The mention of the M107 175mm self-propelled gun brings back old memories because my first TO&E unit had them. When we retubed to the M110A1 eight-inch in around 1980 I believe it made us the next-to-last 175 unit in the history of the Army. A few months later when I was battalion motor officer a guy wearing an Afrika Korps-style hat with the Deutsche Bahn logo walked in my office one day and asked if he could measure one of my howitzers so he could better plan their rail transport to our field exercises in the Grafenwoehr training area.

When I showed him the dimensions of the weapon system in the -10 manual tabulated data he laughed because whoever had made the metric conversions had screwed them all up. I led him to one of our howitzers and told him to have at it. His Afrika Korps hat-wearing crew got to work with tape measures and plumb bobs. When one his men pointed to a puddle of cherry juice forming under an adjacent howitzer I began to explain how the hydraulics of the lock-out system worked. The top guy said, "Ah, leutnant, you do not haff to tell me, I commanded a battery of 88s in Russia!"