The Tank Museum
Published 5 Aug 2022Hello Tank Nuts! M18 Hellcat perfectly fit the American Army’s Tank Destroyer doctrine during WW2. This particular M18 saw service during WW2 and conflict in former Yugoslavia. It is part of the Phelps private collection and recently took part in the celebrations for the 75th Anniversary of the liberation of the city of Mons, Belgium. Discover more on Hellcat and watch the latest Tank Chat with David Willey.
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December 6, 2022
Tank Chat #160 | M18 Hellcat | The Tank Museum
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December 5, 2022
“… when confronted, our self-proclaimed warriors against fake news and misinformation are just lying about what they’re doing”
From the free-to-cheapskates excerpt from this weekend’s dispatch from The Line:
A typical haul of weapons confiscated by Toronto Police Services in 2012. Most of these guns are in the “restricted” or “prohibited” category of Canadian firearms and would not be available for legal purchase by anyone who had not gone through a rigorous RCMP background check and passed multiple training courses. Almost certainly none of them came from a legal owner.
We hate this as much as you do, but we must discuss guns with you again. We think the Liberals have screwed up, and we aren’t sure yet they realize it. (But they’re probably clueing in.)
You know why we’re suspicious? The Liberals are extremely good at marketing. A depressing amount of the time, it’s all they’ve got. They can take the smallest morsel of accomplishment and make it the centrepiece of a coordinated nation-wide grassroots mobilization campaign and fundraising drive. They have memes and other social shareables ready to go. Cabinet ministers release cringe videos captured by staffers who probably realize, in the very moment of their filming, that they’ve wasted their God-given potential on … this.
Outcomes? The hell with those. Let’s talk about those inputs, baby! In both official languages.
But this time? When the Liberals have actually embarked on what would be the most significant overhaul of our firearms laws in a generation? Not only have they not said boo. They’re going out of their way to deny that they’ve done anything. Or, when confronted, our self-proclaimed warriors against fake news and misinformation are just lying about what they’re doing.
So either they don’t know what they’re doing (very possible), regret what they’ve done (also very possible) or it’s a confused mix of both (our working theory).
But let us explain. And forgive us, but things will get a bit technical. (We’ll keep it as simple as possible, but guns are complicated.)
Canadian firearms policy has generally tried to classify firearms by their technical specifications. Three broad categories were created by the major reforms of the 1990s. “Prohibited” firearms essentially were machine guns, automatic assault rifles of the kind used by modern militaries, and easily concealed short-barrelled handguns; prohibited licences were issued in the 1990s to a relatively small number of individuals who already owned such firearms and their immediate descendants (to cover family heirlooms), but prohibited firearms otherwise are not available to the public. “Non-restricted” firearms were the very common rifles and shotguns suited (and frequently used) for hunting or target shooting sports, and require the least onerous level of licensing (but still, you do need a licence that involves background checks and vetting). In the middle we had “restricted” firearms — mostly handguns — that require a special licence beyond the normal licence, requiring extra training and conditions.
These broad categories do not always reflect the reality of how the laws actually shaped up. The prohibited and restricted categories were often stretched by meddling politicians to apply more broadly than they ought to have, so that politicians (mainly Liberals) could claim to be “tough on guns” in particular instances. But these three categories have been generally stable for a generation, and functioned well, more or less. Perfectly? No. But our gun-control laws worked for the public at large, which is why violent gun crime by licensed individuals is rare despite a relatively high rate of firearms ownership in Canada.
You wouldn’t think it given all the political controversy, but Canadian gun control has been a fundamentally successful public-policy program, for decades. The very real problem we have with gun violence in this country is overwhelmingly committed with illegal guns smuggled in from the United States, and fall outside the scope of our gun-control system, which works well doing what it is supposed to do: licensing lawful gun owners, regulating the legal uses of guns and regulating, as well, the lawful hunting and shooting sports industry.
For all its success as public policy, though, the system didn’t work for the Liberals politically. So they decided to get cute. And that’s where their problems began.
