looking at the turret more it is more than likely one of the 6 or 7 prototypes, but I thought that they got converted to training tanks … I do love a mystery …
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And the Bovington Tiger 131 runs on a Maybach HL230 engine pulled out of a King Tiger, since they pulled the original Maybach HL210 engine and made it into a cutaway display piece.
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The collection is part of the Army’s budget, and the collection is used for training purposes, as Ft. Moore is now the training area for new Armor Crewmen/ people?
I asked the curator why they do not have a Merkava in the collection? One has been offered by Israel many times, and Mark 1-4 they want, it has been tied up in the State Department bureaucracy for 8 years.
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Yup; they moved the Armor School out of Ft Knox and combined it with the Infantry School; now called the US Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence.
And it doesn’t surprise me that adding Merkavas to the collection would be mired in bureaucratic red tape. It would be awesome to have a Merkava Mk4 in there.
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Yes, at Ft. Moore is Airborne school, Ranger, Pathfinder, Sniper, OCS, Armor, Infantry, and quite a few more I am sure…the place is HUGE!!
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I made a nice extended weekend road trip…Sunday afternoon I discovered the Andersonville Prison is only 40 minutes north, and also on that site they have the National POW/MIA museum which was interesting also.
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Id take that total with a grain of salt. I saw it first in '88 while PCSing to Stewart.
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Any reason behind this other then cause they can?
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Don’t forget the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School of the Americas.
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This is what the the Curator of the museum told me, and do not see a reason why he would lie, they know who the commander was (maybe the commander embellished the kill tally)?, and he visited the Jagdtiger when it was at Aberdeen.
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They can’t charge money…the curator, John I think his name is was explaining to me the funding…there are only 3 volunteers who work on restoring the vehicles.
Their budget is part of the Army’s budget. They were supposed to get funding in the early 2000’s…but the money went to the big VA hospitals to bring them up to standard… You may remember the stories about Walter Reed hospital and how bad it was… The wounded troops were coming back from afghanistan and Iraq and needed updated and better care.
They took the money allocated to the future museum and gave it to the hospitals…rightly so I think.
They really had to fight to get the space that they have now.
You can imagine that in the Army budget…a museum is low on the priority of things.
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The Jagdtiger came from Aberdeen. That hit on the mantlet is pretty distinctive, and was on the APG vehicle. Im sure much of the rest of the collection came from there as well, although the old Infantry Museum on main post had a pretty decent collection back in the day. Just not so much foreign stuff except for some ex Iraqi vehicles. Although it has been almost 30 years since I was last at Benning. (it will never be Ft Moore in my memory)
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I know when I was active duty; my division (24th Mechanized Infantry Division) donated several captured Iraqi vehicles to Ft. Benning after GW1. I know APG had a massive collection of captured WW2 tanks and armored vehicles, so my guess a lot of them came from APG, or like KT 332, from APG, via Ft. Knox.
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Yes, a big part of it came from Aberdeen, with the rest coming from Ft. Knox. Every piece either came from US stocks, or was captured in combat. All the Soviet era armor came from the Yom Kippur war via Israel and the PT-76 from Vietnam. Some of the US vehicles were taken away and added to the US Army Museum just outside of D.C. The Army paid for that museum as it is close to D.C so they can “host” the Congressmen and Senators to lobby for their new programs…that is what a “birdie” told me this past weekend. It all comes down to politics.
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Fantastic looking collection- thanks for sharing it with us!
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Wow what a great collection!
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