Showing posts with label Tank. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tank. Show all posts

Thursday, July 21, 2022

PanzerMuseum East Gift Shop

The Gift Shop at Panzermuseum East, Slagelse, Denmark, is crowded with uniforms, gas masks, models, spent brass, radio equipment, flags and more.
 
Museums, like their creators, have personalities. Panzermuseum East in Slagelse, Denmark, is neat with immaculately restored guns and vehicles and displays.  And it is very crowded.  Tanks, trucks, guns, armored vehicles, tank engines, radios, field hospitals, field kitchens, missiles, missile launchers, helicopters, a transport plane, and decontamination equipment crowd the buildings and the area around the buildings.  

I wrote about the museum two weeks ago.

The neat, organized, crowded feel of the museum displays carries over into the amazing gift shop near the entrance. In the photo above, are full uniforms, jackets, spent cartridges from every kind of gun: rifles to howitzers.  The snack bar table is atop 55-gallon oil drums.  


Near the entrance, by a window is a display of dozens of scale model tanks and armored vehicles, soldiers and toy helmets.  

There are hundreds of scale models of planes, ships, tanks and trucks from World War II to present day equipment.

Even landing craft....


Along with the models are racks of uniforms.

Spent cartridges up to 105mm cannon ammo. Radios, field mess kits, cases and other gear. 


Gifts and toys.....

Even toy guns!!!!!

Maria, who runs the gift shop, said  they sell nine of these Soviet era replica gas masks each week to kids who want these masks!! 

Hundreds of packs and pouches.....


Lots of belts......

And uniforms.......

A long rack of dress and fatigue uniforms and hats from various armies and eras.

Flags and canteens....

Hats....
Top Gun gear....
Flight suits......



Monday, July 11, 2022

Tank Museum Designed as a Warning: Panzer Museum East, Denmark


Most military museums, particularly tank museums, display the best and most lethal weapons of their country. Part of the intent of these museums is to say,

"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.

The collection is several buildings crowded with Soviet tanks, trucks, missiles, guns, motorcycles, radar stations, ambulances, field kitchens, and other equipment. 

BMP armored personnel carrier 

T-72 M1

T-55 AM2

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the museum has been tagging displayed vehicles, like the BMP and T-72, that are being used by the Russian invaders of Ukraine.

Here is what the head of the museum says about the Russian invasion of Ukraine:

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 regards 
Owner of the Panzermuseum East 
Allan Pedersen and staff




BMP armored personnel carrier

PRAGA M53/59 "Lizard" with 30mm anti-aircraft guns

Tank transporter flatbed truck with a T-72 tank on the end of its bed.










Monday, February 28, 2022

War and Wooden Shoes

Sabot is one of the names for the wooden shoe that in the Lexicon of War.

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. 

BEFORE: 25mm (1-inch) projectile wrapped in 120mm cylinder

 
AFTER: 120mm cylinder breaks away at the gun muzzle, 25mm projectile flies to target at 1 mile per second.

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. 

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Fighting Frigates and Main Battle Tanks Have Some Things in Common


B-13, "Bad Bitch" my tank, 1975-78

The Movie Poster

Royal Navy frigates in the early 1,800s and modern main battle tanks have a few things in common. For instance, if you want to increase morale on a fighting ship do more got to re-practice. Firing cannons and small arms makes the crew happier.  For the past year I have been reading the Master and Commander Series of novels by Patrick O’Brian. I am now reading the 20th novel in this series which is the last novel by O’Brian himself. There is a short 21st novel. O’Brian died while writing it in the year 2000. It was finished by a friend of the author.

I watched the movie long before I knew that the novels existed. The movie Master and Commander starring Russell Crowe debuted in 2003. I have watched it several times sense including just last week. Now that I have read nearly all the books the movie is a pretty good summary.

As I read the novels, I thought a lot about life in a tank. Asked with the frigate the crew is very close together. Both of the main battle tank and a frigate are fighting machines designed around getting their cruise to the battle with as much firepower as possible. As with the movie Fury, many crew members of frigates Think of sailing a fighting ship has the best job they ever had.