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The sinking of HMS Courageous, 17 September, 1939
The Northern Historian
Published 5 Feb 202117th September 1939, just two weeks after Britain had declared war on Germany, aircraft carrier HMS Courageous was on patrol off the west coast of Ireland. Unbeknown to her, she was being stalked by a hidden predator. Within 20 minutes of being attacked she had slipped beneath the Atlantic surface, taking with her the lives of over 500 men. She became the first British naval casualty of World War Two.
She began her life as a light cruiser during World War One as part of the Courageous class of cruisers. They were a trio of ships comprising HMS Courageous, HMS Glorious, and HMS Furious. These ships were designed and built to support Admiral Lord Fisher’s Baltic project.
Following heavy losses at The Battle of Jutland, HMS Courageous became the flagship of the 1st Cruiser Squadron and took part in the 2nd Battle of Heligoland.
Following World War 1 and due to the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, limiting new ship constructions, HMS Courageous along with her sisters HMS Glorious and HMS Furious were converted into aircraft carriers and became the Courageous class of aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy.
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December 4, 2022
L39A1: British Service Target Rifle Before the L42A1
Forgotten Weapons
Published 5 Aug 2022The story of the conversion of the Lee Enfield to 7.62mm NATO would not be complete without the L39A1. This is essentially the civilian competition version of what would become the L42A1. It was actually in British service as a target rifle — not intended for combat. It followed the L8 (the first British military attempts at a 7.62mm precision version of the Enfield) and the L42A1. It was basically a copy of the conversions done by civilian competition shooters in the British NRA.
Sights were made by several different companies, as the rifles were not issued with sights — they were obtained by the unit they went to, whatever particular model that unit preferred. This example has Parker Hale diopter sights. The L39A1 also used a .303 caliber magazine, as they were intended for slow-fire, single-loaded competition but the magazine was used as a loading tray. The .303 magazine will not reliably hold 7.62mm cartridges, but 7.62mm conversion magazines can be put in the L39A1 and will then work just fine. They also sometimes are fitted with .303 extractors. The stock here has a semi-pistol grip a bit less substantial than the L8 .22 rifle, although most had standard No4 stocks.
The original sights were removed, and remarked as L39A1. They were made in 1969, 1970, and 1972, with a single serial number range used for the L39A1, the pretrial trials examples of the L39, and the “7.62 Conv” rifles. A total of 1,213 L39A1 rifles were made, with the other types accounting for about 28 additional rifles.
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December 1, 2022
Crisis? Which crisis?
In The Line, Matt Gurney makes the case that was NATO (and western governments in general) needs is something called “deliverology”:
I couldn’t have asked for a more topical example of exactly what I’m talking about here: the lull between realization and reaction. There were no problems with “expectations” at the top of the federal government in February [during the Freedom Convoy 2022 protests]. Everyone in a position of authority was seized with the urgency of the situation and the need for rapid action. There wasn’t any denial, doubt or incomprehension, which are the usual enemies when I write about our expectations being a problem.
February was an example of a different issue: realizing there was a crisis but not really knowing what to do about it, or whose job it was to do it, and wasting a lot of precious time trying to figure it all out. When days and even hours count, governments can’t spend weeks or months figuring out what to do. But that’s what happened during the convoys, and during COVID, and other incidents I could rattle off. Does anyone think it won’t happen again next time, whatever that threat may be?
And some version of that concern came up over and over in Halifax [at the Halifax International Security Forum]. And not just among Canadians. The world is changing very quickly and even when we recognize a problem, we aren’t moving fast enough to keep up. So on top of our expectations, we’ve got another challenge: response times. They’re just too damned long.
I hope the readers will forgive me for being a little vague in this next section; some of the conversations I’m thinking of here were in off-the-record sessions. Rather than trying to splice together any specific quote or anecdote, I’ll just wrap it all up under the theme of “There are things we should be doing now that we weren’t, and things we should have been doing a long time ago that we only started on way too late.”
An obvious example? The rush to get Europe off of Russian fossil fuels and on to either locally generated renewables or energy imports from allies and friendly nations. (If only there was a “business case” for Canada doing more. Sigh.) Another fascinating example that came up was air defences. Two decades of post-Cold-War-style thinking among the allies has led to widespread neglect among the NATO countries of air-defence weapons. Why bother? The Taliban didn’t have an air force, right?
