Monthly Archives: July 2021

Sure, sure, but do you know of the Colt BOA?

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The Colt BOA was only made in limited numbers for a single year, then sold through a single distributor, making it probably the most elusive and desirable of the company’s double-action revolvers.

Between 1950 and 2003, Colt delivered to wheel gun aficionados a series of seven now-classic “snake” guns: Cobra, Python, Diamondback, Viper, BOA, King Cobra, and Anaconda. Some of these were more popular and widespread, such as the Diamondback which was made in both .22LR and .38 Special, while some were less frequently encountered, such as the Anaconda which was made in .44 Mag and .45 Colt. For seekers of the seven serpents, however, a couple of these guns are almost impossible to find: the Viper, which was just a regular catalog item for Colt in 1977, and the BOA, which is even rarer.

In fact, for many Colt fans, it is kind of a holy grail.

More in my column at Guns.com, where I checked out BOA #513.

Tip of the Spear

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Sail looking kinda rough, but keep in mind that Springer was commissioned 28 years ago. Also, how long before you spot the M249 light machine gun?

APRA HARBOR, Guam (July 8, 2021) Sailors aboard the Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine USS Springfield (SSN 761) depart Naval Base Guam after completing a regularly scheduled evolution with the submarine tender USS Emory S. Land (AS 39). Springfield is capable of supporting various missions, including anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface ship warfare, strike warfare and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Victoria Kinney)

Commissioned in 1993, it was announced last month that Springfield would have her homeport shifted to Guam, which will now host five submarines at a time. It was just two years ago that the attack boat shifted homeports from Maine to Pearl Harbor, joining SUBRON 7.

Halifax on Display

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Check out this great overhead of the Royal Canadian Navy frigate HMCS Halifax (FFH 330), at the time flagship of Standing NATO Maritime Group Two (SNMG2), during Operation Reassurance in the Mediterranean, 30 August 2019.

Note her “HX” helicopter deck identifier, roughly amidships Harpoon cans, VLS Sea Sparrow 4-packs next to the Harpoons, 57mm Bofors hood ornament, assorted small boats in three different sizes, and her hangar-mounted CIWS. Canadian Forces Photo RP24-2019-0034-007 by Corporal Braden Trudeau, Formation Imaging Services

Commissioned 29 June 1992, the lead ship for the 5,000-ton Halifax-class frigates is optimized for ASW, carrying a hull-mounted sonar, two twin Mark 32 Mod 9 torpedo tubes, and a magazine for 24 Mk 46 torpedos to feed both the tubes and an embarked CH-148 Cyclone helicopter. For AShW, she has 8 Block II Harpoons while her anti-air/missile defense is limited to 16 verticle-launched ESSM Sea Sparrows, a Phalanx Block 1B CIWS, and a 57mm Bofors Mk3. Still, for her intended mission, the class has a great layout and it is too bad the U.S. Navy doesn’t have 30 of these in lieu of littoral combat ships. 

Halifax returned to Canada yesterday morning, finishing over six months underway as the flag for Standing NATO Maritime Group One (SNMG1).

Happy Birthday, Herr Glock

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Born 19 July 1929 in Vienna during the old Wilhelm Miklas days of the original Austrian Republic, Gaston Glock purportedly served as a teen in the German Wehrmacht late in WWII (although good luck finding exactly what he did, as he has long professed to have shot a gun before test-firing his own prototypes in the 1970s). Filing his first patent in 1953 at age 24 while the country was still under Allied occupation, he founded GLOCK Ges.m.b.H in 1963 in his Deutsch-Wagram garage workshop. Reportedly started out with a Russian surplus drill press, he took it from there, eventually moving into creating injection molding parts and components, specializing in household goods such as hinges, curtain rods, and brass fittings.

Early Austrian Federal Army contracts for grenade casings and machine-gun belt links built to spec led to a bigger one for a relatively innovative polymer-handled field knife in 1978. That contract set the stage to compete against Austrian firearms giant Steyr for a contract to replace the Bundesheer’s myriad of pistols with a single, universal design in 9x19mm.

Left with the flotsam of the Imperial-Royal era (Dreyse M1907, Roth–Steyr M1907, Frommer Stops, Broomhandle Mausers and Steyr M1912) the old Republic (Frommer FÉG M37s, Browning Babys), the German WWII days (Luger P08s, Walther P38s, Radom VIS, and CZ 27), a decade of Allied occupation (Tokarev TT33s, American M1911A1s) and interwar contracts (“OO” series Browning Hi-Powers, French Manurhin-made PPKs) the Austrians had a logistical nightmare when it came to pistols (chambered in no less than seven different calibers!) and the country was sandwiched between an increasingly chilly and muscular NATO and Warsaw Pact.

To make a long story short, Glock’s new prototype 9mm 17+1 capacity pistol pulled a stunner and beat out the favored Steyr GB18– which the Army had been flirting with since 1974– (as well as 20 other designs from around the world) for the win, being adopted as the Pistole 80 by the Austrian military, winning a tender for the gun that would become the Glock 17 in the summer of 1982.

