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Old 01-09-2012, 11:44 AM
simonmark6 simonmark6 is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: Swansea, South Wales, UK
Posts: 374
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A long as the armoured Rolls Royce is still going, I don't give a monkey's chuff. I've loved that car since I had a ride in it during my first visit to Bovington in the late seventies. I go there now and look at the museum and say, "I remember when all this was fields..."

My school used to do Geography Fieldwork in Swanage in the early '90s and we used to do a day looking at how the army preserved the environment in the grounds. If I remember correctly, the vehicles being used at that time included:

FV 432
Cargo version of the M113
Fox armoured car
Rolls Royce Armoured car
Centurion
Chieftan
Early Chally

Those were what came out regularly, I also heard they had a couple of Panzers (Mk I and MK IV) and later they were receiving Soviet gear from Desert Storm and some of those worked, barely. The ones above are those that are likely to be working with maybe some of the other armoured cars being made to work, mostly variants of the Fox and Ferret as well as a Humber Pig and a Saladin.

There would have been a couple of dozen able to be used as pill boxes with guns running from 155mm to about 76.2mm.

There would also be a fair number of recovery vehicles around and a decent number of old timers that knew a lot about kit bashing: it was the time where the volunteers were basically rebuilding a Tiger Tank from scratch.

How many survived the war? Age would be against them but location would be a plus, good farmland, access to coastal fishing, some excellent defensive positions and yo can't spit without hitting a squaddie (not that I ever tried).
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