25th Infantry Division PFC Milton L. Cook fires his M60 machine gun spraying a tree line, around the Filhol Plantation near Cu Chi, Republic of Vietnam, January 8, 1967.” (Photo: National Archives 111-CCV-345-CC37981)
The U.S. Army Contracting Command in Newark, New Jersey this week awarded an eight-figure contract to a Nevada firm for the venerable M60 machine gun.
The $14,960,325 firm-fixed-price contract awarded to U.S. Ordnance of Sparks, Nevada covers an unspecified quantity of M60E4 and M60E6 machine guns, along with spare parts, accessories, conversion kits, and training.
The “Echo Four” and “Echo Six” variants, better known as the MK43, shouldn’t be confused with the classic M60 and are much modified from the Vietnam-era 7.62 NATO general purpose machine gun made famous in the third act of “Rambo: First Blood.”
The M60E4/M60E6/MK43 is lighter, shorter, and decked out with accessory and optics rails. Further, the gas system is paired to the bottom of the barrel, meaning a quick barrel change can instantly fix most series of failures. (Photo: U.S. Ordnance)
The M60 – based on a redesign of the German MG42 – originally entered service in 1957 to replace the Great War-era M1917 water-cooled machine gun and the air-cooled M1919.
After becoming iconic in Vietnam and the Cold War, the platform was gradually phased out in favor of the FN-made M240, based on that company’s almost universally acclaimed FN MAG 58 platform. Besides small-scale use in special operations units, the M60 endures in a variety of training roles.
Above we see the business end of the Surprise class three-masted canonnière de station, Zéléein her gleaming white tropical service livery, before 1915.
Some 110 years ago this week, this humble colonial gunboat stood up to a pair of German armored cruisers that outclassed her in every way, and in the end, forced them to retire empty-handed.
The Surprise class
Built for colonial service, the three sisters of the 680-ton Surprise class– Suprise, Décidée (Decided), and Zelee (Zealous)– were compact steam-powered gunboats/station ships, running just 184 feet overall length and 26 of beam with a mean draught of just over 10 feet.
They were one of the last designs by noted French naval architect and engineer Jacques-Augustin Normand, who built the country’s first steamship.
Composite construction, they were wooden framed with a hull of hardened steel plates sheathed in copper below the waterline. The hull was segmented via nine waterproof bulkheads. A small generator provided electric lighting topside and belowdecks as well as a powering a large searchlight atop the wheelhouse. Radio sets would be retrofitted later.
Using a pair of Niclausse boilers (Surprise had cylindrical boilers) to supply steam to a horizontal triple expansion engine of 900 horses, they had a maximum speed of 13.4 knots and a steaming radius, on 75 tons of mid-grade coal, of 2,700nm at 10 knots. They carried three masts and were rigged as a barkentine, reportedly able to make six knots under canvas to stretch that endurance.
Armament was a pair of Mle 1891 3.9″/45 guns, fore and aft with limited firing arcs, four Mle 1891 2.6″/50 9-pounders on the beam, and six M1885 37mm 1-pounder Hotchkiss rapid fire guns including one in the fighting tops of each mast and two on the bridge wings.
No shell hoists meant chain gangs to reload from an amidships below deck magazine. While torpedo tubes would have been ideal for these slow gunboats, there seems to have been no thought to adding them.
Crew would be a mix of six officers and 80-ish ratings including space for a small det of marines (Fusiliers marins), to be able to land a platoon-sized light infantry force to rough it up with the locals if needed. Speaking of the locals, in line with American and British overseas gunboats of the era, when deployed to the Far East these craft typically ran hybrid crews with most service and many deck rates recruited from Indochina and Polynesia, which had the side bonus of having pidgin translators among the complement.
Meet Zelee
Our gunboat was the second in French naval service to carry the name. The first was a trim 103-foot Chevrette-class corvette built at Toulon for the Napoleonic fleet and commissioned in 1812. Armed with a pair of 4-pounder cannon and 12-pounder carronades, she saw extensive service in the Spanish Civil War in 1823, was on the Madagascar Expedition in 1830, and later, after conversion to steam power in 1853, was used as a station ship in assorted French African colonies for a decade then, recalled to Lorient, spent another 20 years as an accommodation ship and powder hulk before she was finally disposed of in 1887 after a long 71-year career.
