I was tasked with covering the "funnies" while Sam concentrates on the more "serious" tanks for Treadhead Tuesdays at the Foxhole. ;-)
There's a warm spot in my heart for the *funnies*. For a few months, I was crosstrained as a AVLB *scissors Bridge* driver/commander after our tank battalion was assigned two of the things. Since the version then in use was based on the M48A3 tank, it was a particular sweetheart for me, as I missed the old M48's *butterfly* steering wheel, replaced by a T-bar setup in our HQ tank section M60A1s.
Once the bridges were dropped off, there were still a couple of interesting tasks for the vehicles, which we more or less used as backups to the motor pool's pair of M88 tank recovery vehicles. Less the weight of bridge or a turret, the AVLB tracks could usually do a pretty good job of unsticking an M60 that had picked the wrong spot in a river to ford. We once hauled one out that had found a hole in what they thought was an easily fordable Bavarian springtime stream bed, dropped into an underwater channel, and went under water over the top of the turret. The good news was that nobody drowned- everybody was hedging their bets and riding with open hatches and the suspicious gunner had chosen to ride on the back deck. And we had no problems finding the vehicle, since the antennas were sticking out of the water, though it took both our AVLBs and a VTR combined to pull the thing out; neither was hooking up the tow cables a whole lot of fun. The bad news was that the crew got to buy a new pair of PRC-125 radios, the only thing that didn't work after the vehicle was pulled out, drained and dried out.
Those bridge tanks of *Hobart's Funnies*s were the granddaddies of our own scissors bridges, though we had a couple of nasty little surprises that weren't available to Hobart's lot. We could erase a bridge just as easily as we could emplace one....
-archy-/-
