captain_spalding said:
roughbarked said:
Spiny Norman said:
Just hand-starting my WW2 German tank.Which one is you?
For a while, i went out with a girl whose dad was from Hungary. He’d driven a German tank in Russia during WW2.
He said that it got so cold that the tanks couldn’t be started. Everything would freeze solid. So, they had to warm things up.
This was done by building and lighting a fire underneath the tank. Eventually, the oil etc. would get warm enough to permit the crank to be turned over, and they could get going.
He said it was always a very exciting thing to do, because the tanks had 12 cylinder petrol engines, and the fuel systems were, shall we say, ‘idiosyncratic’.
Thus, you started the day by possibly blowing up your own tank.
:) Which is what the Russians achieved by strapping a bomb to a dog, expecting it to go sit under a German tank. Only it went and saat under one of theirs.