She is probably best known for taking part in Jules Dumont d’Urville’s second polar expedition to Antarctica together with the corvette Astrolabe, a successful four-year voyage that filled reams of books with new observations and charts. The report on the expedition (Voyage au pole sud et dans l’Océanie sur les corvettes l’Astrolabe et la Zélée exécuté par ordre du roi pendant les années 1837-1838-1839-1840) spans 10 volumes alone.
The expedition discovered what is known as Adélie Land, which endures as France’s Antarctic territory and base for their Dumont d’Urville Station. Zelee’s skipper on the voyage was LT (later VADM) Charles Hector Jacquinot, a noted French polar explorer in his own right who went on to be a big wheel in the Crimean War.
The Corvettes Astrolabe and Zélée in the ice, likely near the coast of Antarctica, 9 February 1838. By Auguste-Etienne-François Mayer c. 1850, via the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Our second Zelee was the third of her class and laid down at Arsenal de Rochefort in April 1898, built in the same slip that sister Décidée had just departed. Of note, Surprise was constructed by Normand at Le Havre and completed in 1896.
As completed, she originally carried a black hull. Her first of eight skippers was LT Louis Rémy Antoine Exelmans.
French gunboat Zélée, fitting out near the aviso Mésange, in 1899 at Rochefort.
Canonnière Zélée sur la Charente, 1900, soon after delivery.
Same as the above.
Quiet Antebellum Service
Soon after delivery, class leader Surprise was later joined by sisters Décidée and Zelee caught orders for the Far East.
Painted white and given a lot of leeway in appearance, they roamed, typically separately, from Indochina to China where they served on the Yangtze and as station ships in Nanchang, to Japan, New Caledonia, and Polynesia.
Décidée Saigon
French Canonnière de station Surprise, Haiphong, with canvas covering her decks and her laundry aloft. Surprise would later be moved to Africa, where she would remain until 1916.
The gunboat Zélée in Hanavave Bay, Baie des Vierges, Fatu Hiva Island, 1910. Collection: The Marquesas Islands
Zelee while visiting Australia. Australian National Maritime Museum. Samuel J. Hood Studio ~ Object № 00035067
French Zélée gunboat Papeete Tahiti
In December 1913, Lieutenant de Vaisseau Maxime Francois Emile Destremau (Ecole Navale 1892) arrived to take command of Zelee, then stationed in the backwater Tahitian capital of Papeete.
While ostensibly a “French” colony since 1880, at the time the little harbor only had 280 French residents along with over 350 British and Commonwealth, 215 Chinese, 100 Americans, 50 Japanese, and some 30 or so Germans as well as a few Greeks, Swedes, and Spaniards. The truth was you were far more likely at the time to hear English on the narrow palm-lined streets of Papeete than French.
The colony had big plans. It was even slated to receive, sometime in 1915, a station de téléphonie sans (TFS) wireless station. Until then, it had to rely on semi-regular mail services from France, typically a six-week trip at its most rapid.
As for Destremau, the 37-year-old lieutenant had seen over 20 years of sea service including on the avisoes Scorff and Eure, the cruiser Eclaireur, and the early submarines Narval, Gustave-Zéde and Pluviose. His mission in French Oceania consisted mainly of showing the Tricolor from island to island and doing the old “hearts and minds” thing that goes back to the Romans.
Destremau, who had spent his career largely at Toulon and Brest, seemed to enjoy his Pacific deployment, creeping his shallow-draft gunboat into atolls that rarely saw the Navy.
Since yesterday we have been sailing in a truly strange way. We have crossed a large lagoon of about sixty kilometers, of which there is no map and which is full of submerged rocks. You can distinguish them by the change in color of the water and you avoid them as best you can. After four hours of this exercise under a blazing sun, we are very happy to arrive at the anchorage, where I find a charming little village hidden in the coconut trees. As the Zélée had never been there, we were given a real ovation. A meeting on the water’s edge of the entire population in full dress; gifts of coconuts and chickens, and organization of songs for the evening. Ravishing choirs, extremely accurate voices, and harmonies of a truly astonishing modernism. Just ten men and ten women are enough to compose an ensemble in at least six parts, with solo calls, an ensemble in at least six parts, with solo calls, admirable rhythm, and measure!
