Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Jan 2025The Falkland Islands Defense Force is a small organization independent of the British military, run directly by the Falkland Islands government. When it decided to update its small arms form the L1A1 SLR (aka British FAL) in the early 1990s, the British assumed they would purchase the new L85A1 rifles. However, by that time the flaws in the L85 were pretty well known, and the Islanders exercised their independence and chose to adopt something different. After investigating a number of different options they chose to use the Steyr AUG. At this time the AUG was in service with a number of other nations including the Australians and New Zealanders, and Steyr offered good terms and good support for the FIDF.
The FIDF purchased about 160 AUG rifles in total, including a small number of carbines and heavy-barreled LMGs. The carbines were particularly useful in a maritime role, which was part of the FIDF mission at the time (fisheries patrol). The LMG version, fitted with an Elcan C79 4x optic, was intended to supplant the FN MAG as a support weapon, but was found unfit for that role. Instead, most of the LMGs were converted to standard rifles via simple barrel swap. In addition, the Elcan optics proved prone to breakage, and were eventually replaced with British SUSATs. Indeed, some of the standard AUGs had their factory scopes replaced with SUSATs as well.
The AUG remained the standard rifle for the FIDF until recently, when the service received L85A3 rifles from the British. The AUG was not configured to use the bullet-trap blank adapters that the British used, and the L85s were intended to allow better integrated training between the two forces. A formal replacement for the AUG has not yet been determined, as it remains a bit unclear what the British military will decide to do to replace the L85 in the coming years.
Many thanks to the FIDF for giving me access to their armory to dig out these rifles to film for you! They remain today a small but quite well-equipped all-volunteer force dedicated to maintaining the security of the Falkland Islands.
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May 9, 2025
Steyr AUGs of the Falkland Islands Defense Force
May 8, 2025
Dambusters – Was It Worth It?
HardThrasher
Published 5 May 2025The third and final part in a series on the Dambusters Raid; looking at the attacks themselves and their aftermath
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QotD: Trade empires
The final (and possibly ultimate) sort of empire is the Trade Empire. These develop more because exploring traders have a need for safe bases and secure lines of communication to make their trade work. Theoretically trade empires could be land based (and both the American West and the Chinese spread down the Silk Road argue the case that they started as trade security rather than conquest … no matter how they finished). But in reality the main cause of and reason for trade empires is the development of water transport. Specifically ocean transport.
So let us consider the motives of Empire in a few cases.
The Phoenicians had a magnificent trade empire, though with a few elements we find familiar from the more recent Viking version, or indeed the Venetian “Republic” — namely a bit of raiding, and quite a bit of slave trading. All three broadened into a bit of conquest — Carthage, Normandy and the sack of Constantinople in the 4th Crusade come to mind — but all those offshoots were by-products of the original cultures, and none of them became the norm for the ongoing home culture (each of which faded away as circumstances changed and they failed to adapt). So we could say that they were essentially trading empires.
Greece and Carthage and Rome were also trade empires, initially letting their security concerns drag them into a bit of conquest on the side. The difference in their cases was that the conquest element became dominant and completely changed the “homeland”. The city states of Greece becoming the world-conquering hordes of Alexander, and completely undermining the vibrant city state cultures that had proceeded them. The Phoenician trading city of Carthage becoming an expansionary conquest state that eventually pushed Rome too hard. And Rome’s overseas campaigns in Spain and North Africa completely undermining the independent farmer/citizen/soldier class of the Roman Republic, and replacing them with a system of professional troops whose loyalty could only be bought by ever increasing conquests by the emperors.
Naturally every expansion eventually reaches limits, and the concern reverts to trying to secure what you have, and hold the outsiders further away. Which is why, amusingly, people like the Romans and the Chinese came through their expansionary conquest phase, and then found themselves back in the position of having to protect the fringes through deals with tribes that can be traded with/employed by/or paid tribute. Cue Attila the Hun and his ilk.
