Equipaggiamenti all'Infrarosso tedeschi

Su Missing Linx si è sviluppato inaspetattamente un topic nato a proposito della Kubelwager IR.
prima di tutto è spuntata fuori una nuova foto di questo veicolo che vi posto prontamente

e, come ormai sapete bene, è oggetto del relativo set di conversione della Blast


Contestualmente è stato inserito un estratto estremamente interessante preso dal libro di memorie di un militare inglese dei servizi informativi.
E' molto lungo ed in inglese, ma ve lo psoto lo stesso perchè etremamente interessante. Se non avete voglia di leggere tutto, vi ho messo in grassetto le parti più interessanti:

"Accidental Journey," by Mark Lynton, who served in 3rd RTR, 11th AD.

Book

"We moved from Neumuentser to Bad Segeberg that same day - an idyllic little resort town by a lake and surrounded by immense pine forests...some of our divisional patrols reached both Luebeck and Flensburg without encountering any resistance, and Eleventh Armored had effectively cut Germany in two. west of the dividing line, on the British side, the German forces were dissolving in a relatively orderly fashion; neither side made any attempt to fight, and the Germans, sometimes in large formations, at times in small groups, all of them frequently still armed, were trudging off in various directions, most of them presumably heading for home...O)n our second night in Segeberg, the first in a while on which we all had baths, a change of socks and underwear, and a concomitant attitude, one of the tank sentries reported a German officer outside, who was insisting on seeing someone who spoke German. That was how it all began.

Hauptmann Geiger was a short, swathy, twinkle-eyed man, about my age, massively self-assured and no wonder. A Knight's Cross was not unusual onm a Panzer captain, but the 'hand-to-hand combat clasp' in gold was. (Hitler invented the weirdest nomenclature for decorations.) This particular bauble meant that Geiger had fought hand-to-hand at least twenty-five times, which, for a tank person, is either heoric or careless. He was wearing a full German tank uniform, a rather stunning ensemble based, I always suspected, on some road company performance of Lehar (a composer who could fairly be called a Hungarian Gilbert & Sullivan), which Hitler may have seen as a young man. Jet-black all over (tankmen were frequently confused with Waffen SS, which upset both parties) with a profusion of scarlet and silver pipings, black half-calf boots ending in some nifty black plus fours (rather like a golfer in the morning), and a liberal sprinkling of death head insignas (another SS-related gimmick that made for misunderstandings), the overall impression was faintly ludicrous, but German tank crews were nothing to laugh at.

Geiger had informed me that his unit had had us under surveillance for the past few days and gave me a totally accurate report of our itinerary to prove it...his commanding officer had come to the conclusion that we would be the people he would surrender to, provided we observed his conditions. these simply were, that the unit - with all the men and equipment - should be handed over directly to a British team of technicians and scientists, and go with them to England, rather than be detained in any local prisoner's cage.

Geiger went on to explain that his was one of two tank units that had been in operation on the Russian front using equipment so secret and so effective that it represented another era in tank warfare. Their sister unit had been wiped out, but not before destroying whatever the gadget was (which clearly had limits to its effectiveness; otherwise how come?)...Geiger assured me that our scientists would be simply ecstatic at the sight of whatever they had...So I joined Geiger in his Kuebelwagen (the military forerunner of the Volkswagen and almost as good as a jeep), and we drove for about twenty minutes out of Segeberg and along various forest paths till challenged by first one sentry, and fifty yards beyond, another, and yet another; the kind of security you associate with guarding the Coca Cola formula! We ended up in the depths of the forest, in the middle of a tank leaguer, all of them Tigers, Panthers, and Jagdtigers (A Jagdtiger, like a Jagdpanther, did not have a rotating turret, but carried an extra-heavy gun mounted on a fixed platform and was principally used to destroy other tanks) - about as scary a sight as I had seen since Normandy. everything and everybody looked alarmingly competent, tough and neat, and if anyone was playing at soldiering around here, I was the only one. The officer commanding the whole lot, a Count Dohna-Strelitz, littered with decorations just like Geiger, was impeccably courteous but managed to convey the evident disparity in our ranks, experience, and social backgrounds did not warrant idle conversation. It took five minutes to establish 'ground rules,' and another five for the entire unit to be on its way, and out we came again from the woods, Geiger and I leading the convoy in his Kuebelwagen, and a 88-mm gun of the first Tiger literally ten feet behind us, the closest I have ever been to a moving Tiger. Do not let them tell you any different - it was scary.

There must have been about twenty of these monsters and perhaps thirty half-tracks and trucks, and the whole lot came thundering into Segeberg to the bafflement and apprehension of the locals, who had very much an 'enough already' attitude as far as the war was concerned. To their evident relief, this did not turn out to be some last ditch counteroffensive; instead all the Tigers, Panthers, and trucks formed up in a leaguer on the local football field, tightly guarded by their own crews, and we, in turn, had a guard ring around them - real Chinese box fashion.

...Geiger and Count Dohna, evidently convinced of our zeal and our discretion, promised us a tiny preview that night, just a glimpse, rather like throwing a single fish to a seal.

It was a moonless night, and I was once again heading out into the countryside. Geiger was at the wheel and Teddy and I were in the back of that Kuebelwagen. First he drove at a speed which dimmed-out headlights allowed, then he switched them off and really hit the accelerator. It was so dark a night that we could barely see him in the front seat, and while he had not given the impression of being nuts, I guess you do not have to be Japanese to go kamikaze. Before we could think of some way of saving ourselves, Geiger just as abruptly slowed down, stopped, and suggested that Teddy take the wheel and watch the road through a particular portion of the windscreen. Teddy did, said, 'well, I'll be damned' and proceeded to go even faster than Geiger.

Then it was my turn, and there it was: if you looked through a rectangular area in the windscreen, maybe six-inches-by-four, the entire road ahead was clearly visible in a pale greenish light for perhaps fifty yards or more. That was it - the 'black searchlight,' as some garbled press reports called it many years later. Geiger told us that every tank and vehicle in his unit was fitted with it, that the tank beam was considerably longer and had enabled them to mount numerous successful night attacks against Russian armor. I have no idea how it worked, and I doubt whether they knew; the fact was that, if you threw a switch, you got that beam, which was totally invisible unless you looked through the screen.

So we drove right back to the mess and called our masters then and there, told them all about it and expressed the conviction that if they showed no interest the Yanks would, which was one sure way to get some reaction out of them. Needless to add, the Americans got it in the end, but at least we tried.

By the morning the place was swarming with eggheads and security wallahs, one peering and poking about and the other making us swear all kinds of blood oaths that we had not seen what we had seen, and by mid-day everybody was gone...I never saw any of them again nor heard anything about the gadget , until sometime in the 1960s, when there were press reports about night-fighting equipment of extraordinary efficacy, which British and American tanks had been using in Korea, and of which prototype was a German World War II development."

Mica male...
Forse ci sono davevro ancora tante cose da capire su questo affascinante argomento...!