Postcards exist of her idyllic time in Polynesia.
gunboat Zélée (left) and the armored cruiser Montcalm in Tahiti in 1914
Tahiti Papeete Harbor– Arrival of Australian and American Couriers, Zelee is in the center background, with a giant Tricolor
Tahiti. – Pirogues ornées, 14 Juillet 1914, et Zelee
War!
In early August 1914, the entire armada under the command of RADM Albert Louis Marie Huguet’s Division navale d’Extreme-Orient— a force whose area of operation spanned from the Bay of Bengal to the Yangtze to Noumea to Tahiti– was not very impressive and, worse, was thinly spread.
His flag was on the cruiser Montcalm (9,177 tons, 21 knots, 2×7.6″, 8×6.4″, circa 1902), then steaming to New Caledonia after a rare visit to Polynesia. Another old cruiser, Dupleix (7,432 tons, 20 knots, 8×6.4″, circa 1903), was in Chinese waters. The dispatch vessel Kersaint (1,276 tons, 16 knots, 1×5.5″, 5×3.9″, circa 1897) was laid up at Noumea but was soon to be rearmed. Décidée was in Saigon. And in Polynesia was Zelee.
That’s it.
When the news hit that France and Germany were at war on 6 August– three days after the fact– Zelee was visiting the island of Raiatea, about 150 miles west of Tahiti. Immediately, the 36-year-old artist Joseph Ange Léon Octave Morillot, a naval officer who had resigned his commission in 1906 while on Polynesian station to go native, paint local topless women, and smoke opium, presented himself to Destremau and voluntarily returned to duty as a reserve ensign.
Setting out for Papeete with the news and an extra officer, Zelee arrived on the 7th.
By that time the colony was in full panic mode, with the belief that the German Bussard-class unprotected cruisers SMS Geierand Cormoran(1900t, 15 knots, 8×4.1″/35 guns, 2 tt) were typically in Samoa, just a five-day steam away from Tahiti. As Tahiti was a coaling station for the French fleet, some 5,000 tons of good Cardiff coal was on hand, which would make a valuable prize indeed.
As far as coastal defenses at Tahiti, as early as 1880, the French Navy had built a fort equipped with nine muzzle-loading black powder cannons to protect the entrance to Papeete but it had fallen into disrepair, its garrison removed in 1905 and its guns dismounted. As noted, by 1914, “the artillery pieces were lying limply on the ground among the flowers and moss. The gun carriages, covered with climbing plants, were firmly secured by a tangle of perennial vines of the most beautiful effect. In short, the tropical forest, exuberant, had reclaimed its rights and buried the battery.”
The island’s Army garrison consisted of a Corsican lieutenant by the name of Lorenzi and 25 Troupes Coloniales. When the Tahitian gendarmes were mobilized, they added another 20 locals and a French adjutant. Soon the word got around and reservists stumbled forward until Lorenzi commanded a mixed force of 60 rifles, who were soon drilling 12 hours a day.
French reservists also come running. each of whom is assigned a post. From the bush, we see emerging, with long beards and tanned skin, Frenchmen steeped in the land of Tahiti and who have become more Maori than the Maoris themselves, men who live, love, and think in Tahitian. At first, they hesitate a little to speak the beautiful language of France, but very quickly they find it again in their heads the marching songs that they sang every day during the field service hikes, so hard under the tropical sun.
With the possibility that two German cruisers, capable of landing a 150-man force, could be inbound, and with the likelihood that Zelee could survive a gun battle with either, the decision was made to write off the gunboat and move most of her men and guns ashore to make a dedicated land-based defense.
Destremau had a small wardroom– Ensign 1c PTJ Barnaud as XO, Ensign LSM Barbier, Ensign RJ Charron, Midshipman H. Dyevre, Midshipman 2c JA Morier, and Asst. Surgeon (Medecin de 2e classe, Medecin-major) C. Hederer. Meanwhile, his crew numbered 90.