Most countries have fighter jets and inventories of air-to-air missiles suitable for their planes. However, across the alliance, there are very few ground-based air-defence systems suited to shooting down not just attacking aircraft, but incoming cruise missiles and drones.
Drones pose a particular challenge. They fly slow and low and are highly manoeuvrable, plus they are so cheap that they can be a true asymmetrical weapon: you’ll go broke real quick firing million-dollar missiles at a drone that costs your enemy $50,000 or so. And your enemy may send a few hundred at once in a swarm that simply overwhelms your defences. It’s not that drones are unbeatable. The opposite is true: drones are easily destroyed, if you have the right defences available.
We don’t, though. Oops.
The NATO powers actually had a preview of this element of the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia during the 2020 conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, where drones were used to devastating effect. Every military affairs watcher I know sat up a bit straighter after watching what the Azeris did to Armenia, with shocking speed. Swarms of drones first killed Armenia’s air defences and then went to work on Armenian ground forces. The U.S. and NATO allies have been studying that conflict, and considering how to adapt our own strategies, for both offence and defence. But right now, nine months into the Ukraine war and two years after the conflict in the Caucasus, there still aren’t enough NATO systems available even for our own needs, let alone to share with Ukraine. Russia keeps hammering away at critical Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and the Ukrainians keep begging for help, but we have nothing to send. To be clear, a few systems have been sent to Ukraine, which include not just the weapons but the radars and computers necessary to detect and engage targets. But they can only be delivered as fast as they can be built. There is no real production pipeline here, and certainly no pre-stocked inventories in NATO armouries.
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November 30, 2022
The St Etienne Mle 1907: France’s Domestic Heavy Machine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 Oct 2017When the French first began testing machine guns in the late 1890s, they were one of the few countries that did not purchase quantities of Maxim guns. One of the reasons was that in France’s North African colonies, transporting water for guns was considered an unnecessary liability. Instead, France purchased a number of air-cooled Hotchkiss machine guns for its colonial forces. For the French Metropolitan Army, it wanted a gun designed and produced by its own arsenal system. And so, the Puteaux Arsenal developed the Modele 1905 gun.
This was a gas-trap style of action, pulling an operating rod forward with each shot. The gun was adopted and put into service, and as with every other military user of gas trap guns, the French quickly found the system to be seriously flawed. The St Etienne Arsenal set about improving it, and came up with the Modele 1907, which retained the forward-moving operating rod but used a gas piston instead of a gas trap. This would be the machine gun which France would enter World War One with, and more than 40,000 would be manufactured by 1917.
The Modele 1907 St Etienne gun is a magnificently Victorian machine gun, with a downright Swiss-like rack-and-pinion system running its action. It would have been truly at home on a Napoleonic battlefield — but not a World War One battlefield. The gun was not well-suited to the muddy hell of trench warfare, despite its beautiful machining and quality. Looking for both a lot more guns and also a more field-reliable system, the French began buying a great many Modele 1914 Hotchkiss machine guns, and they would replace the Modele 1907 by the end of the war.
One cannot fault the French for this change, and yet it still seems sad to see such a gorgeous piece of metal fabrication be sidelined — complete with its hydraulically adjustable rate of fire, its fine toothed feed spool, its sights with the spring and lever system to accommodate heat-induced change of aim and its magnificently extravagant flash hider.
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November 29, 2022
Tank Chat #159 | Warrior | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 29 Jul 2022Join David Willey for a new Tank Chat on Warrior.
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November 27, 2022
The Biggest Lie of WWII? The Myth of the Norden Bombsight
Flight Dojo
Published 16 Jun 2022I think most of us, at some point, have had someone say to us “You know, we went to the moon with less computing power than your iPhone” or something to that effect. What you may not know, though, is that less than a century ago, a 2000-piece mechanical computer that lacked a single transistor or chip was the most closely guarded military secret of the Allied war effort. Or, at least, the second most.
