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To: archy
Occasionally encountering a German or Italian armoured car or light tank at intersecting
route roadblocks, American bazookas were one answer, but the .50 Brownings were said
to be quite capable as well, and more certain at night-though the mad Irishman with
the flamethrower must have gotten their attention.


We supply the Jeeps, our cousins have all the fun!
I wonder how these guys ever readjusted to civilian driving after the war.
86 posted on 02/04/2004 8:31:55 PM PST by VOA
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To: VOA
We supply the Jeeps, our cousins have all the fun!

I wonder how these guys ever readjusted to civilian driving after the war.

At least one became a wheelman for a bank robbery gang, using the Tommygun he'd been issued while with PPA during the war. But quite a few were inclined toward a something other than mundane or boring style of life before the war, and once freed from military discipline, set sail on their own courses where their own winds took them, some charted before, some not.

Perhaps the most historically significant of the PPA non-duty milestones was their visit to Venice's Plaza de San Marco, where wheeled vehicles aside from the occasional vendor's cart or workman's wheelbarrow had been off-limits for some 2500 years. But PPA had their MGs mounted and noone was about to argue with them, and in 4-wheel drive and low gear, they climbed the marble steps like it was one of the Sicilian mountain paths to which they were more accustomed, and made a point of circling the place seven times. So far as I know, their effort hasn't been repeated since. But they did a number of things that can only be described as *unique*.

Piazza San Marco, Venezia, 1944.
Fred Yeoman, Paddy McAllister and "J.C" Simpson of "B" Patrol, PPA.

88 posted on 02/04/2004 9:09:32 PM PST by archy (Angiloj! Mia kusenveturilo estas plena da angiloj!)
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