Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Apr 2017The ZK-420S is an experimental Czech rifle that is virtually unknown today, but which was remarkably influential, bearing significant elements of the Garand and several other Czech designs, and influencing the M14 and Kalashnikov rifles. Originally designed by Josef Koucky in 1942, the plans were hurriedly dusted off and improved at the end of World War 2. With many nations looking at the possibility of adopted self-loading military rifles, Brno hoped to make export sales of the design.
The ZK420S uses the trigger mechanism of the M1 Garand and a gas-operated rotating bolt action very similar to the Garand and AK rifles. It has a simple adjustable 3-position gas system, and a quick and simple disassembly procedure. It uses detachable box magazines (10 round, and not copied from an existing design) and was made in a variety of calibers for testing — including 8×57, 7×57, 7.5 Swiss, 6.5 Swedish, and .30-06. Examples were trialed or examined in the United States, Argentina, Israel, Ethiopia, England, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and elsewhere — this particular rifle is from the Norwegian trials.
In my opinion, it is an excellent rifle, and its failure to sell was probably due to price and the combination of tight budgets and cheap surplus war material in the late 1940s. It is handy, well balanced, and has a good magazine design and good sights. Recoil is comparable to the Garand. Ultimately the development program in Czechoslovakia would lead to the ZK-472 in 7.5x49mm, which would proceed to the 7.62x45mm in the vz.52 rifle.
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August 20, 2022
Czech M14: The ZK-420S Battle Rifle
August 19, 2022
How Accurate is Saving Private Ryan? – WW2 D-Day Special
World War Two
Published 16 Aug 2022How accurate is that famous beach scene in Saving Private Ryan? Is it true to the history or just another Hollywood story? Seeing as we’re about to start the filming for our massive D-Day project, we figured we’d break it down, shot by shot.
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August 18, 2022
The Communist Spies in America’s Atomic Program – WW2 – Spies & Ties 22
World War Two
Published 15 Aug 2022The NKVD have wormed their way into British society. Across the pond, America is also teeming with communist spies. They’re in the government, military, even OSS, and the FBI. Now they’re going for the biggest secret of all – the atomic bomb.
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The bridge design that helped win World War II
Vox
Published 12 Mar 2021It’s a simple innovation that helped win a war.
The Bailey bridge was Donald Bailey’s innovative solution to a number of wartime obstacles. The allies needed a way to cross bodies of water quickly, but bombed-out bridges — or an absence of crossings entirely — made that incredibly difficult. That was only compounded by new, heavy tanks that needed incredibly strong support.
Bailey’s innovation — a modular, moveable panel bridge — solved those problems and gave the allies a huge advantage. The 570-pound steel panel could be lifted by just six men, and the supplies could fit inside small service trucks. Using those manageable materials, soldiers could build crossings sufficient for heavy tanks and other vehicles.
As impressive, the Bailey bridge could be rolled across a gap from one side to the other, making it possible to build covertly or with little access to the other side. Together, all the Bailey bridge’s advantages changed bridge construction and may have helped win the war.
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August 17, 2022
Amazing Money Heist by Polish Resistance – WAH 073 – August 14, 1943
World War Two
Published 14 Aug 2022The reality of war finally seeps through to the majority of Germans, and it didn’t match up with the propaganda. Meanwhile resistance is increasing, and part of that is a classic money carriers when the Polish Home Army robs a money transport.
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Prototype Gustloff 206 Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Aug 2016http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
German arms development during World War II was quite the chaotic mess, in many ways. While it is not uncommon for different service branches to have independent procurement systems, in fascist-era Germany this was coupled with the close collaboration between industry and the Party structure. This led to competing and conflicting policies between military and political offices.
Semiautomatic rifle development was no exception. While the Walther and Mauser companies won the competitions to develop the Gewehr 41, the Gustloff concern had also produced a number of designs and these were continued after the trials by political decree. The best of these designs (apparently, from the sparse information available) was the model 206.
The Gustloff 206 is a largely sheet metal rifle with a gas piston operating system and an unusual vertically traveling locking block, akin to the Type 94 Nambu and Bergmann 1910 (as well as the much more recent Arsenal Strike One). The rifle is semiautomatic only (although it sounds like some select-fire models were also made) and feeds from MG-13 box magazines — cut down from 25 rounds to 10 rounds capacity on this example.
