Forgotten Weapons
Published Mar 25, 2024The Charlton was a conversion of a bolt action Lee rifle into a light machine gun, designed by New Zealander Phillip Charlton. Some 1500 were made in New Zealand, but a bit later it appears that there was an effort to also produce the gun in Australia. The Electrolux company (the same one that makes washing machines and other home appliances today) made a few prototypes.
The Electrolux version is different from the original in a couple ways. While the basic conversion mechanism is the same, the Electrolux is more refined, with a shorter gas system and a fairly clean action cover over the working parts. It is also semiautomatic only, intended to be a shoulder-fired rifle where the original was made for the LMG role. Electrolux also used standard No1 MkIII rifles as its base, where the originals were made from a variety of mostly worn out Lee Metfords and Long Lees.
The Electrolux contract was cancelled in June 1944, and only a few prototypes were made. This example is in the British Royal Armouries collection, to whom I am grateful for the access and the trust to take it apart for you!
My video on the standard production Charlton:
https://forgottenweapons.vhx.tv/video…
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July 7, 2024
Electrolux Charlton: Washing Machine Company Converts Bolt Action to Semiauto
May 15, 2024
Fiji in World War Two: the Momi Bay Gun Battery
Forgotten Weapons
Published Feb 3, 2024When the clouds of World War Two began to loom in the 1930s, Britain decided to begin securing some of its more distant colonial outposts — places that might be of strategic importance in a future conflict. Fiji was once of these outposts — a vital point on the seagoing supply line from Europe and the Americas to Australia and Asia. Construction of coastal defense batteries began in the late 1930s, mostly using 6 inch MkVII naval guns. These batteries were constructed around the capital of Suva and the airfield at Nadi on the west side of the island.
Today we are at the Momi Bay Battery, just south of Nadi. This emplacement has been restored and is maintained as a public museum site by the Fijian government today. It houses two 6 inch guns (the King’s Gun and the Queen’s Gun, colloquially), and originally also included an optical rangefinder and various command and control buildings. It had a range of about 8 miles, and controlled one of the few natural approaches to western Fiji.
The guns here were only fired in anger once, and that was actually at an unidentified sonar contact in the Bay. No evidence of an enemy vessel was ever found, and it ended up just being a brief reconnaissance by fire, so to speak. By later in the war, the threat of Japanese invasion had passed, but Fiji remained an active part of the war effort, as a transportation hub and a site for soldiers to get some R&R outside of combat duties. This led to the creation of the successful tourist economy which remains vibrant today on the island.
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March 30, 2024
Extra Firepower for Vietnam: the Aussie “B!tch”
Forgotten Weapons
Published Dec 18, 2023Many of the special forces groups that operated during the Vietnam War found their standard issue weapons a bit unwieldy for use in confined jungle environments. They also found a need for something that could deliver an immediate large volume of fire to break contact during an ambush (or deliver an ambush of their own). The Australians were no exception, and with the typical Special Forces attitude towards customization a few guys made some improvements to what they were issued …
What we have today is a recreation (by Mark Graham of ARS, build on a DSA semiauto receiver) of an Australian L1A1 with its flash hider cut down and a second pistol grip mounted to the barrel. The real examples of these often had rather shorter barrels, and ones that began life as semiauto L1A1 rifles were typically converted to fully automatic (some began as L2A1 automatic rifles and did not require this extra step). Fitted with a large LMG magazine, they could deliver a lot of firepower in a very short time; just the ticket for a small jungle patrol.
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February 22, 2024
The Malayan Emergency – Britain’s Jungle War v Communists
The History Chap
Published Nov 16, 2023Britain’s Victorious Jungle War Against the Communists
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January 1, 2024
Michael Palin’s Great-Uncle Harry
In The Critic, Peter Caddick-Adams reviews Michael Palin’s Great-Uncle Harry:
The first of last week’s volumes nestling on my desk, with its immediately identifiable Ripping Yarns cover illustration, was Sir Michael Palin’s story of his forebear, Great Uncle Harry, who travelled the world but disappeared on the Somme. Here, I felt an immediate connection, not least because Michael, I and his Great Uncle Harry Palin had hauled ourselves through the same academy of learning, Shrewsbury School, though at different times. There are plenty of 1914-18 memoirs and tributes around, but this is one of the best. The further the Great War (as it used to be called) recedes, the more we seem to need to torture ourselves with the staggering sacrifices it involved. I read my copy over Remembrance weekend, which made it doubly poignant.
