Designed in the late 1980s for use in Personal Defense Weapons, or PDWs, the 5.7×28 round was first marketed by FN in the early 1990s in its P90 PDW/P90S carbine and Five-seveN pistol. Since then, those guns have been adopted with military and police forces in more than 40 countries as well as sold extensively on the commercial market.
Now, some three decades after it was introduced, the Western defense alliance recognized the caliber under standardization agreement (STANAG) 4509, which integrates it into the AEP-97– NATO’s Multi-Caliber Manual Of Proof and Inspection.
The Italian Navy’s historic nave scuola (training ship) Amerigo Vespucci (A5312) was constructed back when Italy had a king on the throne and is still going strong. Built at the Royal Shipyard of Castellammare di Stabia, Vespucci was commissioned as part of the Divisione Navi Scolastiche (School Ships Division) on 6 June 1931, joining her sister, the ill-fated Cristoforo Colombo, with the task of training Italian naval cadets.
After falling in love with smallbore riflery while at Boy Scout Camp as a kid, Arthur Edwin Cook, “Art” or sometimes just “Cookie” to his friends, went on to become pretty good at it, winning two National Junior Smallbore Rifle Championships in high school– and pitching in to help train Navy personnel in marksmanship during WWII although he was too young to enlist himself.
Speaking of youth, while attending the University of Maryland as a member of their All-American rifle team, he took a break to represent the U.S. at the XIV Olympiad in London, pulling down the Gold in the 50m Free Rifle Prone rifle, both setting a world record at the time with a score of 599 in a 60-round course and becoming the youngest American– at age 20– to bring back the gold in Olympic shooting sports until 2008.
The Fletcher-class destroyer USS The Sullivans (DD-537) was launched at Bethleham Steel on 4 April 1943, sponsored by the grieving Mrs. Thomas F. Sullivan, mother of the five late Sullivan brothers, and was commissioned five months later. The brothers Sullivan had requested (“We will make a team together that can’t be beat,” one had written) to be ship out together and joined the light cruiser Juneau (CL-52) at the New York Navy Yard on 3 February 1942, just before that ship’s commissioning, and were all lost just before Thanksgiving in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.
The destroyer received nine battle stars for World War II and two for Korean service. Laid up in 1965 at Philadelphia, in 1977, she and cruiser Little Rock (CG-4) were processed for donation to the city of Buffalo, N.Y., where they now serve as a memorial.
Some 30 years ago last week, the British Army’s 7th Armoured Brigade thundered out of Saudi Arabia and into Iraqi-occupied Kuwait as part of Operation Granby’s Desert Sabre, the UK’s end of the Desert Storm ground campaign.
The unit, part of the 1st Armoured Division, was made up of elements of many grand old regiments to include the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards (Carabiniers and Greys), Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars, The Queen’s Dragoon Guards, and The Staffordshire Regiment (Prince of Wales’s) while its sister brigade, the 4th, would include battalions of the 14th/20th King’s Hussars, The Royal Scots (The Royal Regiment) and Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. Divisional troops saw a smattering of battalions from the Guards (Coldstream and Scots), some elements of Highlanders and Gurkhas, and the 16th/5th The Queen’s Royal Lancers as well as artillery and support units.
While many of the regiments carried honors from the Crimean War, the armor of the British division was orders of magnitude higher than the Earl of Lucan’s “1,500 sabres and 6 field guns” of the combined 10-regiment Heavy and Light Brigades in 1854.
The outcome was likewise much different.
The division’s 221 FV4030/4 Challenger 1 tanks moved 180 miles in enemy territory under combat conditions within 66 hours, destroying the Iraqi 46th Mechanised Brigade, 52nd Armoured Brigade, and elements of at least three infantry divisions belonging to the Iraqi VII Corps, for the cost of 10 men killed. The Brits took 7,000 Iraqi EPOWs.
‘We’ve got to really go for it,’ came the orders from Battlegroup and Squadron HQ. Even better. ‘Pedal to the metal, Brew.’ The turbos lit up and the tank leapt forward. The desert was hard. Almost as good as the highway. I looked left and right down the line. Squadrons to the left of me. Squadrons to the right of me. Yea, into the Valley of Death went the 600. It was the charge of the Light Brigade all over again, 137 years later. This time we had swopped our one ton beast of burden, lances and sabres for a 62 ton mechanical monster with a 120mm main armament and two 7.62mm machine guns. Far from being a Light Brigade we were definitely a Heavy Brigade.