So empires on the way down may also be considered trade and security empires I suppose, though many still had a conquest impulse (for fame or fortune or simply to pay the defenders off) built in, or tried to act as if they were still conquering hordes. Cue Constantinople and Belisarius.
In fact most empires will go through a variety of stages, though I think it fair to say that most empires have a core purpose and attitude, no matter how they tinker at the edges to deal with specific circumstances.
Nigel Davies, “Types of Empires: Security, Conquest, and Trade”, rethinking history, 2020-05-02.
May 7, 2025
The Korean War Week 46 – The MacArthur Senate Hearings Begin – May 6, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 6 May 2025The Senate Hearings digging into Douglas MacArthur’s dismissal as UN forces commander begin this week, though they’ll likely continue for some time. Meanwhile in the field, the Chinese Spring Offensive that raged all last week continues, although it cannot reach Seoul, and by the end of the week the enemy seems to be withdrawing on all fronts.
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Boldly Bombing Bugger All – The Bomber War Episode 1
HardThrasher
Published 13 Oct 2023To see more on the Fairey Battle go here – The Fairey Battle – Light Bomber, Hea… also subscribe to Rex’s channel, he’s ace
Selected Online Resources
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butt_…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casab…
https://discovery.nationalarchives.go… – Western War Plan W5a and W6Selected Bibliography
America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing 1910-1945 – McFarland et al.
Dresden – Sinclair McKay
Dresden; Tuesday … – Fredrick Taylor
Absolute War – The Firebombing of Tokyo – Chris Bellamy
Black Snow –
Bomber Command – Max Hastings
Bomber Command’s War Against Germany, An Official History – Nobel Franklin et al.
The Bomber Mafia – Malcolm Gladwell
Undaunted and Through Adversity (Vol 1 &2) – Ben Kite
United States Strategic Bombing Survey (European War) (USSBS) Sept 1945 – Var. – https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catal…
America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing 1910-1945, McFarland
Big Week – James Holland
May 6, 2025
1949: How the Arab-Israeli War Ended – W2W 27
TimeGhost History
Published 5 May 2025In early 1949, the Arab-Israeli War finally comes to an uneasy end. After brutal fighting, armistice talks in Rhodes redraw borders with a green pencil line, displacing hundreds of thousands and reshaping the Middle East. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon reluctantly sign ceasefires, leaving core issues — Jerusalem, refugees, and recognition — unresolved. But can forced armistices really bring lasting peace, or is Palestine fated to endless conflict?
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Gilboa Snake: Is the Double-AR Really so Dumb? (Re-Cut for YouTube)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Jan 2025YouTube removed this video, so I re-cut it to meet their requirements (I think … for now). If you want to get off YouTube and support historical & education gun channels, please consider subscribing to History of Weapons & War: weaponsandwar.tv
The Gilboa Snake is an Israeli rifle (from the same designer behind the Cornershot) that essentially combines two standard ARs into a single unit. In its civilian configuration it has two of every part — barrels, bolts (mirrored, so one ejects left and the other right), triggers, buffers, etc. In its military setup, the triggers and recoil system are combined into single units, and this makes the gun arguably practical. With a single trigger, a person fires two rounds simultaneously, resulting in either two simultaneous hits at close range, or the potential for one hit at longer range instead of what might be a miss with a regular rifle. This is a concept that has been experimented with by pretty much all major militaries over the past decades; the Russians, French, and Americans all had rifles like this. Other approaches to the end result included duplex and triplex ammunition (multiple bullets in one case) and hyper-burst firing mechanisms (like the Russian AN-94 and German G11). Ultimately all of the different systems were deemed poor compromises compared to normal rifles, but it’s not as bizarre of an idea as it might first appear.
Unfortunately, the civilian Snake has to have two separate triggers to avoid machine gun classification in the US. It’s difficult to fire both triggers simultaneously, and this limits the practical military applications of the gun.