In sea battles between wooden frigates can last for hours, but they can also be as short sharp and violence as modern tank battles. The battles are often at very close-range including boarding and fighting hand to hand until one ship surrenders.

In the 4000+ pages of the 20 novels the author spends a lot of time describing sailing in excruciating detail. He knows how every sail on the ship is rigged and used to make the ship faster and maneuver it. He also follows the two main characters through their entire professional lives. Capt. Jack Aubrey and Dr. Steven Mathurin are very different man who develop a lifelong friendship that the novels follow. They go through great ups and downs of fortune and love and loss in success and failure.

And as with the sailing novels my best friends of my life I met while serving as a tank commander.

I had no particular interest in sailing before I read the first novel. But after I started reading the story was so good, I read 20 novels inside of a year. I could not recommend more highly. And if novels are not your thing the movie is wonderful.


Thursday, April 30, 2020

Three Tankmen, Три Танкистa--A Soviet Song About a Tank Crew


There are not a lot of songs about tank crews.  The 75th Anniversary of VE Day is very soon. Here is a song about those of us who are Tankmen: Танкистa!

“The Three Tankmen”

It is a very famous song. It was made in the time when a large danger of a war with Japan was real. 
Japan militaries acted very impudently so the two border conflicts - in the region of the Khasan Lake 
in 1938 and in the region of Khalkhin Gol (in the West it is known as “Nomongan conflict”) in 1939, - 
occurred. In both the conflicts Japanese invasions on Soviet territory (Mongolian one in the second 
case) were repelled by Red Army. It looks like the song was made on the basis of the events in the 
region of the Khasan Lake.

This song was sang in the famous pre-war movie “Tractor men”. A former military gets the post of 
the team-leader of the tractor men’s group, tightens up discipline and learns his subordinates to 
prepare to be drivers of tanks in the case of an enemy invasion.

This song stayed very popular and during WWII. I read memoirs of the WWII veteran who recalled 
how a Soviet tankman played on a bayan and singed this song in a captured German town in 1945.

********************************************************************************************

“The Three Tankmen”

(Translated by Andrey)

Some lowering black clouds move on the state border,
The inclement land is filled by silence.
The high banks of the Amur River are securing by
The sentries of the Motherland who are standing there.
The sentries of the Motherland who are standing there.

A firm covering force is placed there against an enemy.
A valiant and strong unit is standing
Nearly the border of the Far Eastern land - 
It is an armored shock battalion.
It is an armored shock battalion.

Three tankmen, three merry friends, 
They are the crew of a combat vehicle,
Live there like an inviolable firm family –
And the song guarantees that it is true.
Three tankmen, three merry friends, 
They are the crew of a combat vehicle.

Some thick dew fell on grass,
Wide fogs fell on a ground.
Samurais decided to cross the border 
Nearly the river in this night.
Samurais decided to cross the border 
Nearly the river in this night.

But the intelligence reported exactly
And the powerful unit was given by an order and became to move
On the native Far Eastern land -
It was the armored shock battalion.
It was the armored shock battalion.

Tanks were rushing, raising a wind,
The redoubtable armor was advancing.
And Samurais were falling to a ground
Under the pressure of steel and a fire.
And Samurais were falling to a ground
Under the pressure of steel and a fire.

And all the enemies were eliminated - and the song guarantees that it is true, -
In the fire attack
By three tankmen, three merry friends,
Who are the crew of a combat vehicle!
By three tankmen, three merry friends,
Who are the crew of a combat vehicle!

1938

Saturday, April 18, 2020

Corona Movie Five: Kelly's Heroes

Donald Sutherland as "Oddball"

My youngest son and I have been watching movies every other day the past week and a half.

The most recent movie, the fifth, was "Kelly's Heroes" a movie celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.  The movie is as funny as I remember it. The movie opens with Clint Eastwood (Kelly) capturing a German intelligence officer in a town with at least a battalion of German troops. Eastwood drives through the town and the all those German soldiers in a Jeep never gets a scratch.  The officer tells Kelly about 14,000 gold bars 30 miles behind enemy lines.