Before being overshadowed by the Manhattan Project, the U.S. Navy spent billions helping Carl Norden develop a mechanical computer with one job and one job only: to determine the point at which a level-flying bomber would need to drop its bombs to achieve “pinpoint accuracy” on an intended target.
When it was completed, Mr. Norden famously claimed that the sight was so accurate that it was capable of putting a bomb inside a pickle barrel. And if it could, then war would be revolutionized, or so the powers-at-be thought. The idea was simple: fly your bombers above the enemy’s air defenses, above the reach of their flak batteries, faster than their fighters could fly, and drop your bombs, with pinpoint accuracy, on crucial industrial sites, robbing the enemy of their ability to manufacture the equipment they need to wage a war in the first place.
The only problem was that everything about the Norden Bombsight turned out to be a myth. Not just the obviously mythical bits, like the fact that the crosshairs in the site itself were actually webs from a Black Widow, or that, instead, the reticle was made from the strands of hair of a young Midwestern girl, but everything, the accuracy, the secrecy, and even the fact that it was the only bombsight used in the war.
So how can this be? Until two weeks ago, I believed that the Norden Bombsight was an ingenious piece of equipment that more than any other singular device, changed the tides of WWII in favor of the allies. So why do we still believe in the Norden Bombsight?
Because, as it turns out, myths are useful, not just to the Army Air Corps, the Carl Norden Company, and Hollywood, but to us, the public. As it turns out, they can help us swallow hard truths about the war we’d prefer to avoid.
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November 26, 2022
The Volcanic: Smith & Wesson’s First Pistol
Forgotten Weapons
Published 18 Aug 2017The deep beginnings of the Volcanic go back to Walter Hunt’s Volitional Repeater, which became the Jennings repeating rifle, which then became the Smith-Jennings repeating rifle when Horace Smith was brought in to improve it. Smith was able to make it more commercially viable than the Jennings had been, but he recognized that the system needed significant changes to really become successful. He had met a fellow gun designer who had similar ideas, by the name of Daniel Wesson, and the two would spend a couple years developing and refining the system. In 1854 they thought it was ready for production, and formed the Smith & Wesson Company.
Included in the original company was a man named Courtland Palmer, who owned the patent rights to the Jennings system. Smith & Wesson’s system would probably have been deemed an infringement of Palmer’s patents, and by bringing him into the company they avoided legal trouble. The fact that he was a relatively wealthy financier of the new company certainly didn’t hurt!
The pistol that S&W started producing was a manually repeating one with a tubular magazine under the barrel holding either 6 or 10 rounds. It was available in the .41 caliber Navy model (note: not actually adopted by the Navy) and the .31 caliber pocket version. In this first iteration, both used iron frames, which were all engraved lightly. The prices were pretty steep, and the guns suffered from some reliability problems and a fundamental problem of underpowered ammunition (the .41 caliber had a muzzle velocity of just 260 fps / 79 m/s). However, they did offer a much greater level of rapid repeating firepower than the muzzle loading revolvers of the period, and gained some loyal fans. In total, just 1700 of the guns were produced before the company went bankrupt, about a year after forming.
To recover from that setback, they reformed the company into the new Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, and sold stock in the new company to generate a new supply of capital. This allowed them to get back into production, and the Volcanic company would make another 3000 pistols, all .41 caliber Navy types, before also running out of money 19 months later in 1856.
At this point, Smith and Wesson decide to move in another direction, and one of the main creditors of the Volcanic company was able to acquire all of its assets and put the guns into production a third time. The name of this creditor? None other than Oliver Winchester. Winchester puts a new infusion of his own money into the company under the name New Haven Arms Company. This company produces another 3300 guns, both large and small frame by 1861. The New Haven company comes very near to bankruptcy itself before finally changing the design to create the Henry repeating rifle. The Henry’s rimfire ammunition finally solved the reliability and power problems of the Volcanic, and became the starting point for Winchester to become one of the predominant American arms making companies.
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November 24, 2022
Can I make an AUTHENTIC Katana from wood?
Rex Krueger
Published 23 Nov 2022Historical weapon, beautiful construction & a great holiday gift, Katanas have it all!
