosia was the smell of OEP220 in the morning.

I have never seen anything other than the original like-a-small-roadwheel idler. Quite a shock to hear it isn't any more. In seven years in a CVR(T) regiment, I never saw or heard of an idler losing its rubber. Plenty of roadwheels though.

I am currently technical-editing Armoured Farmer A Tankie's Tale 1975 - 1990 by Malcolm Cleverley (coming soon to all good bookshops blah blah). In it, he describes putting a regiment of Chieftains through the washdown, a glorified car wash for Chieftains. He describes how the washdown at Barker Barracks, Paderborn had a closed water loop and how after about two tanks had gone through, the rest of the regiment were more sandblasting their tanks than hosing them down, leading to a uniform light brown finish over the top of the Olive Drab / Black cam.

ISTR reading in Light Dragoons The Making of a Regiment, ISBN-10: 1844154483 that an element of 15/19H was in Libya at the time and on receiving the warning order for Op Musketeer, they set about activating all the in-country standby Centurions in preparation. One of the few times a set of dry-clad tanks had been activated, apparently. Since those vehicles were presumably marked up for operations in Libya, it may be somewhere to start. But I don't have the book to hand (I am sat at me desk in the office) and I only spotted this snippet after about four reads through, so don't quote me as Gospel.

I wonder when was the last time I saw one of those turrets? Oh hang on. It would be Saturday afternoon. I fell for it again. Taking nipper around the Tank Museum. "That's a Scimitar. Like a Scorpion but it's got a point-and-click cannon instead of a real gun. Next to it a Fox with an erect float screen. And a pre-production Scorpion with spoked roadwheels. There's something wrong with that Scimitar though. It's got a 03FD number plate. The 03FDs were all allocated to Scorpions. Why should that be?" "Well Dad, according to this display board, it's a Sabre, converted from a Scorpion by fitting a Fox turret." In mitigation, they revised all the bins in the 1990s and this turret was well concealed behind said bins, but sure enough, the turret was lifted a couple of inches from the hull by the mating plate to allow a Fox turret to fit a Scorpion ring. I last fell for that one in 1995 when I saw a 02FD plate on a BBC report from the Balkans, identified it as a Scorpion from the plate, then was surprised to see the camera looking down the barrel of a Rarden instead of a 76. But as a Scimitar it looked like it had been held prisoner by headshrinkers. Then a TA colleague explained the Sabre mod to all the Scorpions. Nice job. Well done.

Sorry, Double, you were too late. Though on Saturday morning I did mention to Sarah RJ, the Brigadier's wife that I'd had a chance of a stand-in for Wor Lass but I had to respect Mess security. You wouldn't have enjoyed it: it was full of retired officers. Apart from the Brigadier, whom I actually recognised by face, having last seen it on a sprog Lieutenant on the vehicle park about 1982, the only person I recognised was by name, he being our crew's perennial arch-nemesis at the annual RAC Regatta at Kiel. In the past we'd only ever seen his transom disappearing over the horizon. But we did have a nice chat with an ex-13/18H who'd crewed a DD Sherman up the beach ahead of the infantry on D-Day.

I was at Bovington on Saturday at the invitation of the Director of the Royal Armoured Corps. Took a nose around the arena and couldn't help but notice that the Chieftain ARV lurking to pull breakdowns out of the way had a canvas bucket hanging off the back. I thought of you lot and took a picture but haven't downloaded it yet. Watch this space but don't hold yer breath.

I followed the link. I clicked on the I Agree button to enter the catalogue. At the bottom of the next page are links to a Stage 1 and a Stage 2 report. This page explains what the differences between the two reports. Click on either report. On the next page, most of the links take you to comma separated variable data (CSV) files. These are meaningless as such. They are meant to be uploaded into another program (Microsoft Excel is a good example). Knowing which would help. But at the top of each page is a PDF file for download. (No Gary Glitter is not a convicted PDF file.) These are portable documents which you can read with Acrobat Reader (free download) or direct through your webpage - an add-on may need to be installed to allow your browser to read PDFs. Quickly glancing through one of the reports (I haven't studied it) suggests I was right and the CSVs are for upload to Excel. I still don't know what data they'll display. Just enjoy the PDFs. HTH

Sat in Durham Archives Office a couple of years ago doing family history, I got fed up and found and studied a microfilm of the War Diary of a battalion of the Durham Light Infanty, dated 1944. Imagine my surprise to find the diary opening with the battalion deploying to Tot Hill north of Southampton to await D-Day embarkation. I drive past Tot Hill every day to and from work. Then my cousin lent me her collection of her late father's memorabilia. (nobody knew until his eulogy was read that he had driven his Bofors gun tractor over three different invasion beaches on respective D-Days to land in Sicily, Italy and Normandy). His collection included a Regimental History of his Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, of which his battery had been raised from a squadron of Northumberland Hussars immediately after the outbreak of hostilities and his volunteering. I had never known that he too wanted to be a cavalryman. And where did his Regiment encamp to await D-Day embarkation? Believe it or not, Hursley Park, the very field on which my current office was built. It was then the headquarters of Vickers / Supermarine after the Supermarine factories were blitzed out in 1940 and remained HQ Vickers until they sold the park to IBM. Small world or what???

