35
I sat with the gunner who showed me his 3-round magazines which
could be tracer, armour-piercing or mixed. She was just everything I
could have wanted in an infantry fighting vehicle. The company
commander told me they had had their fair share of teething trou-
bles and they were nothing like as trouble free as the M113's as the
exercise took its toll.
Compared with these two APC's, our 432 was a horror. It couldn't
fight, it couldn't run and it was a mechanical nightmare. It did,
however, afford its crews very good protection. They would have
needed it.
Before the exercise kicked off, I managed to visit the reconnaissance
unit. Armoured cars have always been a particular interest which I
had the good fortune to indulge when I commanded the Oxford
University Armoured Car Squadron for two years. I thought I was
being shown a shortened version of the HS30 with only two as op-
posed to six riflemen. I later discovered it was a French-designed
Hotchkiss Schuetzenpanzer 11-2, mounting the 20mm cannon but
with much narrower tracks. My Recce Platoon had four Ferrets and
two Landrovers.
The Bundeswehr, despite its excellent equipment, was not without
its problems. One was the change from the certainties of the
Wehrmacht (disobey orders and get shot) to the dilemma of the
Bundeswehr (obey a wrong order and wind up at Nuremberg). An-
other was the nine year gap after 1945 - a missing generation of sen-
ior NCO's and middle-ranking officers. Perhaps the worst was the
strident anti-militarism of the 1960's, which adversely affected re-
cruiting and morale.
Of the survivors from WWII, the brigadier was outstanding. He had
been a company-commander at Stalingrad. His tales, in those rare
moments when Brigade HQ could relax over coffee, had our undi-
vided attention. The brigade major was a model of General Staff ef-
ficiency, though a trifle pedantic (“Thinks he's running an army
corps”, growled the Bavarian captain). Many of the others were
plainly not cut out for heavy jobs in the economic miracle.
