Between 1956 and 1986, the U.S. military ordered some 23,000~ rimfire semi-auto Mark I and Mark II pistols direct from the company for the use of service marksmanship teams.
Bill Ruger produced his Ruger Standard pistol in 1949, taking lessons from the Japanese Nambu and the Hi Standard .22. His neat little $37 pistol with its 9-shot magazine and 4.75-inch barrel turned out to be his first product and a great seller. So much so that by 1956, the U.S. military sought out a 6 7/8 inch heavy tapered barrel version for use by military shooting teams for practice and competition. The first order, for 4,600 of these guns in serial number range 75845 to 79945 was produced in that year. All were marked “U.S.” on the top right hand side of the receiver.
Now that doesn’t mean that all the guns in that range are GI pistols, as the factory made commercial guns right alongside those for the military. Over the next 15 years, at least another 1,500 guns were bought in a half dozen or more smaller contracts spread out from serial number 150036 to 331744 (about 1 percent of the production volume for that period).
Then of course there were the Mk II models in at least two different barrel lengths and secret ‘hush-puppies” that Mitch WerBell had a hand in…
The Imperial German Army in 1914 was actually an army of confederated German speaking countries that had formed after 1871. The Prussians, augmented by a number of minor states such as Hamburg and Anhalt, made up the bulk and provided some 19 Corps including the Guards, the I-IX, XIV-XVIII, XX, and XXI. Bavaria had three independent corps (I, II and III Bavarian Army Corps) as well as their own air force.
The Royal Saxon Army supplied two Corps, the XII and XIX. Würtemburg marshaled its forces into the XIII Army Corps. The Grand Duchy of Baden provided the lansers for the XIV Army Corps. Each corps had two divisions and each division had four infantry regiments organized in two, two regiment brigades.
As each of the states had their own regiments that were part of the larger national army, they carried two names. For instance, the 4th Regiment of the Royal Saxon Army was also the 103rd Regiment of the Imperial German Army.
Which explains the below:
“A portrait of a Saxon infantryman with the 4th Regiment Royal Saxon Army, 103 Infantry Regiment of the German Reich (Kgl. Sächs. 4. Infanterie-Regiment Nr.103), possibly taken in his garrison at Bautzen, Eastern Saxony, circa 1916. He wears the model 1907/10 Feldrock tunic with the belt buckle with the Saxon motto, ‘Providentiae Memor’ (Providence Remember), and is armed with a Gew. 98 mauser rifle fitted with a S98/05 bayonet. (Image courtesy of the Drake Goodman Collection, colorized by Benjamin Thomas.)”
Well, it seems they finished the target barge up, towed her out towards the Straits of Hormuz, and went at it with missiles, rockets and small fast attack craft (which the footage looks kinda creepy of that mind you).
Anyway, the Iranians were super psyched, saying, “The message of these wargames is that others should pay good heed to the point that they should not take any action near the Islamic Republic’s security circle,” Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, the Guard’s chief commander said.
“We believe (Iran) to be the defenders of the Strait of Hormuz’ security and showed this in our wargames today.”
To which Big Blue replied after watching the tape of the JV’s scrimmage :
Cmdr. Kevin Stephens, the spokesman for the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet in Bahrain, downplayed the attack on the mock ship, saying the U.S. military was “not concerned about this exercise.”
“We’re quite confident of our naval forces’ ability to defend themselves,” he said, according to AP. “It seems they’ve attempted to destroy the equivalent of a Hollywood movie set.”
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday Feb. 25, 2015 A Narcissus in Tampa
Painting by Rob Gelhardt
Here we see the wooden hulled steam-powered gunboat USS Narcissus as she appeared during the Civil War. She was a needed addition to a fleet that was very much overtaxed.
When the U.S. Navy plunged headlong into the Civil War in 1861, the Navy List held the names of 90 vessels, only 42 of which, less than half, were in commissioned service. Even these ships were spread all over the world (9 were in the African Squadron, 3 in the Med, 3 in Brazil, 5 were in Japan or the East Indies, et.al) . Those ships in U.S. waters were hardly ready for modern naval combat on any scale. Compared to the giant Royal Navy who had a staggering 53 steam-powered ships of the line (that mounted between 60 to 131 guns and weighed between 2400 to 4200 tons), the largest ships in the U.S. service were five 1800-ton sail frigates which mounted but 50 guns each. Indeed, the French and Russians outmatched the U.S. Navy as well.
However, with a need to blockade some thousands of miles of coastline from Maryland to Mexico while chasing down Confederate raiders on the high seas, the force soon formed four powerful blockade squadrons as well as the Mississippi River Squadron to help strangle the South in Gen. Scott’s “Anaconda plan.”