In Great Uncle Harry, Palin’s gift is to give us the hinterland of his ancestor. Many First World War authors, here I could mention the great Lyn Macdonald, Richard Holmes and Martin Middlebrook, all of whom I place on pedestals, provide us with erudite studies, laced with gripping eyewitness accounts. I find myself doing the same with 1939-45, but of necessity there is no room to give the brave and the damned a back story. They are parachuted into the text. They fight and live or die and exit stage left. It is refreshing, therefore, to hold the hand of a first war warrior from birth unto death. Palin was lucky his Great Uncle Harry kept a series of notebooks and diaries of his time in khaki, and was able to research his globe-trotting years before battle. Our man was brought up in Herefordshire, and after school drifted out to British India. He had two stints, first working as a railway manager and latterly as overseer on tea plantations. The reader is fortunate that Palin the documentary-maker filmed in both environments and is able to look over his forebear’s shoulder and summon up the Edwardian social standards of the day, with its solar topees and chota pegs (sunset whiskeys), its heat and its dust. Palin the younger’s many diaries and written travelogues, of which I find New Europe (2007) the best, are equally good.
But Great Uncle Harry Palin was restless. The youngest and most headstrong of seven, he flounced out of each of his two jobs serving the Raj, and ended up trying his hand at farming in New Zealand. There he seemed more settled, but not quite. The Palin under the microscope, notes his great nephew, was one of the first to volunteer for war service with the 12th (Nelson) Regiment, a South Island infantry outfit, in August 1914 and sailed with them overseas, initially to Egypt. There they were absorbed into the Canterbury Battalion, and deployed to Gallipoli, from which Great Uncle Harry emerged without a scratch.
Gallipoli is a conjurer’s name. Now known by the Turks as their Gelibolu Peninsula, overlooking the ancient Hellespont (today’s Dardanelles Strait), its southern tip lies 200 miles from what was then Turkey’s capital, Constantinople, officially Istanbul after 1930. Only since the 1990s has this strategically significant sliver of land, across the Dardanelles from ancient Troy, and guarding entry to the Bosphorus and Black Sea, been opened up for tourists. The 1915 operation was dreamt up by Winston Churchill to break the stalemate of the Western Front. He advocated a naval advance on Constantinople, as a way of knocking the Austro-German alliance out of the war. Such a stratagem would then have offered Paris and London the ability to supply the troops of Tsar Nicholas the Last with modern arms and munitions to prevail against the Central Powers.
Instead of breaking the Western Front, Gallipoli broke Churchill. It was a campaign endlessly refought in the inter-war years, which generally concluded that amphibious warfare had no future, though Lieutenant Colonel George S. Patton in his 1936 General Staff study, The Defense of Gallipoli, found it fascinating. It was one reason why the allies had no maritime landing capability in 1939-40, to Britain’s detriment at Dunkirk, and later Germany’s disadvantage when planning a seaborne assault against southern England. Valuable lessons of what to do, and not to do, had to be relearned before D-Day in 1944 could be a success. My own assessment is right idea, wrong commanders. Gallipoli might have offered the success Churchill desired, but was executed poorly.
The original plan had been to overwhelm Constantinople with battleships, and there is evidence that the Turks were preparing to surrender. However, the Franco-British war fleet encountered German-supplied Krupp cannon along both shores of the Dardanelles and a minefield in the middle, and suffered catastrophic losses. A land campaign was then initiated to clear the Turkish land-based defences. This should have been foreseen and a simultaneous, rather than sequential, maritime-land attack might well have delivered the goods.