Kelly, along with Donald Sutherland, Telly Savalas and Don Rickles drive and walk that 30 miles, capture the town and get the gold.  In a gunfight at the OK Corral sequence, they make a deal with a German tank commander guarding the bank and get away with all the gold.

I first saw it in the theater my senior year in high school.  Five years later, after four years in the Air Force, in 1975, I was in Armor School at Fort Knox and served a decade on active duty and in the reserves as a tank commander.  then in 1999, when I had been a bearded civilian for a decade and a half, I got my last tanker nickname.  The company I worked for acquired a subsidiary in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Several of a us flew there to meet the staff.  We got picked up at the airport by a company driver who spoke fluent English he learned from movies.

On the slow trip to the office in Sao Paulo traffic, our CEO told the driver, "Neil used to be a tank commander." At a traffic light he turned around and said, "Oddball! You look just like Oddball.  I love Kellys Heroes."

And that nickname stuck till I changed jobs.

The other movies so far:
Midway (2019)
Ford vs Ferrari
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The Wild Bunch


Sunday, December 24, 2017

Dixie Pig, Motorcycle Racing and Missing my Tank



I am watching the second season of "The West Wing." A suspect in a plot to kill the President in this late 1990s drama was arrested in a Dixie Pig restaurant.




The only time I ever ate in a Dixie Pig restaurant was in 1987 when I took a weekend course to get a motorcycle road racing license. We all had lunch at the Dixie Pig and got a two-hour lecture on the basics of road racing. There were a dozen racers in the room. I was the only one who ordered the vegetable plate.

We were in Virginia. It was July and 95 degrees. We were wearing full leathers in the sun for the next phase after the lecture lunch. I am not a vegetarian, but eating pork barbecue before practicing mass starts and cornering seemed crazy. So I ordered the vegetable plate. When I did, the blond, blue-eyed sugar-voiced waitress said, "You don't want no meat? None?"

I got the license the next day, and I never raced again after the ten-lap road race that was our final exam.



In just ten laps of the two-mile, ten-turn Summit Point Road Course the two instructors lapped all of us. They were riding RD350 Yamahas.


Our machines varied from my 500 Intercepter to a 1000cc FZR Yamaha.


Serious motorcycle road racing means sliding the rear tire in every turn to get the best launch out of the turn. I knew at the end of that ten-lap race that sliding every lap was way beyond my modest skill level and I would be little more than a rolling chicane for the real racers.

Motorcycle road racing was the first of many things I did to replace the excitement of tank gunnery in my life after I left the Army in 1984. I continued to ride motorcycles for a few more years, but by 1992 had switched to bicycle racing.



The switch was healthier in the sense that I was exercising on the bicycle unlike the motorcycle. But racing and speed on two wheels can end with the rubber side up.

In twenty years of motorcycle riding, I had four accidents which resulted in four broken bones, four concussions, two surgeries and two weeks in the hospital--one of the accidents was by far the worst.

Although bicycling can be safer, it is not with me on the bike. Twenty-five years of bicycling includes 14 broken bones, six concussions, three surgeries and eight nights in the hospital.

The military was definitely safer. Eighteen years of active, reserve and Guard service led to just three broken bones and two concussions, but also seven surgeries and seven nights in the hospital. The surgeries were to remove shrapnel from my eyes and reattach two fingers after a missile explosion.

Clearly, I never found anything in civilian life as exciting as Armor. In 2007 I re-enlisted and spent almost ten years in Army Aviation, sometimes flying in Blackhawk and Chinook helicopters in the U.S. and in Iraq.



And this whole thing started when I saw the Dixie Pig on Netflix.

Happy Holidays.

Monday, October 16, 2017

Best Day in the Army and The Best Job I Ever Had


Two weeks ago I started writing about the best day of my life as a soldier out of the 6,575 days (18 years) I served in uniform. That day (I have to find the exact date) was Table VIII tank gunnery at Fort Carson, Colorado, in the Spring of 1976.  It was my first tank gunnery, and my first gunnery as a tank commander.  Why was I tank commander first time out?