The rifle may be related to the Gustloff submission for the Luftwaffe’s FG-42 project, but may not be. All I have been able to find on that rifle is that Gustloff did submit one and it did not progress into any trials, most likely because it failed to meet the design criteria set out by the Luftwaffe. The model 206 would fit that description.
August 16, 2022
Manstein Goes Great War Style – WW2 – 207 – August 13, 1943
World War Two
Published 13 Aug 2022From Sicily to Spas-Demensk, the Axis continue conceding ground to the Allies this week. But the fighting is still tough. The Wehrmacht has halted the Red Army offensive in the Kuban, and the British and American armies have neither the strength nor the willpower to press the advantage against Axis troops retreating to the Italian mainland.
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Nimble, Sleek, And Almost Useless In A Real Fight; the story of the Canadair CF-5 Freedom Fighter
Polyus Studios
Published 8 May 2021Don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to my channel!
Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudiosThe multi-role CF-5 was intended to replace the nuclear-armed CF-104 Starfighter and CF-101 Voodoo squadrons with a conventional warfighter. However, as an air superiority fighter, it was useless against all but the oldest relics in the Warsaw Pact arsenal. It fared little better as a close air support tactical fighter, thanks to its short range, relatively small weapons load, lack of all-weather navigation, and its inability to survive in a sophisticated, integrated air defense environment. Despite this, 240 were built in Canada and served with the Canadian Armed Forces for 27 years, not as a replacement for the existing fleet, but as an addition to them no one in the military seemed to really want. So why did Canada operate the CF-5? As you might well have assumed, the story behind the acquisition and operation of the CF-5 is a complicated one.
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August 15, 2022
QotD: Sparta – the North Korea of the Classical era
When we started this series, we had two myths, the myth of Spartan equality and the myth of Spartan military excellence. These two myths dominate the image of Sparta in the popular consciousness, permeating game, film and written representations and discussions of Sparta. These myths, more than any real society, is what companies like Spartan Race, games like Halo, and – yes – films like 300 are tapping into.
But Sparta was not equal, in fact it was the least equal Greek polis we know of. It was one of the least equal societies in the ancient Mediterranean, and one which treated its underclasses – who made up to within a rounding error of the entire society by the end – terribly. You will occasionally see pat replies that Sparta was no more dependent on slave labor than the rest of Greece, but even a basic demographic look makes it clear this is not true. Moreover our sources are clear that the helots were the worst treated slaves in Greece. Even among the Spartiates, Sparta was not equal and it never was.
And Sparta was not militarily excellent. Its military was profoundly mediocre, depressingly average. Even in battle, the one thing they were supposed to be good at, Sparta lost as much as it won. Judging Sparta as we should – by how well it achieved strategic objects – Sparta’s armies are a comprehensive failure. The Spartan was no super-soldier and Spartan training was not excellent. Indeed, far from making him a super-soldier, the agoge made the Spartans inflexible, arrogant and uncreative, and those flaws led directly to Sparta’s decline in power.
And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not. Spartan soldiers were average. The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems. All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger.
This would be bad enough, but the case for Sparta is worse because it – as a point of pride – provided nothing else. No innovation in law or government came from Sparta (I hope I have shown, if nothing else, that the Spartan social system is unworthy of emulation). After 550[BC], Sparta produced no trade goods or material culture of note. It produced no great art to raise up the human condition, no great literature to inspire. Despite possessing fairly decent farmland, it was economically underdeveloped, underpopulated and unimportant.
Athens produced great literature and innovative political thinking. Corinth was economically essential – a crucial port in the heart of Greece. Thebes gave us Pindar and was in the early fourth century a hotbed of military innovation. All three cities were adorned by magnificent architecture and supplied great art by great artists. But Sparta, Sparta gives us almost nothing.
Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.
Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
August 13, 2022
The Great Escape from a Death Factory – WAH – August 7, 1943
World War Two
Published 12 Aug 2022While enslavement, and mass murder continues unabated in August 1943, at the Treblinka Death Factory the forced laborers decide that enough is enough, and bring battle to the SS in a daring escape attempt.
Huge thanks to Purple Purple, Steven Yarnell, Pieter Kleij and Ruben Alikhanyan for their support during the episode premiere.
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QotD: Erich von Manstein
In the Britain of the Sixties, a certain mystique still attached to the generals of the Third Reich. In their stylish uniforms and their gleaming jackboots, they had swaggered. Only two, Keitel and Jodl, were executed at Nuremberg; the rest got away with murder.