Instead, the few Turkish defenders on Gallipoli could see a landing was imminent, called in reinforcements and dug trenches ferociously. On the peninsula, amidst scrub, trench and memorials lie scattered British, Commonwealth, Ottoman and French (yes, they were there too) cemeteries, hinting at stirring tales of derring-do. Last time I was there, I encountered not only rifle cartridges, pieces of pottery rum jars, and shell cases, but human bones. My guide observed, “Probably wild pigs dislodging the topsoil. It happens all the time.” An indication of the 300,000 Allied and 255,000 Turkish killed, wounded and missing in a campaign where illness often took as many as combat wounds. Along the western coast, amidst shards of amphorae from pre-history, lie many wrecks associated with the 1915 campaign in crystal-clear water. It remains high on my recommended battlefields to visit.
December 9, 2023
All those (officially unexplained) “excess” mortalities
Mark Steyn discusses European and Antipodean statistical reports that echo what Maxime Bernier was talking about the other day on the as-yet officially unexplained huge rise in “excess mortality” since the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:
We are now three years into the administration of the Covid vaccines, and we have many startling statistical anomalies, including the most basic one of all: a huge mound of extra corpses. Per the EU’s official statistics agency:
Among the eighteen EU Member States that recorded excess deaths, the highest rates were in Cyprus (13.9%), Finland (13.4%), the Netherlands (12.7%) and Ireland (12.5%).
Those percentages are sufficiently high that in the Netherlands, formerly one of the healthiest nations on earth, they’re reducing life expectancy. The ongoing excess deaths are at odds with the normal post-pandemic pattern, such as the Spanish Flu a century ago. The intro to this new scientific paper sets out what’s meant to be happening:
Our approach takes into account age and gender, but also under-mortality that you would expect after a period of excess mortality.
“Under-mortality” occurs because, if the Spanish Flu killed you prematurely in 1920, you weren’t around to die when you otherwise would have done in 1924. Hence, excess mortality is followed by under-mortality. So:
If this under-mortality does not seem to be happening, it is actually hidden excess mortality.
That’s an important point. What Eurostat identifies as an excess mortality rate in Ireland of 12.5 per cent is, as a practical matter, actually higher – because it should be measured against not the pre-Covid baseline but the under-mortality one would have expected four years on. So persistent excess mortality is deeply weird, and, unlike those killed by the virus (where the median age of death by Covid is above most developed nations’ life expectancy), the extra deaths, as we have discussed on The Mark Steyn Show, are skewed towards the young and middle-aged:
We note that excess mortality in the Netherlands remains consistently high during 2020-2022 and has shifted from high to low age and towards men.
In other words, it’s not a general trend of excess deaths, but something more particular. Which, in a normal environment, would suggest something particular is causing it. Aside from excess deaths in “low age”, we also have excess deaths at no age – the babies who aren’t being born. The western world’s jabbed and re-jabbed citizenry has seen a catastrophic slump in newborns. Scandinavia:
The whole region reported sharp declines in fertility rates in 2022. Finland had the lowest fertility rate of all Nordic countries, 1.32 children. This is also the lowest Finnish rate since 1776 when monitoring of fertility rates first started.
Incidentally, that Finnish rate – of 1.3 children per woman – is what demographers call “lowest-low fertility”, from which no society has ever recovered.
Fortunately for officialdom, there was enough Covid circulating in Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, etc that the ever higher mountain of corpses can be shrugged off as most likely “Long Covid” or maybe, if necessary, “Extra-Long Covid”. In the Antipodes, they can’t get away with that. Australia and New Zealand enacted some of the most draconian public-health measures on the planet, and in effect quarantined their entire nations. As a result, pre-Omicron they had all but negligible accounts of Covid. But they obediently submitted themselves to the mass vaccination regime. And, whaddaya know, they too have extraordinary rates of excess death.
Clare Craig, a favourite guest of The Mark Steyn Show, has published a detailed analysis of the post-vaccination years Down Under. It makes for sober reading.
In 2021, for example, they had officially 1,224 deaths from Covid.
But also in 2021 – the first full year of the vaccines – they had 876 excess deaths from ischaemic heart disease alone. Plus another 583 excess deaths from other cardiac diseases.
