Tag Archives: Vickers gun

Cue, ‘Fortunate Son’…

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I recently hit the road in southwest Alabama and visited the U.S. Army Aviation Museum, one of the largest military helicopter collections in the world.

Located at Fort Novosel (formerly Fort Rucker, aka “Mother Rucker”), the sprawling 60,000-acre complex has been home to all Army helicopter training since 1959 and all aviation training since 1973. 

The Museum has over 250 aircraft in its inventory – some incredibly rare.

The post earlier this year was named in honor of Army CWO Michael J. Novosel, a UH-1 medevac pilot who evacuated an amazing 5,589 wounded personnel while in Vietnam, earning a well-deserved Medal of Honor.

While I have a full 15-minute video and lots of images over in my column at GDC, these two struck me as appropriate for today.

In a sobering display, a downed Huey is shown in the center of the museum’s main gallery.

The Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association estimates over 3,300 UH-1 models were lost either due to combat or accidents during the war.

The sound of 16 Vickers 303s

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One of the scariest sounds for any of the Kaiser’s foot soldiers in the Great War had to be that of the Vickers gun, ready to rattle away in .303 all day. 

The below amazing eight-minute video is the sight and sound of 16 Vickers machine guns rocking and rolling at a recent event saluting the centenary of the disbandment of the British Army’s Machine Gun Corps. Held at the Century range at Bisley, Surrey, it was pulled off by the Vickers Machinegun Collection and Research Association. Set up as a machine gun company, the guns represented gunners from 1912 through 1968, including one team of female factory testers. 

More on the Vickers 303, and its interesting American connection, after the jump in my column at Guns.com.

“The Kaiser’s necklace, compliments of Camp Lee, Va.” showing Doughboys training with a Vickers gun and holding up one of its 250-round cloth belts. Both the 80th “Blue Ridge” Division, drawn from volunteers from Virginia and western Pennsylvania, as well as the 37th “Buckeye” Division of the Ohio National Guard trained at Camp Lee. (Photo: The Library of Virginia)

Comfy Socks and Shorts Combos, with Accessories by Vickers

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As the weather is heating up, and I find myself switching increasingly to khaki shorts, hiking socks, and boots, this image seems fitting.

Official caption: A battalion of the Manchester Regiment in the Far East is busily engaged in preparing for anything the future may have in store and the art of camouflage is not being overlooked. Photo shows – a Vickers gun in use during an exercise, circa 1941.

For the record, the 1st Battalion, The Manchester Regiment, was stationed in Singapore in October 1938, following overseas service since January 1934 in Jamaica, Egypt, and Palestine. Fighting the Japanese in Malay until Singapore fell in early 1942, “The battalion marched from Singapore Town to the Prisoner of War concentration area at Changi on 17th February, led by Lieutenant Colonel Holmes carrying a large framed photograph of King George V strapped to his back.”

The war was not kind to the Manchesters. Of the 1,003 officers, NCOs, and men of the regiment at Singapore on 8 December 1941, 438 failed to return from Japanese POW camps in 1945.