Warlords always get the coolest guns
War Noir recently uncovered a short clip from Haiti’s near-lawless streets, apparently showing Galil-, Kalashnikov-, and M14-equipped members of the Unite Bawon Laplen (UBP) preparing for war as their leader blesses other gang members and their weapons with rum, as one does.
Lanm SanJou, the gang’s leader, was shown mogging with a very rare American-made Colt R80 Monitor, a subvariant of the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle.
Colt produced only about 125 Monitors in its Connecticut factory, the result of a “cleanup” of leftover parts from its Great War contract to supply 12,000 BARs to the military.
Capable of emptying a 20-round magazine of .30-06 rounds in under three seconds when cyclic, the Colt Monitor could bring it when needed. (Photo: Springfield Armory National Historic Site, courtesy of Alex MacKenzie, curator)
Note the massive compensator. In the early 1920s, Colt made the early Auto Ordnance Thompson submachine guns, which also included a Cutts. (Photo: Springfield Armory National Historic Site, courtesy of Alex MacKenzie, curator)
With a bit of infamy, Colt loaned Texas Ranger Frank Hamer a slow-selling Monitor (Serial No. C-103168) to help bring Bonnie and Clyde to ground, and Dallas County Deputy Sheriff Ted Hinton used it in the 1934 ambush that well-ended the outlaws. The gun lives in the Ranger Museum today.
Of the 125 made, at least 90 went to the FBI, and the specimen in SanJou’s possession could have come from U.S. stocks during one of the periods when the U.S. assisted the Gendarmerie d’Haiti.
For much of the Duvalier period and into the early 1990s, the Haitian military and police mirrored the U.S. military of the late 1940s.
Haitian Army 1980s-early 1990s
Seeing the Monitor reminds me of the worst M1903s I’ve ever seen, two five-digit serial-numbered Springfields that I was able to handle at the U.S. Army’s Museum Support Center at Anniston Army Depot in 2017.
They had been recovered, among tons of other relics, during the 1994 Uphold Democracy operation.
Among the other Uphold Democracy relics recovered was a M3A1 Stuart, found with five improved M5A1s, all apparently acquired by Papa Doc from “an Italian arms broker during the 1950s after being refurbished by the automobile company Ferrari.”
Kept in service until the 1970s, they were left to ruin.
The U.S. Army brought the M3A1 back to Anniston, where it was later restored and sent first to Baumholder, then to Fort Bliss, where it remains today.
Ex-Haitian M3A1 Stuart in the Fort Bliss Museum, Wikimedia Commons
With the U.S. military on the ground off and on in Haiti since at least 1915, invited or not, and with the Pentagon currently supporting the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force (recently supplying C-130s to airlift Salvadoran special forces into Port-au-Prince following the gang ambush and disappearance of Salvadoran personnel attached to the force), the prospect that SanJou’s monitor could possibly “come home” isn’t totally off the table.
Cue the “it belongs in a museum” memes.