Even some of those who were convicted of war crimes had friends in high places. One of the most prominent was Erich von Manstein, the architect of many German victories both in the Battle of France and on the Eastern front. He was also complicit in the genocide of more than a million Jews and others by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine.
Yet Churchill was among those who successfully campaigned to have Manstein’s 18-year sentence reduced to 12, of which he served only four.
Manstein’s memoir Verlorene Siege (translated as Lost Victories) appeared in 1958, a key text in the mythology that depicted the Wehrmacht as “clean” and laid the blame for war crimes on Hitler. Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the postwar Federal Republic, also played his part in the rehabilitation of Manstein, on the grounds that West German rearmament required a sharp distinction between the Nazis and an untainted military tradition as the basis for the new Bundeswehr.
Daniel Johnson, “The moral blindness of Putin’s generals”, The Critic, 2022-05-10.
August 12, 2022
Canadian Army Newsreel – Allies take Sicily
canmildoc
Published 4 Sep 2011Canadian war news reel.
August 11, 2022
US Navy Fleet Problems – Now its time to play with carriers (VIII-XII)
Drachinifel
Published 10 Aug 2022Today we take a look at the background and thinking behind the inter-war USN Fleet Problems, with summaries of Fleet Problems 8 through 12
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“Carbine” Williams’ Battle Rifle: The Winchester G30R
Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Jan 2018The Winchester G30R is the final iteration of David Marshall Williams’ work on a full power .30 caliber military rifle. The project began with a design by Ed Browning (John Browning’s half brother) using a tilting bolt and annular gas piston, manufactured for US military trials by Colt. It moved to the Winchester company, which assigned Williams to the project when Browning died in 1939. Williams first replaced the annular gas piston with his gas tappet system, creating the G30M rifle. This performed poorly in trials, and the next iteration was the replacement of the tilting bolt with a Garand-type rotating bolt, creating the Winchester M2 rifle.
The US military was not interested in the M2 in .30-06, but thought the concept could be ideal for the Light Rifle trials then underway, and Winchester scaled it down to .30 carbine, and won the Light Rifle trials with it. That weapon would go on to become the M1 Carbine. Once it was in mass production, Winchester returned to the M2 design and improved it into this G30R. It was tested by the Marine Corps, but not adopted. The Canadian military also expressed an interest, but the US government opted to not allow any exports, and so Canada never tested it.
The US Army was quite satisfied with the M1 Garand, but suggested that this rifle might be made into a replacement for the BAR if it were redesigned a bit for greater sustained fire capacity. Winchester did so, creating the Winchester Automatic Rifle (WAR), which was on track for adoption until World War Two ended and immediate arms development became a much less important priority for the military.
Thanks to the Institute of Military Technology for allowing me to have access to this rifle so I can bring it to you! Check out the IMT at:
QotD: Logistical limits to Spartan military action against Athens
During the first phase of the Peloponnesian War, called the Archidamean war, after the Spartan king who conducted it, Sparta invaded Attica functionally every year in an effort to inflict enough agricultural devastation that the Athenians would be forced to come out and fight […] The core problem is that it just isn’t possible to do a meaningful amount of damage in the short campaigning season before the army has to go home.
And I want to be clear just how long they bang their head against this rock. The Spartans invade in 431, besiege a minor town, accomplish nothing and leave (Thuc. 2.18-20), and in 430 (Thuc. 2.47), in 429, because of a plague in Athens, they instead besiege tiny Plataea (Thuc. 2.71ff) and then leave, but in 428 they’re back at it in Attica (Thuc. 3.1), and in 427 (Thuc. 3.26), and in 426 but turn back early due to earthquakes (Thuc. 3.89). But they’re back again in 425 (Thuc. 4.2), leaving each time when supplies run out. Sparta mounts no attack in 424 because Athenian naval raiding forces them to keep the army at home (Thuc. 4.57); in 423 they have a year-long truce with Athens (Thuc. 4.117). They only finally suggest the creation of a permanent base in Attica in 422/1 (Thuc. 5.17) but the war ends first (they’ll actually fortify a small outpost, Decelea, only when the war renews in 413).
Thucydides is in several cases (e.g. Thuc. 3.1.3) explicit that what causes these armies to fail and disperse back home is that they run out of supplies. They are two days – on foot! – from a major friendly trade port (Corinth), and they run out of supplies. Their last invasion was six years after their first and they still had not resolved the logistics problem of long-term operations in what is effectively their own backyard.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
