In the above video shot by my homie Ben Philippi, Sig’s Rich Morovitz talked to us at SHOT Show about the U.S. Army’s new M17 sidearm and points out some of the differences between the military’s variant and winner of the landmark Modular Handgun System contract and the standard Sig Sauer P320. Besides the manual safety– an Army requirement– Morovitz also goes into detail on the removable top plate for a Leupold DeltaPoint Pro sight, which is a big move for a MIL-STD handgun meant for the common Soldier in the field.
And in celebration, here is a picture of the Ton-class minesweeper HMS Packington:
Why the connection?
After service in the Royal Navy for a few months in 1959, the little minesweeper was transferred to the fledgling South African Navy and recommissioned as SAS Walvisbaai. Under the South African flag, she served for 41 years during the darkest days of that country’s fight against Soviet/Cuban-backed forces to the North.
Still don’t get it?
The humble 153-foot/440-ton vessel was then sold on the surplus market for a song and subsequently used in 2003 as the R/V Belafonte in the Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, filling in, of course, for Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s famous R/V Calypso, herself the retired 136-foot Royal Navy minesweeper HM J-826.
Now you get it…
Packington/Walvisbaai/Belafonte is now a yacht, the Mojo, under private ownership.
Calypso, long out of service after sinking in an accident in 1996, is being refurbished under the direction of the Cousteau Society for use as a museum.
The Navy was already experienced in marine salvage prior to World War II. However, the Navy did not have ships specifically designed and built for salvage work when it entered WWII, and it was not until the start of the war that salvage ships become a distinct vessel type.
Then came the purpose-built Diver-class.
Built at Basalt Rock Co., Napa, Calif. — a gravel company who was in the barge building biz– 17 of the new 213-foot vessels were constructed during WWII. Fitted with a 20-ton capacity boom forward and 10-ton capacity booms aft, they had automatic towing machines, two fixed fire pumps rated at 1,000 gallons per minute, four portable fire pumps, and eight sets of “beach gear,” pre-rigged anchors, chains and cables for use in refloating grounded vessels. And of course, they were excellently equipped to support divers in the water with one double re-compression chamber and two complete diving stations aft for air diving and two 35-foot workboats.
They had a surprisingly long life and, even though they almost all left U.S. Navy service fairly rapidly in the 1970s, several gained a second career. Two went to South Korea where one, ex- USS Grapple (ARS-7) is still active as ROCS Da Hu (ARS-552) in Taiwan and another, ex-USS Safeguard (ARS-25), went to Turkey. The latter is supposedly still active as TCG Isin (A-589) though her replacement is nearing.
Three, Escape (ARS-6),Seize (ARS-26) and USS Shackle (ARS-9) went to the Coast Guard as USCGC Escape (WMEC-6), USCGC Yocona (WMEC-168) and USCGC Acushnet (WMEC-167) respectively.
USCGC Acushnet (WMEC-167) arriving at Kodiak, AK, 26 August 2008. Photo courtesy Marine Exchange Alaska. Via Navsource
Escape was sold for scrap in 2009, Seize/Yocona was sunk as a target in 2006 and Shackle/Acushnet, decommissioned in 2011 as the last Diver-class vessel in U.S. service then put up for sale for years in Anacortes, Wash with efforts afoot to save her in one form or another.
Well it looks like Shackle/Acushnet was in fact picked up last summer by a non-profit group called Ocean Guardian, who intend to keep the Coast Guard name and put her back to work as a research ship/museum/education vessel in conjunction with the National Maritime Law Enforcement Academy.
Seems like you can’t keep a good old salvage ship down.
Joe Meaux with Aklys Defense is ready to send his 7-pound integrally suppressed AKSV Velociraptor into regular production.
The Baton Rouge-based manufacturer has burned up the social media pipes in the past week with their Krink-sized shiny AK SBR and was at SHOT Show with a couple of examples in tow.
Developed over the past 10 months as their fifth (hence “V”) integrally suppressed AK design, the prototype on hand was crafted on a Sharps Bros custom lower with a folding stock but everything from the trunnion forward is all-Aklys. The magic is a 12-inch multi-stack chamber system sandwiched around a 9.3-inch barrel to keep a handy and lightweight profile.
“It’s meant for an optimal defense carbine,” Meaux todl me about the Velociraptor which is small enough to fit in a backpack with the stock folded.
PACIFIC OCEAN (Jan. 20, 2018) Amphibious assault ship USS America (LHA 6), front, transits the Pacific Ocean conducting a passing exercise next to Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70).
