Land Rover (lrm.co.uk)

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behind the lines
SAS Land Rovers have achieved a legendary status amongst military vehicle buffs, and their history dates back to the early post-war desert campaigns

Over the third weekend in October, following the US Special Operations Command missions in Afghanistan, news programmes featured night vision footage of Land Rovers deploying from the back of Chinook helicopters. This film was, of course, shot on a training exercise rather than being news footage from Operation Enduring Freedom, but it is the first time we have seen moving shots of the Rangers Special Operations Vehicle (R-SOV) Defenders as featured in the November 1999 and January 2001 issues of LRM.
The R-SOVs were not used in this first Rangers operation, but no doubt they are lurking somewhere close by for future use. It is also highly likely that their British equivalent, the SAS Desert Patrol Vehicle (DPV) 110 fleet, is also on standby with brimming fuel tanks.
Sixty years ago, what was to become the world's elite fighting unit was formed to strike back at the mighty German Africa Korps where and when they least expected it. Conceived by a young British Army officer, at the time recuperating in an Egyptian hospital, the Special Air Service (SAS) was a small and highly motivated group of commandos. They trained to parachute deep behind enemy lines to attack strategic targets out of the darkness and then melt away into the desert sands, to be picked up later by the trucks of the Long Range Desert Group.
The US Special Ops spectacular near Kandahar on 20th October, was the modern equivalent of these early SAS raids, though recovery of troops on this occasion was by aircraft rather than vehicles due to the vast distances involved.

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Despite some of their earliest operations being somewhat less than successful, the WWII SAS soon established a reputation for being able to pull off incredibly daring missions. The effect they began to have on enemy morale grew out of all proportion to their meagre number, resulting in Hitler decreeing that any SAS Trooper captured should be executed on the spot.
Sixty years on, 22 Regiment of the Special Air Service, carries on the traditions of David Stirling's elite band of men. At the time of writing, it is believed that they are on active operations somewhere in the region of Afghanistan, if not actually inside the country. They are also operating in Bosnia, Macedonia, Sierra Leone and other countries.
Indeed, it has even been reported that, in late October, the United States asked Britain to commit a significant portion of the regiment to the Afghanistan operation, as they have such a high regard for them. Even Delta Force, the very best of America's Special Forces units, was created along SAS lines after its founder, Colonel Charlie Beckwith, spent a year in Britain with them as an exchange officer.
By 1942, the original SAS had realised that it needed its own form of transportation to allow it to operate independently of the LRDG who, after all, had their own missions to fulfil in addition to being desert taxi drivers. They turned to the then-new Jeep, as a possible solution to their transportation problems.
It was both light enough to allow it to be used on sandy terrain where the heavy LRDG Chevrolet trucks would flounder, and it could carry sufficient weapons, ammunition and fuel for their needs. The Jeeps were also relatively easy to lay their hands on as the rest of the army had yet to latch onto the usefulness of these new little trucks from America.

