Eyes at the Edge of the Iron Curtain - Life in a 1960s British Reconnaissance Regiment (434)

0:00Welcome to Cold War Conversations, the home of real stories of the Cold War. And we're live from the living room As Doug eyes up the match day spread He's reaching for the Buffalo wing Perfect Hang on, what's this? Oh, he's going for a can of Pepsi too Incredible What a finish Sensational combination Look at the delight on his face There's no doubt about it It just tastes better Match days deserve Pepsi Food deserves Pepsi Grab a pack of Pepsi Zero Sugar For today's match It's poetry in motion. I wrote a little song to remind you. Choice Hotels gets you more of the experiences you value. The Cambria Hotel's got it all.

0:43A rooftop bar, have a ball. Bring a date, your squad, or even your mom. Book direct at choicehotels.com. We did used to go into the local pub. There'd be Germans in there, and they were our parents' age. And when he got round to asking what they did in the war, it was always very cagey it was always of course we fought on the eastern front I never came across the one that fought the English This is Cold War Conversations If you're new here you've come to the right place to listen to Cold War history please make sure you follow us in your podcast app so you don't miss future episodes This is the second part of the story of Miles a British National Service conscript during his military service in the late 1950s.

1:36I'd like to give special thanks to the Norfolk Tank Museum for highlighting Miles' story and one of his relatives for putting me in contact with him. Throughout the episode, Miles shares captivating anecdotes and a thrill of being part of a light-armoured reconnaissance regiment on the inner German border. One of the most intriguing aspects of his service were the border patrols, where he and his comrades would venture into the woods, often encountering their East German counterparts. I'm delighted to welcome Myles Cavin to our Cold War conversation. You then get 14 days' embarkation leave, and then you're on a troop ship.

2:15Had you ever been abroad before then? No, first time ever. First time ever. Apart from going to Scotland or Wales. I mean there was the Empire there was three on the line going from Harwich to the Hook Hook of Holland and there was the Empire Thaui the Empire Wandsbeck and I can't remember the third one now but interestingly enough the Wandsbeck and the Thaui were the same ships that brought a lot of the Trinidadians to the UK after the war they were the same in the early 50s they were the same ships and believe me they were weird every single space was a bunk bed because they weren't hammocks they were beds and going across the North Sea at night the North Sea can be a bit rough and I discerned that there was less movement centrally the lower you got to the keel of the ship.

3:25Because if you're up high up, you've got the angle coming into play. Lower down, the angle wasn't quite so great. Forward and back movement wasn't quite so great. So I suppose I used my limited loaf and tried to get down as low as I possibly could in the accommodation areas. It worked. I wasn't seasick. A lot of the lads were. It was awful. It was awful. And then we had almost a 24-hour road journey then across Holland into Germany where the regiment was. There was a lot of regimental rivalry even in those days. People wanted what they called a foreign posting rather than a home posting. Home posting, there was no financial incentive.

4:16But a foreign posting, you got extra money for being in the Middle East or the Far East or somewhere like that. You got more money. More risks, obviously, as time has proven. No, we were in Germany. I was in Germany. And what were your first impressions of Germany arriving there? Very, very dark. There was not much in the way of street lighting. Very, very cold because it was early September, October by this time. And rather strange. Austere, yes. And we were in the barracks where I was, an old Wehrmacht barracks. And you could see where the German eagle had been chiseled out of the pediment on the entrance.

5:09the hangars where our vehicles were they were all original all the rooms were original and the A squadron which is one squadron I joined they had one end of the wing had been badly damaged so much so that it was used for exercises on recovering battle injured personnel and so on but downstairs in the cellar there's all these huge mural paintings from the 1930s showing these big burly farmers welding spades and shovels metamorphosing into the Wehrmacht, you know, with his steel helm and his rifle and his swastika and so on. They were still on the walls. They were still there. and I wish that I had the wit or the nerve to go down there on my own with a camera and take pictures and record this.