Oh, and don’t miss the unique elements in the Snake to allow for the barrels to be zeroed before mounting sights!
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QotD: World War I shattered the European notion of what “war” actually was
We’ve actually talked before about just how profoundly our modern view of war and battle (and battlefields) is conditioned by the experience of the first world war and the vast literary production of the generation that went through those trenches. Certainly for English (and German and French, etc.) literature, World War I seems to almost snap the tradition in half, making everything before it feel trite and washing the whole of war literature in grim tones of field grey.
And, of course, that is the point. World War I was a new kind of war that shattered the old certainties born out of the old kinds of war. It is often a mistake to assume those old certainties had been born out of some eternal peace, but while the 1800s had not seen a general European war, they had seen many wars, in the many imperial possessions of European countries, on the edges of what the British or French considered “Europe” and also in the heart of Europe itself (not to mention a few dust–ups in the Americas). These were not peaceful societies confronting their first war and shocked by the experience, but very bellicose societies encountering for the first time a new sort of war and being stunned at how different it was from what they had expected, from the wars of their (recent!) past.
All of which is to say war, war really does change. And warriors with it.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
May 5, 2025
Remembering The Battle of Britain (1969)
At SteynOnline, Rick McGinnis discusses the 1969 film The Battle of Britain, which was considered a financial flop at the time it was released and only turned a profit once home VCR sales provided a new revenue stream — it was how I first watched the movie, although I do remember seeing posters for it at the cinema while it was in theatrical release.
The best recent depictions of the war – my subjective list includes Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Saving Private Ryan, Dunkirk, Das Boot, Greyhound and Letters from Iwo Jima – were mostly made with veterans advising on historical accuracy and mostly being heard. This wasn’t always the case: for at least two decades following the war, when veterans were still thick on the ground, historical accuracy was frequently sacrificed in the interest of adventure, drama, comedy or romance.
(My subjective list includes Kelly’s Heroes, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, D-Day The Sixth of June, Where Eagles Dare, Operation Petticoat, From Here to Eternity and Von Ryan’s Express. Not that these aren’t entertaining, enjoyable films; they just shouldn’t be considered history.)
If there was a turning point – a film that struggled and mostly succeeded in telling a plausibly accurate story about the war to audiences likely to contain not just veterans but civilians with lived memories – it was probably Guy Hamilton’s Battle of Britain, released in 1969, barely thirty years after the event it commemorates.
While in pre-production for the film, 007 producer Harry Saltzman and his co-producer (and veteran RAF pilot) Benjamin Fisz realized that their American backers at MGM were nervous about making a film about something Americans knew little about. This led to The Battle for the Battle of Britain, a short TV documentary about the film and the event that it was based on, hosted and narrated by one of the film’s stars, Michael Caine.
Included with the 2005 collector’s edition DVD of Hamilton’s film, The Battle for the Battle of Britain begins with a series of “man on the street” interviews conducted outside the American embassy in London. Older interview subjects talk vaguely about how they’d admired the British for standing alone against Nazi Germany at the time; younger ones almost unanimously admit that they don’t’ know anything about it. One woman states that she doesn’t wish to give an opinion since she works for the embassy. At the time these interviews were made the average age of a British pilot who fought in the battle and survived would have been around fifty, as the vast majority of the young men who flew to defend England in the summer of 1940 were on either side or twenty.
Making Battle of Britain felt like a duty in 1969; it attracted a cast of big stars who were willing to work for scale just to be involved, but that didn’t stop the film from going massively over schedule and over budget. Historical accuracy was so important that Saltzman and Lisz ended up collecting what became the world’s 35th largest air force, rebuilding wrecked airframes and making planes that had sat on concrete plinths outside museums and airfields flyable again.
Still from The Battle of Britain
The film begins with the fall of France in the spring of 1940, and British pilots and air crew struggling to get back in the air ahead of the rapidly approaching German army. We meet the three RAF squadron leaders who will be at the centre of the action: Caine’s Canfield, Robert Shaw as the curt, intense “Skipper”, and Colin Harvey (Christopher Plummer), a Canadian married to Maggie (Susannah York), an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.
