Picture of the day

fat tony said:
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Cute. Rifled sleeve inserted into a 64 Pounder on a fortress or "garrison" carriage IRRC. No sign of anywhere to attach the tumbrels.

moonshot5 said:
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Côte 304, one of the hellish places of Verdun.

A lot of interesting photos here: http://talesofwar.tumblr.com/

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Soup in the trench. This is an early WW1 photo, soldiers still wear the standard issued képi. You can see the firing slots installed to protect men from snipers. The good quality of German optics and early training provided to selected riflemen gave a large advantage to German snipers in the firsts years of the war.
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"...il sont toutes condemnees, ces sont des sacrifiees..." 100 dead per square meter at Verdun, estimated.

Words from Le Chanson de Craonne; author unknown. The French government considered the song so harmful to morale that they offered a reward of a million francs and immediate discharge from the army to whoever would identify the author. He was never found, so I've read.

Wow, I just checked Wikipedia and the song was banned in France until 1974!!
 
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The Wonderfull "Bren" Carrier. Also known as the "Universal " Carrier. Its primary role was not of a weapons platform. The sole Bren was purely a self defence weapon. Its role was that of tractor to pull around the small Antitank/Field Guns(17pdr was a great match). As well as small 2 wheeled trailer's hauling Ammo/food etc. This was the end of the Horse wagon unit's as the Bren was more USER friendly.

Variants:

Carrier Universal #2 MKII and MKIIA
Carrier Medium Machine Gun #3
Carrier 3" Mortor #3
Carrier Universal T16 MKII (longer with 4 roadwheels)
Carrier 4.2" Mortor T16 MKI
Carrier Universal (Windsor) (longer with 4 roadwheels and a noticable gap between #3 and 4 wheels) The Chysler Plant in Windsor ONT made several thousand of these.

In the mid 50's or so they were all replaced by the Oxford Carrier in the UK, while Canada developed the Bobcat Carrier and the US introduced the M113. A shame the Bobcat (a real cool piece of kit) was dropped so we could buy the US M113.

Ken
 
762shooter said:
OK, tell me about our Bren gun carrier. I've always been a bit puzzled about its useage. As a mobile pill box, not much armour and sticks up about 3 feet not counting the crews' heads. Not really enough room to transport troops. As far a transporting supplies, not much capacity or speed. So what can some of you old hands tell me about how the Bren gun carrier was used and how useful it really was?
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The design philosophy? the idea was to have something small with a low silhouette that could take more advantage of cover and dead ground.

'Carden Lloyd tankette'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carden_Loyd_tankette

The low silhouette idea was picked up even by the Swedish who developed the S-tank based on the Carden Lloyd ideas on cover and concealment.

There are people out there who heap derision on the concept, but Germany during WWII picked up on the low silhouette concept as well and built some very formidable assault guns based on the concept.

The Carden Lloyd tankettes were designed to have one man crews, but other countries expanded on the concept and found that a slightly larger tank with a two man crew was more practical.

I think the S-tank and the WWII German assault tanks had more than two man crews.
These are my ideas, Skylark's are probably more accurate.
 
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Look at this one: Marmon - Herrington, twin 37mm automatic guns, 5 round clip in each gun, used mainly by Surinam in Central America.

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Crew four
Armament twin 20 mm gun (Also stated: 37 mm)
one MG in an eye-ball mounting on the right-hand side of the turret; two further 0.30" Browning MGs (also stated: up to eight)
Engine Hercules, water cooled
Dimensions 16'1" long, 8'8" wide and 9'2.5" high (4902.2 x 2641.6 x 2806.7 mm.).
Weight 22 (US ?) tons (19,958 kg.)
Armour 0.5" - 1"
Speed 26 mph cross country
Range
Fording
Trench crossing
Vertical step

http://www.marmon-herrington.webs.com/tank.html#ctl-3
 
Those critters certainly look weird enough, but they learned a great deal about suspension systems from them.

These are the little machines which made the Tigers and the Panthers, the Matildas and the Churchills, the Comets and the Centurions, the Shermans and the Pattons, all POSSIBLE.

Looking at some of the Moon and Mars rovers, seems to me that they could have used an ex-Tanker to help with the design: they build stupid little things with a dead-track chassis design, shoot them 100 million miles and then wonder why they can't CLIMB. ANYBODY from Armoured could have told them!
 
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