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Whats your caption?


Nick Johns

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Oh, the blue lines were rivers, not motorways....

 

 

Maybe Baz can help here. Maybe not - come to think of it I know he had move from 3 Tp B Sqn because we had been in Command Troop in the meantime.

 

Summer of 1981. A glorious day and a memorable exercise (exept the exercise name escapes me). We must have exercised in at least brigade strength because we had real armour and real infantry against us. Come to think of it, it was us who were orange forces (exercise speak for commies but the politicians didn't like us saying that.

 

This is going to be a string of events from the exercise, not necessarily in chronological order. You'll see where it comes on-topic.

 

Our recce screen advanced into the sprawling village of Forst, somewhere in central BRD. (Some years later an F16 fell out of the sky on the village ... messy.) Understand that the terms Dorf (village) and Stadt (town or city) do not correlate with their English translations. A Dorf might be almost as big as what we'd consider a town. A collection of farmhouses might or might not be classed as a village. When in Rome ...

 

Our section motored past a farmyard ... with 432s and Chieftains cammed up therein. We carried straight on through and I initiated a Fire Mission on an Armoured Combat Team FHQ.

 

Having had our attached artillery lay waste to this HQ, on our next sweep through the village we found the farmyard mysteriously quiet as if recently deserted ... It was breakfast time so we parked up our Scorpions in a side street and churned out a brew and sausages, bacon grill and beans from the boiling vessel. While the BV was doing its thing, as gunner I prepared the cups, only to discover we had run out of tinned milk. Being a German linguist I disconnected my umbilical radio lead, collected my Small Metal Gun and legged it to a nearby grocery store. The old lady was gassing with her mate like Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough (yes?) though in German, not Yorkshire. They stopped as I walked in wearing baggy green skin, CVR(T) bonedome and SMG, then passed comment. "Aah Englaender, nicht wahr?"

This little village had almost certainly never seen a CVR(T) bonedome before, so I was fairly confident when I pointed at my orange armband and replied, "Nein, heute bin ich Russisch." ("No, today I am Russian.") They stopped laughing and paled a little. Then I asked sweetly for some tinned milk, said my polite goodbyes and got back in the turret.

 

Breakfast safely consumed, we got back on with the war. As we pulled out of our back street, I stared in disbelief and nudged troopy's (the troop leader) arm, pointing out to him a mechanised infantry company in the process of debussing from their 432s in full view on a hillside just outside the village. Another fire mission (I don't recall there was actually any RA representation on the exercise: the Golf 11 callsign, who FHQ assured me was our Shelldrake rep, sounded remarkably like one of our own FHQ operators ...) and I had personally clocked up my greatest ever number of Cold War kills for a single day, and the locals were hardly on their way to work.

 

Next morning our recce screen was to advance to contact in the village, leading the way for an armoured combat team. Trouble was that in the pre-dawn there was a pea-souper which lasted well into the morning. The driver couldn't see a vehicle's length in front of him. The advance was pitifully slow but we were recce troops and had to do it right. We were maybe 1/4 mile from the village when we stopped one last time to check the map (well Troopy WAS map reading). As he and I leaned over the map spread across the turret, we became aware that the Scorpion's idle was getting ever louder and shaking the vehicle ever more intensely. As it peaked, I looked over my right shoulder and saw the whites of an RTR tank commander's eyes. They had got fed up of playing the game and wanted a swan. All I ever saw was the commanders eyeballs and the whole side of the Chieftain as it thundered by six inches from my right elbow. And the loader's two-fingered salute as they disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. Then another Chieftain and a third.

 

One afternoon our squadron led the left flank of an assault on the village, held by dug-in enemy infantry. 1 Tp were to our left, 3 Tp to our right, 4 Tp and Surveillance Tp in reserve.

 

1 Tp and we were making heavy weather of our advance across open country. 3 Tp on the other hand suddenly announced they they were making excellent progress and were entering the village along the Blue. This village was nowhere near an Autobahn: cue large numbers of recce troops trying to work out wtf 3 Tp were up to. Then I saw then to my right, advancing into the village along the stream bed. They actually caught the enemy cold. Their AT capability was all covering the logical entries into the village: a quick pass under the main road bridge into the village and the enemy were in chaos. 3 Tp leader then ordered his driver to right-stick out of the river and up the bank, into the village centre. Unfortunately his driver was a bit keen on his right stick and they threw a track in three feet of water. The seals on the belly plates were less than perfect. They'd have been fine, but suddenly they were looking at a very difficult recovery. Oops.

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Yes, I remember that well, it was the same exercise that some Marders of our erstwhile Enemies tried to cross the forementioned stream and as a result were knocked out. On enquiring why they were knocked out the were informed that as a protection to our flank we had laid A/Tk Mines in the stream bed after we had crossed. The Germans did not believe the Umpire, so I led them to the stream, moved a side the gravel and exposed 6-8 dummy bar mines that the veh carried, that I had laid on the bed of the stream. The look on the Germans Faces was a peach.

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