Using sweat, yardarm hoists, and jacks, the crew dismounted the stern 3.9-incher (for which there were only 38 shells), all four 2.6-inchers, and all six 37mm 1-pounder Hotchkiss guns. They left the forward 3.9 mount and 10 shells.
Rigging a line from the harbor to the top of the 100-meter hill overlooking it, a roadcrew was formed to slowly muscle up the five large guns to the top. Meanwhile, the six Hotchkiss guns were mounted on as many requisitioned Ford trucks from a local copra concern– primitive mobile artillery– led by Ensign Dyevre. Ensign Barnaud formed a group of 42 riflemen who, with Dyevre’s gun trucks, formed a mobile reserve.
Destremau (center, with cap) and his staff in Tahiti: Ensigns Barbier and Barnaud, midshipmen Dyèvre and Le Breton, colonial infantry LT Lorenzi.
One of the ship’s engineers formed a section of dispatch riders mounted on proffered bicycles. The signalers formed a series of semaphore stations at the top of the hill battery visible to the old fort 18 km to the east, and the end of the lagoon five km to the west. Bonfires were built to signal at night. Within days, telephone lines connected the whole affair. Two old bronze cannons were mounted at the hilltop semaphore station and Pic Rouge in the distance, ready to fire as signal guns. Gunners mined the channel markers, ready to blow when needed. Likewise, plans were made to burn the coal depot.
The colony’s resident Germans as well as the Teutonic members of the captured Walküre’s crew, were interned and moved to the island of Motu-Uta in the harbor. In deference to their neighbors, they were not placed under guard, simply left in their own tiny penal colony in the middle of paradise.
The painter Morillot, taking it upon himself to become a one-man recruiting officer, made daily trips to the island’s interior in search of warm bodies. Soon there were more volunteers than there were rifles or positions on the gun crews.
With the whole island in a state of tense pre-invasion alarm, on 12 August the British-built German Rhederei line cargo steamer Walküre(3932 GRT) appeared offshore. Loaded with a cargo of phosphates from Chile and headed to Australia, she was unaware of the state of war.
Ensign Barbier, racing to Zelee with a skeleton crew, managed to raise steam and, with 10 shells quickly returned to the gunboat by Dyevre for its sole remaining 3.9-incher, soon set off to pursue the German steamer.
With Dyevre leading the boarding crew, pistols in hand, Walküre was captured without a shot. Impounding the vessel– with the support of her mixed British and Russian crew– our gunboat and her prize returned to Papeete to the reported wild cheers of her colonists.
By 20 August, the colony was as ready as it was going to get, with the five large guns of the ersatz battery commanding the harbor and pass, trenches dug, observation posts manned, 150 armed if somewhat motley irregular infantry, and six 37mm gun trucks, all there was to do was wait.
They had a month to stew.
Enter Von Spee
While Geier and Cormoran never made it to Tahiti, Admiral Maximillian Von Spee’s two mightiest ships in the Pacific, the 11,400-ton twin armored cruisers SMS Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, did.
Scharnhorst and her sister were very distinctive with their four large funnels.
With a mission to seize the port and its desperately needed coal supply, and with no Allied warships within several days of the isolated colony other than our tiny (and largely toothless Zelee), it should have been a cakewalk.
With each of the big German cruisers packing eight 8.2-inch and another six 5.9-inch guns, and able to put a battalion size landing force ashore, the sight of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau appearing like a phantom from the sea smoke just 2,000 meters off the reef at Papeete at 0630 on 22 September 1914 was a shock to Destremau.
The signal cannon fired and the phones rang. Soon, Papeete became a desert as its inhabitants, long ready to bug out, took to the interior.
Orders came quick.
Barbier was ordered to rush to Zelee with 10 men and light her boilers, to ram the German cruiser closest to the pass once she had enough steam. The coal yard was set alight. The channel beacons went up in a flash of light and smoke. A crew on Walküre rushed to open her seacocks and she soon began settling on the bottom of the harbor.
Ensign Charron, in charge of the battery, was ordered to hold his fire until small boats began to gather for a landing which was logical as the popguns wouldn’t have done much to the German cruisers but could play god with a cluster of packed whaleboats.
