Foreign military vehicles to add to US units for variety
 

Been looking thru a copy of a Jane's Armour and Artillery 1996-1997 that we had in the library at work (an excellent source of what was really deployed and in development back then) and saw some interesting vehicles that GM's and players might want to try out if you are looking for new vehicles for your campaigns that US units might obtain, either thru being issued them or five finger discounting them (similiar to several USMC pickups detailed in various source books)

Detials on them can be found at http://www.pmulcahy.com as to their 2nd edition stats - which can be converted to 1st edition easily enough

For units in South Korea the K-1 tank is an obvious choice as its cannon is the same as the US M-68E1 105mm rifled gun and is very similiar in size to an M1. I can easily see those units being issued this tank as a replacement.

For units in Austria and southern Germany the Pandur APC, which comes in a huge amount of versions mounting everything from a 7.62mm MG to a 90mm cannon, would make an excellent addition for players, especially if they decide to play an Austrian player character. The Pandur may also be found in Kuwait as well.

In Yugoslavia the units there may have picked up the BOV Wheeled APC, again in multiple variants, or the M-60 or M-80 APC's, either from friendly allied forces or captured units, as well as the M-48 MBT.

For those who would have been fighting with the Turks the M47 and M48A5 tanks would also be available (the game description of the Turkish Army only lists the Leopard I and the M60 tank but in reality they had 3000 M48's and 80 M47's still in service as of 1996)

Will be posting other ideas as I read thru the book more.

West Germany might also still have some M48s (pulled from reserve storage) during the Twilight War. IIRC, they were a major user back in the day.

Southern Austria would be a fun place for esoteric gear- you'd probably run across quite a bit of Italian and Czech weaponry and vehicles- maybe some Bulgarian and Hungarian equipment as well- in addition to your more common American, Soviet, German, and Austrian stuff.

Another one for Austria

SK-105 Kürassier light tank - great way to have an alternative to the M8 or the LAV-75 for a light tank for your players

or alternatively for that "what the heck is that?" moment for GM's when they want to throw a real curve ball for players and give a marauder unit something different than the standard NATO or Warsaw PACT vehicle

Totally agree with you there - with all the countries and units that fought there its a place where you can run into almost anything - and can make for a real challenge when players have no idea what they might be running into as opposed to the usual mix of BMP/BTR's and T-54/55/etc.. of Poland

Just a thought....

What IF in southeastern Germany, a unit stumbles upon a hidden SS/Weremacht arms depot... This was the area Hitler was designing to be his "Final Stand", that is until he had the thought (?) that his presense in Berlin could make a difference.

May be even a few Tiger II's?????!!!! AFAIK, not EVERY Tiger II was accounted for.....

I would think that would be a real kick in the a$$.

My $0.02

Mike

Small arms would be serviceable but vehicles would be basically useless after sitting around for 65 years. Hoses, belts, gaskets and filters would have dry-rotted, bearings would have seized due to rust, etc. etc. It'd take a year of nonstop work to get a single one up and running...and then you'd have tank that would fall to an RPG-7 or LAW round, or from autocannon fire.

Ammo for the 75mm or 88mm guns would be whatever was in this depot and that's it, period. I suppose if you really wanted to do this, setting aside the mechanical issues, you could take a few rounds to Krakow and find someone to make you replacement ammo...

Now that would be a hell of a surprise!
As an alternative, there was also a lot of WW2 Allied material cached by Western European countries as more modern equipment began entering service in the 1950s or 1960s (and in some countries a few of these WW2 vehicles were kept on the books until the 1980s or 1990s).
Particularly trucks and armour so the PCs could stumble across an old warehouse stuck in the middle of some remote forest that has several of these for example...

http://www.armyvehicles.dk/images/austink2y.jpg
Danish Army Vehicles Homepage page here

or...

http://www.armyvehicles.dk/images/bda2.jpg
Danish Army Vehicles Homepage page here

or even some of these...
http://www.armyvehicles.dk/images/loydcarrier_2.jpg
Danish Army Vehicles Homepage page here

and for those who really, really, really want a tank (or something close to a tank), the Danes only decommissioned these in 1982...
http://www.armyvehicles.dk/images/m10achilles_1.jpg
Danish Army Vehicles Homepage page here

Danish Army Vehicles Homepage can be found here http://www.armyvehicles.dk/

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Tigers and Panthers were mechanical nightmares that required hours of PMS every week and wouldn't be working unless someone was taking care of them full-time.

