Colonel Cooper’s Bren Ten: Shooting Too Close to the Sun
Legendary Marine Colonel John Dean “Jeff” Cooper was possibly one of the greatest ambassadors of the arts of combat shooting. The Colonel was and remains among the most influential thinkers on modern tactical shooting yet his greatest foray into the handgun market was the ill-fated Bren Ten.
Though he often taught pistol with 1911s, Cooper was a fan of the Czech designed CZ-75, a 1970s double stack 9mm with great ergonomics. The Colonel liked everything there was about the CZ, except its caliber, deeming it too low-powered. After reading an article Cooper wrote about the CZ and its perceived limitations, two like-minded gunmakers, Tom Dornaus and Mike Dixon, reworked the basically public domain design, stretching it out to a 10-shot doublestack magazine holding .45 ACP.
This gun in hand, they went to talk to the Colonel.
Read the rest in my column GUNS.com at
The Neat Little Davy Crickett Rifle
Your child’s first gun is a momentous choice to make. Children who are brought up without an introduction to firearms become adults who are afraid of guns. One of the best firearms on the market today is the Cricket series of single shot 22 rifles.
This is no high-power sniper rifle that you can run out and take Cape buffalo with at 1000-yards during a hailstorm. Its super-simple youth model rifle that is just…tiny. The has a short length of pull, an ideal for those pint-sized shooters. The firearm will only accept one round (in the chamber) and after inserting the .22 caliber cartridge, you have to cam the turn bolt forward then cock the striker before you can fire. This gives the user, especially new shooters, a simple and safe experience.
A nice little rear peep sight that is adjustable for windage and elevation with a tall ramp front post help train those basics of proper alignment. A pushbutton safety on the bottom of the rifle will lock the bolt from being able to cycle. This safety button pin has a locking key that Mom or Dad can use to disable the rifle to keep those unauthorized little hands out of it….
Read the rest in my artcile at Firearms Talk.com
The Semmerling LM-4 Pistol: Sleek, strange, secretive, sought
Sure, it looks like a smooth little semi-auto mouse gun but, as with many things in this crazy world, under it’s sleekness hides some strangeness. First, it’s not a pee-shooter, but rather a 5-shot .45 ACP hardballer. Second, its not semi-auto at all but rather more of a pump-action. It’s the Semmerling LM-4, and though it may look like a swan to some, at its heart it’s still one odd little duck.
Since the beginning of modern time, there have been rough handed individuals whose services are retained by certain quiet branches of the government to maintain a fragile system of covert operations. These individuals are sent to exotic places, meet interesting people, and occasionally have to fight for their lives to make it back home.
In the 1970s, a small shadowy company in the Boston area by the name of the Semmerling Corporation began producing a compact little gun for the special purpose of arming such individuals. The primary tenants of the pistol was that it be a small and durable as possible, with absolute reliability but crucially pack a decent punch—no mouse guns, as the gun was to allow a covert agent working deep cover, to have a concealed firearm to engage in violence if they could not otherwise extract themselves from the situation.
Read the rest in my column at GUNS.com
US and German troops vs SS Panzers…it really happened
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/12/world-war-ii-s-strangest-battle-when-
americans-and-germans-fought-together.html?utm_source=feedburner
On 5 May 1945—five days after Hitler’s suicide—three Sherman tanks from the 23rd Tank Battalion of the U.S. 12th Armored Division under the command of Capt. John C. ‘Jack’ Lee Jr., liberated an Austrian castle called Schloss Itter in the Tyrol, a special prison that housed various French VIPs, including the ex-prime ministers Paul Reynaud and Eduard Daladier and former commanders-in-chief Generals Maxime Weygand and Paul Gamelin, amongst several others. Yet when the units of the veteran 17th Waffen-SS Panzer Grenadier Division arrived to recapture the castle and execute the prisoners, Lee’s beleaguered and outnumbered men were joined by anti-Nazi German soldiers of the Wehrmacht, as well as some of the extremely feisty wives and
girlfriends of the (needless-to-say hitherto bickering) French VIPs, and together they fought off some of the best crack troops of the Third Reich. Steven Spielberg, how did you miss this story?
The battle for the fairytale, 13th century Castle Itter was the only time in WWII that American and German troops joined forces in combat, and it was also the only time in American history that U.S. troops defended a medieval castle against sustained attack by enemy forces…read the rest at the link above.
Schloss Itter
Warship Wednesday, May 22 The Mighty Miss
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.
- Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday, May 22
Mississippi as a brand new battleship in WWI complete with lattice masts and disruptive anti-U boat camouflage
Here we see the New Mexico class battleship USS Mississippi (BB-41) in about 1918. The Mighty Miss had a career much longer than most other WWI-era battleships and gave good service for over forty years.
Laid down just a few months after the start of WWI in Europe, she was commissioned 18 December 1917 some eight months after the entry of the US into the Great War. Built as a oil-fired ship (most other warships of the era were coal burners), her WWI career was spent largely in US waters, a fleet in being along the US East Coast should the High Seas Fleet of Kaiser Wilhelm ever make a sortie to New York. In 1931 she was overhauled and modernized, spending almost all of the time period from 1919-1941 in the Pacific.