6:14But I didn't because we were told it was dangerous and we weren't allowed to go down. So this was only like 15 years after the end of World War II. Yeah. So not long at all. And this is Wolfenbuttel, the barracks you're in. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Welsenberg was five kilometres as the crow flies from the East German zone, because obviously Germany was partitioned. So we were literally almost within stone-throwing of the East German or the Communist bloc. And we were told when we were inducted into A-squadron properly that the average life of a squadron in battle would be something like two or three months and we would be wiped out.

7:15Two or three months? Two or three months, yeah. And that is quite scary. When you consider that you're in armoured cars, because the regiment, I suppose I ought to speak a bit about that, but the regiment is a light armoured reconnaissance regiment. We had Saladins, we had Saracens, and we had in the early days the Dingo scout cars. And then later on, about 18 months after that, the ferret scout car took over from the Dingo. and our role was to be information gathering and spotting for the Royal Tank Regiments. So we're up front, closest to the front line if you like, to check the lay of the land out.

8:13Yes, we were in armoured vehicles but they were very lightly armoured vehicles. we had I suppose it's common knowledge these days the 76mm cannon on the front and one cover actual machine gun and one freestanding machine gun which you could swing around on the turret Was that on the Saladin? Yeah, on the Saladin On the Saracen we had a very very small turret with just a machine gun, a single machine gun But Sir Saracen was an armoured personnel carrier. You carried between eight and ten troopers in the back as ground troops. Their job was to get out and go in front of our vehicles and look for pockets of infantry and to report back if possible, if possible.

9:11and so how are you introduced to the squadron you're you're going to be working with how does that go right okay as a 19 year old national serviceman never been abroad before uh we we were allocated squadrons by the rsc depot back in england so we all had paperwork saying which squadron we were going to. And when we got there, the squadrons, the three squadrons, were out on exercise. So there was only what we call the headquarters squadron was in place. And we were all given various duties, area cleaning, sweeping up, blah, blah, blah, and so forth and so on. And I was given an area to sweep in front of the NCO's mess and the main cooking canteen.

10:06And I was there with the brush sweeping away there for all I'm worth. And this officer is slowly walking towards me, just waving his stick around in his hand. And I just carried on brushing. And I said, good morning. I said, morning, sir. And then I just literally, I'd like to see road sweepers. I just leant on me brush. And he said, you knew him? and I said, yes, we got in a couple of days ago. How are you finding it? He said, oh, quite well. And then I thought, this bloke's an officer and I haven't even thought of saluting, which you are on a band to do. Salute all officers, no matter what they are and what they're doing.

10:57So I thought, well, it's a bit late to do it now, so I just carried on talking to him. Anyway, he said, well, I hope you enjoy life in my regiment. I thought, oh, God, it's the colonel of the regiment I was talking to. Yeah, Lieutenant Colonel Jay Harmon, Jackie Harmon, he was. Yeah, yeah, good lad. He didn't report me to the authorities. But yeah, so we did a fair bit of that sort of thing, toilet cleaning, area cleaning, took the squadrons going back, and then we were told which troop we were to belong to. and in my case it was first troop A squadron. A squadron made up of five troops. A squadron was one of the three sabre squadrons.

11:43Sabre squadron being a harken back to the days of cavalry which were fighting squadrons rather than headquarter squadrons. So the elite of the regiment again and A squadron was the best because I was in it.

12:01Of course. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. With most armoured fighting vehicles, you've sort of got to be trained in some of the other roles in case somebody gets wounded. That's right. That's right. So were you trained in driving and gunnery and stuff like that? I was, yeah. I mean, let me just go back to the wireless. The first time I got into an armoured car, I thought, oh, I'm a good operator. I know where to net in and all of this. So I sat there and looked at the wireless and I thought, what the devil is this? It wasn't a number 19 set. It was the whatever the latest thing was. I don't know what the number is even to this day.

12:42It was entirely different. It was small. It was neat. It was concise. So I got someone to show me the rough ropes. The troop sergeant showed me the basic controls. He said, you learn on the job. Learn on the job. I spent three months learning on obsolete equipment. Anyway, so I became an operator in an armoured car. And, I mean, normal day-to-day work, it was cleaning the car, checking things, making sure the batteries were topped up right and taking part in various wireless net exercises. Usual run-of-the-mill stuff. and then they wanted us to multitask as you quite rightly point out. So I was sent away on a vehicle driver's course on AFV course.