Back across the channel we meet Sir Laurence Olivier as Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command and the man who will lead the English in the air battle to come. Blunt and charmless, Dowding had the unenviable task of telling Sir Winston Churchill, only just appointed Prime Minister, that he doesn’t support his promise to send more fighter squadrons across the Channel to aid the French as they would be squandered in a lost cause and, in any case, he needs every plane and pilot he has to fight the German invasion that’s doubtless coming.
The Bloody Battle of Agincourt | Animated Episode
The Rest Is History
Published 30 Nov 2024“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”.
The Battle of Agincourt in 1415 endures as perhaps the most totemic battle in the whole of English history. Thanks in part to Shakespeare’s masterful Henry V, the myths and legends of that bloody day echo across time, forever enshrining the young Henry as the greatest warrior king England had ever known. So too the enduring idea of the English as plucky underdogs, facing down unfavourable odds with brazen grit. And though the exact numbers of men who fought in the two armies is hotly contested, the prospect was certainly intimidating for the English host looking down upon the vast French force amassed below them the day before the battle. Hungry and weary after an unexpectedly long march, and demoralised by the number of French that would be taking to the field, the situation certainly seemed dire for the English. One man amongst them, however, held true to his belief that the day could still be won: Henry V. An undeniably brilliant military commander, he infused his men with a sense of patriotic mission, convincing them that theirs was truly a divinely ordained task, and therefore in this — and his careful strategic planning the night before the battle — he proves a striking case of one individual changing the course of history. However, the French too had plans in place for the day ahead: total warfare. In other words, to overwhelm the English in a single devastating moment of impact, sweeping the lethal Welsh archers aside. So it was that dawn broke on the 25th of October to the site of King Henry wearing a helmet surmounted by a glittering crown and bearing the emblems of both France and England, astride his little grey horse, and riding up and down his lines of weathered silver clad men, preparing them to stride into legend … then, as the French cavalry began their charge, the sky went black as 75,000 arrows blocked out the sun. What else would that apocalyptic day hold in store?
Join Tom and Dominic as they describe the epochal Battle of Agincourt. From the days building up to it, to the moment that the two armies shattered together in the rain and mud of France. It is a story of courage and cowardice, kings and peasants, blood and bowels, tragedy and triumph.
00:00 What is to come …
00:50 Shakespeare and Henry V
02:53 Agincourt is exceptional
04:15 The battle is a test of God’s favour
05:27 The English see the French forces …
09:30 The French aren’t offering battle
10:40 Why the French delay
11:13 The French think they’re going to win
11:35 An ominous silence
12:35 Henry’s plan
20:50 The French plan
24:28 How big were the armies
28:49 The lay of the land
34:50 Henry makes the first move
37:00 The French charge into darkness
38:57 The French army advances
45:50 Reaction to the slaughter
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May 4, 2025
The Clean German Myth, Doomed B-17 Pilots, and Japan’s Rapid Victories – Out of the Foxholes Live
World War Two
Published 3 May, 20205Indy and Sparty tackle some more of your interesting questions in another live Out of the Foxholes. Today they look at loss rates of B-17 crews, the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, and ask why the West was apparently so unprepared for Japan’s attack.
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May 3, 2025
Development of the Uzi Family: Standard, Mini, and Micro
Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Jan 2025The Uzi was originally designed in the 1950s, and it was on the technological cutting edge at the time. The stamped receiver, telescoping bolt, and compact magazine-in-grip layout made it an inexpensive and effective weapon. Its sedate 600 round/minute rate of fire helped as well, making it easy to shoot effectively. Uziel Gal experimented with a compact version at that time, but dropped the idea when he proved unable to make a smaller version with the same low rate of fire as the standard pattern.
