Czech Cobra
A Cold War-era Czechoslovak soldier in class Pattern 1963 Tonak,závod Nasavrky rain camo along with a sense of humor:
Dig the Vz. 58 (V) side folder, tho
Also, this is why safety briefs exist.
Category Archives: weapons
You call that a tank? That’s a tank (or 3)
Via The Tank Museum:
A line-up of three generations of Australian tanks.
The Matilda in the middle is the oldest. It was first acquired by Australia in 1942 and used against the Japanese in New Guinea and Borneo until the end of the Second World War. Heavily armored, they were very popular. The last Matildas were retired in 1955.
On the left is the Centurion Mark 5/1. These saw service in Vietnam, where they proved highly effective and resilient. Unlike most users, the Australians kept the 20 Pounder gun throughout its life. 117 gun tanks were bought, with the first arriving in 1952.
On the right is the Leopard AS1, new to the Australian Army at the time this photograph was taken. The first arrived in 1976 and a total of 90 were bought. They were painted green all over – the brown color is mud!
If only they had some Bren carriers, Ford Scout Cars, M3 Grant medium and M3 Stuart light tanks to go with it, then they could cover the old school early WWII Australian Armoured Corps as well!
Australian soldiers move through the jungle of Papua New Guinea with their M3 Stuart tanks
Happy first day of Spring
The cherry blossoms always make me swell with joy this time of year– especially after a dark winter.
“In the cherry blossom’s shade
there’s no such thing
as a stranger.”
—Kobayashi Issa
Here we have a Japan Ground Self-Defense Force Type 74 (nana-yon-shiki-sensha) main battle tank under cherry blossoms somewhere in Japan.
Designed in the late 1960s as a contemporary of the U.S. M60 and the Soviet T-62/64, about 900 Type 74s were built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries as a replacement for Japan’s first indigenous Post-WWII tank, the Type 61, which is turn was a very M46 Patton-like design that mounted a 90mm popgun.
If it looks familiar, the Type 74 uses the hull of the German Leopard I– though with different suspension and a 10cyl MHI diesel– and equipped with a licensed Royal Ordnance L7 105mm cannon with a number of local improvements.
They have largely been relegated to second-line service since the 1990s when the very Leopard 2-ish Type 90 Kyū-maru MBT went into production and in the end will be replaced as the new Type 10 MBT, complete with a 120mm gun and nano-crystal steel modular ceramic composite armor, is fielded in greater numbers.
Though a dated design for sure, about 250 updated Type 74s remain in service and, due to the current Japanese constitution, will likely never deploy outside of the Home Islands. As such they should prove a good enough deterrent for Godzilla.
The Anderson ‘Patton’ knives of WWII
Via USMC Museum
Via the National Museum of the Marine Corps: In the early days of WWII, supplying the rapidly expanding American military was an extreme challenge. As knives were scarce, an enterprising knife manufacturer in Glendale, CA bought a stock of M1913 Cavalry Sabers to construct them into something usable that he could sell to deploying troops.
Knives of this type were created from surplus M1913 Cavalry sabers by the Anderson Company in California.
The company cut the long straight blade into three pieces, honed a point of the blades, and made a handle out of molded plastic. The owner of this knife personalized with “USMC” burned into one side of the gray plastic handle and “Robert Ames” on the other. GySgt. Robert Ames, serving with the 5th Marine Division, carried this knife on Iwo Jima, where he was wounded by shrapnel on the second day of combat.
Andersons are pretty popular in the militaria collecting community.
Hand-made Anderson fighting knife, made from the ricasso portion of a 1913-1919 dated Springfield Armory and LF&C Patton Saber blade. cut these blades into three separate pieces and re-shaped the points, and then made cast plastic handles. They run upwards of $300 on the collectors market, with twice that paid for nice examples.
Is that a Swiss M49? Well, actually it’s a P210 by way of New Hampshire, but sill…
The new, U.S.-made P210. Previously imported versions were made by Sig in Eckernförde, Germany. These are made in Exeter, NH and just started shipping (Photo: SIG)
The long-teased domestically produced version of Sig’s classic Swiss military service pistol is ready for the market and chock full of features.
Designed as the Swiss Army’s Pistole 49 just after WWII, the Sig P210 has been a hot commodity in Europe for generations and has more recently been embraced on this side of the pond — though supply was far less than demand.
The Pistole Modell 1949 in Swiss military service– note the rack numbers. The Swiss Army and gendarme still use the weapon though it is rapidly being replaced by Glock 17s. Ex-military guns are common in the Cantons as officers can purchase their sidearms on the conclusion of their military service for a negligible fee.
The new P210 Target, made here is the states, has made quiet appearances at trade shows for the past couple of years but Sig says the gun is now shipping. Best yet, the new offering has updated ergonomics via custom walnut grips and an adjustable lightweight target trigger while keeping the styling and tolerances of the M/49 intact.
