Weird War You're dealing here with complicated psychological states. No man in battle is really sane. The mind set of a soldier on the battlefield is a highly disturbed mind, and this is an epidemic of insanity which effects everybody there, and those not afflicted by it die very quickly Dyer, Gwynne War Indeed, there is one particular story which provides graphic cofirmation of just how feared the Cobra quickly became. It tells of an incident which took place soon after the first Marine Corps AH-1Gs reached....Da Nang in April 1969. "With Cobras covering, a Marine company was moving out cautiously. Shots came from around the bend and the Cobras covered the area with fire. When the Marines got there, five Viet Cong were horizontal: four dead and one wounded. The VC was souting and banging his fists into the dust. One company commander asked the interpreter what all the souting was about, "`He's apparently the squad leader', the interpreter replied. `He's yelling, "If I told them once, I told them a thousand times - don't shoot at that kind of helicopter!"" Peacock, Lindsay AH-1 Huey Cobra. Thus, in the operations area at Guderian's Panzer Group there were, once the Bug had been crossed, only two good roads of advance - from Brest to Bobruyusk and to Minsk. Along these two roads some 27 000 vehicles of the Panzer Group and another 60 000 of the following infantry, headquarters personnel, and communications troops had to be ferried. To cope with this problem and to avoid complete chaos, Guderian had introduced three priority ratings. For any traffic with No. 1 priority the road had to be cleared. Anything with No. 2 priority had to yield precedence to anything with No. 1. Only when no formation with No. 1 or No. 2 priority was on the road could it be used by No. 3 priority traffic. Needless to say, this arrangement gave rise to fierce squabbles and rivalry. The Hermann G”ering Luftwaffe Communications Regiment, for instance, had been assigned No. 3 priority since at that time it was concerned only with the transport and erection of telegraph posts. The Reich Marshal was very angry and ordered the regimental commander to see Guderian about it. G”ering demanded No. 1 priority. Guderian listened to the complaint and then asked, `Can telegraph posts shoot?' `Of course not Herr Generaloberst,' the regimental commander replied. `And that,' Guderian said to him, `is why you'll keep No. 3 priority.' That was the end of the matter. At least of the official side of it. On the human plane it ended more tragically. The regimental commander dared not report his failure to the Reich Marshal and shot himself. Carell, Paul Hitler's War on Russia The Norwegian campaign produced another flurry [of official RAF comment]. A Secret Memo dated 5 May [1940] stated: ` The dive bombing successes obtained in Norway by the Skuas and Junkers have raised in the minds of the Air Staff the suspicion that perhaps the pre-war policy of neglecting the dive bomber was not entirely sound,' Smith, Peter C Dive Bomber! ... in early March of 1945, some M24s of Troop F, 4th Cavalry Recon Squadron blundered into a pair of Tigers outside Domagen, Germany. Both sides were equally surprised at the encounter; but the M24s had the advantage of faster turret traverse, and before the Germans could swing their large, clumsy turrets at their bantamweight foes, the M24s slammed several HE rounds against the side and rear turret armour of the Tigers. The rounds did not penetrate, but detonated internal ammunition and stores which burned both tanks out. The incident hardly inspired other M24 crews to go Tiger- hunting; but it did accent the fact that paper calculations cannot absolutely predict the outcome of tank battles, due to the vagaries of circumstance, luck, and crew performance. Zaloga, Steven J. US Light Tanks 1944-84 K battery [Royal Horse Artillery], the battery stationed at St.Johns Wood, apparently mobilised in 1939 as a horse- drawn battery. Its horse `reinforcements' were drawn from what remained of the civilian draught horses left in London. Rather than split up teams that had worked together for years, they were allocated to sections as teams. The gunners irreverently nicknamed the gun sub- sections so formed with the names of the firms who had supplied the horses. Thus, the `Whitbread sub-section' and the `United Dairies sub-section' entered into the Army List unofficially for a short time. The story that the `United Dairies sub' would not move - and then only at a sedate pace - until it heard the clank of empty milk bottles behind, is, no doubt apocryphal. Ventham, Philip, &, Fletcher, David Moving the Guns: The Mechanisation of the Royal Artillery 1854-1939. ---------------------------------------------------------------------