13:40So this is going to be good. I'm going to get to drive one of these things. Now I'm sure you've seen us seldom. It's a six-wheel job on the car. If not, I'll send you some pictures. We might have seen them on the website. I've seen them on the Facebook page. And you actually standing in front of the salad inn at the Norfolk Tank Museum as well in the same pose. That's right. Which is brilliant. Yeah, that was a lot. That was a total surprise there. Anyway, so I learned how to drive a car, drive an armored car, how to get in, how to get out, both quickly and correctly. Normal daily maintenance routines, checking the oil and how to start the engine.

14:24you had to pump the gear change pedal 20 times before you switch the ignition on and all that sort of thing. And then we had, you know, also had obviously cross-country training, and then we had road training, and then we had a test, a driving test, which I fortunately I was lucky enough to pass. I don't think I was the world's best driver, but I could do it, and I could probably still do it if I had to. Not likely to happen, but there you go. Yeah, we went out. And then, of course, the squadron life went on. We had an early morning parade, first parade, where the troops came out and lined up.

15:08Tallest on the right, shortest on the left. One rank four. And then the right marker got called forward. And our Sergeant Major, he was a... Ooh... a figure of fear almost. He was very tall, very upright, ginger hair, and in those days his head was shaven up above his ears, a voice like a foghorn, and we were all... Most of us were scared of him, to be honest with you, but he was fair. Looking back, he did his job, and they called him the screaming skull for obvious reasons.

15:57he would scream at us and and what personal weapons were you carrying there because you wouldn't be with a Lee Enfield in a Saladin no no no we didn't the assault troopers they had Lee Enfields as a driver I had a pistol a Webley pistol because the driving compartment is so cramped that you couldn't keep a personal weapon with you. There just wasn't room. There's barely room to sit and turn, let alone anything else, fumble about for weapons. The gas mask, if you were lucky, was hanging somewhere in the stowage compartment. I felt that a good that would have been in the gas attack, but that's another story.

16:52so we had a pistol the commander he had a sterling submachine gun as did the wireless operator and that was I was going to say an offshoot but that's not perhaps the right word to use the later incarnation of the Sten gun but far more sophisticated it was a folding stock and carried a magazine 9mm whereas my Webley was a 38.38 bullet. And how much practice did you have with that? Oh, no, there, yeah. That's one of many things I enjoyed. We went on the rangers quite regularly firing personal weapons and the first time we went on, we also had to use the Lee-Enfield. It wasn't our personal weapon, but we had to fire all our weapons.

17:51And I enjoyed the.303. It was good, nice to use. And at the end of the session, when everybody had done their qualifying, they never used to like taking ammunition back to barracks where the boxes had been opened because it meant they had to be counted and made up. So they used to let the butt party, that's the people who did the marking in the target butts, fire whatever they wanted, at whatever they wanted, as long as it was downrange and not uprange. So we used to get the Bren guns out and the Stirlings, the rifles, pistols. If we had one, we'd have a go at it. but that was only for the butt party.

18:40They were the volunteers, so I used to volunteer for that on a fairly regular basis. So, yeah, I fired all sorts of weapons, all sorts of weapons. I've always enjoyed target shooting, yeah. Miles, what sort of a shot were you? Any good? I was quite good. Good enough where I was marked up as a potential cross-country skier because we also had to have skiing in the winter months in the Harse Mountains. We had to be able to get about on skis and we had to be able to ski so far and then be able to shoot. But I was never a good enough skier to go any further with that. But I did enjoy, I enjoyed the shooting part of it.

19:30they offered me the opportunity of becoming a gunner as well but by this time I wanted to get back home because I'd been in Germany for the best part of 18 months something like that and I thought well I wanted to get home see the old place, see my mum and dad Can I ask you a little bit more about the Queen's Dragoon Guards So in the Saladin, when that 76mm fires, is the recoil quite strong in there? Does it actually shake the vehicle? Oh, it does, yes. It rears the vehicle up on its axle. I mean, it's on wheels. The thing weighs 12 tonne, the vehicle. It makes quite a loud crack, a bit smelly.