More in my column at Guns.com.
Plum Duff flotsam
Here we see the SAS beret, stable belt, medals, wings and rank slides belonging to Captain Andy Legg (22 SAS) which will be going up for auction with Woolley & Wallis on May 3rd, 2018.
Captain Legg, as a young lieutenant, commanded the SAS team that was inserted onto the Argentinian mainland to gather intelligence about the enemy airbase at Rio Grande on Tierra del Fuego with an aim to destroy the Argentine Armada’s sole Exocet-carrying Super Étendard squadron on the ground in an echo to the SAS’s WWII North African lineage destroying Luftwaffe bases supporting Rommel’s Afrika Korps.
The recon mission, with 8 SAS commandos inserted by helicopter from the Harrier carrier HMS Invincible, was termed Operation Plum Duff. The plan was part of the larger Operation Mikado which would have seen nearly a quarter of the entire SAS– the 55 men of B Squadron– land directly on the runway Entebbe-style and exfil towards Chile afterward. While Plum Duff was a disaster and Mikado itself was scrubbed as a suicide mission, the event did tie down four battalions of elite Argentine Marines, arguably the best troops in their whole military, and they were sorely missed in the Falklands.
The estimate for the Legg collection is £40 000.
A Magach sentry
Here we see, via DimaWa, a gently-used Israeli Defence Forces Magach 3 tank somewhere in the Golan Heights, where it has been since the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
The IDF inherited something like 500 surplus M48s from West Germany, the U.S. and Jordan (the latter as recycled battlefield trophies in 1967) and gave them a series of Magach (Hebrew = “ramming hit”) that have them a newer gun (the M68 105mm L7), a new 750 hp diesel and a number of other internal upgrades to the gunnery and commo system to make them closer to the M60.
The IDF kept variously upgraded M48s in their armored units through the 1990s.
Of Carolina and the ides of March
Something smokey 237 years ago today…
Dressed in a period correct Continental uniform, Guilford Courthouse National Park ranger Jason Baum fires a rifle similar to those Continental soldiers would have employed against the British Army during the Revolutionary War. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Javier Amador)
The Battle of Guilford Courthouse was a fought on March 15, 1781, was a tactical win for Cornwallis, but the losses he suffered (~500 killed, wounded and missing, a full quarter of his effectives) forced him to abandon his campaign for the Carolinas and head for Virginia, which was a strategic end of the line that led to Yorktown.
Meet The ‘Captain
In their upcoming April Premier event, Rock Island Auction is set to offer a trio of desirable Colt wheel guns including a “Fluck” Dragoon, a military-marked Eli Whitney Walker and a civilian model fit for a Scandinavian skipper.
The rarest of the three, the only known original cased civilian Walker in circulation, is referred to by collectors as the “Danish Sea Captain” due to its first owner, Captain Niels Hanson, who purchased the massive gun in New York while in port and brought it back to Europe with him where it was passed down through his family and collectors in Denmark for over a century.
The ‘Captain. (Photos: RIA)
The ‘Captain. (Photos: RIA)
According to lore, the gun even survived being buried in a garden by its then-owner during the Nazi occupation of that Baltic country during WWII.
The estimated price for this rare .44-caliber bird, which has been extensively documented over the past 80 years? How about somewhere between $800,000 and $1.3 million.
More on the big Dane and the other Colts in my column at Guns.com.
The Russians are going Cold War deep
The Russian Red Banner Fleet is rediscovering very deep manned salvage/rescue ops via atmospheric diving suits (ADS). These things date back to the 1900s with the U.S., Germany and the Brits leading the way and Moscow playing catchup. Since 1989, with the atrophy of the late-Soviet fleet, the Russians have largely lost their very deep skills and their divers have been kept north of the 100m depth with the only occasional use of hardhat gear on mixed air such as Heliox and Trimix to go gradually deeper.
However, over the past couple of years, the Russians have invested in relearning the lost skillset and last year used ADS systems to hit the 317m mark, and are pushing to 400m in coming months. More from Russian state media below:
Besides obvious overt uses in salvage and submarine rescues, such deep water skills also prove useful in covert taskings such as in eavesdropping on subsea cables.
As a matter of record, U.S. Navy Chief Diver (DSW/SS) Daniel P. Jackson hit the 610m mark inside a Hardsuit 2000 off southern California back in 2006. He reportedly enjoyed the show very much.
“At 2,000 feet, I had topside turn off all the lights, and it was like a star show. The phosphorescence that was naturally in the water and in most of the sea life down there started to glow,” Jackson said. “When I started to travel back up, all the lights looked like a shower of stars going down as I was coming up. It was the best ride in the world.”
In other news, Russian state media also posted this interesting piece about combat swimmers under ice. Seems like a theme.