You can imagine how well that worked in actual practice in, e.g., the bocage country of Normandy. Something like that would take half an hour or more, which is not ideal when you're a tank and the message your infantry support wanted to relay to you was LOOK OUT PANTHER AT 2 O'CLOCK.

The solution? Develop a radio system that the infantry and tanks could use to talk directly to each other? Noooo, of course not, that would have been far too complicated and taken too long, and there's probably some kind of rule about any military communications system interoperating that obviously.

No, what they did was weld a box on the back of the tank (those boxes that belts of machinegun ammo came in were popular because every tank unit had a lot of them lying around, but they'd use anything that was reasonably waterproof) and stick a telephone in it, wired into the tank's intercom system. If an infantryman had something he thought the commander of a tank needed to know, why then he could just walk up to the back of the tank, open the box, take out the phone, and speak to the commander. (Or, knowing the American GI, ask the operator to put him through to the White House.)

This... evidently worked! I like the slightly crocky but completely logical slapdashery of it.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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