Fast forward to the late 1970s, and the designers at IMI revisited the idea of a compact Uzi. They were willing to accept the increased rate of fire of a shorter receiver and lighter bolt, and their first prototypes were ready in 1978. full export sales began in 1980. The gun was advertised as having a 900 rpm rate of fire, but the reality was much higher.
The final step of classic Uzi development was the Micro Uzi, introduced in 1986. This was actually developed form the semiautomatic, closed-bolt Uzi Pistol made for American commercial sales. That pistol was given a select-fire trigger group and a folding stock, and it became a micro-compact submachine gun for only the most tactical of operators. It was advertised as having a 1200 rpm rate of fire, but this was again underestimated to improve sales.
In reality, the standard Uzi does fire at about 600 rpm. The Mini (in closed-bolt form) ran at 1300+ in my testing at S&B, and the Micro was over 1400 rpm. Where the original Uzi is best kept in fully automatic mode and can easily fire single shots when desired, the Mini and Micro Uzis are definitely best suited to semiautomatic use. Firing them in fully automatic is a much more difficult proposition if one wants to maintain any level of accuracy and situational awareness.
Thanks to Sellier & Bellot for giving me access to this set of Uzis to film for you!
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May 2, 2025
The New York Times still values “the narrative” more than the truth
Alex Berenson on the way the New York Times chose to present the summary of the crash investigation on the fatal collision between a US Army Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial passenger aircraft over Washington DC:
The New York Times cannot stop mangling the truth to serve its political goals.
On Sunday, the paper exhaustively examined the collision between an Army Black Hawk and an American Airlines jet that killed 67 people over the Potomac in January.
The massive 4,000-word article claimed the crash had many causes, including an overworked air traffic controller. “Missteps, Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash“, the Times proclaimed.
Except that’s not really what happened. Or what the Times found.
Yes, the controller was busy. Yes, the Black Hawk pilots wore night-vision goggles that can, ironically, complicate seeing in cities with lots of ambient light.
Those choices and problems raised the risks of an accident.
But despite all the words the Times devoted to explaining the crash, its root cause was simple. The Black Hawk was flying too high. It flew directly into the CRJ700 regional jet. The plane’s pilots and passengers had no chance.
That’s the reality. The second reality is that an inexperienced female Army pilot, Capt. Rebecca Lobach, 28, (CORRECTION: original article said 36) was at the controls of the Black Hawk when it hit the CRJ700, on a training and evaluation mission.
What the Times actually found, the news in the article, is that the Lobach’s copilot repeatedly warned her the helicopter needed to descend in the minutes before the accident. Just seconds before the crash, he suggested she tack left, a path that would likely have avoided the jet.
She didn’t respond.
In other words, the story here is that Lobach — who had never deployed overseas but had volunteered in the Biden White House and whose obituary prominently called her a certified advocate for “sexual harassment” victims — flew her helicopter into a passenger jet and killed 67 people, including herself.
May 1, 2025
Military Tactics In The Falklands
Pegasus Tests
Published 27 Dec 2024A discussion with Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons about Argentine and British tactics during the Falklands War.
#forgottenweapons
QotD: The Eurovision Song Contest
The Eurovision Song Contest has never quite recovered, but oh, you should have seen it in its glory days, when the rich national cultures that gave the world Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Purcell, Debussy, and Grieg bandied together to bring us “La-La-La” (winner, 1968), “Boom-Bang-A-Bang” (1969), “Ding-Dinge-Dong” (1975), “A Ba Ni Bi” (1978), “Diggy Loo Diggi Ley” (1984), and my personal favorite, “Lat Det Swinge,” the 1985 winner by the Norwegian group Bobbysocks. The above songs are nominally sung in Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, and even English, but in fact it’s the universal language of Eurogroovy: “Ja, ja, boogie, baby, mit der rock ‘n’ roll”.
Mark Steyn, “Waterloo”, Steyn Online, 2020-05-17.