(Notice the much lower masts and more streamlined look. She was one of the most modern battleships of WWI, but sadly was pushing obsolescence by 1940)
She would have been at Pearl Harbor more than likely alongside her sisters New Mexico and Idaho, but all three ships were sent to the Atlantic in June 1941 to help enforce the neutrality patrol against Nazi U-Boats. Once the Japanese struck in the Pacific however, Mississippi and her sisters were sent racing back to the Pacific. For the first several months of the war she protected convoys up and down the West Coast as California braced for invasion. In 1943 she helped protect the landings in the Aleutian Islands. After conducting shore bombardments in Peleiu, Makin Island, Kwajalein, and others, she found herself in the last Battleship vs Battleship action– the Battle of Suriago Strait. There, Mississippi herself fired the final salvo in history by a battleship against other warships– contributing to the sinking of Japanese battleship Yamashiro.
(Again with the camouflage. During WWII her armament of anti-aircraft guns steadily increased)
More shore bombardments in the Philippines and Okinawa took place before she witnessed the surrender of Japan in Tokyo Bay, winning a total of eight battle stars. In 1946, while most of the rest of the pre-1938 US battleships were laid up and/or scrapped, Mississippi was reclassified from BB-41 to AG-128 (auxiliary, gunnery training/guided missile ship) and spent the next decade as a platform for development of surface to air and surface to surface missiles. For this her rear turrets were removed to give a platform of missile launchers. Without her, the RIM-2 Terrier and Petrel missiles would never have been adopted.
Mississippi firing Terrier missiles in 1955. This hybrid missile/gun arrangement was a wet-dream for battleship advocates for the next fifty years. When the Iowa class were eventually recommissioned in the early 1980s, they were given 16 harpoon anti-ship missiles and 32 Tomahawk cruise missiles in place of a few of the 5-inch twin mounts, but never a large SAM complement as envisioned earlier.
Stricken in 1956, at the time she was the last pre-WWII battleship in active service with the US Navy. Of the 12 WWII era US dreadnoughts, only three of the Iowa class were on active duty when Mississippi was decommissioned. The other 9 much newer North Carolina, SoDak, Alaska, and Iowa-class battleships and battle cruisers all being laid up in red lead row as members of the mothball fleet. Within a few years all of these except the Iowas would be pulled from mothballs and sent either to live the rest of their lives as museum ships, or broken up.
Mississippi herself was scrapped without ceremony at the end of 1956, just shy of her 40th birthday. Today knick knacks of the ship sail beneath the sea with the modern Virgina-class submarine USS Mississippi, after being carried for a while by a large nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser of the same name while her bell and silver set are on display in her home state.
Specs
Displacement: 32,000 long tons (32,500 t)
Length: 624 ft (190 m)
Beam: 97.4 ft (29.7 m)
Draft: 30 ft (9.1 m)
Speed: 21 kn (24 mph; 39 km/h)
Complement: 55 officers, 1,026 enlisted
Armament: (1917)
12 × 14 in (360 mm) guns,
14 × 5 in (130 mm)/51 cal guns
4 × 3 in (76 mm) guns, and
2 × 21 in (530 mm) torpedo tubes
Armor:
Belt: 8–13.5 in (203–343 mm)
Barbettes: 13 in (330 mm)
Turret face: 18 in (457 mm)
Turret sides: 9–10 in (229–254 mm)
Turret top: 5 in (127 mm)
Turret rear 9 in (229 mm)
Conning tower: 11.5 in (292 mm)
Decks: 3.5 in (89 mm)
If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO)
They are possibly one of the best sources of naval lore http://www.warship.org/naval.htm
The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.
Nearing their 50th Anniversary, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.
I’m a member, so should you be!
Coast Guard Bringing Lost WWII Airmen Back Home
The service today began the public process of searching for a company who can bring three airmen killed in the line of duty – on November 29, 1942 – back home to U.S. soil.
The difficulty is that the three men, two from the Coast Guard and one from the Army, are encased in ice, 40 ft. below the surface near Koge Bay, Greenland, in their amphibious J2F-4.
The Grumman J2 Duck was one of the great unsung little aircraft of WWII. One of these planes has just been found 40 feet under the ice in Greenland with its two USCG crewmen and a rescued US Army aviator entombed.
“The United States Coast Guard has located a downed J2F-4 Grumman Duck aircraft in the arctic of Greenland that was lost during World War 2,” reads the sources sought notice in today’s Federal Business Opportunities website. “The aircraft is in a remote region of the arctic and buried under 40 feet of ice.” Onboard, presumably, are Coast Guard Lt. John Pritchard, Petty Officer 1st Class Benjamin Bottoms and U.S. Army Air Force Cpl. Loren Howarth.
Keep reading at Aviation Week
Never let it be said that the U.S. Coast Guard doesn’t take care of its own in addition to others.
Nostalgia Trip: 5 Classic 50s Battle Rifles
In the 1950s cars were made out of steel, cigarettes were a food group, and men scraped the hair from their face with a straight razor. That decade where Elvis was thin and everybody liked Ike was also the golden age of the battle rifle.
In 1953, the infant NATO military alliance adopted the US-developed 7.62×51mm T65E3 cartridge as its standard rifle round. This round was destined to replace the US .30-06 fired by the M1 Garand, the British .303 of the Commonwealth Armies, the 8mm Mauser of the West German Army and others. It brought to the table a shorter length round that still had the power of the cartridges it replaced—but with less recoil. This led to a number of so-called battle rifle designs, ending the 70-year reign of the bolt-action rifle in military service. and Guns.com is looking at five classics, many of which are still around today:
Read the rest at GUNs.com
(The m14 in the hands of the soldier above in Afghanistan is likely as old as his father, but is still trucking. Classics are like that)
Goodreads
