In the Donguz training ground in the arid Orenburg region this month, the Russians have been running the division-sized Tsentr-2019 (Centre 2019) military exercise. The Russian Ministry of Defense just did a photo dump showing off the goods, complete with lots of Mi-24 Hinds and T-72B3 tanks.
Sure, they are updated 1980s monsters that scream Tom Clancy, but they still look decidedly wicked and will have you waking up in a Wolverine-style cold sweat.
Between its innovative “squeeze-cocking” feature and its West German craftsmanship, Heckler & Koch’s P7 was billed as “the best combat pistol” on the market when it was released in Europe, pitched to police and military use.
Once it crossed the Atlantic, this morphed into the world’s “most expensive handgun” in marketing materials in the U.S. in the 1980s with a list of the reasons why the P7 was superior to the more economical options.
With a fixed cold hammer-forged barrel and polygonal rifling, the all-steel P7 was accurate while the 110-degree grip angle was billed as being very natural. Reliable, the P7 was designed so that an empty case would extract and eject even if the extractor was missing from the handgun. Using a hybrid gas-delayed blowback, recoil was light.
It was imported in a few different varieties.
This HK P7 PSP with a five-digit serial number is “PW Arms Redmond, WA” import marked and was produced in West Germany in the early 1990s.
This HK P7M8 is a Sterling, Virginia-marked import produced in West Germany in the mid-1990s. Note the difference in the trigger guard which now has a heat shield, the improved rear sight, and grip from the P7 above. The gun also has an ambi magazine release just below the guard and a lanyard loop in place of the original PSP’s heel-mounted release.
Add to this the P7M13, with the ability to carry 13+1 rounds, notably sported by fictional German terrorist-turned-crook Hans Gruber.
Ultimately, the P7 series was retired by HK over a decade ago but you can be sure that the legacy of these patrician pistols will endure as long as Die Hard is considered a Christmas movie.
Soviet frontoviks with a straw-camouflaged ZPU-4, a quad PM 1910 Maxim gun set up, getting ready for the Great Pumpkin.
Or maybe it was a Stuka they were looking for…
Nonetheless, Happy Fall!
Marine artist Robert G Lloyd was recently tapped by Royal Mail to paint both HMS Dreadnought, perhaps one of the most beautiful battlewagons ever, as well as the new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth.
The stamps are part of a eight-ship set that also includes: Henry VIII’s flagship Mary Rose (1st class), Charles I’s Sovereign of the Seas (later renamed HMS Royal Sovereign and in the mid-17th Century the most potent man-o-war afloat: £1.55); HMS Victory; HMS Beagle which carried Charles Darwin on his revolutionary evolutionary voyage (£1.60); ironclad HMS Warrior (£1.55); and, naturally, HMS King George V (£1.35).
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Navy Band’s Commodores jazz ensemble. They have a gala concert at Rachel M. Schlesinger Hall in Alexandria, Va., this afternoon at 3 p.m.
In the interest of, Happy Friday, here is this May 1945 U.S. Army Signal Corps image of an M4 Sherman tank crew from the Library of Congress.
111-SC-209070
Offical caption:
“A tank sunk in 5 feet of water waits for towing equipment. The Tank Commander gives vent to his feelings with a string of unprintable phraseology, while his driver uses a helmet to bale out the interior. Okinawa.”
HMS Prince of Wales (R09), second of the UK’s Queen Elizabeth-class carriers maneuvered out of the basin at Rosyth Dockyard yesterday and into the Firth of Forth. From there, she will wait for the time when the tide is right to head out to the North Sea and begin her contractor sea trials.
It will be the first time since 1941 that a British warship with the name has been at sea. Although the Royal Navy has previously used the moniker no less than six times going back to 1765, the last HMS Prince of Wales (53) was a King George V-class battleship that famously duked it out with SMS Bismarck, although still incomplete, only to be sunk by land-based Japanese bombers immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The well-worn battleship HMS Prince of Wales mooring in “peacetime” British Singapore, 4 December 1941. Only seven months earlier she had been under the guns of the Bismarck and six days after this photo was taken she was on the seabed (Photo: IWM)
THE SINKING OF HMS REPULSE AND HMS PRINCE OF WALES, DECEMBER 1941 (HU 2763) A Japanese aerial photograph showing HMS PRINCE OF WALES (top) and HMS REPULSE during the early stages of the attack in which they were sunk. HMS REPULSE had just been hit for the first time (12.20 hours). Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205022172
Let us hope the seventh Prince of Wales will see a much more happy career.
Colt first began marketing the semi-auto AR-15 Sporter to consumers in 1963 and continued to sell the SP-1 (R6000) series with few changes until 1984, since moving on to other AR-style rifles.
So last week, Colt signaled they were getting out of the consumer rifle market, at least for now, which basically means they weren’t going to sell AR-15s to the public. This set about much hand-wringing by some pro-gun advocates who called the company all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons and some high-fiving from anti-gun groups who all thought it fit their agenda of fewer guns in fewer places until that number is 0/0.
Sure, it was a big move. But it was one that you could see coming from a mile away.