Death by ischaemic heart disease had been in decline in Australia in the pre-vaccine years, but, having shot up in 2021, it went up even further in 2022. (Same trend with strokes.) So, having shut down the country for those 1,224 Covid deaths, you would think the public health bureaucracy might show a smidgeonette of interest in those 1,359 excess cardiac deaths.
But apparently not.
Now, across the Tasman Sea, we have a Kiwi whistleblower, Barry Young, who has released an avalanche of data with some quite disturbing takeaways that I referenced on Wednesday’s Clubland Q&A. I was careful to qualify my remarks with a lot of “ifs”, but our friend Norman Fenton, Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University, has taken a look and The Conservative Woman has published his findings. I see that on the Internet the kneejerk reaction was that Mr Young had simply leaked a lot of vaccination stuff from the old folks’ homes where the Covid centenarians would have died anyway. So it’s a biased sample.
In reality, it does not appear to be a “sample” at all:
[Steve Kirsch] says that there are widespread misunderstandings about the data and it is not biased. For a start he says that the dataset is the complete set of ‘pay-per-dose’ vaccination records and therefore there is no biased sampling at all. He says:
“The people within the group is representative of the total population. There are 2.2 million people in the group, and there are 4 million records. Each of those records is a Vaccination Record.”
2.2 million is over forty per cent of the population of New Zealand. That’s some “sample”. Nevertheless, Professor Fenton is being scrupulously cautious:
Even accounting for inevitable “survivor bias” (the more jabs a person gets, the quicker they are likely to die after their last jab) there was some evidence of increased risk the more doses a person gets. Moreover, given Steve’s comments about the datatset being the complete set of “pay-per-dose” vaccination records, this conclusion seems robust even if there were a biased proportion of vaccinee deaths in the dataset. Also (as per my above quote in Steve’s presentation) I felt that the data provided further support for the hypothesis that the vaccine was increasing the mortality rate in the older population (something which we had already concluded based on the most recent ONS data).
It’s interesting that such questions never come up at Britain’s official “Covid inquiry” which is increasingly risible in its palpable determination to find that the only mistake that was made was not to lock down harder and faster.
The other takeaway mentioned by Professor Fenton is the fatality rate of individual batches. Take a look at this handy graph:
I suppose it would be possible to argue that all 711 jabs of Batch #1 were administered to residents of the Shady Acres Retirement Home for Centenarians with Stage Four Ebola. But it’s difficult to make the same case with Batch #62 which went into the arms of 18,173 New Zealanders and killed 831 of them. Which, all by itself, is two hundred times the country’s official death toll from the vaccines. Which is to say, according to His Majesty’s Government in Wellington, precisely four Kiwis are dead of the vax.
August 22, 2023
QotD: Megafauna extinction
Another marker to put down about the extinction of the varied megafauna. A lot of which went extinct just as human beings – or varied ancestors of – turned up in the same area. The usual bit being that we eated it.
There is, sadly enough, a common misconception about our ancestors. Nature loving, that Rousseauesque fantasy of just drinking the clear water, munching on the acorns that fall unbidden. That humans don’t thrive on acorns matters not a whit to those who share this fantasy of an Elysian past. The truth being that humans – and proto- – were the most vicious beasts out there. That’s why we survived to thrive. It’s not just modern day humans who would scale down a cliff to throttle babbie seabirds for the pot after all.
So too with the bargain bucket meal on legs just found:
Half-tonne birds may have roamed Europe at same time as humans
They roamed, we eated, they roamed no more. As with the arrival of the Maori in New Zealand and the exit of moas. The American horse disappearing about the same time Amerinds made it past the ice barriers into British Columbia and points south. Dodos and sailing ships and on and on around the globe. The major factor in megafauna going extinct being humans turning up to eat them.
Tim Worstall, “Crimea Fried Ostrich – And Then We Eated It”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-06-27.
July 10, 2023
Remington-Lee Model 1885
Forgotten Weapons
Published 5 Sept 2015The model of 1885 (a modern collector designation; Remington called these the “Remington Magazine Rifle” and did not differentiate between the different versions) was the final iteration of James Paris Lee’s bolt action rifle made by Remington. It incorporated a number of improvements from the earlier versions, including a relocated bolt handle, improved bolt head, and a magazine that could now hold cartridges securely without the use of a sliding catch at the nose.
