I drove The Telegraph’s Land Rover in active conflict
The Telegraph in fact owned/used two armoured Land Rover 110 vehicles – the need for the second shall soon become apparent.
The first was a Land Rover Series III with a 2.5-litre diesel engine, built in the late 1980s and repurposed with a steel cab and bulletproof glass.
During the Kosovo conflict (1998-1999), The Telegraph found the money (about £75,000 I believe) for an armoured Defender, as the Series Land Rovers had been renamed. This time the whole vehicle, not just the cab, was armoured. The Kevlar composite used made it lighter and easier to drive than the steel-clad first iteration.
It took an accident to prove just how heavily-protected was the first armoured Land Rover. I managed to roll “The Beast”, for that is how the converted 110 was affectionately known, on an icy Balkan road in January 1994 during one of the wars that pulled Yugoslavia apart.
One minute I was bustling along happily listening to a Hothouse Flowers mixtape, the volume cranked up to make the music heard above the rattle of the diesel engine. Then began the most delicate of pirouettes, the onrushing road ahead momentarily filling the passenger window, the view through the windscreen of a snowy Bosnian field disconcertingly perpendicular to my line of travel.
When the tumbling stopped, it was clear the plated steel cab had protected me like a roll-cage. Dizziness apart, I was fine. But we had ended up on our side so after unclipping my seatbelt I stood on the new “floor”, that same passenger window, and tried to get out.
It was impossible.
The Beast (with a white paint job) in Croatia during the Bosnia War – Tim Butcher
The Beast was designed very much as a two-seater, meaning the protection (10mm thick steel along with 15mm thick bulletproof glass) was entirely sealed apart from the two doors: there was a letterbox communicating to the rear cargo area, the windows very much not openable.
It was as I reached up to heave open the driver door that the sheer weight of the protection layer became fully apparent. It weighed more than 100kg, a single steel sheet cut to size and hinged on two 15cm bolts welded to the leading edge. For the love of God and in spite of myself weighing not much less, with a preternatural gym obsession, it was beyond me.
I could prise it open a few centimetres before it crashed back down. My fingers had to be kept clear of all edges or else they would have been guillotined clean off. I tried to perch on the bulk of the gear housing to get my shoulder to the door. Again, no joy.
It took the arrival of two fortuitously bulky farmers with crowbars to release me. Clambering out, destruction was all around. All of the “soft-skin” parts of the Beast were damaged: bonnet gone, wings smashed, rear exterior peeled away like a scab, radiator punctured, radiator fan flattened to a frisbee.
But after recovering in the farmhouse with medicinal slivovitz (plum brandy) and grainy coffee, the real miracle took place. The Beast started on the first time, its chassis true, the cab sound, the cold making the radiator redundant.
That morning with the farmers captured the soul of that vehicle: agricultural. It looked and sounded like a piece of farm equipment.
The weight of the cab and anti-mine belly plate meant the suspension coils had to be strengthened but even then it was set heavy, like a pedalo carrying a well-oiled Andrew Flintoff. Apart from the suspension everything else was standard. The trick was to drive slowly, brake early and, as it happened, not speed on icy roads.
Flashy it was not. Functional it was, churning over the mountains of Bosnia on old tracks re-named by British Army engineers deployed as peacekeepers. One was grandly called Route Diamond, a muddy, rutted superannuated goat-track, but while other vehicles struggled the Beast ate it all up. Slowly.
Although the armour was designed to protect against small arms fire and anti-personnel mines, the reality was that it would not help against the big stuff. A Reuters news agency armoured Land Rover is in the collection of the Imperial War Museum, badly damaged in Gaza by Israeli munitions. The journalists inside were injured.
The Beast saw its fair share of warzones, including during the Israel-Hezbollah War in 2006
What the Beast did do was provide reassurance. You might have got yourself into trouble, but the Beast could get you out. During the siege of Sarajevo word came one day that the single road held by friendly forces was open. I broke the two-seater rule by taking two fellow journalists and under cover of twilight we approached the start of the dangerous climb.
The trail wormed up over a massif called Mount Igman, held only in part by friendlies. A British soldier had been killed there days earlier when his vehicle was spotted by hostiles only a few hundred metres away.
As darkness fell I unscrewed the fusebox cover under the steering wheel – as accessible and simple as a piece of farming equipment – and took out the brake light fuse. The briefest glow from the brakes threatened to attract “incoming”.
We crept slowly and lightlessly over the mountain under partial moonlight, past the wreck of the dead soldier’s vehicle, each hairpin negotiated without any dangerous glow of red.
When the Kosovo crisis began at the end of the 1990s the beancounters at The Telegraph decided the cost of insurance liability outweighed the cost of a new, improved armoured Land Rover. A new Defender 110 2.5 TDI was purchased, this time with armour covering both cab and body. And it had four doors.
To save on weight the body plates were Kevlar, painted mustard yellow on the principle that nobody would confuse a car painted the colour of custard as a military vehicle. It was lighter and easier to drive than the original Beast. It even had creature comforts such as interior trim, although in the case of the Yellow Peril (it was inevitable it would be nicknamed thus) that consisted of industrial carpet glued to the inside of the panels.
I drove the Peril to Pristina airport on the famous day when the British commander Sir Mike Jackson “refused to start World War Three” when ordered by an American general to confront Russian soldiers. It was wonderfully reassuring to drive onto the runway to hear the defiant press conference and then drive to safety down another rutted, rainswept road, my trusted Land Rover providing haven and sanctuary.
‘The Beast’ confronting a different beast during the 2006 Lebanon War
The Peril followed me to the Middle East when I covered Israel/Palestine. I was never able to get her through Israeli security protocols into Gaza but she did do valuable service up on Israel’s northern border during the 2006 Hezbollah War. With Hezbollah rockets raining down intermittently, the peril became effectively a mobile bomb shelter.
Last seen, the second and last of The Telegraph’s armoured Land Rovers was parked in a compound atop the Mount of Olives, not far from where the Bible tells us Jesus ascended unto heaven. It felt a suitable place to bid farewell to a line of vehicles that had so often answered my prayers.
Source link
