Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Forgotten Weapons"
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The Cook brothers are considered two of the heroes of the Confederacy. Even though they were both from England, they adopted the Confederate cause after they moved to New Orleans in the 1850's. Ferdinand married a New Orleans woman, Mary Jane Wilcox, described as "one of the fairest belles of the City", in 1852. He moved to New Orleans after the marriage and was later followed by his brother Francis some time in 1855. Athey were representatives of Novelty Iron works of New York City, where they worked from about 1850 until the outbreak of the war. The company manufactured mostly cotton and sugar machinery, so locating in New Orleans was a logical move. Both brothers learned engineering and metalworking at Novelty, then regarded as one of the finest machinery companies in the nation. There was also another brother, Frederick, who ended up in New Orleans, and Francis and Frederic established the Belleville Iron Works in Algiers, outside New Orleans. They made mostly agricultural equipment, but also spent some time making prototype rifles in hopes of selling them to the US Army. They even wrote to then US Secretary of War Jefferson Davis in 1856 about establishing an arms factory in the South since none then existed. Of course, that suited the Union fine, so nothing ever came of it. When the Civil War began, Ferdinand resigned his position with novelty and it appears Frederick made his way back to New York since he was a Union sympathizer. The remaining two brothers, Ferdinand and Francis, set to work immediately converting the Belleville company to producing rifles. The company was renamed Cook and Brother and a new factory, initially the Nashua Iron Works, was established in New Orleans. Although I don't know for sure, I assume the Belleville factory was sold to help finance the new rifle company/
The removal of the rifle company to Athens had some of the same heroics as the Russians removing their factories in the face of the advancing Nazis. I could write a book on that alone, and this is already getting close enoough to a book. The brothers had no intention of going through that turmoil again. They reserved at least 250 of their rifles for a local defense company to defend the plant and the Athens area when it was clear that the Union forces would make their way through Georgia. They even made a few small artillery pieces. The plant defense force did fight the Union forces as part of a larger local militia at Griswoldville, GA and Hardeeville SC, and several factory workers were killed in the battles. As Ian said, Ferdinand gave his life for the Confederacy on December 11, 1864, stuck down by a Union sniper during the Hardeeville battles.
After the War ended, Francis managed to get a Federal pardon after spending some time in Union custody because he was a Confederate officer. Because he was a British subject, he managed to escape imprisonment as a traitor. Even though he managed to stave off several years of attempts by US Marshals to seize the factory, the local sheriff auctioned it off in 1868 to pay of the company's substantial debts that were never made good due to the collapse of the Confederacy. The buildings and grounds were purchased by the Athens Manufacturing Company and used as a cotton mill. To the best of my knowledge, the factory burned to the ground sometime in the 1890's. Ferdinand gave his life and Francis gave his fortune, both for the Lost Cause.
The only reason I know some of these details is the brothers are distant relatives. As far as I can tell from my genealogy program, they would be cousins six times removed. I found out some of the information while researching that line of the family. As you might imagine, I'd love to have one of the Cook and Brother rifles. Unfortunately, I don't have a spare $30,0000 readily at hand.
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This was also the last use of gliders by the Germans. Only 12 of the 22 gliders dispatched against Vassieux-en-Vercors actually landed in the right place, with the rest either landing too far to the north or crashing upon landing. Thus, the actual numbers of German troops (who were mostly Russian or Ukrainian) were combat effective upon landing numbered only about 150 of the 400 dispatched. It showed once again why glider operations were just not effective, especially in terms of the numbers of troops lost as part of the operation, and the difficult of piloting gliders to a specific spot.
The biggest problem for the Marqui was their almost complete lack of heavy weapons. Air dropping artillery and the attendant ammunition was impossible in 1944, but the air drop operation did include at least 14 British 3" mortars and somewhere between 2 and 5 4.2" mortars, along with at least 150 bombs for each mortar. These should have provided enough mortars to stop or significantly delay the German advance up the Massif. Unfortunately, all those containers, dropped from one B-17, landed among the Germans, who retrieved them and turned the mortars against the Marquis and the civilians in the villages on the plateau. On such events does the turn of many a battle come.
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While two battleships were ordered by the Ottoman Empire, only one of the seized vessels, Reşadiye, was from that order. Fatih Sultan Mehmed, the second ship, wasn't even ordered until April, 1914, and laid down in June, just before the outbreak of war, so there was no chance it would even have been delivered. The second ship was the Brazilian Rio de Janeiro, sold to Ottomans in 1913 and renamed Sultan Osman I. She was just finishing sea trials and was ready to be turned over to a Turkish crew when Churchill decided to seize both Turkish vessels. This almost led to open warfare on the docks of Newcastle, as the Turkish captain and 500 crewman threatened to take the ship by force. Churchill ordered the ship held by force if necessary, and it was only the Turkish lack of arms that allowed a negotiated settlement. The Sultan Osman I was renamed Agincourt and added to the Royal Navy. She was an impressive looking ship, which is what the Brazilians wanted. Her seven 12" twin turrets had the most main battery turrets of any dreadnought, and the twenty 6" guns of her secondary battery were the heaviest of any dreadnought ever built. The seizure of these ships, especially since they were both paid in full, caused an uproar in Turkey, and was one of the events that saw the Ottoman Empire declaring war on the side of the Germans.
