A brain-cleaning post for you

Well, some of us, anyway.  After clicking through on the links at Patterico's place in the post Dusty put up, I need something like a nice clean tank to clear the images.

So, some of you fellas were whining about the size of the pic in yesterday's post on the M48.

Fine - here's a bigger one.



And for those who are going to whine the picture is still too small - click here.

Update:  After reading Olaf's comment below, I'm moved to add this.

This vehicle has been a non-active/junked vehicle for a long time, as in decades. She may well have spent some time on a range, too, as a target.  She may have had parts salvaged for other vehicles - but that's not the sort of thing that catches my eye with tanksicles.  I expect that, frankly.  Especially here in the US.

No, things that catch my eye would be unusual features and such, about which more later, in tomorrow's wrap-up post.

It's a display vehicle, and units tend to just dump paint on them periodically - so things like proper stencils, red handles for fire extinguishers, and ancillary gear, like the handsets of external troop phones, etc, may well be missing or damaged.  Units may periodically have a commander like me, (or heck, even when I was an Adjutant) who takes an interest in a vehicle, and works to restore them to a more accurate look and better condition.  They're inevitably followed by commanders who don't care.

I recall the the negotiations to bring an italian field gun that sat at Gibbs Kaserne in Nuremburg, home of the 1st AD engineer battalion.  The earth pigs just dumped paint on it periodically.  LTC (later LTG) Dubia secured the gun for us and we put it in front of the 1-22 FA HQ at Pinder Barracks. 

Why?  For me, as an artilleryman and history junkie, I just hated seeing that gun rotting over at Gibbs.  For the boss?  The 6-14 FA, the other artillery battalion on post, had a Skoda howitzer and 1st AD DIVARTY had a 105mm (later swapped for an M1 155mm) as well. The Skoda having been brought to Pinder back when Pinder was better known as Flak Kaserne Zirndorf, and the gun was a WWI war trophy of the German Army.  The One-Two-Zoo didn't have anything... and now we did.

I researched how the Italian guns were painted, got the right color paint (which meant varnish for the wood wheels, the wood was not painted) and myself and some like-minded soldiers (all volunteers) got to work cleaning that gun up.  I don't remember how many coats of paint were on her, but we stripped many layers, and at one time or another she'd been painted all red and all orange.

We restored her to her fighting look and fighting trim - freeing up her frozen breech block, recoil mechanism and other moving parts.  She could safely fire 75mm salute rounds.

Then I got reassigned to DIVARTY HQ, LTC Dubia left, and the new battalion commander didn't like a grey gun with a black muzzle and blonde wood wheels.  So she promptly got painted... green.  And then, a few months later, she got the standard US camouflage pattern painted on her.  Heh.

When I last saw her, right before Pinder lost the artillery units and shortly before they closed the installation, she was painted brown, and they hadn't been taking care of her wheels, and the wood was rotting.  Sigh.

Since we've been fighting our wars overseas for the last 100 years, 9/11 notwithstanding, much of our famous "combat experienced" gear sits on plinths or in museums in other countries, was given to other countries to rehab their militaries in the immediate post-war, or got scrapped and made into Volkswagens, Peugeots, and Ferraris...  some sit forgotten, slowly rotting in a lagoon of a quiet archipelago that once was a deadly maelstrom of violence during a clash of titans.

We 'Murican's oft times don't take very good care of artifacts like this. It's kind of a disease, but it also reflects our cultural focus on the future, not the past. That's why our equivalents of Bovington, Kubinka, and St. Cyr are an embarassment in comparison. We just don't spend the money on that stuff.