In the process, the Brits destroyed approximately 120 Iraqi tanks and twice that number of armored and support vehicles, including one Challenger of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards achieving the longest-range (reported) tank-to-tank-kill in the war from 4,700m away.
Fly By, the periodical of the Fleet Air Arm Association of Australia just republished (with my permission) a recent Warship Wednesday of mine on the MV Daghestanand her role in naval aviation history.
And it was the cover!
Here is the newsletter, which is 21 pages and covers much more than my drivel.
For the past few months, I have been kicking around a Diamondback DBX 57 pistol. Unlike most firearms chambered in 5.7x28mm, which are simple blowback weapons, the DBX is a large format pistol that uses a dual gas piston action that can be dialed up or down with the aid of a screwdriver in the field without stripping the gun down.
It accepts standard AR-15 triggers and grips while having the same style safety lever format. Unlike the AR, there is no buffer tube, and the locked-breech rotating bolt’s action is side-charging, oriented out of the box with a left-hand knob– but don’t worry, it can be swapped to the right if that’s how you swing. The barrel is threaded with a 1/2x28TPI pitch, opening it up to a wide array of muzzle devices and cans.
As far as mags go, it takes standard FN FiveseveN style double stacks, which are made in both factory and aftermarket variants in 10, 20, and 30-round formats.
And, I found out, that it shoots pretty well.
The total weight of the DBX with the Romeo5, TF1913 side-folding brace, and 21 rounds of V-Max came to 4.4-pounds, which is still balanced enough to fire one-handed with ease. You can move to 30-rounder FN mags and only add a couple extra ounces.
This month remembers the fateful day on 7 February 1951 when the footsoldiers of Company E of the 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry (Wolfhounds) Regiment, under the command of 30-year-old CAPT Lewis Lee Millett Sr., would undertake a successful bayonet charge on an enemy position atop frozen Hill 180 near Anyang, South Korea.
An understrength unit of just ~100 men, they fought their way up every step of what later became known as Bayonet Hill, and for good reason.
S.L.A. Marshall described the attack as “the most complete bayonet charge by American troops” since Cold Harbor in 1864.
Millett, who had received a Silver Star for driving a burning ammunition truck away from a group of soldiers before it exploded during WWII, would become a Medal of Honor recipient for his actions. He went on to found the famous Recondo school and left the military in 1973 as a colonel. He passed in 2009.
Here is Col. Millett describing his service and the action at Hill 180.
The U.S. Army in Korea remembered the event earlier this month.
Ships assigned to the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group sail in formation with Indian navy ships during a cooperative deployment in the Indian Ocean, July 20, 2020. Photo By: Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Donald R. White, Jr. VIRIN: 200720-N-MY642-0207M
The Nimitz Carrier Strike Group is returning after operations in U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and U.S. Central Command areas of responsibility. It was the first carrier strike group to deploy under COVID-19 protocols. By the time the carrier strike group reaches home, the sailors and Marines aboard will have been gone for 321 days.
The Nimitz, the cruiser USS Princeton, and the destroyers USS Sterett and USS Ralph Johnson made up the group.
Overall, the carrier strike group steamed more than 87,300 nautical miles during its deployment. The carrier launched 10,185 sorties totaling 23,410 flight hours logged.
I’m not sure the value of wearing out ships and crew on year-long deployments when there are no major conflicts underway, but you damned sure don’t see other fleets able/willing to pull off this type of crap, which is a statement of deterrence all its own, I suppose.
Of note, Nimitz is our oldest active warship in fleet service– and the oldest commissioned aircraft carrier in the world– slated to celebrate the 46th anniversary of her commissioning in May. Princeton is no spring chicken either, as the early Tico left Pascagoula for the fleet in 1989.
Back in 2019, I was considering a Zenith ZP-5, which is a Turkish-made (by MKE) semi-auto-only Heckler & Koch MP5 clone imported and rebranded by the Minnesota-based company. MKE, which worked with HK closely back in the 1960s and 70s– as Bonn was much cooler than Berlin on gun and gun technology exports– to license-produce G3s and MP5s, has retained the tribal knowledge and continues to make decent versions of those classic, pre-CNC, guns.
Zenith had a really nice lineup of roller-locked 9mms– back in 2019 (Photo: Chris Eger)
At the time, the ZP-5 was $1,700, which was (and still is) a big ask. So big of an ask that I didn’t pull the figurative trigger.