AFAIK, the last known use of the Tiger II in combat was in the 1968 6-Day War, where their mechanically poor condition led the Syrians to simply park them in ditches and revetments to help defend the border. Most were bombed into oblivion.

And in something of a case of synchronicity, I found these pages when looking for a website I knew of that listed various experimental vehicles of WW2

Mail Online article: Inside France's secret World War I bunker: Urban explorers find wartime weapons stowed away in underground quarry
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...nd-quarry.html

Gizmondo article: Secret Underground Bunker Is Full of World War Weapons and Military Vehicles
http://gizmodo.com/5906168/this-secr...itary-vehicles

If anything for older vehicles you may find T34/85's that by 1996 would have been in storage and may not have been pulled from depots yet.

Good find! This weirdness factor is exactly why I included the SK-105 in the Czech vehicle sourcebook for 2013.

- C.

Upon further thought, both Raket and Paul are correct in their analysis of any vehicles found in a SS depot. However, the first five minutes of discovering, say, 4 Tiger II's would be over whelming. Then the crusty old Master Sergeant (are there any other type?) looks it over....

To quote from Kelly's Hero's, "It's a piece of junk. The fuel system leaks.."

My $0.02

Mike

Afraid not: Urban myth that. The Syrians did have some old German Equipment, but that equipment was a handful of old STuG's and PzKw IV's, which was all in pretty sad shape. The Tiger II's are for all intents accounted for, in that we know how many was made, and we know where they all went and eventually died. The Tiger II should have been monster: but by the time it entered production, the quality of its construction has gone downhill: the armour wasn't treated correctly as they didn't have the time, material shortages meant short cuts in the manufacture of final drives, and the like, and then you have the fact that is was woefully underpowered.

The idea that the Panther was a maintenance is a bit overstated. Like all AFV's of the period, including US and Soviet ones, were all intensive compared to today. The Panther's bad rep comes from the initial batch that was sent forward for Kursk. The A's and the earlier G's (Before shortages got hold) was actually, provided the crews took basic precautions, quite reliable. And for German Panzers, overpowered - it has the same power to weight ratio of the M1. And it could have been better: In 43 they come up with a new fuel injector that would have gave the engine 900 horsepower and improved fuel consumption instead of the 750. But they decided that 750 was enough - a 900 horsepower Panther would have been faster than the M18 Tank Destroyer - known as the fastest thing on tracks in Europe. The mistake was they didn't think it through: the engine in the panther was the same as the one in both versions of the Tiger. Now those, those could have used an extra 150 horse. Of course, they did finally figured out that mistake, but by that time, it was too late as the new engines was scheduled for late 45.

Back on point on the Tiger II. There was a lot of work done looking into that tank at the end of the war. Even the Swede's grabbed one to play with. It was pointed out, once we also got hold of the plans, that had the Tiger II been built to proper standards - no shortcuts - the only downside was the engine. It was all that it was said to be: a monster. Up until the late 60's, early 70's, it was the view of the US armour community that the Tiger II was a threat even to the M60, both because its armour was thick and well shaped enough to handle then current AP rounds, but also because of just how good the 8,8KwK/L71 was firing AP.

The scene in George Pal's The Time Machine springs to mind - when the time traveler finds the vast eloi library of the tens of thousands of years of human history...and when he opens a book, it crumbles to dust (as do all the others).

And its a pretty good piece of equipment as well - dangerous for sure as a vehicle in the hands of opponents and a pretty good vehicle to have if you are a player. And trying to find spare parts for it would be the basis for several scenarios.

Don't forget that the former Yugoslavia still used the M-36 tank destroyer and the M-4A3E8 (that's why 'Kelly's Heros' was filmed there)....right up until the NATO intervention.