(U.S. Navy Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Sean M. Castellano/Released)
Of course, America can operate 16 or more F-35Bs, generating 40 sorties in a 14-hour period, which is more than most of the world’s carriers out there, and the last America (CV-66) was a full-fledged carrier that held the line for 30 years during the Cold War, but hey…
Built at Pascagoula and commissioned Oct. 2014, the current America served for almost three years as a test bed for the class and non-carrier operations of the F-35B while underway and is just now finishing up her maiden deployment, a seven-month cruise as the flag of her ARG hosting the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit.
Warship Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2018: The wandering Dutchman of the Baltic
NHHC Catalog #: 19-N-11-21-10
Here we see the Holland-class Pantser-dekschepen (protected cruiser) HMNLS Gelderland of the Royal Netherlands Navy (who else?) at the Jamestown Exposition Naval Review, Jamestown, Virginia, 12 June 1907– with her laundry out to dry as a schooner passes. Designed before the 20th Century, she would go on to have the longest life of her six pack of sisters and, modernized to fight a very different war than she was intended, suffer a curious fate.
The Hollands were the Dutch answer to the Royal Navy’s Apollo-class second-class protected cruisers (3,600-ton, 19.75 kts, 6×6-inch, 6×4.7-inch) and the class leader was ordered in 1894. The first flight of three cruisers (Holland, Zeeland, Friesland) had a displacement of 3,840-tons while the second batch (of which Gelderland was the lead followed by Noord Brabant and Utrecht) went 4,100-tons as they held 12 Yarrow boilers as opposed to 8 in the original design and went just a couple feet longer. Speed was 20-knots on the latter trio while the ships were armed with a pair of 149mm/37cal singles fore and aft and a half-dozen 120mm/37cal guns in broadside as well as smaller guns, all made by Krupp. The “protected” in their designation came from a thin coating of Harvey nickel armor.
They were handsome craft and could both show the Dutch flag in the Caribbean-protecting the Netherlands Antilles, the Pacific where Holland held the sprawling Netherlands East Indies, and of course in metropolitan waters in Europe.
Class leader HMNLS Holland colorized by Postales Navales
The subject of our tale, Gelderland, was laid down at Nederlandsche Stoomboot Maatschappij, Rotterdam in 1897. Commissioned 15 July 1900, our new cruiser, on the orders of Queen Wilhelmina herself, was dispatched to carry the former Transvaal president “Oom Paul” Kruger into exile from Portuguese Mozambique, through British sea lanes, to the French port of Marseille.
She left Africa with Kruger on board in October, arriving in France on 22 November where a crowd of 60,000 awaited.
President Paul Kruger of the South African Republic (left) leaving Delagoa Bay, Mozambique on 20 October 1900 aboard HNLMS Gelderland. Photo Nat. Cult. Hist. Museum”, presumably the National Cultural History Museum in Pretoria, South Africa.
From the Med, Gelderland proceeded to her first posting, the Dutch East Indies, where she served until rotating back to Europe in 1905.
She was off again in 1907 to represent the Netherlands at the Jamestown Exposition Naval Review in Hampton Roads.
GELDERLAND (Dutch cruiser, 1898) Caption: At the Jamestown Exposition Naval Review, Jamestown, Virginia, 12 June 1907. Description: Catalog #: 19-N-11-21-9
Then came a sortie to Curacao in 1908-09 along with her sister Friesland in response to a brush war from Venezuelan strongman Cipriano Castro who was pissed that his political rivals were being sheltered by the Dutch in their Caribbean colony offshore.
Castro sent his small naval forces to meet the much more imposing Dutch fleet and Gelderland promptly captured the Venezuelan coast guard ship Alix off Puerto Cabell on 12 December 1908. The Venezuelans offered no resistance and the Gelderland towed the Alix as a prize into Willemstad, making headlines around the world. The Dutch then proceeded to effect a naval blockade of the South American country’s coastline. The crisis only ended when vice president Juan Vicente Gómez, with U.S. help, seized power and Castro fled to Germany.
Returning to Europe, Gelderland was rushed to the Bosporus in 1912 to protect Dutch interests during the Balkan Wars, and a 100-man landing force from her crew along with Korps Mariniers of the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps defended the legation area in Constantinople.
The Kingdom of the Netherlands was a well-armed neutral during World War I, though the Germans occupied neighboring Belgium and the country absorbed a million refugees (as well as 30,000 escaped Belgian soldiers and the majority of the British 1st Royal Naval Brigade). Though spies from all sides swarmed across the country and German U-boats and mines sank numerous Dutch merchantmen and fishing craft, the Dutch Navy, though mobilized, escaped conflict.
Dutch protected cruiser Hr. MS. Gelderland at Vlissingen, the Netherlands in 1916, The photo was published in the Dutch magazine De Prins dated 23 September 1916 page 148. The Dutch queen Wilhelmina is visible while walking on the pontoon bridge. Source: http://warshipsresearch.blogspot.com/2011/10/dutch-protected-cruiser-hrms-gelderland_27.html
Gelderland 1917
After the war, the class was considered obsolete and whittled down. To be sure, two units, Friesland and Utrecht were decommissioned in 1913 before the conflict and had been scrapped already. Another pair, Holland, and Zeeland, were decommissioned in 1920 and 1924 respectively. Noord Brabant was disarmed in 1920 and used as a barracks ship and hulk at Vlissingen while only Gelderland was retained in service– as a gunnery training ship.
Pantserdekschip Hr.Ms. Gelderland, 1930, via Nederlands Instituut voor Militaire Historie
She undertook regular training missions and was often seen in warmer waters.
Gelderland well-lit during the night, a display in celebration of the birth of Princess Beatrix in January 1938. The photo was most likely taken at Curacao. (Collection J. Stolk via NetherlandsNavy.nl) http://www.netherlandsnavy.nl/index.html
In 1939, the pivotal year that the Netherlands would try to escape a Second World War, Gelderland was armed with some additional .50 cal and 8mm machine guns in preparation for the conflict.
When the Germans swarmed into the country in May 1940, the Dutch managed to scuttle Noord Brabant at her moorings, but Gelderland was captured at Den Helder. Renamed by the Germans as Niobe after the figure in Greek mythology, the nearly half-century-old cruiser was heavily modified to serve as an anti-aircraft cruiser (flakschiff), she was given a FUMO 213 Würzburg radar, searchlights, and outfitted with a mixed battery of eight 105mm, 4 40mm, and 16 20mm guns.
Via NetherlandsNavy.nl
The Germans sailed the old Dutchman (slowly) to the Baltic in 1941 where she served as a floating AAA battery to protect key coastal points from the Red Air Force.
Niobe notably fought off Soviet swarms at the Finnish city of Kotka where the Russians thought she was the Finnish coast defense ship and former Warship Wednesday alum Väinämöinen. At Kotka, she was attacked by waves of more than 150 Red A-20 and Pe-2 bombers on 16 July 1944, sending her to the bottom that night after 9 bomb hits.
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.
With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.
PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.
Auto Mag’s president, Patrick Henry, told me it’s the same story over and over. With less than 10,000 original Auto Mags out there, and those numbers declining through attrition every year, the guns are rare and often cherished collectors’ items that rarely get a chance to leave the safe. Therefore, seeing a collection of them– brand new– is a jolt.
“It’s amazing to see guys stop as they walk past and then one will turn their head and gape and then grab their buddy and pull them over to take a look,” said Henry, who has shepherded the South Carolina-based company, reborn in 2015 with the express purpose to bring the iconic gun back from the dead.
The Honolulu-based Coast Guard Cutter Sherman (WHEC 720, shown here as she returned home Sept. 20, 2017, after a 94-day, 16,000-mile patrol in the Arctic Ocean and the Bering Sea. (U.S. Coast Guard photo by USCGC Sherman/Released)
The 50-year-old Hamilton-class 378-foot high endurance cutter USCGC Sherman (WHEC-720) has returned from her final trip under a U.S. flag last week following a 76-day patrol in the Bering Sea. She is scheduled to decommission in March.
From USCG Public Affairs:
During the three-month patrol, the crew supported the safe transit of a disabled vessel over 800 miles to Dutch Harbor, enforced fisheries regulations in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska. They also provided a command and control platform capable of embarking a helicopter, thus providing search and rescue coverage to those operating in the Bering Sea.
Sherman has a storied history including being the last remaining U.S. Warship in the Coast Guard or Navy to have sunk an enemy vessel. It is also one of only two cutters to hold the Vietnam Service Award and the only cutter to hold the Combat Action Ribbon for action in the Vietnam War.
In 2001 it became the first cutter to circumnavigate the world, after conducting U.N. sanctions enforcement duty in the Persian Gulf and goodwill projects in Madagascar, South Africa and Cape Verde.
Adding to Sherman’s history, in March of 2007, a boarding team dispatched from the cutter discovered 17 metric tons of cocaine on the Panamanian-flagged freighter, Gatun. This seizure remains the largest drug bust in U.S. history with an estimated street value of $600 million. As the record holder, Sherman proudly wears the Golden Snowflake.
The crew rounded out the cutter’s storied career in the Bering Sea; conducting 16 fisheries boardings, issuing four fisheries violations and one safety violation, ensuring the integrity of the $6 billion fishing industry. As the primary search and rescue asset in the region at the time, Sherman also ensured the safe transit of the crew of the Resolve Pioneer, a Dutch Harbor-based ocean-going tug, following a severe casualty at the far end of the Aleutian chain, restricting their speed and maneuverability.
“As Sherman and her crew return home from this final patrol, it is humbling to look back on the history and the accomplishments of this crew and the previous,” said Capt. Steve Wittrock, commanding officer of Sherman. “This final patrol has been significant in that the Bering Sea mission is one of the most demanding and historically important in the Coast Guard and I am very proud of the way that the crew has performed throughout the last two challenging months.”
Sherman is one of the Coast Guard’s four remaining 378-foot high endurance cutters still in operation. The 1960s era fleet of cutters is presently being replaced by the 413-foot national security cutters, which will soon serve as the Coast Guard’s primary, long-range asset. Honolulu will serve as a homeport to two of the national security cutters, replacing Sherman and the already decommissioned Morgenthau.
So far, the State Department has passed on three of the stricken “378s” to the Philippines (USCGC Hamilton, Boutwell, Dallas), two to the Nigerian Navy (Gallatin and Chase) and two to the Bangladesh Navy (Jarvis and Rush). Morgenthau went to the Vietnam Coast Guard last year. With Sherman decommissioned, only USCGC Mellon (WHEC-717) and Midgett (WHEC-726) based in Seattle, and Munro (WHEC-724) in Kodiak remain in U.S. service and are expected to be replaced by the National Security Cutter program by 2021.
180126-N-LY160-0243 PEARL HARBOR (Jan. 26, 2018) The crew of the Virginia-class fast-attack submarine USS Missouri (SSN 780) renders honors to the Battleship Missouri Memorial following a homeport change from Groton, Conn. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Michael H. Lee/Released)
The Iowa-class battlewagon USS Missouri (BB-63) was the third U.S. Navy ship to carry the name, which she picked up at her christening 29 Jan 1944, sponsored by Ms. Mary Margaret Truman. The Mighty Mo, some 887-feet of floating firepower, received a total of 11 battle stars for service in World War II (where she hosted the Japanese surrender), Korea, and the Persian Gulf, and was finally decommissioned on 31 March 1992 after serving just 16 of those years on active service and the rest in mothballs. Her name was stricken from the Navy List in January 1995 and she has been a museum vessel, the final battleship to be moored at Pearl’s Battleship Row, since 1998. There, she watches over the remains of the USS Arizona.
The current Missouri, now also stationed in Hawaii, was commissioned in 2010.
The previous namesakes are BB-10, a Maine-class battleship commissioned in 1902 and scrapped in 1922 as a result of the looming Washington Naval Treaty; and the first Missouri, a short-lived 10-gun sidewheel frigate commissioned in in 1842 and destroyed in an accidental fire at Gibraltar the next year.
Made it back alive (though the flight back from Vegas was full of walking wounded) so you neither have to avenge me nor get the opportunity to split up my gear.
Here are some of the more interesting developments, though I will circle back around later in the week with a couple of tales of interesting people I met on the way.
Franklin Armory’s BFS III-equipped Revelation “firearm” seems like it would be an SBR, but it only seems that way. (Photos: Chris Eger/Guns.com)
So I got to check out the Reformation by Franklin Armory, and like I called it, it uses a non-rifled barrel (straight lands and grooves) with rifle ammo (.300BLK/5.56mm) to give you a non-NFA short barreled rifle (because, duh, it’s not legally a rifle!). I made contact on the range with it at close distances and it shot well but is billed with an accuracy of just 4 MOA at 100 yards, which is better than the old Brown Bess– or your typical SKS for that matter– but sill is generating a lot of hate as something as a Stormtrooper rifle. More on that in my column at Guns.com here.
Would you like to know more? (Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)
Then there was the new Tavor TS12 shotgun, which looks like low-effort Starship Troopers cosplay but brings 15 shells of 12 to the party in a bullpup design that is just 29-inches overall (and 10 high!). Recoil impulse was…different. Meh, bullpups. More here.
Mossberg points out that their new 590M series, shown with a 20-round mag inserted above, allows for quick reloading in a smaller package than the other guys’ single-stacks. A pair of 10-round mags, standard to the shotgun, is seen to the left (Photos: Chris Eger/Guns.com)
The surprise of the party was Mossberg’s HUGE double stack 12 gauge mags for a dedicated series of 590 shotguns. Sure they are expensive ($100) and giant (like a loaf of french bread for the 20-rounder big) but they are still smaller than comparable single stacks from Remington and Black Aces while being similar in price to Saiga mags. More on that here.