By 0740, after a 70-minute wait, after steaming slowly in three circles just off the reef, first Scharnhorst and then Gneisenau opened up on the town and as retribution for the billowing smoke from the prized coal yard and the sinking Walküre.
By 0800, the fire shifted to Zelee, whose funnel was making smoke.
By 0820, the wrecked gunboat was filling with water, Barbier and his men moving to abandon their little warship– the crew in the end finished the job of the Germans by opening Zelee’s water intakes to the harbor.
Some accounts list 14 shots of 8.2-inch and another 35 of 5.9-inch fired by the German cruisers by 0900, others put the total count higher to 80 shells. Von Spee, afraid the harbor could be mined, retired, his plan to fuel his ships with French coal spoiled. He would miss those irreplaceable shells at the Falklands in December.
Two residents of the colony, a Polynesian child and a Japanese expat, were killed as well as several injured.
Estimates that as much as half of Papeete was destroyed in the bombardment.
The bombardment of Papeete, capital of Tahiti, a French possession in the Pacific. Showing a panoramic view of Papeete, capital of Tahiti, after being shelled by the German cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The numbers indicate: 1. German prisoners under an armed guard, after having been compelled to assist in clearing away the debris resulting from the bombardment. 2. The market where all perishable food (…?) 3. Ruins of the back premises of Messrs A B Donald Ltd., with the Roman Catholic Cathedral in the background and the signal station on the hill to the right. Supplement to the Auckland Weekly News, 22 October 1914, p.43. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections AWNS-19141022-43-01
Divers went down to Zelee just hours after the Germans steamed away, and recovered the ship’s tricolor. It was presented to Destremau.
German propagandists remembered the raid in spectacular fashion, complete with incoming fire from shore batteries and the ships coming in far closer to the harbor.
Die Kreuzer Scharnhorst and Gneisenau beschießen Papeete, die Hautpstadt von Tahiti, by Willy Moralt, via the Illustrierte Geschichte des Weltkrieges 1914.
Epilogue
Zelee would be partially salvaged in 1925 but remains a well-known dive site in the Tahiti area.
Her on-shore 3.9-inch gun is preserved at Bougainville Park in Papeete.
Décidée survived the conflict and went to the breakers in 1922.
The French navy recycled Zelee’s name once again in 1924 on the 285-ton remorqueur-patrouilleur Zelee (ex-Lakeside) which served into 1950.
As for the German freighter Walküre, she was salvaged and repaired, then sold to an American company and would remain in service until 1925.
The painter Morillot hung up his uniform after the bombardment and returned to his painting, opium, and women, passing in 1931.
Denigrated by the governor general of Tahiti– who hid in a church during the bombardment while Destremau handled the defense– our gunboat skipper was ordered back to France to face an inquiry board. Given interim command of the destroyer Boutefeu while the board hemmed and hawed about meeting, Destremau died in Toulon of illness on 7 March 1915, aged but 39.
His decorations came posthumously.
He was cited in the order of the army nine months after passing (JO 9 Dec. 1915, p. 8.998):
Lieutenant Destremau, commanding the gunboat La Zélée and the troops in Papeete, was able, during the day of 22 September 1914, to take the most judicious measures to ensure the defense of the port of Papeete against the attack of the German cruisers Sharnorst and Gneisenau. Demonstrated in the conduct of the defense operations the greatest personal bravery and first-rate military qualities which resulted in preserving the port of Papeete and causing the enemy cruisers to move away.
After the war, he was awarded the Legion of Honor in March 1919.
The colony’s newest station ship/gunboat, the 262-foot Teriieroo a Teriierooiterai (P780) arrived at Papeete in May after a two-month transit from France.
The more things change…
Ships are more than steel and wood And heart of burning coal, For those who sail upon them know That some ships have a soul.
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80 years ago this month. Wartime official caption: “First American Heavy Guns to Fire into Germany, 16 September 1944. Here is a battery of American 155mm. self-propelled guns, mounted on tank chassis as they fired into the village of Bildehen, Germany, which is located six kilometers southwest of Aachen on the Liege-Aachen road. They opened the barrage with 21 rounds of high explosive shells each weighing 100–pounds.”