Another vehicle that is not in any of the canon equipment lists for the V1 and V2 versions of the game would be the TH-400 armored car that Germany produced. They were ready for production in 1996 and thus would have been part of the equipment of the German Army, especially with the war already in progress between the Soviets and China.

As such they would not only be great vehicles to "obtain" from the Germans, they would most likely have been part of the re-equipment of the 278th after they lost most of their equipment on the way over, as well as other of the Cav regiments.

Its a 6x6 mounting a 105mm gun that can fire the full range of NATO ammo. Its armor is only good against small arms and the 7.62mm MG but that cannon more than makes up for it.

Could be used as either an alternative to the LAV-25 or the LAV-75 for die rolls for initial eqiupment but keep in mind it only has a crew of 4.

http://www.pmulcahy.com/wheeled_lcv/german_wlcv.htm has details on it - there are also two other variants that could be used but in 1996 in reality the TH-200 and TH-800 were only in the design stages so the TH-400 would be the better bet for play.

Lost Valley of the Tigers...
 

An alternate to the SS-Werwolf cache: Someone else already found it, and the not-running Tigers were towed into place as hull-down pillboxes. The guns work, there's a fair amount of ammo, and the turrets can turn, but that's all.

The whole valley could be covered by 88s, and the local militia all outfitted in 1940s uniforms, helmets, StG44's, etc.

NASTY!!!! :panzer:

I LIKE it !!!!! :D

My $0.02

Mike

Actually the Soviets had border installations that consisted of old German and Soviet WW tank turrets on top of concrete bunkers.

Also there would be another place you could find old WWII tanks that could be put back into action - there are tank museums in the Soviet Union, Poland, Germany, France and Czechoslovakia- any of those nations, later in the war, may have raided those collections to find any tanks that were still workable - even if it was only the turrets and they dragged the tanks into place to use them as pillboxes.

Absolutely. It's good enough to be a challenge, but not good enough to be an "I Win" button, and players have to fight smart if they want to get full advantage out of it. I'd much rather see something like that in play than a full-on MBT.

Or they only have two working towed 88s. Everything else is blanks, pyros, painted telephone poles, and other decoys - with larger "firing" signatures than the two real guns. Have fun wasting your ammo shooting up those fake positions!

- C.

If by "then-current" you mean 90mm, maybe. If you mean 105mm, no way. Tiger II sported 150mm armor; the M456A1 could burn through 450mm of RHA. The M431 (HEAT-T, 60's development for the 90mm M2 that the earlier tanks of the Patton line - M47, M48, M60A1 - carried) could go through 400mm. However, the earlier M341 could just get through about 180mm, and so the Tiger might have gotten off with the first round, depending on where it got hit.

Question what about all the tanks in private hands. Granted they are all demiled but they might be able to get fully functional again.

Depends on who has them. If by "Tanks" you mean main battle tanks (anything from the 30's onward) then they're either static, or in the hands of people who know what to do with them, and they might - depending on whatever warlord, would-be politician or MilGov wants - be pressed into service by 2000 (in the 'states, I mean).

With that said, there's owning a tank, and there's owning a tank and knowing what to do with it.

If the M48 in front of the VFW was maintained by a group of ageing Vietnam vets whose life expectancies have been cut short by wartime exigency and to boot they didn't really have a warehouse full of spare parts for when something breaks, odds are that tank is going to become more of a liability than an asset. Best to park it at an important overpass and sit there and look menacing.

But if you mean something the size of the Jacques Littlefield collection which is supported by a huge machine shop and more than a few skilled mechanics, that might become a real asset.

The Littlefield collection, for sure, would have been pressed into service in CA for MilGov - especially considering how tank poor most of the units are there, both on MilGov and the Mexican side. Those tanks would prove crucial in any MilGov attempt to take back southern CA.

What's the physical address of the MVTF, though? I mean, if it's close to a primary site it's as good as done.

