I've seen in a few models on a 50cal. machine gun the ammo belt feeding into the gun every other, or every 5 bullets has a red tip on it. Now are they tracer rounds, or what?

Mike

You are correct there, they are tracers.

I belive you are correct. Its been awhile. We usually fired 4:1 API-T (armored piercing, incendiary, tracer). On these rounds the tips were black for the AP rounds, and there may have been a red tip with the black on every fifth round. The black paint went about a quarter of the lenght of teh exposed projecticle. The red portion covered about a 1/4-inch od the tip of the round. As a scout, we didn't want to mess with ordinary almost useless ball ammo :-)

Jeff--is there a story here or what?

"Delta 6, your company looks like a band of gypsies" Commander of 2nd BDE, 8th ID
entering my company net, APR 84

DJ :-)

Yes there is. Tankers like to be as self sufficient as possible, we carry everything, including the kitchen sink. Never know when the company trains will catch up.

My battalion had just completed tactical exercises at the Hohenfels training area in Germany and we were roadmarching back to Grafenwohr for gunnery season. Normally, when in the field we carried the load I mentioned in the "bedroll, tarp" tread above. But since we were on an administrative move we carried items we only used in garrison: We added four each folding cots to the bustle rack, the tarp was folded up and placed on the front slope of the turret, some of the tanks were carrying concertina wire from the main gun travel lock (the wire hung as a roll behind the rear grill doors - the concertina was placed around the tent where we stored are small arms when they weren't be used in the training area) and we all had our drip pals hanging from the tow pintle at the rear of the vehicle (we used the pals to collect bildge drippings when parked in dirt/gravel motor pools). We could not carry much inside the vehicles as we carried our wartime basic load of 63 main gun rounds on board at all times.

One thing I forgot above: We also carried a spare roadwheel bolted to the middle of the bustle rack and 10 spare rubber track pads bolted to the underside of the buslte rack. We carried spare end connector and center guide kits in teh sponson boxes. (this was still during the height of the cold war, so we were ready at all times.) My units' bumper markings were still covered in dirt, although all lights had been cleaned-off, however all of our battalion vehicles had a blue sign with a "silver lion", vehicle number, and tank commander's name in yellow attached inside the roadwheel on the bustle rack.

Well anyway as we passed a checkpoint along the route of march there sat a jeep with HQ 6 since on the bumper. As I passed the vehicle and the infanctry colonel standing next to it, I rendered that proper hand salute, reported my passing the check point to battalion, and as I settled into my autobahn seat, I received a call over my company net with the gypsy comment.

Infantry colonels just don't have a sense of humor.

So they loaded up the tank and they moved to Hohenfels, Germany that is, Blonde haired babes and lots of bier. Nice story Jeff. Makes me miss the old country. Thanks (tanks). Chris. :-)