By the end of the war in 1865, the Union Navy ballooned to 671 ships on its list and its rolls contained 84,000 sailors and another 13,000 Marines. They did this by a massive shipbuilding program in every yard north of the Mason-Dixon Line as well as taking up ships from trade.
The Narcissus was one of the latter.
Built as the civilian steam tug Mary Cook in East Albany New York to move ships out of port, she was completed in the summer of 1863. That year she was purchased by Navy buyers and, after adding a 20-pounder Parrott rifle to stern deck and a 12-pounder to her bow, the little 81-foot vessel was named, for reasons unknown, the USS Narcissus. This moniker was only used this one time in the Navy (*however a USCG buoy tender, WAGL-238, did repeat it in the 20th Century).
A rather interesting single-cylinder inverted steam engine fed by a coal boiler drove her at 14-knots, which was PT-boat fast for her day.
Commissioned 2 February 1864 at Brooklyn Naval Yard, she left for the Gulf of Mexico where she was to join Rear Admiral David Farragut’s West Gulf Blockading Squadron. The admiral’s father, George Farragut, had died at Pascagoula Mississippi in 1817 and as a young boy; David hung around New Orleans and the Mississippi Sound, which made it something of a bittersweet homecoming for him to be in charge of the squadron tasked to blockade those waters.
Farragut
Speaking of which, the Narcissus, due to her shallow 6-foot draft, was perfect for patrolling inside the waters of the Sound. Shallow draft schooners from Pascagoula and Biloxi ran the blockade with great regularity even while the Union fleet controlled Ship Island, which closed in half of the Sound. One of the most notorious, the 180-foot blockade-runner Fox, had only just been burned by her crew while hard aground off Pascagoula’s front beach (the wreckage of which can still be seen off 11th Street at low winter tide). However, there were others to pick up the Fox‘s slack.
Within weeks, the little Narcissus was victorious. On Aug. 24, 1864 she captured the confederate schooner Oregon in Biloxi Bay while under the command of 56-year old recessed U.S. District Judge and then-Acting Ensign William G. Jones. The Oregon had scrapped before with the steamer USS New London and Farragut had long ached to either catch or sink her. So, mission accomplished.
It was just after this prize that the little gunboat was ordered to Mobile Bay, the location of some very hot action when Farragut “dammed the torpedoes.” And by torpedoes, we mean floating naval mines. It would be Narcissus’s job to become one of the first mine-sweepers in history and, as the joke goes, any ship can be a minesweeper once.
As you may have guessed she caught a mine, (we mean torpedo) right in the teeth while off the Dog River Bar in Mobile Bay in 7 December and sank in the shallow mud there. Jones reported: ”. . . the vessel struck a torpedo, which exploded, lifting her nearly out of water and breaking out a large hole in the starboard side, amidships . . . causing the vessel to sink in about fifteen minutes.”
While Jones and the crew, which suffered no losses, were reassigned around the squadron, the Narcissus was raised for salvage. She was at Pensacola Naval Station when the war ended, undergoing repairs. Made seaworthy, she received her last crew.
She wasnt the last Union steam tug/minesweeper to hit bottom in Mobile Bay. On 12 April, the day Mobile finally surrendered, USS Althea struck a torpedo in the Blake River and sank while dragging primitive sweep gear in an effort to clear the channels of explosive devices. Like Narcissus, she was raised and repaired.
The two battered tugs were ordered to the East Coast for decommissioning and disposal. The two unlucky ships became separated off Tampa, Florida in a storm on the night of Jan. 3/4, 1866. It was then that Althea grounded on a sandbar and the two ships exchanged signals in the howling wind and rain but when the dawn came, the Althea, after working herself free, only found bodies and floating wreckage of her companion.
It is believed that Narcissus, under Acting Ensign Isaac S. Bradbury and with a 28-man crew, hit a shifting bar 1.5 miles northwest of Egmont Key at the mouth of Tampa Bay and her boiler exploded, destroying the vessel. No living crew members were ever recovered.
Although her war was short, the hardy tug survived a rebel torpedo, supported the capture of Fort Morgan, helped close off the Mississippi Sound, and in the end gave her charges over to the sea in what could be taken as some of the last casualties of the Civil War.
Her wreck has always been known to some extent, lying in pieces along the sandy bottom off Tampa in just 15 feet of water. Texas A&M extensively mapped the site in 1999, however, most relics of the vessel are long since gone, ether carried away by divers over the years or by Union troops who salvaged her cannon and anything else useable back in the 1860s.