No worries there - its in the mountains north of Santa Cruz and southwest of Sunnyvale - nothing hit anywhere near there - which means that the facility and its trained techs and vehicles is very much intact -

possibly even being used as a Depot by MilGov for its units in CA

Depends on fallout patterns but it may be OK. And, assuming it is, yeah...I can see either CivGov or MilGov appropriating it for the "duration of the emergency" (and Littlefield (and by extension family) getting very good treatment as a result...probably not even triaged due to the condition that eventually took his life).

Well, it wouldn't be the first time that Jane's has disappointed me...

Most likely it would be MilGov - they have all the CA units - CivGov is pretty much confined to the East, the South and the Midwest

I have as of late started to wonder about Janes at times. Some of their later publications have had some glaring errors in pics not matching title, etc. My guess is they need some one to do a better job of editing or fact checking..:rolleyes:

Jane's themselves acknowledged that some of their information was not up to spec. Later editions of the yearbooks add the word "verified" for entries that they consider have been checked.

Wandering off topic
 

A little on buried tanks... http://www.armchairgeneral.com/panze...-in-norway.htm

I wish we'd known about this years ago, when I was a student at OSU, one of the miniatures club's "experts"* had us attack one or another of the Norwegian airfields in a WW3 scenario at least twice. Hidden PzIIIs in the hills would have been just the kind of wrinkle we would have loved.

*Minis club experts (my definition): back then, most of us were students, with a handful of alumni. The latter were the guys who had money to buy & paint minis, so they were the sources of scenarios, referees, and so on. We had one guy who had WW2 tanks, another with WW3/Vietnam stuff, and so on for Am. Civil War, WW2 ships, WW2 planes, and Napoleonics. They worked out a schedule at the begining of every quarter; the rest of us just showed up and played, never bothered to read the rules.

It seems Janes, like the universe, is subject to entropy.

Another possible vehicle is TH-495 Infantry Combat Vehicle. TH-495 was a infantry combat vehicle being proposed by German-based Thyssen-Henschel for NATO countries, but it was primarily being pitched to the Canadian Forces and the then government of Brian Mulroney in the 1990s. It was planned as replacement for the Old M-113 Fleet found in many NATO nations armies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TH-495

Another vehicle from the Jane's would be for the RDF forces. The Santa Barbara BMR-600 is a wheeled APC that is in service in Saudi Arabia by their Marine forces.

Knowing the US Marines proclivity for "five finger discount" (i.e. stealing anything they can get their hands on) as shown in Europe (hey isnt that a German Leopard tank in that Marine unit that just went thru town?) they could easily have managed to get their hands on several of these vehicles to replace losses.

As usual, Twilight 2000 stats can be found for the vehicle at:

http://www.pmulcahy.com/wheeled_apcs...eeled_apcs.htm

I noticed earlier in the thread a picture of the loyd carrier...
the Rhodesian used up armored and heavier armed T16 universal carriers during the war there in the 1970's.

So I can see earlier vehicles scaved up with some new armor or armaments just like the Syrians are doing in there current war.

If you are playing a game in Korea there are lots of ways you could introduce alternate vehicles - South Korean, Chinese, North Korean and Russian equipment could all be part of US units

Especially with any units that got all the way to the Yalu and then had to retreat under the Russian attack - they could have cutoff Chinese troops as part of their forces, still equipped with Chinese tanks, APC's or SPG's

Especially among either the USMC units (see what they have done in Europe for ideas) for the units like 25th, 41st and 45th that lost most of their equipment in the fighting. Most likely they would be re-equipped with either captured or repaired enemy equipment or South Korean equipment that they were issued once they got back to US lines - i.e. older second line equipment

For instance in 1996 South Korea still had 400 or more M47 tanks and several hundred old M48A3 tanks in reserve storage - some of those tanks could be issued to the American units to give them an armored component again to replace the lost LAV-75's and M60A5's of those divisions.

Probably a bit of a long shot, but you could also add British vehicles (and troops) into that mix - the 6th UK Infantry Division briefly linked up with US forces on the Yalu around about July / August 1997 before withdrawing back to Hong Kong after the nukes started flying. It's not impossible some UK forces could have been cut off and unable to withdraw to HK with the main body of the Division so found a home with the Americans.

A small amount of Aussie and Kiwi gear might be present in Korea, too.