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small and quick
Unlike the LRDG, the SAS would not be spending long periods on patrol out in the desert, but would be launching lightning attacks and then bugging out as fast as possible, so the diminutive size of the Jeep was not a problem. However, by the time they had added a plethora of weaponry and numerous jerrycans to each vehicle, these desert equivalents of tinkers carts were running way above their design payload; but they did the job.
Following the success of the North African campaign, the SAS was redeployed for the Italian campaign and in 1944 some of its personnel were sent behind German lines in France to support the Normandy landings. Over the next few months small groups of SAS troopers, often travelling in machine gun-armed Jeeps that had been parachuted in with them, linked up with the French, Belgian and Dutch Resistance movements, to attack the German occupying army where it least expected.
By that time the SAS Jeeps had been customised with proper long range fuel tanks and armoured shields for both driver and front gunner, and some of these kits would later be transferred to Belgian SAS Minerva Land Rovers for post-WWII service, but that is another story. The British SAS Jeeps, like the SAS itself, were demobbed soon after the war as being surplus to requirements, but this turned out to be a rather short-sighted decision.
In 1951, in response to communist insurgency in Malaya, the SAS was reformed. Its primary role was to take the war to the terrorists by deploying deep into the jungle for long periods to track them down, attack their bases and cut off their lines of communications.
Dedicated vehicles were of little use in this jungle war, or in the later Borneo campaign but, by the end of the decade, the SAS was also involved in Oman, where the terrain was more suited to vehicle operations. By then, the SAS were running a small fleet of Series One mini-gunships rigged in similar fashion to their WWII Jeeps.
These heavily armed 1957 Land Rovers, built on the latest 88 inch wheelbase chassis, carried three men plus communications equipment. The commander sat to the left of the driver, on a raised seat, and was armed with twin forward firing Vickers machine guns mounted above the dashboard.
The radio operator sat centrally in the rear compartment, facing backwards with his radio sets to his left and a .30 calibre heavy machine gun before him to allow coverage of the rear. Even the driver had a machine gun, mounted on his door pillar.
These Series One SAS Land Rovers were okay for short range operations, but the deserts and coastal plains of Oman, where the regiment was heavily involved in a secret war, and the expansive terrain of nearby Aden, which was turning into a hot potato as the British Empire shrank, both demanded vehicles with greater payload. The long wheelbase Series IIA 109, now in widespread army service, seemed the ideal vehicle for the job.
Like the Series One, the 109 could be rigged to carry three men and be festooned with machine guns. Its increased payload and much larger load bed would allow very large, long-range petrol tanks to be fitted and considerably more stores and ammunition, to be carried.
After much experimentation, including the field conversion of ordinary military-specification Land Rovers to evaluate just what was required, a final design was formulated and the ‘Pink Panther’ 109 was born. This fleet, which gained its nickname as a result of its unusual pink paint scheme applied for desert operations and the SAS attributes of stealth and speed, entered service in 1967. It would operate for the next two decades until replaced by the One-Ten DPV.
As the vast majority of the Pinkies, as they would eventually become known, were finished in this desert paint scheme at some time in their career, it is often assumed that they were all pink and that they only served in the desert. Neither is true.

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It has not yet been established if every single one of them started life in Deep Bronze Green, but a large number certainly did, with the pink camouflage being spray-painted on at a later date. Some restorers claim that their Pinkies (a considerable number still exist in private hands) show no evidence of ever having been painted green, but I have been at this military journalism game too long to ever say never.
From past experience I know that, one day, original paperwork is bound to turn up to disprove any mistaken apprehension on my part, so I am not tempting fate. As for them being "for desert service only", we can knock this one on the head by confirming that they served in tropical Belize and Brunei, not to mention deployments close to the Inner German Border where, in all cases, a bright pink paint job would stand out like a brown object on a billiard table.
The Series IIA SAS Land Rovers entered service at a time when the British Army still had worldwide conventional commitments (just). However it would not be long until international terrorism took the ascendancy and the role of the SAS expanded to counter this.
No doubt the Pink Panthers took part on active military operations somewhere between 1967 and their eventual replacement in the mid-eighties, with the early seventies Dhofari campaign in Oman being a prime candidate. However, the secrecy that surrounds the SAS has prevented any operational photographs of the Pinkies appearing to date.
If anyone can confirm use of these vehicles anywhere, excluding exercises in the usual SAS peace-time training haunts around the globe, we would be glad to hear.
The One-Ten DPV (in the ##KD## series) which replaced the original Pinkies, is a much less camera-shy beast than its older brother. Many Gulf War photographs have surfaced over the last decade.
Like the original Series One, the teenager of the SAS Land Rover family was also crewed by three men and heavily armed, but it carried four times the payload (officially – in real life all combat Land Rovers are heavily overloaded). It had capabilities that would stupefy the SAS driver of thirty years before.
Powered by the V8 petrol engine and with coil suspension instead of the cart springs used on the Series One, it was capable of penetrating deep behind enemy lines in desert conditions like its 1942 Jeep predecessor, but in a degree of comfort unimaginable to WWII heroes, at undreamt of speed and over unimaginable distances. The SAS DPV fighting columns of the 1991 Gulf War were to spend literally weeks behind enemy lines.
At first General Norman Schwarzkopf, overall commander of the multinational Coalition forces, was not overly keen on the involvement of Special Forces but, after being persuaded to let the SAS participate, he soon changed his mind. US Special Forces also then became involved.
One result of the ensuing co-operation between the British and American specialists was the realisation by the Yanks that the Land Rover was much better than the Hum-vee (Hummer) for helicopter insertion and rapid intervention. Shortly after the Gulf War, the US Rangers specified the Land Rover as vehicle of choice for their rapid intervention assault squads.
During the Gulf War, a number of DPV Land Rovers were damaged beyond repair, and at least one was deliberately destroyed to keep it out of Iraqi hands after a rollover accident while crossing a wadi in darkness. Attrition rates on various training exercises had also taken its toll on the small fleet, resulting in an order for a small batch of replacements, seemingly fitted with the Tdi diesel engine.
Generally, these later vehicles follow the same configuration as the original One Ten DPV batch, with three crew stations, raised commander's seat and machine gun mounts in front of commander and radio operator, but the keen-eyed will spot minor detail differences. The last confirmed operational outing for the DPV was to Sierra Leone in 2000.
Unlike earlier SAS Land Rovers, the coil sprung fleet has had various different camouflage schemes over the years. The originals arrived at the Central Vehicle Depot in the West of England in a plain, matt NATO green paint scheme, but that was soon over-sprayed in a light sandy shade, usually referred to as stone, if the vehicles were tasked for overseas training exercises in either Africa or the Persian Gulf region.
For one such African exercise in 1987, some were painted with an unusual tiger stripe pattern of sand, stone and dark green, but this does not appear to have found much favour. By 1990, sand and grey seems to have been in-vogue, with the grey areas containing particles of grit which gave a very rough feel and may have been experimental.
A few of the later dune-buggy style Light Strike Vehicles, which were not a success, and SAS motorcycles of this period were also painted with this stone and grey scheme. However, although some of the DPVs used in the Gulf War seem to have been stone and grey, at least a few had their grey patches over-painted with a pinkish shade which was reminiscent of the original Pink Panthers. This might have been the paint used on Sea King helicopters, but was clearly applied by brush rather than spray gun, which may account for it being of a considerably darker shade than that seen on aircraft.