Florida’s Underwater Archeological Preserves and the Florida Aquarium maintain excellent relics to include sheathing, lanterns, and other items that were recovered. Her rare steam engine, anchor, and screw rest remarkably intact along the ocean floor.
On Jan. 15, 2015, the inshore construction tender USCGC Vise (WLIC-75305), dropped a reef ball monument on the site of USS Narcissus
As for former U.S. District Judge and former U.S. Navy Acting Ensign William Giles Jones? He liked Mobile Bay so much that he remained there after the war and took up private practice as a lawyer, dying at age 80. Althea, the Narcissus‘s traveling companion, was sold in December 1866 in New York and remained in service as a commercial tug until the turn of the century.
Specs
Displacement: 101 long tons (103 t)
Length: 81 ft. 6 in (24.84 m)
Beam: 18 ft. 9 in (5.72 m)
Draft: 6 ft. (1.8 m)
Depth of hold: 8 ft. (2.4 m)
Propulsion: Steam engine
Speed: 14 kn (16 mph; 26 km/h)
Complement: 19 officers and enlisted
Armament: 1 × 20-pounder Parrott rifle, 1 × heavy 12-pounder
If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International
They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find http://www.warship.org/
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.
Nearing their 50th Anniversary, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.
The Rescued Film Project stumbled across 31 rolls of film shot by a U.S. Army soldier apparently in Western Europe during the latter part of WWII. While a lot of the pictures didn’t come out, and others are in poor shape, they have a really great collection of images including this German Army marked French Renault FT.17 Tank (we called them the M1917).
The same soldier shows up in many of the images, and its speculated that he may have been the shutterbug
Back in the 1980s, the West German Bundeswehr was a massive roadblock to the Warsaw Pact hordes coming through the Fulda Gap. Established on the 200th birthday of Scharnhorst on 12 November 1955, the force used largely Allied equipment and Nazi-era officers, but within a generation, both were replaced by some of the newest and most forward thinking leaders and gear in the World. German Leopard tanks were (and Model 2A7s today still are) seen as perhaps the most deadly armored vehicle in Europe.
Gerhard von Scharnhorst, 1755–1813, Chief of the Prussian General Staff and later one of Napoleon’s greatest thorns.
At the height of the Cold War, when fully mobilized, the Bundeswehr could count on nearly a million men under arms and some 4,000 Leopards to hold the gap.
Then came the great melting of the Berlin Wall, reunification with the East, and a general downsizing of the ‘Heer over the past 25 years.
Now, the 60,000-strong German Army has but two active Panzerbrigades and 225 Leopards of all types backed up by an equal number of Puma and Boxer armored vehicles.
And even this corps is struggling.
The very Stryker-ish German GTK Boxer. The Heer is buying 250~ of these to replace the vintage Fuchs APCs. Hopefully, they will come standard with machine guns.
As reported by both German and English sources on the “tip of the spear” of German rapid response forces:
“Late last year, as the German Bundeswehr was considering rebooting its expensive, failed Euro Hawk drone program, the army of the country with the fourth largest economy in the world fielded its newest armored vehicles in a major military exercise in Norway with broomsticks painted black and lashed in place of missing machine gun barrels. That detail was part of a German Defense Ministry report leaked to Germany’s public television network ARD that exposed widespread shortages of basic combat equipment.
According to the report, the Bundeswehr units deployed as part of a test of NATO’s Rapid Response Force in September were far from combat-ready: they deployed with less than a quarter of the night vision gear required. The units were also missing 41 percent of the P8 pistols and 31 percent of the MG3 man-portable machine guns they were supposed to deploy with. And none of the GTK Boxer armored vehicles that deployed were equipped with their primary armament—the 12.7 mm M3M heavy machine gun.”
The horribly abbreviated Moro Islamic Liberation Front, who has been fighting the government of the Philippines for autonomy since the 1960s off and on, has had something of a truce for the past three years. The thing is, with 11,000 heavily armed rebels in the field armed with everything from slingshots to Chinese-made RPGs and Dshk guns, their surplus stockpiles of arms figured in at least one very messy overseas sales scheme that wound up taking down a California state senator, old Leland “Tough on Guns” Yee.
Well the MILFs stumbled across a force of Philippine National Police Special Action Force commandos poking around in their area in January and, in an incident termed a “misencounter” by both sides, some 44 cops were left dead and much of their U.S. supplied (via the War on Terror) hardware, to include M249s, M4s, M60s, M240s, and other goodies, were captured.
This led to the rebels turning over a collection of 16 of these pieces this week in an effort to keep the peace.