The camouflage pattern applied is Dispersed Pattern, not Disruptive pattern (and DPM is Dispersed Pattern Material, not Disruptive Pattern Material as popular misconcept has it, except on Dennison smocks). Disruptive Pattern has sharp edges, usual acutely triangular or splinter. The effect is to break up the shape. Apart from Dennison smocks, it is most often seen i pictures of ships (in the Far East in WW" IIRC) where the sharply contrasting colours and angles prevent the eye from determining the shape of what it is seeing. Possibly the most violent Dispersed Pattern was on Fighter Command aircraft at the outbreak of WW2, where the left side of the underbelly was painted black and the right side white. To an observer on the ground, only one half of the aeroplane or the other (depending on the colour of the sky / clouds behind it) would be noticed, and because the eyes only saw half an aeroplane, the brain would not see an aeroplane. Dispersed Pattern consists of swirls of colours (maybe five on a combat jacket) which blend the jacket into the background. The pattern is similar on vehicles but normally in the UK only using two colours (some countries use three or four) in the ratio 2/3 base - normally green - to 1/3 black. In winter, whitewash may be issued to be cover 1/2 the green to make it 1/3 green, 1/3 black, 1/3 white. In eight years in BAOR we got issued winter cam once (in January 1981).

You have identical real e-mail and PM. You need to reply to one of them as a matter of urgency. Like NOW. Are you STILL reading this? Pick up the phone. Double!

... and courtesy of the Director of the Royal Armoured Corps, who was a sprog 2Lt when we served together, I'll have the use of the Officers Mess, a running barbecue and free entrance to the museum for my whole family for the day. And separate parking. Oh the joys of being a Royal Armoured Corps Alumnus.

If you don't get a better offer ... If you come down from God's Country along the M3 and pick up the M27 to head off the way you intend, there are numerous cheap hotels from well-known chains around Southampton to cater for the cruise trade. There is one such (Travel Lodge I think) on the M27 at the first services (Rownhams) after you join the M27. Next exit is the M271 spur motorway into Southampton: first exit off there is an Express at Holiday Inn, and just off also at that exit is a Travel Inn. As the crow flies these are all within a couple of miles of my house. I shall be travelling to Bovington on Saturday for the Tank Museum open day and I'll allow a generous hour and a half to get there.

Not sure about that. Our Samaritans got the exact same treatment as the rest of our vehicles. Park the FHQ in a wood, cam everything up, disappear from view ... except that the ambulance catches the eye and draws attention and the whole FHQ is exposed. I was surprised to find that Samaritans came with roll-down blinds to cover the red crosses to aid camouflage. I guess it depends on the ambulance's role, whether it is part of a tactical or a non-tactical unit.

Pretty much. There were differences in the collar and the lining and that was about it that I can remember. It was only the stitching in the 68 pattern collar that ever caught my eye. I'd have to say that there probably weren't too many examples of 68 pattern still in the field (particular in an Infantry battalion) by 1980. By the time I joined my regiment in 76, the majority of combat jackets I clocked were 75 pattern. Being on ops in NI, it was easier to get new kit than usual. That said, the Queens will have done their own NI tours and cycled their combats as necessary too. Although the 85 pattern came out in 85 (surprise!!!), the 75 pattern was, I think more popular with the troops. I still had two examples of a 75 pattern (along with two times 85 pattern) when I left in 89. There ought still to be a 75 pattern at the back of my wife's wardrobe. So. Beginning of the 80s, the 75 pattern is the only realistic choice. After 85, either 75 or 85 pattern. By the end of the 80s, the 85 pattern would be most authentic. As for the cam pattern, I once knew a guy whose mother worked in a factory producing the DPM material. He reckoned the pattern changed several times per year, but if it was subtly different, it was never noticeable.

I am confused by your DPM dates. If 68 was the first original DPM pattern combats, the second was 75 pattern, which I was issued twice in 1975, once in January for my abortive 3 months in RMP then again when I re-enlisted in the cavalry in September. The 75 brought in full length lining and a simple collar. The next (fairly significant) change was in 85. It took most of the lining back out, had velcro cuffs instead of buttons to catch on cam nets and had an intriguing extra little blister pocket on the (gets up and walks to the coat rack to check his 85 pattern combat jacket) right sleeve. All the pockets bar the pen pocket on the left sleeve are blister pockets. The tail was also removed. There were, it seems, subtle changes in 94 including the use of rip-stop material and (ISTR) velcro instead of a zip fastener, then a complete revise in 95.

Special Boat Squadron of the Royal Marines (or however they define SBS at this precise moment in time). Their peace-time remit nowadays is to guard nuclear packages being moved around the country. Right up until Maggie's day, most cabinet ministers, particularly Tories, had served their time. Willie Whitelaw commanded a Churchill Squadron in Normandy. Tony Benn ISTR was also RAC - at least he knew what he was talking about whenever he took an anti-war stance. Sir Ian Gow served in Malaya against the Mao Mao with 15/19H, God rest his soul. And then came Tony ... (and Dave, to be fair).