By the end of WWII in Europe, the term stonk was applied by the British Army at large for just about any concentrated artillery bombardment, yet to the artillery, where the term originated, it stood for Standard Regimental Concentration. This was a 525 yard block of fire which could be quickly calculated and plotted with a celluloid map template. It would be fired by the twenty four 25 pr's in a field regiment, or eighteen 5.5" in a medium regiment and so on. Soon, though, as writer and former artilleryman Ian V Hogg wrote, all and sundry would be asking for any size of target to be stonked and "if you started mumbling in your beard about 525 yard frontages, he looked at you as if you were mad". Similarly with the artillery term "barrage", which was often used by people who wanted a bombardment. I am currently reading a divisional history of one of the British divisions involved in North West Europe and it is clear from many diary entries that many people were using stonk incorrectly. Do you have any comment on this or any other specialist military term which escaped into the wider world and lost its meaning?
This is an interesting one! Spike Milligan used to say that it was the sound of mortors going of and I agree with him. When the round leaves the tube you do get a "Stonk" sound! But how about the expression "the full nine yards" intially it refered to the length of the belts for the vickers gun but now is used to encourage people to go the full way. :ph34r: :ph34r:
