No Warship Wednesday today.
Paul Harrell just passed, which is a big bummer to millions in the gun community.
Like a real gent in a time of lads, he filmed an “I’m Dead” video just for the occasion, as one does, apologizing for letting his viewers down.
“As always, don’t try this at home, and thanks for watching”
Thanks for everything, Paul.
29 August 1915, 109 years ago today: Frank Hurley’s picture of the Endurance, stuck fast in the Antarctic ice, during the polar night, illuminated using about 20 flashes.
“Half blinded after the successive flashes, I lost my bearings amidst the hummocks, bumping my shins against projecting ice points and stumbling into deep snow drifts,” the photographer noted.
Born in 1885, Hurley accompanied British explorer Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition which saw Endurance crushed in the ice in October 1915. The survivors, Hurley included, were rescued by a Chilean trawler the following August.
A collection of Hurley’s glass plates, photographs, and notes from his half-dozen Antarctic journeys are held by the State Library of New South Wales.
Some 80 years ago, the 25 August 1944 issue of “Yank” magazine carried a wide shot of a “Tanker in the Marianas” on the cover, showing said helmeted armored vehicle crewman amidst a scene of urban wreckage, his trusty mount behind him and seemingly camouflaged by various sheet metal bits and local signage.
The shot, from a series by Yank’s own SGT Bill Young and LIFE’s Peter Stackpole, is of 20-year-old CPL Thomas O’Neal of the 2nd Marine Division’s 2nd Tank Battalion as he rests against his Fisher-made M4A2 Sherman Tank after securing the town of Garapan during Operation Forager, the Battle of Saipan, in late July 1944.
Of note, only the Marine Corps, the Russian Army, and the Free French Forces predominantly used the diesel-powered M4A2 Sherman, while the Army had standardized the M4A3, with its gasoline-fueled Ford GAA engine, for its own mass production.
The ad behind O’Neal, printed by Saichi in Nakajima, is for Yuchu “stomach disease tameyui” of the Makoto Sheiro Yutada gastrointestinal and pulmonary medicine company, based in Osaka City, Tennoji Mito. In short, for stomach pills (almost) good enough for the Emperor himself!
While on Saipan, both 2nd and 4th Tanks shrugged off hits from Japanese 47mm guns and teamed up to decimate a battalion of the Emperor’s Type 95 Ha-go light tanks– one of the few large tank-on-tank fights seen in the Pacific in WWII.
O’Neal, his M1938 helmet still plugged into his tank and an M1911 in a shoulder holster across his chest, seems less than impressed.
Thomas “Tom” Everett O’Neal was born on 28 April 1924 in Long Beach, California, and enlisted in the Marines at the ripe old age of 17 just a week after Pearl Harbor. Volunteering for tanks, he fought at Guadalcanal and Tarawa before the landings on Saipan.
O’Neal survived the war without injuries and returned home to his high school sweetheart to start a family. Called back to active duty in July 1950 to head to Korea, he fought with the Marines at Inchon, Seoul, Wonsan, and around the Chosin Reservoir before returning home to later retire from the Los Angeles Police Department in the late 1960s. He then moved with his wife to Oregon and took up woodworking, belonging to the Oregon Old Time Fiddlers “where Tom played the guitar.”
Thomas O’Neal passed away in 2007 at the age of 83, leaving behind a “wife of 65 years, two sons and two daughters, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.”
As for 2nd Tanks, formed on 20 December 1941, at Camp Elliott, San Diego, they cased their colors in 2021, capping 80 years of service to the Marines. It was the final Marine tank unit, a decision that could lead many future Devil Dogs to take stomach pills.
Here we see this amazing shot, some 80 years ago this week, of the Ruler (Bogue) class Royal Navy escort carrier HMS Nabob (D 77) as she doggedly returns to base, very well trimmed aft, her stern low down in the water, after being hit by a German torpedo on 22 August 1944.
She lost 21 of her crew but the survivors couldn’t quit her.
Hudson, F A (Lt) Royal Navy official photographer Imperial War Museums (collection no. 4700-01) A 25368.
Constructed in Seattle under the name USS Edisto (ACV/CVE-41), Nabob instead entered British service on 7 September 1943, with over two-thirds of her crew being Canadian.
Less than a year later and half a world away, Nabob, loaded with Wildcat Mk V fighters and Avenger Mk.IIs from 852 and 856 Naval Air Squadrons, were in the main force attacking KMS Tirpitz in that German battlewagon’s Norwegian stronghold during Operation Goodwood.
It was then, after the first strike was recovered, that a Type VIIC U-boat on its 8th patrol, U-354 (Oblt. Hans-Jürgen Sthamer), encountered our little “jeep” carrier and pumped a spread of FAT torpedoes into her just after 01.14 hours on 22 August 1944. One hit, blowing a 32-foot hole below her waterline aft of the engine room and causing extensive flooding.
Sthamer tried to finish off the wounded carrier with a Gnat torpedo but it was instead soaked up by the Buckley-class destroyer escort HMS Bickerton (K 466), sending the greyhound to the bottom of the Barents Sea with 38 dead.
The British sloop HMS Mermaid and the frigate HMS Loch Dunvegan would in turn send U-354 and all hands to the cold embrace of the sea floor courtesy of dozens of depth charges.
Nabob, her engine room shored up against the open ocean, managed to limp to Scapa Flow some 1,070 miles at a steady ten-knot clip. She somehow even managed to get a few of her Avengers airborne when a sonar contact suggested another U-boat blocking her path.
As her galley and mess facilities were out of service, the skeleton crew that shepherded their hogging carrier back to Scotland had to get by on “short rations and rum for the five days it took to get the ship home.”
It was a marvel of damage control and was cited as an example to emulate in RN publications for years.
Declared a constructive loss as repair to her warped shaft could not realistically be accomplished she was returned to U.S. Navy custody in March 1945.
Sold for scrap the next year to a breaker’s yard in Holland, she was in fact found still serviceable and, converted to mercantile service, steamed for another 30 years.
Never doubt a Jeep carrier.
Often regarded by some as Canada’s first aircraft carrier, her ship’s bell was retained by the RCN and is in the Naval Museum of Halifax, CFB Halifax. Although her crew cut off her guns and jettisoned several of her planes to cut weight and correct trim lest water poured into her hangar deck from the stern, they couldn’t bring themselves to 86 the bell.
Did it ever really get any cooler than Alain Delon?
An avid gun collector, Indochina vet, and movie tough guy who influenced generations of action filmmakers has passed away.
Alain Delon was born in November 1935 in the Paris suburb of Sceaux, France, and four years of his childhood living under German occupation.
After turbulent adolescence with time at a foster home and Catholic boarding school followed by a stint in the French Fusiliers marins during the Indochinese War in the 1950s— which included service at Dien Bein Phu and catching a court-martial charge for liberating a jeep in Saigon for personal use– Delon found himself discharged and on the streets of Paris and soon found him living as a literal pimp in Montmartre.
The French Navy and Marines in the 1950s had a war that precluded the American “Brown Water Navy” of the 1960s and 70s. U.S. Navy Historical & Heritage Command photo NH79376
The square-jawed young man caught a break in the movie industry that saw him appear in the first adaptation of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (“Plein soleil”) in 1960 and on to a host of films working alongside some of France’s most iconic directors to include Jean-Luc Godard, Jean‑Pierre Melville, and Louis Malle.
It was his tough guy roles, alternating between gangsters early on and detectives later in life, that saw Delon make his biggest marks, including 1967’s Bushido assassin film “Le Samouraï,” 1970’s “The Red Circle (Le cercle rouge),” 1973’s “Big Guns (Les grands fusils),” 1975’s ” The Gypsy (Le gitan),” and 1982’s “The Shock (Le Choc).” He even crossed over into American cinema, notably in the spy film “Scorpio” opposite Burt Lancaster.
These films, many of which were later cited as favorites and influences by later action directors like Quentin Tarantino and John Woo and actors such as Keanu Reeves, Delon built a lasting cult following around the world.
The Internet Movie Firearms Database has more than 40 listings of the guns he used on-screen, leaning heavily toward Smith & Wesson revolvers and Colt M1911s with the occasional Glock, Beretta, and Manurhin thrown in for good measure.
A firearms enthusiast and collector ever since his military stint in Indochina, Delon maintained a personal shooting range at his home because, well, freedom, right? Sadly, the long arm of the law caught up with him earlier this year and seized 72 unlicensed guns from his estate, because France.
Delon passed on Sunday, aged 88, leaving behind “at least” four children.
Reposz en paix, Alain.
Twenty-year-old Ens. Darrell C. “Smoke” Bennett, USNR, stands beside “Smokey’s Lucky Witch”, his FM-2 Wildcat, onboard the ill-fated Casablanca class escort carrier USS Gambier Bay (CVE-73), August 1944. The young aviator strikes a jaunty pose carrying an M1911A1 pistol in a shoulder holster, along with a mag pouch and survival knife on his gun belt, as he leans on the fuselage and exhaust-frosted engine cowling, a Composite Squadron Ten (VC-10) insignia painted below the cockpit windshield, and his plane number (White 27) on the starboard wing.
Note the exhaust-streaked cowling and nose art. Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. Catalog #: 80-G-243864
Just three months after the above image was snapped, Gambier Bay was lost during the “Sacrifice of Taffy 3” in the Battle off Samar on 25 October 1944– the only American aircraft carrier sunk by enemy surface gunfire during WW II.
Bennett was in the air at the time and was able to divert to nearby Tacloban Field, where the Army was setting up a base for P-61s and P-38s. The field, only partially constructed and very recently liberated from the Japanese, turned into muddy chaos as dozens of homeless Wildcats and Avengers were forced to land there throughout 25 October. Not to be deterred, pilots helped Army aerodrome personnel refuel and reload with anything available, then took back off to try and chase away the Japanese surface group.
After continuing to operate from fields around Leyte, VC-10, which had lost 10 men on 25 October as well as most of its planes, was shipped back home to be reconstituted at NAAS Ventura and would end the war on one of Gambier Bay’s sisters, USS Fanshaw Bay (CVE-70).
Bennett would survive WWII as well as later service in Korea, continue his Navy career as a pilot, a flight instructor, and as Commander Fleet Air Miramar, retiring in 1965. CDR Bennett received the following decorations: Air Medal (5), Presidential Unit Citation, Navy Unit Citation, Korean Presidential Unit Citation, WWII Victory Medal, Navy Occupation Service Medal (Europe), National Defense Service Medal, Asiatic Pacific Campaign Medal, Korean Service Medal, and the United Nations Service Medal.
Retiring to the Florida panhandle after a second career as a corporate and personal pilot to Hollywood types, CDR Bennett was a well-known supporter of the Pensacola National Naval Aviation Museum, where one of his former airframes was on display, and the USS Gambier Bay Association.
CDR Bennett passed in 2020, aged 96, and is interred at Barrancas National Cemetery, Pensacola, leaving behind “two sons, seven grandchildren, and 15 great-grandchildren.”.
For more on Taffy 3, be sure to check out “The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors” by James D. Hornfischer.
Group Captain (ret’d) John Allman “Paddy” Hemingway, DFC, AE, just turned 105 years young on the 17th.
Joining the RAF at 21, he flew No. 85 Squadron Mk I Hurricanes over the beaches at Dunkirk and in the Battle of Britain. As noted by the RAF, “Paddy is the last verified surviving pilot of the Battle of Britain.”
He was one of just 3,000 Fighter Command pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain. This force included a hodgepodge of 145 Poles, 88 Czechoslovaks, 29 Belgians, 13 Frenchmen, and a single Austrian from Nazi-occupied Europe– as well as 10 Irishmen. Some 544 Fighter Command pilots lost their lives in the three-month campaign.
Speaking to Parliament on 20 August 1940, Churchill famously said, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” when characterizing the efforts of those brave young men from throughout Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the U.S. who held off the Luftwaffe and went a long way to dashing Hitler’s Unternehmen Seelöwe plans.
Their main duty station is the Alabama State Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Spanish Fort and since 2017, when the Armed Forces Honor Guard of Baldwin County started with just nine original members, have rendered over 1,000 military honors throughout the area.
Today, they have 22 part-time members but they are dwindling and need more willing and able volunteers to continue the mission.
From some 80 years ago this month comes this amazingly detailed and vibrant period Kodachrome.
Original Caption: “Armament men must exercise extreme caution in loading .50 cal. machine guns of a plane. 8th AF. Extreme caution must be exercised in loading .50 cal. machine guns of a P-47 fighter. It may mean the life of the pilot of another victory. These men are experts as you can see by the number of Jerries shot down by the pilot of the plane who is none other than Lt. Col. Francis Stanley “Gabby” Gabreski, Oil City, Pa., leading ace in the ETO, with 28 planes to his credit. Left to right: Sgt. John A. Koval, Rochester, NY, and Sgt. Joe Di Franza, East Boston, Mass.”