I was in the U.S. Air Force from 1972-74 and got out a few months after being temporarily blinded in a missile explosion.  After a year as a civilian, I re-enlisted in the Army and went to Fort Knox for Tank training in July and August 1975.  I re-enlisted as an E4 and made E5 in January of 76.  I got my own crew and was determined to qualify--not bolo as the old hands predicted the ex Wing Nut would.  I had a great platoon sergeant and my crew fired Distinguished on Table VIII. 

I will be re-reading gunnery procedures and interviewing at least four tankers who fired Table VIII at Carson that year.  If all goes well, it could be a book.

I admire the "Day in the Life of..." form. Especially the books A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin.  So I am writing Home on the Range: A Day in the Life of a Cold War Tank Commander with the idea of telling a much larger story of the effect that day would have on my life, but never leaving that one day.

I was talking to a friend about how even after writing several hundred words, I have more questions the more I write.  One related question that came up was about travel. Part of loving the military and why I kept re-enlisting was travel.  I flew space-available flights across America and Europe as a young soldier, everything from a C-130 to a C-5A.

Now that the military part of my life is over, any travel I do will be as a civilian.  This summer I went on a six-week trip that began in Belgrade, Serbia; circled north and east to Ukraine; back west as far as the very western edge of the Normandy beaches; and then to Israel and back through Paris to Stockholm.

That trip included seven Holocaust memorials and changed my view of life profoundly.  So my friend asked if their were other trips that changed me as much.  The answer I just blurted out was: The trips with a gun.  The only two trips that had as great an effect on me as the trip this summer were deploying to Cold War West Germany with Brigade 76 and deploying to Camp Adder, Iraq, in 2009-10 with 28th Combat Aviation Brigade.

Tank gunnery 1976 was, in part, training for sending the entire 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division to Germany in October.  And that day made me so much more confident I could lead a tank crew if the Cold War heated up.

In the past 40 years, I have been to 44 countries on five continents.  The bicycle-train-plane-automobile-boat trip this summer is the only trip that has come close to traveling in uniform with a gun in its profound effect on how I look at the world.

If you read this blog, you likely made one or more trips with a gun.  What it means to travel with and without a gun has been stuck in my head since that conversation.

Being a tank commander was without a doubt the Best Job I Ever Had.

Monday, September 18, 2017

Visiting the Base Where I was a Tank Commander from 1976-79 in Wiesbaden, Germany










When I visited Wiesbaden Air Base this summer, the tank in the photo above was the only tank on the base.  When I arrived the first time in October 1976, the 54 tanks of 1st Battalion, 70th Armor were combat loaded with 63 rounds of cannon ammo. We were on the East-West border within 48 hours after we landed at Rhein-Main Air Base.  



The building above was post headquarters for 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division as soon as we took over the base.  It still serves as headquarters, now for the reserve forces in Europe, commanded by Major General John Gronski, my division commander in Pennsylvania before he took over this new command in Europe.  



This building was my barracks in 1976-77, before I moved off post.  It is offices now. Bravo Company was mostly on the second floor.  The barracks were carpeted and had relatively luxurious living spaces.  I shared a room with three other sergeants.  Enlisted men were eight to a room.  Sergeant Daniel Rosera was the first one to buy 300 Watts of stereo to play Peter Frampton Comes Alive out his barracks window.  Her also bought a mic so he could belch at 300 Watts.  He could belch short sentences.  A man of considerable talents.


Across this fences is a few dozen trucks and a dozen more Blackhawk helicopters.  The tanks are gone and aircraft sit where M109 howitzers and their support vehicles were parked 40 years ago.


I rode up to Wiesbaden Air Base from Darmstadt and visited John and Berti Gronski. They live in the housing area. Gronski and his wife still ride. I didn't find out until this visit that they were really serious riders.  When Gronski left active duty as a lieutenant in 1981, he and Berti rode home from Washington state to Mossic, Pa. on bicycles! John towed a trailer carrying their 15-month-old son.  

