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Guest Papav66
Posted

thanks for posting that link, some amazing pics.

Posted
Ok you guys, how do you begin to recover some of those, or are they just left there?

 

About my last ever exercise with 15/19H. The OC (Squadron Leader) was sat in the back of my Sultan running the Combat Team Command Net. It was Friday morning and all going belly up. Scorpion after Scorpion was getting bogged and the OC was furious because as Recce, commanders ought to be able to appreciate the ground and simply not get bogged. The trains back to Paderborn were booked for mid-day and by God they were going to be there. The net, which ought to have been used for tactical control of the Combat Team, was clogging with pleas for REME assistance and SitReps wrt ongoing REME tasks.

 

Eventually Two Niner threatened to bust the next commander to bog and anybody who wasn't at the railhead would be left to his own devices. He claimed that when 15/19H had been stationed in the area a decade or more back, it wasn't unheard of for a vehicle to be lost forever to these marshes, the cost to be deducted from the commander's salary for the rest of his natural life. But I always felt he was winding them up.

 

If you were a member of http://www.arrse.co.uk and you could convince the Armoured Farmers that you were a friend, they'd let you view a secret thread (which currently runs to about 770 pages) which is full of stories of boggings and recoveries. One I read yesterday involved the REME deliberately bogging an ARV behind and at an angle (to give purchase) to a bogged MBT and laying railway sleepers so that the bogged ARV and another could pull out the bogged MBT which could get back into battle, while the REME recovered their ARV at their leisure.

 

Currently, the Royal Armoured Corps has five Armoured regiments (where a whole squadron has been reclassed as "medium (or is it light?) armour" and equipped with Scimitars but only as many MBTs as we need to fight the wars we are currently fighting. Apparently regiments not currently on ops get one or two Panzers for driver training: the rest are cetrally pooled. The days of fielding 600 tanks to keep 3 Shock Army the other side of the IGB are long gone. We cannot afford to lose a single Challenger. There is nothing in reserve.

 

Aside from five Armoured regiments, there are five Formation Recce regiments and one NBC regiment.

 

If this makes you feel bad, consider that the US Army have not had a new Abrams since 1994. Their tank factories merely take the oldest Abrams, strip them down to nothing and rebuild them with all the latest modifications in a rolling programme similar to our own Bargepole (for Chieftains) and Scorpole (for Scorpions) in the 70s and 80s.

  • 3 months later...
Posted (edited)

We have just got 50 some odd of the rebuild Adrams and the talk is that they will be around till 2030 at least and that is in the US and Australia. Our 50 are for training and then we will take over US vehicles in country.

 

Re Leopards falling over, some crews don't get out, especially on night moves across country and this has been going on since tanks were invented.

Paul downunder

Edited by Shakey985
add re Leopard
Posted

Alien, they must have been very glad when you retired. The excersise problems must have halved.:-D By the way what is the German for 'You got it stuck, you dig it out!' You ought to write a book.

Posted (edited)

Just to go on a bit from Aliens post, on the same ex I was following a Scorpion down a deep track, he was about 25m in front, the track started to get narrower and deeper. We must of gone about 150m when the veh in front came to a grinding halt. I stopped and walked down to the veh, what had happed was that the tracks on both sides of the veh had been pushed of the bottom run of the roadwheels by the pressure of the soil building up on the sides. The crew then had to dig out the sides of the veh so the tracks could be split and the veh then was dragged back up the track so the tracks and roadwheels could be replaced, it took hours.

 

Bazz

Edited by Bazz
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