Of course, some in the government pointed out that most of what the commandos lost is still unaccounted for, but hey, its the Southern Philippines, mano.
Three Grumman-designed fighters of the Confederate Air Force in flight (front to back): A General Motors FM-2 Wildcat (although painted as an F4F-3 of the USS Ranger’s airwing, VF-4 “Fighting Four” squadron), a Grumman F6F-5 Hellcat, and a Grumman F8F-2 Bearcat. The lineage is unmistakable. U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation photo No. 1996.253.7383.025
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday Feb. 18, 2015 Marshal Massena of Gallipoli
Click to bigup
Here we see the Charles Martel-class pre-dreadnought battleship of the Navy of the French Republic, Marshal André Masséna. Just about one of the coolest late-19th century warwagons, she is a classic of Edwardian naval tumblehome hull architecture.
This 11,000-ton, 369-foot warship today would be classified as a cruiser or even a Zumwalt-class destroyer, but in 1892, she was an ass kicker. An incredibly complicated system of two dozen Lagrafel d’Allest water-tube boilers fed manually by coal pushed three triple expansion engines that could propel her and her near sisters at about 17-ish knots, which was pretty good for the day.
in port
If she had to fight, a pair of 12”/40 caliber (305mm) Modèle 1893 guns, mounted in single turrets fore and aft, could hole an enemy ship with a 770-pound AP shell out to 13,00 yards. These were backed up by another pair of 10-inch guns, 16 smaller mounts and, like most battleships of the era, had submerged torpedo tubes. She was made to be able to slug it out, being fitted with up to 18-inches of steel plate armor.
A great overhead shot. Note the armament plan, with the two 12-inchers fore and aft and two single 10-inchesr port and starboard.
Laid down at Ateliers et Chantiers de la Loire in 1892, she was named after André Masséna, Duc de Rivoli, Prince d’Essling, one of Napoleon’s original 18 Marshals. Of course Massena turned his back in little N when the Bourbons came back to power and kept it turned during the 100 Days, but hey nobody is perfect.
The namesake battleship was commissioned in June 1898, after five years on the builder’s ways. Coming out during the Spanish-American War, in which most of the ships in combat were armored cruisers smaller and less heavily armed than Masséna, her design was felt validated.
French pre-dreadnought battleship Masséna, alongside one of her sisters
She spent the next decade in happy peacetime maneuvers, gunnery trials, and practice. However, by 1908 a funny thing happened. You see after the Russo Japanese War of 1904-05, dreadnoughts of her type were hamburger. In fact, four Russian Borodino-class battleships, themselves actually more modern versions of the Masséna and her sisters, lasted just minutes in combat. With the all-big-gun HMS Dreadnought being commissioned in 1906, she was further made obsolete.
Masséna was sitting in French mothballs when World War One erupted and she was eventually dusted off. Even old battleships are useful in a Great War after all. She was to be used to help force the straits to the Bosporus during the Gallipoli Campaign in late 1914 along with her recently recalled sisters.
Note the hull shape
There, Bouvet, one of these sisterships struck a mine and sunk in just two minutes during operations off the Dardanelles on 18 March 1915. That was indicative of campaign. When that whole thing unraveled, Massena, the 17-year-old bruiser was scuttled in shallow water and used as a breakwater to help evac the ANZAC/French forces in 1916. In 1923, the postwar French Naval Bureau sold the hulk, which they still technically owned, to breakers for scrap.
Her three surviving near sisters in French service, Charles Martel, Jauréguiberry, and Carnot, were out of front line service after Gallipoli and scrapped before the next war, the class forgotten.
As for Masséna himself, his sabre is on display at the musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Neuchâte
Specs
Charles Martel class line drawing as commissioned. Image from Shipbucket
Displacement: 11,735 tons (11,550 long tons)
Length: 112.65 m (369 ft. 7 in)
Beam: 20.27 m (66 ft. 6 in)
Draft: 8.84 m (29 ft. 0 in)
Propulsion: Three triple expansion engines
Speed: 17 kn (31 km/h; 20 mph)
Complement: 667
Armament:
2 × 305 mm/40 (12 in) Modèle 1893 guns
2 × 274 mm/45 (10.8 in) Modèle 1893 guns
8 × 138 mm/45 (5.5 in) Modèle 1888 guns
8 × 100 mm (3.9 in) guns
4 × 450 mm torpedo tubes (submerged)
Armor:
Belt: 450 mm (18 in)
Turrets: 400 mm (16 in)
Conning tower: 350 mm (14 in)
If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International.
They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find http://www.warship.org/
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.
Nearing their 50th Anniversary, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.