Long the only game in the AR-15 market, Colt had exclusive rights to the platform for a generation after they bought the program from the Armalite Division of Fairchild Aircraft in 1961. However, once the basic design passed into the public domain, dozens of AR-specific companies such as Bushmaster, Daniel Defense, Eagle, and Olympic sprouted up, nibbling away at Colt’s dominance of the market.
More recently, traditional gun makers such as Remington, Ruger, Sig Sauer, Savage, and Smith & Wesson all jumped on the ever-growing domestic AR train, effectively crowding Colt out of its own niche. This has seen the company switch gears and return to popular offerings it long ago put to pasture, such as revolvers.
Then, on Wednesday, the other shoe dropped with the Pentagon saying that Colt had just won a $42 million M4 contract in the form of Foreign Military Sales to several U.S. overseas allies.
“Our warfighters and law enforcement personnel continue to demand Colt rifles and we are fortunate enough to have been awarded significant military and law enforcement contracts,” said Dennis Veilleux, Colt’s president and Chief Executive Officer, in a statement Thursday. “Currently, these high-volume contracts are absorbing all of Colt’s manufacturing capacity for rifles.”
So will Colt return to the consumer market once their military orders are filled? As long as they can be competitive, you can bet your sweet bippy they will.
And the beat goes on…
The Boeing/Saab T-X was selected on 27 September 2018 by the Air Force as the winner of the Advanced Pilot Training System program to replace the aging Cold War-era Northrop T-38 Talon. The downright cute little twin tail trainer will, in all likelihood, be around for decades provided it is successful.
The USAF currently has some 500~ T-38A/B/C models in inventory, with the newest example coming off the lines in 1972. It is envisioned that some 351 new T-X aircraft and 46 simulators are to be supplied by Boeing as part of the $9 billion program to put the venerable Talon to bed.
The T-X could also go on to be a sweet little scooter for budget air defense/COIN if given underwing hardpoints, after all, Saab runs the Gripen and in the past developed the Viggen, Draken, Lansen, and Tunnan, which all had a solid pedigree.
The T-X does look pretty sweet though.
Both of the current two Boeing T-Xs in flight.
While I suggested “T-60 Peashooter II” as a name update, in honor of Boeing’s last cute little combat-ish trainer, I have been overruled and the U.S. Air Force has named it the T-7A Red Hawk to honor the Tuskegee Airmen who famously flew the red-tailed North American P-51 Mustang in World War II (after working their way through P-39s, P-40s, and P-47s). The “Red Tails” of the 332nd Fighter Group were renowned for their work plastering Axis ground targets and successfully escorting B-17s and B-24s in the ETO in 1944 and 1945.
Which is better than the Peashooter II anyway.
British Lt. Jack Reynolds, aged 22, with LCPL George Parry in the background, gives the classic British two-finger salute to a reportedly grinning German Wehrmacht cameraman as he is captured near Arnhem, The Netherlands 19 September 1944, during the start of the worst chapter of Operation Market Garden, some 75 years ago today.
“Down the road, I saw a German chap with a camera and a huge grin on his face and I thought ‘what a bastard’ and gave him the V sign” Reynolds later said. (Photo: Bundesarchiv 497/3531A/34)
Reynolds, (SN 190738), joined the colors as a signaler in the Sussex and Surrey Yeomanry in 1939 and served in the Coastal Artillery during the Battle of Britain, exchanging fire with German big guns across the Channel in Dover. He later volunteered for the new glider-borne infantry with S coy, 2 Battalion, South Staffordshire Regiment (“South Staffs”) being stood up in 1942, which became part of the 1st Airlanding Brigade in the 1st Airborne Division.
He earned a battlefield commission by 1943, leading the company Recce platoon as part of Simforce through Operation Ladbroke, an element of the Allied invasion of Sicily, where he picked up the MC.
This officer with his party of nine men landed at 2225 hours some four miles south of the Battalion Rendezvous. He led his party throughout the night to Waterloo Bridge encountering stiff opposition on the way during which six of his nine men became casualties. On the way up he collected several stragglers, forming them into an organised group, eventually assisting in the defence of the Bridge, during which two more of his men were killed and another missing.
Throughout the fighting this officer set a very high example of courage and leadership in the face of heavy odds.
Leading S coy’s Mortar Platoon at Arnhem, and facing being overrun after two days of fighting after Allied armor failed to make it to the town in time to save them, Reynolds and his remaining men tried to break out westwards towards Oosterbeek and only took the reluctant decision to surrender after being pinned down and running out of ammunition and water.
The British 1st, 3rd, and 11th Parachute Battalions, along with the South Staffs, had made it to Arnhem but were so mauled that, when the survivors of the four units amalgamated near Oosterbeek on 20 September, they only counted about 450 combat effective members. The rest had been killed, captured, or were still holding out to the East in little pockets.
As for Reynolds, he spent the rest of the conflict in Germany as a prisoner of war, until his liberation in 1945. He was demobilized from the army in 1946.
Jack passed away last month, on 21 August, aged 97.
Another one of the Greatest Generation, lost
Vale, Lt. Reynolds.
And of course, remember the entire 1st (British) Airborne this week, who were sent epically “a bridge too far.”
For more on the battle, a great and amazingly comprehensive book about Market Garden is The Battle of Arnhem by Anthony Beevor.
I’ve spent the past several weeks digesting it and have no regrets.