Reply To: Manhandling heavy weapons

[John D Salt]

Not Connard Sage might be being a bit hard on desk jockeys. I’m sure some of them ride point-to-points, and can easily get their desks over hurdles and water obstacles. Or, if not a desk, at least an office chair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqv_Sr7jfOI

Of course we all understand the wisdom of the late, great Terry Pratchett in preferring indoor work with no heavy lifting, but Phil Barker wrote a very interesting piece for the Nugget not long ago about how recent generations of wargamers have very little experience of what life was like, within living memory, when travel was mostly on foot, and work was mostly outdoors, and mostly done by muscle power (human or animal). A pal of mine at Fort Hatstand some years ago managed to get some official time to set up an indoor scale range populated with 1/72nd scale vehicles, so that trainee analysts from “the generation that stopped going outdoors” could get an appreciation of just how tiny even a 70-tonne MBT looks at a (scale) range of a thousand metres or so.

Spending any time outdoors, in the UK at least, also builds familiarity with two more inconvenient aspects of physical reality that are usually omitted from wargames rules, weather, and mud. In the good old days of the cold war, when we still had a Military Engineering Experimental Establishment (MEXE), I recall seeing — I think in the university library at Exeter — a copy of the MEXE soil survey for NW Europe. Essentially, this was an extensive survey aimed at providing the equivalent of Jane’s Book of All the World’s Fighting Mud. This mattered when the Army still contained lots of people who remembered the strange gruel-like consistency of the Normandy mud, which dried to a fine powdery dust. More recently they would also have recalled the embarrassment of Saladin-equipped medium recce regiments in BAOR having to ask the Centurion regiments of their armoured division to do route recce for them, as the properties of soggy Soltau mud meant that wheeled vehicles had an alarming tendency to tear the top layer of soil off a wet slope and fall off it, whereas a tracked vehicle could dig in and get on. The trials that decided CVRT(T) should be (T) and not (W) were called Operation Mudlark, quite appropriately.

So, a reasonably complete ruling on how fast guns can be manhandled should include not only the weight of the beast, and whether it is designed for human traction, but the ground conditions, the slope, and perhaps the extent to which the gunners are recruited from a rural population retaining their traditional fondness for root vegetables.

Some design features make manhandling very awkward. Like Not Connard Sage, I am a son of a Gunner, and my father also played with 25-pounders in his training battery before going on to be a surveyor. He reckoned his detachment could get the gun onto the platform and ready to fire in 30 seconds from the Quad’s wheels stopping, which I’m sure is substantially less than the offical time to emplace. The idea of the firing platform — apart from acting as a spade — was to give 360 degrees of traverse for anti-tank work, rather than having to rely on the top traverse alone. However it must have made it a bugger to move the thing a short distance, as you’d have to get the gun off the platform and stow the platform (I can’t find a weight for the firing platform anywhere, but it doesn’t look light). Similarly, the 2-pdr — a fine example of the gun-founder’s art, but a pretty hefty gun for its calibre — was taken off its wheels and its legs splayed to give a 360-degree traverse. I cannot find again a video from the Australian War Memorial that shows this process being conducted, but it looks a royal PITA (as the Aussies called the PIAT, incidentally). No wonder British anti-tank gunners went for portees.

A film I found instead shows a bunch of Aussie gunners in Singapore in the 60s having a “gun gymkhana” with their Pack Howitzers. Bear in mind that the Oto-Melara 105mm is about 300 Kg lighter than the 25-pdr:

I should perhaps have mentioned that the categorisations I offered earlier were partly motivated by a desire to have the (post-war) members of the BAT family in different categories. The original BAT was bitterly complained about for its weight, and so the Mobat was designed to make it more mobile. More mobile yet was the Wombat. I cannot find a weight for the original BAT, but Mobat seems to be 770 Kg, and Wombat 308 Kg, putting the latter into the “handy” class. But these things are relative; a pal of mine who is a retired Colonel in the Fusiliers spent some time early in his career commanding a Wombat platoon. During one of our (frequent, protracted) discussions over coffee, he told me that the manual said that the Wombat could easily be manhandled cross-country by its detachment. This, he considered, was a lie to rank with “the cheque is in the post”.

I also understand that the PaK 40 — otherwise a very fine anti-tank gun — was harshly criticised when so many had to be abandoned in retreat once the Russian “General Mud” had made an appearance.

Which wargames rules have the best mud rules, I wonder?

As Donald Swan used to sing:

Грязь, грязь, чудная грязь,
Лучшее средство как кожная мазь!
Так возьми ж свою даму
И поведи её в яму
И там мы окунёмся в чудную грязь!

All the best,

John.