Another pull!

This one if cool. Shows you why as an old armor crewman tractor pulls don't do much for me. All that power and weight and a 120MM gun!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXG-6NFPGn8

The M1A1 is heavier and more powerful too.

Rick

We ran drawbar pull on that vehicle back in the 70's using this heavy field dynamometer and an M88 gas version connected to the last trailer in reverse. We only needed the M88 in the lower gears and for a stall. One of the final drives failed on the Leopard and we had to redo that gear. Hal

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Hal the Leopard is a pretty good tank but is really designed to defend the Fulda Gap in a defensive roll. The Germans when first confronted in a training exercise against the M1's started calling the "silent death" because with the turbine engine they are real quite and the M1's would be on them before they knew they were that close. The M1 has 1500 shaft HP with the AGT1500 and is 70 tons.

Rick

I'm sure you've heard the old tale about the public introduction of the M1. Audience was composed of officials, news people, general public, and brass. Three NCOs were to cover the vehicle systems (propulsion, electronics, weapons). Naturally a little friendly rivalry arose between them as to which system really was the most important. The intro/demo was going well with the first NCO stressing the ultimate importance of the engine/speed capabilities of the tank; the next NCO said that although the tank was fast and powerful, it was primarily the commo suite that really was the focus of the design, ie: data linking, GPS, etc., for battlefield management; the last speaker was a hard bitten old line armorer who allowed that the tank was fast, had great commo, but in the final analysis without the gun-it was merely a high speed, self propelled radio!!

Smallcrawler, Unfortunately, that story/joke stems from years ago and can't be true. When the M1 was demoed the radios were from the era of the Viet Nam war with PR77's in vehicle mounts and the AN/VRC 64's. GPS and DATA link wasn't available yet. We didn't get GPS until the M1 went from there to the M1IP and the M1A1. However when in Armor advanced training at Ft Knox in 1974 we did the automotive and commo parts of the training then started on gunnery. Our instructor was an older SSG who started the class by stating "if you have a tank that will shoot and communicate but will not move it's worthless to the unit because it can't operate with it, but can still defend itself. If you have a tank that will shoot and move but will not communicate it cannot operate effectively because of the inability to communicate via radio but can still fight. If you have a tank that will communicate and move but will not shoot you have a 63 ton portable radio".

Rick

Believe what I posted as a humorous anecdote was originally (to me) in Reader's Digest Humor in Uniform section, unknown date, mid 70s?, may have been re: M1A1. Sounds like a close paraphrase of your recollection with some literary "license"/human interpretation. Thanks, however, for pointing out the facts!!

Smallercrawler, wasn't trying to knock ya. Just trying to set the record straight. I know I first saw that in Readers Digest's "Humor In Uniform" in the 60's pretty much they way it was presented to me in 74 at Ft Knox. So I'm sure that they used that line in the classroom for many years. As a former instructor, Armor Tactics, Armor Officer Basic, I know that some of the things we put out to our students was old school to impress on the students the importance of certain things. I know most of us as trainees were pretty impressed with just how important it was to have a working fire control system after that little speech. In each phase the instructors tried to make their portion of our training seem to be the most important part of being a tanker. The real story is that all that stuff has to work together to make the tank an effective weapon. Another Knox story. While an instructor we were all SSG or above in rank. We had to mow the lawn around our building. Each of us instructors were sent to 4 days of training to learn to run a weed whacker, push mower and a TORO rider. Grand total value was about 3,700 at the time. Just a couple of years earlier I was given NET (new equipment training) training for 2 whole weeks and at the end of it they gave me a brand new 5 million dollar M1 tank. Gotta love the Army.

Rick

And we had a sign in the bomb dump a Sawyer Air
Base that read "Without munitions K I Sawyer is
just another airport without any scheduled flights"
I thinking now the sign wasn't totally correct, the
bomb dump (okay WSA) is a lumber mill and Sawyer is
another airport but they have scheduled flights.