Note the gunner with the bag of propellant, fresh from its tube, and a system of ramps to stop recoil and help with elevation. Acme Photo by Andrew Lopez for the War Picture Pool, via Allison Collection, City of Little Rock Archives
Ironically, the guns shown above started out life as Great War era towed howitzers with spoked wheels: U.S. Model 1918M1 155mm gun, the famous French GPF (Canon de 155mm Grande Puissance Filloux) a direct copy of the C modèle 1917 Schneider.
Late in 1942, some 100 GPFs that remained in storage were mounted on the turretless chassis of the obsolete M3 Lee tank to form the M12 Gun Motor Carriage as a form of early self-propelled artillery. When teamed up with the companion Cargo Carrier M30 (also a turretless M3), which allowed them to go into the line with 40 rounds of 155mm ready, they proved popular in a niche role.
M12 Gun Motor Carriage 155mm self-propelled gun with the US 987th Field Artillery Battalion near Bayeux Normandy June 10, 1944. IWM – Laing (Sgt) Photographer. IWM B 541
155mm M12 Gun Motor Carriage sniping strongpoints along the German Siegfried Line, late 1944/early 1945. At its core, it is a French 155 from the Great War
These tracked GPFs earned the nicknames “Doorknocker” and “King Kong” in service due to their ability to pierce up to seven feet of reinforced concrete and turn pillboxes into a smokey hole in the ground– a useful thing in Northeastern Europe in 1944.
Like this:
M12 Gun Motor carriage used in direct firing mode against a fortified German position during the Battle of Aachen in October 1944.
Official wartime caption, some 80 years ago this month in the recently liberated Belgium:
“(Hawker) Typhoon IBs undergoing maintenance and repair at Melsbroek (B-58), near Brussels, 10 September 1944. An aircraft from No 247 Squadron RAF (foreground) and a No 181 Squadron machine are parked in front of an elaborately camouflaged hangar at the former Luftwaffe bomber base. The Germans had gone to great lengths to disguise the airfield, fabricating fake houses, shops, and even a chateau, all of which had failed to protect it from air attack.”
Goodchild A (F/O) and Bellamy W (F/O), Royal Air Force official photographer, IWM CL 3979
One of the most powerful inline piston aircraft engines in the world, it was only used in the Typhoon and its derivative, the Hawker Tempest. Little wonder Tempest became the go-to V-1 killer as it was the fastest of Allied fighters at low level (the P-51 beat it at altitude) and the Tempest knocked down at least 20 Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbes.
For the record, No. 247 Squadron RAF– which flew everything from Felixstowe F2A flying boats to Gladiators and Hurricanes to Vampires and Hunters– disbanded in 1963. Ironically No. 181 Squadron had a much shorter run despite its lower squadron number, only existing from August 1942 until September 1945, running first Hurricanes and then Typhoons.
80 years ago this month. An M18 (T70) Hellcat of the 603rd Tank Destroyer Battalion during Patton’s Lorraine Campaign in an ambush position down Rue Carnot in recently liberated Lunéville, France, 22 September 1944. The dismounted .50 cal M2 gunner is going to have a bad day if the Hellcat’s 76mm gun gets rowdy, especially in the days before hearing protection.
Via the Bovington Tank Museum.
Established 15 December 1941 as the TD unit for the 3rd Infantry Division, by D-Day the 603rd had been sent to England and, reequipped with M18s, deployed to the continent in support of the “Super Sixth” 6th Armored Division. They landed at Utah Beach and entered combat on 28 July 1944.
Loading shells onto a B Company, 603rd Tank Destroyer Battalion M18 just outside Brest, France, are, left to right: T/5 Francis J. Kangas, Astoria, Oregon; Pfc. Dominic Juncewski, Silver Lake, Minn.; Sgt. Emory Triggs, Arkansas City, Kansas; Pvt. John Horns, Dickinson, N.D., and Cpl. Cliff Pratt, Selah, Washington. 12 August, 1944. SC 195544
Fighting through Northwest Europe, the 603rd raced through Brittany then Lorient, and through Lorrane to the Moselle. Then came the Saar, Bastogne, crossing the Rhine, and pushing through the Fulda Gap where it later helped free Buchenwald and, with the rest of the Super Sixth, is recognized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Liberating Unit.
