Queen’s Royal Hussars, Petrovac, Bosnia, early 1996, an FV4030 Challenger 1 of 3rd Troop, A Squadron, and a FV107 Scimitar of RECCE Troop, with an AAC Lynx AH.7 overhead. In January 1996, the QRH was the first unit deployed in Challengers to Bosnia with NATO’s British-led Implementation Force.
Cold War veterans who served in the Falklands and Op Granby against Saddam, among other places, Lynx and Scimitar have long since been retired, while Challenger 1 has been superseded by Challenger 2 since 2001.
As for the QRH, today they are the senior-most armored regiment in the British Army, equipped with C2s, and are based at Assaye Barracks, Tidworth, since moving from Germany home (for technically the first time) in 2019.
Formed in 1993 from an amalgam of the Queen’s Own Hussars and the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars (both of which were formed from amalgamations of other historic cavalry regiments in 1958), the QRH and its myriad antecedents have been awarded 172 Battle Honours going back to 1685, and remember eight Victoria Cross holders, while observing Regimental days for Dettingen, Balaclava, and El Alamein.
No, it is not early morning on the Savannah, but “Danske Leoparder et Letland,” i.e., Royal Danish Army KMW Rheinmetall Leopard 2A7DKs of I Panserbataljon, Jydske Dragonregiment (I/JDR) in Latvia on a NATO deployment getting a live fire ex underway recently.
And that Rh-120 L/55 A1 120mm main gun does growl.
Also note the SAAB Barracuda anti-IR camo system installed.
A closer look:
Of note, the “Blue Dragoons” of I/JDR, Denmark’s sole tank unit and home to 44 Leopard 2s, has a long and storied history going back to 1657, but held on to their horses until 1932. They have been operating successive versions of the Kampfpanzer Leopard since the 1970s.
They are somewhat famous in modern times for the “Mouse Ate the Cat” engagement in Bosnia in 1994, where they just went ham on some particularly dreaded and troublesome Serb positions and bagged at least one T-55 in the process.
They have also completed deployments to Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq in modern times, and have a reputation for being eager to let their tracks (and guns) run free when needed.
Black beret clad in British Armored Corps fashion, their motto is Virtute Vincitur (“He is overcome by strength”).
Here we see a white-painted Leopard 1DK main battle tank of the Royal Danish Army’s Jydske Dragonregiment (Jutland Dragoon Regiment) while deployed to the UN-led international force UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force) in the former Yugoslavia in 1994.
Danish Leopards 1A3s were originally purchased in 1976, 120 in all which were renamed Leopard 1DK, delivered until 1978. 110 more were acquired in 1993 and all were gradually upgraded to the 1A5 standard.
Designed in the 1950s as the Standard-Panzer to replace the West German Bundeswehr’s U.S.-built M47 and M48 Patton tanks, the Leopard was built on all of the German lessons learned from WWII and the follow-on Allied after-action reports from Korea. In all, some 4,744 Leopard I MBTs were produced between 1965 and 1984 when they were replaced on Porsche’s line by the much-improved Leopard II. Besides West Germany, the Leo was sold throughout NATO including Denmark, as shown above, Canada, Belgium, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and Turkey. Outside of the military alliance, Australia, Brazil, and Chile bought Leopard Is– with the latter going on to sell theirs to Ecuador while Lebanon picked up former Belgian panzers.
With all of those thousands of Leos in circulation, it may come as a surprise that the first combat action by the tank was by the Danes.
Yes, in April 1994, DANSQN (Danish Tank Squadron), a 10-tank unit of the Jydske Rgt, commanded by Major Carsten Rasmussen, was dispatched to form the armored overwatch fist of the 2nd Nordic battalion (NORDBAT2) composed of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish forces operating under the UN mandate. Commanded by Swedish Col. Ulf Henricsson (later dubbed the “Sheriff of Vareš” for his “no shit” attitude in Bosnia), the Nordic unit was composed of the Danish armored squadron, a Norwegian field hospital (NORMEDCOY), and the three-company strong first Swedish mechanized infantry battalion (BA01).
While in Bosnia, in an action remembered as Operation Bøllebank (“Hooligan bashing”) 7 tanks of the Danish squadron rushed to the aid of a Swedish observation post on 29 April that was under attack outside of Tuzla and was in turn ambushed on the way by elements of the Bosnian-Serb Sekovici brigade of the VRS (Republic of Srpska Army) outside the village of Kalesija.
The VRS had Sagger anti-tank missiles (which had proved deadly to other UN armored forces), 122mm guns and T-55 tanks but the Danes had better, FLIR-enabled night vision (the engagement started at 2315hrs) and in the end, carried the day.
Serb casualty reports range from 9 to 150. The Danes lost none of their 28 tankers involved and all of the Viking tanks were still more or less operational, though one had its paint scratched a bit.
The Leos had fired 72 105mm rounds in the 2-hour fight, (44 HE, 9 WP and 19 armor piercing.)
Eskadronchef Rasmussen, who was on scene for the fight in his command tank, said later of the counter-ambush against a nominally superior force, “The cat set a trap for the mice, but the mice caught the cat.”
Here is a pretty good run-down of the battle (in Danish)
Besides the Leo’s first use in combat, it was the first Danish overt military action since World War II and the first Dane tank-on-tank fight ever (in 1940, the Danish army only had a half-dozen Swedish-built Landsverk 180 and Landsverk PV M 39 Lynx armoured cars, armed with 20mm Madsen cannon, and they did not have a chance to engage German tanks in the brief blitzkrieg of the tiny country).
While the event has since been celebrated in Denmark, Rasmussen has downplayed the notoriety of the engagement. The tankers were not even decorated for the engagement.
As for DANSQN, they caught a whiff of gunpowder again on 26 October 1994 when three Danish tanks fired 21 rounds against Bosnian Serbs’ near Gradacac north of Tuzla in order to retake a UN- observation post. Dubbed Operation Armada, the Nordic Leos bagged at least one more T-55 in that engagement, suffering zero casualties.
As part of IFOR, they later helped in the disarmarment of local forces in Bosnia.
Leopard 1A5 of the Royal Danish Army Jutland Dragoon Regiment (Jydske Dragonregiment) crushes a 20mm autocannon abandoned by Bosnia Serbs
I recently had the chance to tour U.S. Army’s Museum Support Center at Anniston Army Depot, the keepers of the flame for military history in the country.
The 15,200-acre installation in North Alabama was established in World War II and overhauls both small arms and vehicles for the Army. A longstanding tenant on the sprawling base, based out of Building 201, is the Museum Support Center, operated by the Center of Military History. The CMH maintains an immense collection of 650,000 historic items across 228 sites including 57 large museums that are a part of the Army Museum Enterprise. Items not yet on display, waiting for a public home, or are excess to current museum needs are stored in the “Army’s attic” in Anniston.
In secured storage at the MSC are 13,000 live weapons of all sorts, ranging from 13th Century Ottoman gear to guns captured recently in Afghanistan…and they were gracious enough to roll out the red carpet for me:
Men of ‘B’ Company, 1st Battalion, Royal Highland Fusiliers on Christmas Day, 25 December 1994. Major David Crumlish has a whiskey with the men at a checkpoint in the Vitez area, Bosnia.
In October 1992, 2,400 British troops deployed to Bosnia and Croatia under Operation Grapple and became operational in November. They were tasked with providing armed escort to United Nations humanitarian aid convoys as part of the UN Protection Force, UNPROFOR, in Bosnia. Shortly afterward they stumbled on the scene of the Ahmići massacre. UNPROFOR was replaced by the much more muscular NATO-backed IFOR/SFOR in 1995.
