Thirty miles west of Manhattan on Long Island is the Museum of American Armor. This collection of mostly World War II armor and equipment is occasionally rolled out for convoys. Museum patrons can ride in halftracks, scout cars and other armored vehicles across fields in Long Island.
Click on the web site above and you can learn about every vehicle in their collection.
One long night in November of 1977, my tank crew was on our third week of training in the West German countryside near the East-West border. We needed fuel. The 375-gallon fuel tank in our M60A1 Patton tank was at half full. To be combat ready, we needed to refuel. Usually we refueled when the big M559 Goer fuel truck pulled up alongside us. Other nights we would pull out of the line and go to the Goer.
On this night, the Goers were gone. I never learned what happened, but our only option was carrying five-gallon cans of fuel 200 meters up the hill from a five-ton truck with a fuel pod. Two of us had to stay with the tank, while two of us carried the 40-pound jerrycans up and down the hill. We stopped at 100 gallons of fuel, 20 cans. Tanks drink fuel. We needed more fuel the next day; thankfully, the Goers were back.
I was thinking about walking uphill with eighty pounds of fuel when I heard the news about German Leopard 2 tanks going to Ukraine. The BBC news report was talking about NATO training crews for the tank. Ukraine will also be training soldiers to fix, to resupply fuel and ammo and follow close behind the tanks with everything that a 60-ton, 1,500-horsepower tracked vehicle consumes.
A Leopard 2 can fire on the move at up to 50 mph with its advanced electronic sights and gun stabilization computers. It can fire a dozen cannon rounds per minute. But a Leopard only carries 42 120mm cannon rounds. At a dozen rounds per minute, it would be out of ammo in four minutes. To reload, the tank has to leave the battle area and go back a supply depot.
At the supply point, each round is handed from a platform beside the tank or up from the ground. Each round is then handed through the loader's hatch and stowed in racks in the turret and hull of the tank. Even the fastest crew will take ten minutes or more to stow 42 rounds inside the tank.
In a battle, a single tank can burn more than one hundred gallons of fuel, more than one hundred rounds of cannon ammunition and upwards of 5,000 rounds of machine gun ammunition.
A battalion of 50 tanks and fifty more support vehicles burns more than 100 gallons per mile of fuel. In a sustained attack it will fire 5,000 rounds of cannon ammo and a half-million rounds of machine gun ammo. If the attack covers 20 miles, the battalion will consume upwards of 100 tons of ammo and fuel in a day. All that fuel and ammo has to follow the tanks to the edge of the battle.
Logistics win wars, said every general from Napoleon to now. The Russians have shown themselves to be terrible at logistical support. With these new tanks, Ukraine will get another chance to show how much better they are than the Russians, both fighting with the tanks and keeping the hungry beasts supplied.
"Look at the awesome firepower our soldiers had."
When I visited the Deutsche Panzermuseum, one hundred years of German innovation and technology was clearly on display. The Armored Corps Museum at Latrun, Israel, displays tanks Israel fought with right up to the Merkava (chariot) developed and built in Israel.
So I was quite surprised when I toured the many exhibits of Panzermuseum East in Denmark. All of the exhibits are of Cold War Soviet weapons and equipment. The museum was designed and built as a warning to what could have happened to Denmark if the Soviet Union had invaded. Their official intent:
At Panzermuseum East we tell the story of the Cold War and our focus since its inception has been to show visitors from around the world what would have been seen on the streets and in the air if the Warsaw Pact, led by Russia, (The Soviet Union), had attacked Denmark during the tense and heated period leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. We also document what would have happened if nuclear weapons had been used, and the terrible consequences of this, namely that there would have been a total Ragnarok throughout Europe, with millions of dead and destroyed.
Regarding the horrific and heinous attack on Ukraine.
Ukraine is being brutally attacked right now, with a lot of material that the Panzer Museum East has on display, which the heroic Ukrainians are also using to defend themselves. Unfortunately, the brutal superpower also has far more modern equipment than the Ukrainians, so it's an unequal battle. That is why it is so important that we all support and help the Ukrainians in their fantastic fight for freedom and democracy.On 28 February, Tank Museum East asked the Danish army for a donation of 1,200 boxes of field rations for the brave soldiers of Ukraine. If they are donated, we will immediately drive to one of the major border crossings between Poland and Ukraine and hand them over to all those who enter Ukraine to fight for freedom and democracy and a happy future. Right now, as you read this, what I myself was terribly and cruelly afraid of when I was young is becoming a harsh reality. I myself, together with my wife, visited Chernobyl and experienced Kyiv, and we had only positive experiences and great respect for the people in their struggle to build a healthy democracy and live as free people.Out of my pacifist ideology and to point out that war and enmity can and will never lead to anything good for humanity, I have founded my very own private tank museum East. That is why spreading the word about history is so important, even if it seems that at the moment no one cares about the atrocities of the past. Of course I have deep contempt for the cruel and blunt attack on Ukraine.Best regardsOwner of the Panzermuseum EastAllan Pedersen and staff
One of the reports I heard about the Invasion of Ukraine talked about Russian saboteurs sneaking into the capital Kyiv.
The word saboteur is French using a Dutch word for wooden shoes. The sabot was a wooden shoe worn by Dutch workers, either the single piece of wood as in the photo above or a wooden sole with various materials forming the upper part of the shoe.
Sometimes angry workers would throw these wooden shoes into machines and stop work at factories. One who breaks a machine by throwing a wooden shoe into the mechanism is a saboteur.
Long before I learned the source of saboteur, I learned about the Sabot armor-piercing cannon shell fired by all tanks in all armies to defeat enemy tanks. I was at Fort Knox in 1975 and was surprised to learn that the main round we would fire at enemy (Soviet) tanks was not explosive. The Sabot round travleed a mile-per-second to target and destroyed enemy tanks with impact, not explosion.
The way sabot came to be used as a name for armor-piercing cannon shells is that the wooden shoes were very easy to slip off. This characteristic led to calling a small armor-piercing round fired a big gun a Sabot round. Since the military always uses a long name reduced to an acronym, the technical description was Armor Piercing Discarding Sabot (APDS) round.
The simple, deadly design of Sabot rounds fires a 25mm projectile from a 120mm gun. With the full force of a five-inch cannon pushing a 1-inch projectile, the tungsten carbide round travels more than a mile a second to target. There is no explosive charge, the impact of a 5,700-foot-per-second round can punch through more than a foot of armor plate and destroy a tank.
The humble Dutch workers shoe has become a metaphor for very destructive weapons of war. Language can be so strange.
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