Recce in the 8th Army

[holdfast]

Did each armoured regiment in the 8th Army include a recce troop (if only in theory), or was recce left to complete regiments (as it was in the BEF in Belgium)?
ie does my Alamein era Armoured Regt need a recce troop, and if so, of what? I would venture Stuart Honeys, which would of course add to the maintenance and repair nightmare that such units were.

[sultanbev]

By Alamein each armoured regiment had a RHQ Recce Troop of about 6-9x Daimler Scout Cars, one-two models in BKC terms.
The Stuarts were still "battle tanks" at this time.

[fred.]

Mixed tank regiments where pretty common in the 8th Army. 

I looked at 3 RTR in detail, and photos of models are here http://www.kerynne.com/games/BritishDesert.html - which really need re-taking in better light

And they ended up with a squadron of Crusaders, another of Grants and a third with Shermans. How they kept spares for this many different tank types!! At one point they did standardise on Stuarts, but this was a rare point of homogeneity.

[holdfast]

Daimlers it is then.
The rationale for the mixed types within a regiment seems to be that whenever a delivery of a new model of tank arrived, the tanks were sent forward quickly, and it was deemed better to give everyone a squadrons worth of improved tanks rather than fully equipping a third of the units with the new tanks. So by Alamein the newly arrived Shermans displaced the oldest model, in that case the Valentine.