Well, fancy this. A Lance lovers' web site. How did I get here? Well, cycling to work a couple of days ago the phrase "56lbs of cast double based propellant" came to mind. (It was the stuff that got the concentric pistons moving to get the juices into the engine.)

So I thought I'd do a Google search and here I am. I was an Ammunition Technician in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. I dealt with everything from a .22 bullet to Lance.

The actual Lance course was several weeks at the Army School of Ammunition in Warwickshire (Americans, don't pronounce the second "w") and I think I did mine back in 1980. Lots of de-tanking drills; not getting the yellow apparatus mixed up with the green apparatus. Then I went to the storage depot in Sennelager in Germany for a couple of years (1980 -1).

I remember huge convoys of British Army, US Army and German police as we took the missile bodies from the depot to the rail head for transporting up to one of the docks on the North coast for shipping to our ranges on the Outer Hebrides; a group of islands to the West of Scotland.

And then much to my surprise I got posted there myself. 1981 - '83. We saw off about 14 missiles a year mainly fired by European NATO troops. Most of the Americans went to Crete. We also stored and maintained the surface to air Rapier and shoulder launched Blowpipe missiles there so it was a fairly busy place.

Anyway, great meeting you all. Bye.

Robert,
Good to hear from some of our NATO friends. LANCE sure made it around the NATO horn; lets see the Brits, Germans, Italians and Dutch all used LANCE. Truely remarkable if you think about it. I live in Raleigh, NC, now and was working a booth at the State fair this past fall when this English gentleman starts inquiring about some Landscaping techniques, turns out he was a LANCE Missile crew member serving in Germany for a couple of years. No matter how far I get away from the Army, my LANCE background always seems to be topic of discussion when I mention that I worked with Nukes. I thought it was interesting to say the least that I was talking to this fellow for about an hour on our LANCE memories. Thanks for the post.