Disbanded in 1946, one of the Hellcats from the 603rd is on display at the National Museum of Military Vehicles in Wyoming.
M18 Hellcat of the 603rd Tank Destroyer Battalion at the NMMV
Did you know that, while the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions jumped/glided into Holland during Market Garden some 80 years ago this week with relatively light air-cooled machine guns (M1918 BARs and M1919 Brownings), the British and Polish airborne forces landed with 60 proper full-sized water-cooled Vickers MGs in both their parachute and airlanding battalions?
On a more somber note, the Americans, Brits, Dutch, Poles, and even the Germans have been in attendance for the anniversary of the jumps.
The 82nd in Nijmegen, Mook, Grave and Groesbeek:
U.S. Army Paratroopers assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division stand in formation during a commemoration ceremony at the 82nd Airborne Division Memorial near Mook, Netherlands Sep. 18, 2024. Each year, U.S. Army units’ partner with Dutch communities to celebrate their shared history from the campaign and the initial liberation of the Netherlands during World War II. (U.S. Army photo by Maj. Matthew Diaz)
The 101st at Nuenen and in unveiling bridge monuments in Sint Oedenrode and Son:
A convoy of vintage U.S. military World War II vehicles passes through the Netherlands town of Nuenen during the 80th anniversary of Operation Market Garden in Nuenen, the Netherlands, Sept. 14, 2024. Over 200 vintage U.S. military World War II vehicles, including jeeps, trucks, and even an M24 Chaffee tank, traveled in a convoy from the Netherlands town of Nuenen south to the town of Veghel, following the route that the 101st Airborne Division took alongside British soldiers against German forces during Op
Two fallen Brits from the battle were interred at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery:
While traveling around New Orleans, I often come across old French Foreign Legion insignia in antique and curious goods shops. My guess is that Francophiles and Cajuns in the area often, at one point, would sign up for life in the old Legion Etrangere and then return home at the end of the contract.
Holding their old insignia as souvenirs of places long gone, these items would eventually ebb away from them when they passed on to the great barracks in the sky. Echoes of history, I suppose.
This one is appropriate today.
Insignia of the Marching Regiment of the Foreign Legion, (Regiment de Marche de la Legion Etrangere = R.M.L.E) designed in 1943 with France Dabord (“France First”) motto:
This is the scarcer metal and enamel type insignia made for officers. It is marked Drago, Paris, and was likely manufactured in late 1944, post-Liberation.
The RMLE was created in July 1943 at Sidi-bel-Abbes, Algeria, under Colonel Gentis from the remnants of the old 1st and 3rd REIM (régiments étrangers d’infanterie de marche) which had fought against Rommel in the final days of the North African campaign, specifically at Djebel Mansour. The original “les anciens” RMLE had been formed in the Great War under the famed “father of the Legion” Colonel Paul Frederic Rollet so the name was very symbolic to Legionaries at the time.
Assigned to the 5th Armoured Division (5e DB) at Oranie, the unit was equipped with American uniforms and equipment, including Springfield M1903 bolt action rifles, and had the same general structure as the 3e REI.
Some 80 years ago today, 20 September 1944, the RMLE landed at Provence near Saint-Raphaël on Dramont beach as part of the Dragoon Landings and raced towards the Rhine, helping liberate Alsace in the process.
Along the way they fought at Belfort– where I/RMLE was decimated at Montreux-Château– helped reduce the Colmar Pocket, broke through the Siegfried Line, crossed the Black Forest, entered Stuttgart, and made it into Austria by VE Day.
13 November 1944 at Valdahon, General de Gaulle, Sir W. Churchill, Generals Juin, and de Lattre de Tassigny review a detachment of the RMLE the day before leaving for combat.
Respected by the Allied troops it fought alongside, the RMLE earned a U.S. Presidential Unit Citation and Distinguished Unit Citation (“Rhine-Bavarian Alps”).
At the end of the war, the RMLE was transferred back to North Africa. Once there, on 1 July 1945, it was renamed 3e REI.