20:21Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking about the ear defenders and things like that. We didn't have them. But we all had ear headpieces on, you know, earphones, so that Amanda could talk to us. The wireless operator could talk to us. We could talk to the driver and so on. So there was in-vehicle communication system going. So we all had what we called headsets on, which killed some of it, some of the noise. They're quite, when you have to bomb a vehicle up, or put the weapons, the armor and so forth. They're quite heavy, hurling these shells around. There's not much room for personal gears all strapped on the outside.

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22:26Go to shopify.com slash realm. That's shopify.com slash realm. Got a Sam's Cafe pizza order up. You know the best part about this spicy Italian sausage? I voted for this topping. Yeah, just another perk of being a member. Come join us. Sam's Club. Your large pack and your small pack, it's stuffed in corners, strapped on the outside. Your bedding roll is definitely on the outside, come rain or shine. Yeah, there's an art in living in there. We used to have a brew up, and they used the old desert way of doing it. If we hadn't got the tilly, what do they call them, the camping stove type things. you boil the water open a tin of tea chuck three or four spoonfuls in let it boil a bit tap it to knock the tea leaves around then just dip your dixie in or your mug in add water and milk and that was your tea and that was normally the job of the world's operator or any odd bod that happened to be about probably one of the most important jobs you had there Making sure the tea was ready, I just think.

23:46Now, you said that you were five kilometres from the East German border, so you must have been doing quite regular border patrols. Yes, we did. The regiment had to send a squadron out on a very, very regular basis. Normally, we came round to a regiment every two or three months to send one of their squadrons out. So we would go out two or three times a year, something like that. You'd go to your allotted patrol area, where you'd have to then dismount from your vehicle, camouflage it all up, and then you'd have to advance on foot through the woods if you're in a wooded area, and just reconnoiter.

24:30And it was quite funny because they were doing exactly, I say they, the East Germans were doing exactly the same thing. They more or less knew when we were going and where we were going, as we did when they were doing the same sort of thing. So you'd be going through these woods, you'd see a movement, you'd stop, you'd get your binoculars out, you'd have a look, and you'd see this bloke probably 300 yards away, dressed similarly to you, but a different colour uniform, with binoculars looking at you. So we were all doing the same sort of thing. But we were both fully bombed up. Our vehicles had weapons ready to discharge if necessary.

25:19So then we would have to go back to our vehicle, make a situation report, highlighting what we'd seen, the numbers we'd seen, the colours of the uniform we'd seen, and what they were doing, really. Yeah. So it was semi-war footing, I suppose. What was the border like then? Because this is before the Berlin Wall goes up, but there is some fortification along the border, I think, during this period. Yeah, it was a cloud strip. There's a demarcation line between the trees. So no fences at this point? No fences, no. Wow. So you could quite easily wander accidentally into East Germany? Yeah, you could, yeah.

26:09I mean, where we were stationed, just across the road from the barracks, there was a huge block of housing, very, very rudimentary housing. And we learned then that it was a refugee camp for people that did cross in those days. And we weren't allowed to go anywhere near it. Technically, we weren't allowed to go. So, pretty good little lad, I didn't. but I think one or two of them did. Did you come across any refugees when you were patrolling the border? No, no, no, we never saw any. The only people we saw were when we were on military exercises, native exercises, where we would drive our vehicles into a farm if there was one nearby.

27:03we would swing into the farm we would commandeer their barns push the, you know, run the vehicles underneath the eaves of the houses and so on net everything up and just generally make ourselves at home if we cause any damage, it was up to the local farmer to seek recompense from the appropriate authorities so, but they weren't refugees they were just Germans earning their living. What was the relationship like with the West Germans at the time? Because again, this was only 15 years after the end of World War II. Did they still see you as an occupier? I think they might well have done in their heart, in their head and heart.