The unit motto of the 28th Division, Pa. National Guard, is "Roll On!"  Gronski would say that at formations and public ceremonies. I had no idea in 2012 - 14 when he was division commander that he took "Roll On" so literally. He and Berti rolled on for 3,000 miles across the country.  




Thursday, June 1, 2017

Tanks are Symphony of Roars and Rattles


The M60A1 Patton tank that was my home and weapon in West Germany was a symphony of sound I could never quite describe in prose, so I tried poetry:


M60A1, On the Border in Fulda, October 1976

Growling, howling, eighteen hundred cubic inches
Of diesel engine roars, belches smoke and launches
Fifty-seven tons steel and rubber and flesh across a
German field.

While the engine roars, end connectors grind in the
Sprockets, center guides screech as they scrape
Aluminum road wheels lined with steel. Ammo racks
Rattle, White Phosphorus rounds in the Ready Rack shake.

Torsion bars creak, flexing over rocks and ruts. 
Ratchets, wrenches, track tools, clasps,
Hinges, and locks jangle and ring on the fenders.
Jerry cans clang in their tie downs on side of the turret

Hydraulic motor screams as the commander swings the
Turret over the driver. A cacophony of track blocks,
Bolts, rack handles, the coax ammo box,  
Cupola ammo doors, the tanker bar and Little Joe,

Assails the ears of the crew as they scan the horizon.
Across the fence, squat Soviet T-70s track the
Trundling Pattons as they parade north, roaring,
Rattling and ready to rain ruin in a moment.


-->

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Soviet Armor vs. American Armor, Israel 1973


In July and August 1975, I went to the U.S. Army Armor School in Fort Knox, Kentucky, after three years in missile weapons testing.

We learned the basics of armor and about our tank, the M60A1.  We also learned about a serious flaw in our tanks that was fixed at great cost by the Israeli Army.  The Israelis fought and defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan using the M60A1 among other tanks.  It turns out the hydraulic fluid in our tanks was prone to catch fire.  After the Israelis lost crewmen to these fires, the hydraulic fluid was changed.

We also learned how important mechanical reliability is to combat tank crews.  The Arab countries used Soviet tanks, primarily the T-55 and T-62 main battle tanks.  We learned the difference between "live" and "dead" track.  Soviet tanks used dead track, like bulldozers that does not use rubber bushings.  In hard use, especially at high speeds, dead track is more prone to break.  According to one report, the Syrian Army lost one-fourth of its tanks before they reached the battle in the Golan Heights due to automotive failure.

After the 1973 War, the Israelis installed American-made drive lines in captured Soviet tanks to make the Soviet armor more reliable.

To people who have never trained and lived in a tank, they can seem like the indestructible behemoths of movies.  But real life in a tank is a life of wrenches and rags.  As a tank commander of one of the most reliable tanks of its time, my crew and I spent five hours or more maintaining our 54-ton tank for every hour of operation.  Each of the 80 track blocks on each track were held together with a center guide and two end connectors.  Each of the 160 center guides and 320 end connectors could work loose and had to be checked, often.  The center guides ran between six pairs of road wheels, three pairs of return rollers, the drive sprocket and front idler wheel for adjusting track tension.  Each of the wheels had inner steel plates bolted to the aluminum wheels.  The road wheels were attached to torsion bars.

We tightened bolts all the time.  Our tanks would received major service at 6,000 miles of operation, usually including a refurbished V12 diesel power plant and transmission.

And our tanks were so much more reliable than the Soviet counterparts that the Israelis ditched their drivelines and installed American-made drivelines to make the Soviet tanks more reliable.

War shows strengths and weaknesses.  Reliable, effective armor is definitely an American strength.



Exhibit of Contemporary Art from Ukraine and Talk by Vladislav Davidzon at Abington Arts

I went to "Affirmation of Life: Art in Today's Ukraine" at Abington Arts in Jenkintown, PA. The exhibit is on display through...