Amphibians

3.4

It is often said that an army fights the next war with the weapons of the last. Should a third world war have occurred, it was assumed that the attack would have come from the east where the German plains are criss-crossed by rivers.

It was also a NATO ‘given’ that advancing Soviet troops would have destroyed vital bridges, making it essential that their forces possess some reliable means of crossing water obstacles. It is hardly surprising that, for three decades, NATO remained obsessed with amphibious vehicles.

These were the days before heavy-lift helicopters. Without bridges, there were two ways for a military vehicle to cross water, either by ‘swimming’ or floating across, or by‘wading’ or ‘fording’, with the vehicle driving on the bottom.

Since the Land Rover was likely to be involved in operations virtually anywhere in the world, a technique was required which would allow the vehicle to take to water. One experiment, which was carried out with some success, was to wrap the vehicle in a tarpaulin, and to float it across a river, pulling it from one side to the other using a rope. Although this might have been successful as a field expedient, it was not practicable for large numbers of vehicles, much less a complete invasion force, and clearly, some other method of flotation was required.