The rest, as they say…

Happy 92nd birthday, Herr Glock

Cavalry Barracks, Hounslow Closes After 228 Years

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The historic walled enclave at Hounslow dates to the threats of the French invasion of England in 1793 but had been used by the British Army for generations before that– back to at least the days of Cromwell and James II. Florence Nightingale was reported to have arranged the hospital there. A young Winston Churchill passed through Hounslow several times in 1896 while a second lieutenant in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars.

In WWII, Eastern Command was based there, reading for the invasion from Mr. Hitler, and, later, most of the replacements for Montgomery’s 21st Army Group cycled through the base on their way to the Continent.

The historic base, in the Southwest of Greater London, was long a favorite garrison for the Guards, used since the 1970s by the Grenadiers, Scots Guards, Welsh Guards, and Irish Guards– its last tenants– in succession.

1st Battalion Irish Guards special St Patrick’s Day Parade at their Barracks in Hounslow, 3.16.2017. MOD photo by Sgt. Rupert Frere.

Now, with the reforms and rebasing initiatives in the ever-shrinking British Forces, the flag has come down at Hounslow for the final time. Its buildings and grounds will be developed for their real estate potential.

103 years Ago: I will Hold

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Via the National Museum of the Marine Corps:

On 19 July 1918, 1st Lt Clifton Cates, who would later become the 19th Commandant of the Marine Corps, sent this legendary message back to his command during the fighting at Soissons. At the time, his company, No. 79 of the Sixth Marines, was holding the line by its fingernails along with remnants of the regiment’s 2nd battalion, in the face of stiff German opposition. 

Cates, who was Commandant during Korea, would see his Marines involved in the mud once again, albeit 30 years apart. 

Lieutenant Colonel Ray Murray, commanding the 5th Marines, shows a captured percussion fired, black powder wall gun to Commandant of the Marine Corps General Clifton B. Cates, in Korea. From the Photograph Collection (COLL/3948), Marine Corps Archives & Special Collections

The Kids are Alright…

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One of the stops I did while on the road filming last month was to drop in on America’s fastest-growing school sport at the Minnesota Trap Shooting Championship in Alexandria – which for the record is the world’s largest shooting sport event – with over 6,500 student-athletes in 300 high school teams taking the field over the course of nine full days of competition.

It was pretty impressive.

Time Capsule, Bonita in Beantown Edition

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95 Years Ago:

Check out this great shot of the V-class/Barracuda-class diesel-electric submarine USS V-3 (SF-6) at the Boston Navy Yard, most likely in June/July 1926, shortly after her commissioning at the Portsmouth Navy Yard, Kittery, Maine.

Note her big 5″/51 on deck, impressive for a submarine deck gun, and the signalmen atop her fairweather. Photo courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection

The most impressive part of this shot, in my opinion, is the ships in the background. Note the historic frigate USS Constitution, at least one cruiser, and the lattice masts of at least one battleship.

For the record, V-3 would be one of the few U.S. Navy submarines to pick up a name instead of a number (most in the 1910s-20s lost theirs rather such as Warship Wednesday alumni USS Salmon, err USS D-3). She was renamed USS Bonita, 9 March 1931, and reclassified (SS-165), 1 July 1931.

An older boat taken out of mothballs in 1940 as war loomed, Bonita patrolled in the Pacific off Panama until after the U.S. entered World War II, then transitioned to patrolling the East Coast then, later, training duty out of New London and was decommissioned even before WWII ended, on 3 March 1945, sold for scrap seven months later.

However, “Old Ironsides” remains.

What the Glock?

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Intended for “an undisclosed foreign government” the contract for the Glock 19 Mariner was not completed and these interesting and very functional collectibles are now filtering out to the market.

I’ve been kicking one around for about a week. Spoiler alert, the ones spotted in the wild in the States are, by and large, standard Gen 3 G19s but have a few, um, maritime changes.

More in my column at Guns.com.

Bon 14 juillet à tous! (With Echos to 1941)

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Of interest to military history buffs, the 4,400-strong French military parade down les champs Élysée to celebrate the 232nd anniversary of Bastille Day yesterday was led by a 232-member company of the famed “Les marsouins de Leclerc” of the Régiment de Marche du Tchad or RMT.

Régiment de marche du Tchad leading the parade. Respect aux anciens, et vive la France!

The full, 2 hour parade: 

As discussed before here, today’s RMT shares the lineage of the old Senegalese colonial infantry regiment of Chad (Régiment de Tirailleurs Sénégalais du Tchad, RTST), from which a young Major Philippe Hauteclocque (under the nom de guerre, Leclerc) handpicked a column of 400 to strike out from that rare Free French colony against the key oasis of Koufra in Italian Libya in January 1941. They went on to win other honors fighting alongside the Allies at Fezzan (1942), Tunisia (1943) Alençon (1944), Paris (1944), and Strasbourg (1944).

Les marsouins de Leclerc is also the name of a popular French military graphic novel series covering the regiment’s history, from “Koufra to Kabul.”

Those who are students of military history will also appreciate the irony that the RMT is carrying France’s new infantry rifle, the Heckler und Koch HK416. Seen here in rehearsals last week: 

Also note they wear the fouled anchor badge of the Troupes de Marine on their kepi, although they are a mechanized infantry regiment in the French Army, another throwback to the old colonial days. Their unit patch is the old Free French Lorraine Cross. 

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