Over the years there has been a lot of confusion around British HE for 2pdr and 6pdr guns – especially in the early part of the war. e.g. The 2pdr didn’t have HE, yes it did originally in 1940 but they stopped making it, no it didn’t, yes it did and they even had 11,000 rounds of it siting in storage at the outbreak of World War II – they just never issued it to the troops! Anyway I thought it might be useful (for my sanity and anybody else’s) to collate the facts as known (at least as I now know them), given a lot more information has come to light in the last 10-15 years on the subject. This was partly sparked by a recent YouTube video I watched (on the Matilda) that quoted quite inaccurately the claim that the British had 2pdr HE (in storage in 1939-1941) and never issued it, either through incompetence or criminal negligence!
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Mackay Force in the Florina Valley 1941
Quite sometime ago I wrote a simple resource document for a Spearhead mini-campaign set in the Florina Valley in April 1941. Mackay force was a weak-division sized force (of British, Australian & New Zealand troops) sent to cover the Monastir Gap; and prevent a German thrust down central Greece that would split the main Greek Army on the Albanian Front in the west from the British & ANZAC “W” Force (and remaining weak elements of the Greek Army) on the Bulgarian (eastern) front. It was necessitated by the sudden and very unexpected ‘rapid’ collapse of the Royal Yugoslavian Army, which, although not overly modern was still expected to have put up sufficient resistance to have at least held up the Germans for a few weeks and been able to at least hold a final defensive line in Southern Yugoslavia in co-ordination with the Greek Army on the Albania frontier.
Continue reading “Mackay Force in the Florina Valley 1941”