8th AF Photo K 2618, rec’d September 1944 (but taken in July 1944) from BFR, Filed War Theatre #12– England– Armarment and Gunnery. National Archives Identifier 325596069. Local ID: 342-C-K-2618
If you look at the loading door, there is a belt loading diagram. Of note, the P-47 could carry as many as 425 rounds per gun, with eight .50 cals, giving it a “throw” of some 3,400 rounds, which was tremendous compared to other U.S. fighters (1,840 rounds for the 6-gunned P-51 Mustang and 2,400 for the similarly armed F4U Corsair.) Also note that rather than a mix of tracers and other ammo, the belts all seem to hold standard M8 “silver tipped” armor-piercing incendiary (API) ammo belts ammo, which means this could just be a publicity shot and not a real “war load.”
Take count of “Gabby’s” scorecard, at the time, of 28 Nassi victories, dating the image to around July 5/6 1944.
Born in Franciszek Stanisław Gabryszewski in 1919 to immigrants from Frampol, Poland, Gabreski went through the USAAF’s Aviation Cadet program while at Notre Dame in 1940, and by late 1941 he was a 2nd LT in the 45th Pursuit Squadron of the 15th Pursuit Group at Wheeler Army Airfield, Hawaii, where he tried unsuccessfully to engage the Japanese on 7 December from behind the controls of an obsolete P-36 Hawk. Volunteering to work as a liaison with the Free Polish pilots of the RAF in England, Capt Gabreski was flying Spitfire Mark IXs with No. 315 (Dęblin) Squadron by January 1943 before he was tapped to lead the new 61st Fighter Squadron that summer, flying the P-47.
And the rest, as they say, is history, putting in 300 flying hours with the Eight Air Force on 166 combat sorties logged in just over 13 months and was officially credited by the USAAF with 28 aircraft destroyed in air combat and 3 on the ground between 24 August 1943 and 5 July 1944, making the 25-year-old the leading American ace at the time.
Lt. Col. Gabreski was shot down on 20 July 1944, spending the rest of the war with 9,000 other Allied airmen at Stalag Luft I in Western Pomerania, liberated in April 1945 by the Soviet Red Army.
Post-war, he chopped over to the newly formed USAF, while at the controls of an F-86 shot down 6.5 MiG-15s in Korea for 123 combat missions, totaling 289 for his career with 34.5 “kills.”
Gabreski retired on November 1, 1967, at the time commander of a wing of F-101 Voodoos. When he left the military, he had over 5,000 flying hours.
He earned the DSC, DSM, Legion of Merit, 2 Silver Stars, 13 DFCs, a Bronze Star, and 7 Air Medals. He passed in 2002, aged 83.
SMLE-armed Pvt. Harry Shelley, Co A, U.S. 132nd Infantry Regiment, 33rd “Prairie” Division receives the British Distinguished Conduct Medal from King George V, for his 4 July 1918 actions in the Battle of Hamel, where elements of the 33rd were attached in platoon-sized groups to Australian units– the first time American outfits were under British command in the Great War. The award was issued, among others, at Molliens, on 12 August 1918
The four companies of Yanks fighting at Hamel earned no less than 4 DCMs, 4 Military Crosses, and 6 Military Medals.
The same group was decorated with a host of American honors including at least one Medal of Honor (CPL Thomas A. Pope Company “E”, 131st Infantry Regiment, the last surviving Great War MoH recipient who died in 1989, aged 94) and 8 DSCs, with the above PVT. Shelley received one of the latter.
King George V and General John Pershing inspecting men from every unit of the 33rd American Division which took part in the fighting at Hamel on 4 July and Chipilly on 8 August. Molliens, 12 August 1918. IWM Q 9259
Activated in July 1917, the 33rd was formed from the Illinois National Guard and, from Hamel through Saint-Mihiel suffered almost 7,000 casualties (KIA – 691, WIA − 6,173) in just five months on the Western Front.
Reformed for WWII, they would fight in the Pacific from New Guinea to Luzon, earning six Presidential Unit Citations after suffering another 2,500 casualties.