24 NAVY NEWS, DECEMBER 2010


Stand-by f THERE are advantages


To be sure, there’s no railway station, no cinema any more, nor hospital at Haslar, and a trip on the A32 at rush hour possesses all the joy of watching an autopsy.


to living in Gosport.


But if you were walking down the shingly beach at Browndown overlooking the sheltered waters of Stokes Bay at, say, 2pm on Thursday October 28 2010, then you’d have been treated to the panoply of amphibious fire power the Royal Navy and Royal Marines can bring to bear when asked. There were landing craft. There


were raiding craft. There were 70 Royal Marines Commandos storming ashore with SA80 rifles at the ready. There was a Challenger 2 tank courtesy of the Army (but ferried ashore courtesy of 6 Assault Squadron Royal Marines). There was two rather large assault ships (HMS Albion and RFA Largs Bay). Further out to sea the guns of


HM Ships Kent and Chatham barked,


the tiny patrol boat


HMS Tracker made a nuisance of herself. Overhead buzzed Merlins and Sea Kings, while Harrier jump jets put in some of their final public appearances. All in all, not a bad show... However good the good folk of Gosport are, this was not laid on for their benefit. The beach assault at Browndown was the climax of four days of demonstrations laid on by the Senior Service for its junior counterparts, VIPs, industry leaders and foreign guests. Most of the 350 or so hailed


spectators Advanced


Command


from the and


Staff Course at Joint Services Command and Staff College – which has traditionally given this week of demonstrations the name ‘Staff College Sea Days’. But not any more. No, now it’s a Maritime Combat Power Visit. It’s also returned to the Solent after several years of being run in and around Plymouth.


Despite the change of name and change of location, the aim of the ‘visit’ is to give middle- ranking Army and Royal Air Force leaders an insight into what the Royal Navy does day-to-day (replenishments at sea, main gun, Minigun and machine-gun firings, helicopter transfers, Merlins pinging for submarines, warships fending off suicide bombers – the latter role played by HMS Tracker – then fending off attacks by Hawk jets) to the more complicated art of synchronising an air-sea assault. It’s not all action, however, for the staff college ‘students’: they also spent a day in the dockyard touring warships and receiving briefings from Royal Navy personnel on the Service’s global missions, not least from the crew of Ark Royal, whose ship is history.


about to pass into


“The students are lectured at Shrivenham about the various assets that each of the Services


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