Patrons get all plans early: http://www.patreon.com/rexkrueger
Get the FREE templates!: https://www.rexkrueger.com/store (scroll down to bottom of page).
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November 22, 2022
W+F Bern P43: A Swiss Take on the Browning High Power
Forgotten Weapons
Published 22 Jul 2017In 1940, Switzerland began a series of trials to replace their Luger service pistols with something equally high quality, but more economical. They had squeezed as much simplification out of the Luger as they could in 1929, and by this time the guns just needed to be replaced. The first 1940 trial had only two entrants (a Petter prototype from SIG and an Astra 900), but a second trial in 1941 included a large assortment of modern handguns, including a French 1935A, a Polish Vis-35, and prototypes from both SIG and W+F Bern.
One of the most tenacious competitors (aside form the winning SIG/Petter design) was the Bern factory’s series of Browning High Power copies. In this video, we will be looking at three progressive versions of this gun as they were modified through the course of the trials (which would last until 1949). While they are all mechanically very similar to the High Power, they will get progressively less visually similar as the trials progressed. In addition, we will see features like the slide lock, manual safety, and magazine release evolve and change.
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November 20, 2022
Tank Chat #158 Spartan and Stormer | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 22 Jul 2022David Fletcher is back with the next Tank Chat instalment! This week he chats about not one but two vehicles, Spartan and Stormer.
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November 18, 2022
The Model SS41 – A Czech Bullpup Anti-Tank Rifle for the SS
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Jun 2017The SS41 was a bullpup, bolt-action antitank rifle manufactured in small numbers by CZ for the SS. Contrary to common assumption, the SS were not a part of the standard German military arms procurement system, and were forced to scrounge for their weapons from other sources. Czech factories were one of the more popular sources, as smaller production lines could escape being integrated into Wehrmacht oversight and were able to contract privately with groups like the SS (the ZK383 as used by the SS is another example of this).
The Model 41 had been in development by the Czech military when the Germans occupied, and it was adapted to the German Patrone 318 cartridge for this production run. That cartridge was also used in the PzB-39, and fired a 220 grain tungsten-cored bullet at 4000 fps — although even this extremely high velocity only allowed it to defeat 30mm of vertical armor at 100m. As with the other antitank rifles of WW2, it would obsolete almost as soon as it was introduced, although it did remain useful for attacking emplaced positions and light armored vehicles (much like the Soviet PTRD and PTRS rifles).
Only a few thousand of the SS41 were manufactured, and they served primarily on the Eastern Front. As a result very few exist in American collections, and this is a particularly excellent example. Thanks to the Institute of Military Technology for allowing me to have access to this very cool AT rifle and bring it to you! Check them out at:
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November 14, 2022
Two Variants of the French RSC 1917 Semiauto WW1 Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 Apr 2017The RSC 1917, aka FSA1917, has the distinction of being the only true semiautomatic service rifle to see significant frontline infantry use during World War One. It was introduced in 1917 as a long rifle, and about 75,000 were made in that configuration. An improved carbine model was developed in in 1918 right at the end of the war, with only a few thousand of those made. However, what we are looking at today are a pair of 1917 rifles which show a couple of differences.
One of these is a standard RSC 1917 as originally produced, and the other has been updated to a 1918 standard in two ways: the bolt handle/disassembly and the bolt holdopen mechanism. I do not know if these changes were actually implemented during the war, or in the years afterward, but they make the rifles substantially easier to field strip.
If you know of details relevant to these changes, please let me know in the comments!
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November 10, 2022
USMC Winchester 70 Sniper – Vietnam Era
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Sep 2016This Winchester M70 was a rifle owned by the captain of the Camp Pendleton rifle team, and as such it is an excellent authentic example of the US sniper rifle of the early Vietnam era. It is chambered for the .30-06 cartridge, with a Winchester heavy target barrel and shorter stock. The scope is a 14x Unertl — quite high magnification, considering that the most recent official issue sniper rifle at the time was the M1D with a 2.2x scope. These rifles were used in a quasi-official capacity in Vietnam, and would ultimately evolving into the official M40 and M40A1 sniper rifles.
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