The last SAS Land Rover variant that I am aware of, excluding the small batch of improvised diesel Defender 90 gunships built to escort the Gulf War SAS resupply convoy, is the one spotted in Sierra Leone last year and which we featured in the August 2000 issue.
At the time I speculated that it might have been one of the Tdi-powered batch which entered service just after the Gulf War, but I am now not so sure. I still think it was diesel powered, but suspect that it may have been an experimental or trials configured vehicle rather than a conversion to one of the ##KK## series vehicles.
As always when dealing with SAS matters, it is very difficult to get a straight reply to questions due to the obviously necessary degree of secrecy which must be maintained on much of their operational detail. However, enough bits of the jigsaw have fallen into place to make me doubt my original assessment. I suspect it may be some time before more info on this one surfaces.

no longer big enough
As I briefly mentioned in my Loose Ends article in last month's LRM, it looks likely that forty-plus years of Land Rover service to the SAS could be drawing to a close with the replacement of the One-Ten DPV by a much larger vehicle capable of tackling more demanding terrain. From what I have gleaned from the limited amount of official documentation on what is widely assumed to be the contract for the One-Ten DPV successor, a vehicle with an all-up combat weight in excess of five tonnes is required.
Clearly, a conventional 4x4 Land Rover with standard chassis and drive train could not be expected to meet this requirement and still provide a good degree of mobility and high road speed, so it is unreal to ask it to do this. As Land Rover is a bulk car manufacturer, rather than a constructor of bespoke military vehicles, it was only a matter of time before the SAS needs parted company with the manufacturer's product portfolio. Nevertheless, something in the order of forty-five years of continuous service to the Special Forces is still something of which to be proud.
The SAS Land Rover lineage may be coming to an end, though I expect a few DPVs will soldier on for a while longer, but the marque has already earned itself an unequalled record of achievement in a very elite sphere.
It will be a long time before memories of the Pink Panthers fade. Vehicle restorers, collectors and museum curators, not to mention book and magazine publishers, will ensure that.

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