Repair vehicle and units

[m113apc]

The longest salvage operation I have been a part of took almost 48h.
It was a Leopard 1 MBT back in 1999.

We used two Leopard1 ARV to winch with and 4 Leopard 1 MBT as anchorage, with a couple of big trees as well to anchor the 4 MBTs.

If I don’t remember wrong, we winched with 170t (total, with all safeties off), then we got it out of the march. It was so deep, that we only saw the tip of the cannon, and the cannon was elevated to the maximum, so we had to send down engineer divers to hook up the wires.

I saw it went down, all the crew made it, the driver and loader was send to hospital with march water in their lungs, they had to wait to the compartment was filled with water, before they could evacuate through the commanders hatch. It took about two long minutes before we saw them in the water. An ice block blocked the loaders hatch.

Good it was peacetime exercise.

Anyway, this was an interesting topic with many good answers and stories.
Thx...

[RERomine]

How did they end up in the water in the first place? Did you see it happen or just part of the recovery operation?

[gingertanker]

saw one that took about that long. Merkava Mk 2 stuck in mud, another came in to tow it, got stuck. A D9 Dozer came to help and got stuc kas well. Seriously bad mud that was. They brought another D9 that pulled out the first D9, than both towed each tank out.