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I'd love to go but since i'd be traveling by myself, $3375 plus a $580 supplement for a single room on a seven day tour is completely out of my price range. Dinner is only included on the first night. Breakfast I'm sure are the typical continental breakfasts included with the hotel charge. There's no mention of the star rating of hotels, just "first class accommodations". That can mean a wide range of things in Europe. Most tours will say something like two or three star hotels so you have a better idea of what to expect. Mycost would be $565 a day not including lunch or dinner. That will easily be another $25 euros per day in any kind of decent neighborhood restaurants, and a lot more in tourist places. I'd have to add air fare from the US to Brussels and then back from Paris.
There's an 11 day tour at the end of June covering many of the same points but with two days in Paris and more time at some of the battlefields. It's all inclusive at four star hotels, unlimited non-alcoholic drinks on busses and at meals with a glass of beer or wine at lunch and dinner. The cost is $5,250, or $480 day. The minimum cost for your tour with meals is $507. Even the single room supplement is $52 a day on the 11 day compared to $82 for your tour, and September is the low season in Europe. I'm retired on a mostly fixed income. I'd really like to go, get to meet you, and hear your narration, but the cost is just too high for what's essentially a budget tour.
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I bought one of the Century Arms 7.62 Nato conversions in 1991 for $220. The bore was well done, and armory had redone the parkerizing and refinished the wood. What Century didn't do was enough testing after the conversion. Apparently they shortened the barrel so they could cut new metal for the 7.62 chamber, shortened the gas tube to match the 9/16" barrel offset, and left the original French springs and recoil system in place. A friend of mine ordered one at the same time. I think these were among the first Century conversions. Mine would never fire a full mag without a jam of some kind, some of which got stuck so badly it required a rod and rubber mallet to free it from the chamber. My buddy's rifle would happily go through multiple mags without a problem. Type of ammo didn't matter in mine, but his could fire cruddy surplus ammo all day. Mags for the 7.62 guns are also crazy expensive now, $50 and higher last I looked. Unless you can confirm from the owner his gun is a shooter, avoid the Century conversions. I've heard of slamfire issues with the 7.5 guns, but they can be fixed with a change ot the firing pin, again from what I've heard. I will say mine was a good shooter when it was feeding rounds properly, about equal to a Garand in accuracy. Unless you're like Ian and just an aficionado of French guns, there are many better shooters than the 56/49.
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@johnfisk811 "Cocked it all up" is a term that makes it sound as if Churchill's decision was capricious. The British had just gone through a war with their major ally using ammunition that wasn't used by the British. That created massive logistical problems, since ammunition showing up at the front might be the wrong types for most of the guns in use at that front. Churchill was determined, and I think rightly so, not to repeat that mistake, since both countries were adopting new ammunition at about the same time.
Churchill hope the US would adopt the .280 round and even the EM-2 rifle. The US was adamant the an intermediate round was not powerful enough for a battle rifle, and Canada had already committed to adopting whatever round the US chose. Australia wasn't far behind on that decision, so it was clear that the 7.62 NATO round was going to be the winner. We can argue id the round itself was really the right one but, for the first time in history, the armies of what would be major allies in war would be carrying, if not the same rifles, at least the same ammunition. It may be hard to realize looking back over seventy years what a big deal that really was.
While interesting, none of this answering my original question. Why did it take so long for the British to adopt a self loading rifle? Even if we use the adoption date of the EM-2 as benchmark, that was still fourteen years after the M-1 was adopted in 1937.
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@matthias1031980 Actually, English is one of the few major languages that is completely genderless. All the major European languages use gender except for Italian, but even they have some bits of gender. I think it all stems from Latin. Having gone to Catholic school for 12 years, Latin was another one I was forced to learn. Many gendered words in Latin make no sense, so I just had to memorize. Of the ones I remember, a pair of standouts are garden, which is male, and tree, which is female. Seems like a tree in a garden should be female too, but not in Latin. I'm kind of glad I did learn Latin now because it makes me a better English speaker. I was a respiratory therapist for a number of years, and knowing Latin made it way easier to at least guess at the meanings of many of the medical terms we had to memorize. Other students who never took Latin were lost. Same with making good guesses about the meanings of other English terms I had never seen before. I sure hated it at the time though.
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@s1n1stersixsgaming8 Makes sense. We have plenty of those in English too. Archer, Baker, Brewer, Butcher, Carter, Clark, Cooper, Cook, Dyer, Farmer, Faulkner, Fisher, Fuller, Gardener, Glover, Head, Hunt or Hunter, Judge, Mason, Page, Parker, Potter, Sawyer, Slater, Smith, Taylor, Thatcher, Turner, Weaver, Woodman, and Wright are all family names derived from the occupations of the first families in that occupation. The occupational name eventually become the family name.