27:53But obviously, when you're in a pub having a drink, as we did used to go into the local pubs in Wolfenbüttel. The Blue Boar was one of them, some Bauern Bloch. Bloch, there'd be Germans in there with the caps on. They're very fond of caps in Germany. And we would be talking to them. And they were our parents' age, so obviously there were ex-soldiers there. we would be talking laughing, joking with them and so on and when he got round to asking what they did in the war like you know what did your dad do in the war sort of thing it was always very cagey it was always of course we fought on the eastern front I never came across the one that fought the English

28:53yeah Yeah. I'm sure it's the same the world over, though, you know. Yeah. And I imagine you also had, like, emergency crash-outs to simulate, you know, the Red Army pouring over the water. Yes, we did. We had two hours to clear the camp entirely. We had to get the vehicles up and running. They had to be fully petrol-oiled and watered. That's how all the weapons stowed up. bestowed up, that's the machine guns, personal weapons, and we used to have ammunition on board, and we were given two hours to clear the camp out and get to our area of patrol, our designated patrol area. One of the most frustrating parts of that exercise was getting the secondary weapons for the armoured cars.

29:45Because obviously they were all half-inch machine guns and each Salatin had two. The APCs had one. The Saracens had one. And of the Ferrets and the Dingas, they had one apiece as well. So the gunners from the various vehicles had to form an orderly queue outside the arm store. the arm storeman had to check the driver's name and number into the register then he had to go and find the appropriate weapon that was allocated to that driver's vehicle get it from the racks and almost religiously ceremoniously hand it over and it used to seem to take for hours. It probably didn't. But when you're at the back of the queue and there's about 10 or 15 guys in front of you and you know that you want to get out of camp quickly, it was frustrating.

30:51But the armorer, the weapons armorer had to do his job. Everything had to be listed and signed for. So that was frustrating. But once you got that, I mean, you just fled and you went back and you went out in cowboy fashion, four mile an hour maximum speed. Right. I guess, you know, being five kilometres from the East German border, that does seem like rather a slow process to get you, you know, ready. It does, yes. And was your patrol position nearby or was it some distance away, your patrol area? I have no idea how far we travelled. I mean, I was coupled down inside the Armour car, listening to the wireless.

31:41We could have been going to Timbuktu as far as I was concerned. I was just doing my job. I was netted in, listening to the network, listening to any commands coming through that would apply to my vehicle or our vehicle. I was a bit clueless in that respect. I was just what I didn't need to know. Were you given any instructions around if you became a prisoner of war or anything like that as part of your training? No, no, none whatsoever. Never mentioned, never entered our minds. I suppose we felt that we were invincible inside an armoured vehicle. Therefore, we couldn't be taken prisoner. The fact that the armour car could be blown from here to Kingdom Come didn't have any bearings and we wouldn't have cared one way or the other.

32:33So no, we didn't have any direct evasion training or anything like that. We never entered our sphere of concerns, strange as it may seem. I remember we were on one exercise, NATO exercise, and we were in our position. We were dismantled. We'd gone forward. And some tanks came, some from the opposing enemy tanks, started coming towards us. And I never felt so vulnerable in all my life then. I thought, well, they can't see me. They're not going to shoot me with a cannon. But I felt really vulnerable. and coincidentally I had exactly the same feeling when I was inside the armoured car and we had opposing troops dotted around the hillsides in front of us I thought well they can see me they don't know you know I don't know how many of them there are out there but these were enemy troops but they were friendly forces playing a part of the enemy but it was sobering It was a very sobering thought.

33:53And thank God, it wasn't for real. Because in reality, if the Red Army had come over the border, your survival time, particularly as you being up front and being a reconnaissance troop, would have been, I don't know, minutes? Hours? Hours, yeah. Yeah. We were told that. We were told that. we could expect life expectancy in a squadron troop as an individual troop could be three weeks if you're lucky I mean that seems a lot longer than I would expect with your proximity to the border yeah yeah I don't know whether that was they told you that to try and boost your morale or not I don't know try to make us aware that things happened can happen, could happen.