Life In Germany

Germany was very interesting. We had our full complement of soldiers, we had good equipment and we travelled around Germany on exercise with our allies, German allies, American allies and we learned a lot. We worked with French allies as well and it was tanks and armoured personnel carriers that we used. A typical day in Germany would be morning PT -physical training, so we’d all go and run and go through an obstacle course and I was a company commander. I had about one hundred and twenty men and we had a bear pit we called it. We dug it out and put sand bags around and it was about 15 feet across, not unlike a boxing ring, and the idea was so many go in, I think it was about 20 at a time, and the last man is the one that goes into the next and the idea is to throw people out, throw them out of this bear pit, and that was very popular. We enjoyed that and it was good exercise, of course. The rest of the time we did weapons training, communication training, tactics, of course, and the other thing was maintenance. The vehicles, the armoured personnel carriers M113's American, they required a lot of maintenance, a lot of track maintenance, that sort of thing so we worked on our vehicles everyday to make sure they were up to snuff and our weapons, our heavy weapons, of course, our heavy machine guns, 50 calibre machine guns anti-tank missiles we had to work on those so it was a fair bit of work to keep the equipment in shape. And then we’d go on exercises that would be up to six weeks at a time, where we’d fire our weapons, we would practice our tactics and we would move with our colleagues in the tank - the armoured core and the artillery and helicopters and so on. We worked together with all of them and practiced what we would probably have to do in war time.