I'm currently going through the 2nd Salvage company's war diary and found that a few tanks might have been referred to, but they don't have the usual Letter and number code.
31st July 1917 - "no. 56 ditched at D.25" and also "Nos. 52, 58, 59 ditched near Wild Wood".
I'm aware they are usually refered to as G48 tank, nut have yet to come across them being called Nos. 52 or 58. Do the numbers (52, 58 etc) correlate to the tank or the crew?
Welcome to the wonderful world of making sense of War Diaries, something I've been doing for ten years or more. Best to bear in mind that they were often written by stressed young men who were dog tired, frightened and traumatised. Expect errors, and expect them to take administrative short cuts so you need to corroborate them with every other source you can possibly find. They will tell you a lot, but they won't tell you all you wish.
Right, found a photo of the original page. The handwriting's awful - you must be a glutton for punishment!
Indeed it looks like Ospreys, which doesn't make much sense. I thought it might be a code in case the document fell into enemy hands but on the next page and in the same hand we have "7 tanks to CW". The O of Ospreys looks odd, especially when compared to other ones on the page, but I still can't work out what else it might be. Perhaps a distracted author at work? Or a mischevious one?
Thanks for double checking for me. I went to Kew to double check the transcription and can also confirm that it is definitely Osprey!
The handwriting does get better, presumably someone else took over the war diaries.
I will keep searching, the only tedious link I could gather was that HMS Osprey was a destroyer in anti-submarine warfare, using 12-pounders and 6-pounders, of which the tanks use - and the guns nicknamed "ospreys". But like I said, tedious link
No, that's not a tenuous link at all! If it was common slang at the time to refer to naval 6 pdrs as "Ospreys" then the War Diary entry makes perfect sense. The Tank Corps had a workshop dedicated to overhauling tank guns.
Or have I misunderstood and you imagine the guns might have been called Ospreys??
I met a friend of mine today who is an authority on firearms and explosives (whilst I was with him he took a call from the police who needed his advice...). He was unable to shed light on the meaning of "Ospreys" in this context.