Its regimental flag carries honors from the old RMLE of Great War fame (Artois 1915, Champagne 1915, The Somme 1916, The Verdun Mountains, Picardy-Soissonais 1918, and Vauxaillon 1918) as well as our WWII era RMLE (Alsace 1944-1945 and Stuttgart 1945) and those it has earned under its own name (Indochina 1946-1954— where the regiment lost 3,396 officers and legionnaires– and AFN 1952-1962).
Capping a 37-year career, Lt. Colonel John “Karl” Marks retired last month and hung up the title of the A-10 Thunderbolt pilot with the most flight time.
Kansas-born Marks entered the Air Force in 1987 and then went on to fly the big “Warthog” in combat for the first time in the 1991 Gulf War, chalking up 23 Iraqi tanks over three missions shared with his flight lead Capt. Eric “Fish” Solomonson.
Then-1st Lt. John Marks, poses with an A-10 Thunderbolt II at King Fahd Air Base, Saudi Arabia, during Desert Storm in February 1991. (Photo: 442nd Fighter Wing / Lt. Col. Marks) and Lt. Col. John Marks stands in the cockpit of an A-10 Thunderbolt II attack aircraft and pumps his fists in a sign of victory after his “fini” flight on August 23, 2024, on Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo. Marks retired after 37 years with more than 7500 hours in the A-10. (Photo: Mr. Bob Jennings/U.S. Air Force)
Since then, Marks has deployed overseas at least a dozen times and responded to 48 troops-in-contact situations over 358 combat sorties.
As noted by the 442d Fighter Wing in a release, Marks flew 1161 combat hours during which he expended 39,340 rounds of 30mm ammunition, dropped nearly 350 bombs, and fired 59 Maverick air-to-ground missiles. Going past that, his trigger time on the Warthog’s hulking GAU-8/A Avenger 30mm cannon included another 141,500 rounds, bringing his career total to 180,840 30mm rounds.
The GAU-8/A, made by General Electric, is a 19-foot long 7-barreled rotary cannon that fires huge 30x173mm shells— each about the size of a catsup bottle as fast as 3,900 rounds per minute. Unloaded, the gun weighs more than 600 pounds.
In all, he has logged 7,500 hours in the aircraft, a record, with the Air Force noting, “With the clock inching toward midnight on the divestiture of the A-10 Thunderbolt II attack aircraft, there are no pilots close enough in hours behind the Warthog’s stick to even come close to the bar set by Lt. Col. John ‘Karl’ Marks.”
Brigadier General (Army of the United States, Captain in the Regular Army) James “Jumpin’ Jim” Gavin (USMA 1929), commander of the 82nd “All American” Airborne Division, checks his equipment before boarding a C-47 at Cottesmore airfield near Rutland, England for Operation Market Garden on 17 September 1944. He was in Chalk number one of Serial A-7, 316th Troop Carrier Group. The aircraft was piloted by Major Kendig, CO of the 44th Troop Carrier Squadron.
National Archives and Records Administration Still Pictures Unit SC 232810
Note his M1 Garand along with the M1911A1 on his hip and a fighting knife behind the pistol. Gavin had jumped into Sicily carrying a lighter folding M1A1 Carbine but the gun jammed on his first encounter with the enemy, leaving the general to switch to the big .30-06 battle rifle as his personal weapon moving forward.
Gavin assumed command of the 82nd the month before Market Garden on 8 August 1944, the third Commanding General of the Division during the war, after Omar Bradley who led the reformed division in 1942 when it was still a “leg” unit, and Matthew Ridgway who had commanded the All Americans in Sicily, Italy and at Normandy. Jim was the only American general officer to make four combat jumps in the war.
For the record, a lookback by the IWM on “The Bridge Too Far” that was Market Garden and the Arnheim operation.
Gavin, at age 37, was also the youngest general to command an American division during the war. He was later the youngest Regular Army lieutenant general when promoted in July 1954, at age 47.
A silly relic of the 1989 California, and subsequent 1994 AWB below: the bayonet-neutered SKS. For a decade it was legal to sell the otherwise featureless rifle, with its 10-shot internal magazine, so long as the bayonet was dismounted.
You could still buy the bayonet as a curio – usually on the same table as the SKS at the gun show. (Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)