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My neighbor's dad had two of these when I was a kid. He was one of the soldiers in a unit tasked with inventorying remaining German rifles and other small arms right after the war. As a reward for his work, he was able to bring back two of these .22 rifles. One was a Walthers that, from memory, looked and performed identically to the Walthers model single shot rifle shown in the video. The other was a stripper clip fed semiauto version made by BSW. It had a tiny clip that held, as I remember it, either seven or eight rounds, and it performed the same as the KAR98K stripper clip. I know he had at least 10 of these stripper clips, and my friend and I shot both the single shot and semiauto versions in Boy Scout target matches to get our target shooting merit badges. Both were in excellent condition, never having been issued, and they were great shooting guns. Unfortunately, both my friend and his dad are no longer with us, and I have no idea what happened to these rifles. At the time, we had no idea that these weren't just cooler versions of our JC Higgins .22 rifles.
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@dennisspencer1113 The Solothurn was the Cadillac of anti tank rifles then. Several wholesalers were selling them in the same time period (1960-65) for $150 to $200 including everything - case, optics, bipop, tools, cleaning kit, a couple extra barrels, ten mags, a few practice rounds for dry firing.IIRC, you could get 20mm rounds for about $40 per 50 live rounds. I don't remember the shipping weight, but I know it had to come by truck so there was no chance sneaking it up to my room. I used to sit there panting away over the ads, but I could never convince my mom or dad I HAD to get a 20mm cannon for some reasonable purpose. Back then, you could buy a six year old Ford for $200, and I sure wasn't going to get a cannon that cost as much as a used Ford. Rats!
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@ramjb I don't know how I ended up on such an old video, but I've been studying naval history as a hobby for about 60 years now. My other hobby is amateur radio, for with I hold an extra class license. I take particular interest in radar history. and the technical aspects of radar.
The Graf Spee was equipped in Fumo-22 radar, not Seetakt. That radar set was on Deutschland, and both ships were used as sort of test beds for each type of radar. The Fumo 22 could have been used for gun laying, but the radar only had better than 50 meter circular probability of error out to about 8 kilometers, and German optical rangefinder had similar results out to about 14 kilometers in clear weather. The Kriegsmarine was interested in radar only for surface search and range estimation in 1939, so Graf Spee's gunnery accuracy was the result of superior German optics and crew training, not radar.
The Admiralty actually did display a keen interest in the radar on the Graf Spee, and sent an experienced radar engineer to the River Plate to inspect the radar and electronic systems that remained. Unfortunately, his report has never surfaced. If and when it does, it will answer a lot of questions about exactly what kind of radar the Graf Spee actually had. Photos of the relatively small mattress radar antenna on the AGS had the British worried that Germans had a working microwave radar or, even more alarming, had perfected the cavity magnetron the British were working on. What they did find was the Fumo-22 operated at 600 MHz, a far higher frequency than the radars in use by British warships at the time, which operated in the 43-75 MHz range. The British were unaware that the Germans had developed an Ultra High Frequency (UHF) radar, and the knowledge gained from the Graf Spee allowed the British to develop jammers in only a few months.
The British Type 79 operated at 43 MHz. Since higher frequencies required much higher power input, and the transmitting tubes of the day were incapable of high power inputs, the Fumo-22, with an input of only about 150 watts, had a range of about 20 kilometers on a good day, and usually about half that. The ranging when a target was located was far more accurate than a Type 79, but it was not far enough out to make it practical for any kind of radar gun control. However, the Type 79 operated at 20 kilowatts, so it could locate ship size targets out to an average of 60 kilometers. It was a tradeoff between range and accuracy in 1939, but the problem was solved with the British perfection of the cavity magnetron and the type 271 radar in 1941. The Germans never even came close to catching up after that.
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Hans Muller Hans, thanks for the rundown on Swedish gun laws. It may seem to you that the rules are pretty simple and uncomplicated. To me as an American, they are overly complicated, must cost quite a bit of money to comply with, and seem to have a certain amount of difficulty that's there to discourage gun ownership without jumping through a lot of hoops.
You say you don't have a need for guns for personal defence. I find it difficult to believe that being Swedish somehow has changed basic human nature, so people there don't try to rob, assault, and murder other people. That's why I own weapons. So far, after having guns for over 50 years, their only use has been at the range. I hope it stays that way, but owning guns, to me, is no different than owning homeowner's insurance. I hope the house doesn't ever burn down, I have fire extinguishers to help stop that from happening but, should the worst come, I want to have enough insurance to make sure I can go on with my life.
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My former department had one of these specifically for breaching, as Ian said. The SWAT guys were the custodians, and it was used at least four times that I remember. This was back in the 80's and early 90's when we had clandestine drug labs all over the county, and some of them had two or even three door systems to prevent a typical raiding team from getting in. Unfortunately, I was just a grunt, so I never got he chance to fire one, but I did see the results of using it. Our armorer was a top notch reloader, and he came up with round similar to the Hatton. It had a slug made with frangible aluminum in some kind of binder. The details were on a need to know basis, and grunts didn't need to know. They raided a house modified by a well known speed "manufacturer", and he had set up three steel doors with six hinges each, all chrome steel. After our raid, the hinges were not only destroyed, but the slug tore the underlying sistered wood door frames apart. They went through eleven of the twelve rounds before they were in. It was a very impressive performance.
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