These rifles were made in .45-70 caliber for US use and in .43 Spanish for export sales. The US Navy purchased most of the .45-70 guns that were made, and this particular rifle is one of those Navy guns. By the time these rifles were actually in production, Great Britain had also decided to adopt the Lee system in 1888, which would go through several iterations and ultimately become the iconic SMLE that would be the mainstay of British infantry during the First World War.
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July 3, 2023
The Battle That Prevented A Nuclear World War Three | Kapyong: The Forgotten War | Timeline
Timeline – World History Documentaries
Published 2 Jul 2023On April 24, 1951, following a rout of the South Korean army, the Chinese People Volunteer Army pursued their enemy to the lines of Australian and Canadian troops still digging fall-back defences, 39 kilometres to the rear. Here, sometimes at the length of a bayonet, often in total darkness, individual was pitted against individual in a struggle between a superpower and a cluster of other nations from across the world. They fought for a valley, the ancient and traditional invasion route to Seoul. If it fell the southern capital and the war, was lost. The United Nations troops had the military advantage of the high ground and artillery support: the Chinese relied entirely on vastly superior numbers. As a result, young men from both sides found a battle which was very close and very personal.
The Battle of Kapyong became the turning point of China’s Fifth Offensive in that Korea spring. The aim of the offensive was to finally drive the foreign troops out of South Korea and into the sea. What happened instead, changed the history of the Korean War. The Chinese were denied victory and forced back into negotiations. Had they succeeded, another crushing defeat for the US could have triggered events that led to a nuclear holocaust in Asia — and World War Three.
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March 27, 2023
The war against fertility
The effacement of women’s bodies is changing from a cultural signal to a battlefield maneuver. The acceleration of the presence of men as dominant participants in women’s sports, the growing intensity of casually monstrous blue zone attacks on families and parenting, the emergence of drag queens — men playacting as women, burlesque cartoons about sexual identity — as The Most Important Symbol Ever (and something children should definitely see) …
… and now this:
That’s footage from a Let Women Speak event in Auckland, New Zealand, where women arguing that “women” are “adult human females” were physically attacked by a mob of “transwomen” — by men — and their allies. It’s very progressive when men dressed as women silence women and hurt them. More here, also linked above.
In the opening paragraph of this post, you may have thought that one of the things I mentioned was different than the other things — that the blue state assault on families and parenting isn’t specifically gendered, and is equally an assault on the role of mothers and fathers. And it is. But.
It seems to me that the very very strange thing breaking out all over the world — or all over the Anglosphere, because I don’t see Nigeria and Peru and Singapore going all-in on transgendered everything — is loaded with subtext about a febrile loathing for fertility. In policy, we’re incentivizing childlessness, and disincentivizing childbearing. Birthrates are declining sharply, and were declining even before the mRNA injections, while blue state governments work on laws that tell would-be parents their children can vanish from their custody on political pretexts. Who has the future children while the state says that hey, nice family you have there, be a shame if something were to happen to it?
I suspect the reason so much hate and rage is being directed at women is that their bodies can produce babies, which means that the hate and rage is being directed at the future. Peachy Keenan, who’s all over this stuff in multiple forums, wrote recently about Hicklibs on Parade, describing “how deeply the postmodern, anti-human gender ideology has penetrated into what we used to call ‘middle America'”:
In Plano, Texas last fall, an “all-ages” drag brunch attracted some unwanted attention from people who thought they lived in a conservative state. At the brunch — which was held at Ebb & Flow, an eatery in an upscale strip mall — a buffoonish man in a dress wearing cat ears sings, “My p*ssy good, p*ssy sweet, p*ssy good enough to eat”, while flashing his underwear.
In the video from the event, a four-year old girl stares in shock as the “drag” performer twerks and grinds for the ladies in attendance.
The people in the crowd watching this man systematically strip away a little girl’s innocence look like nice friendly Texans; plump grandmas and families and the types you’d run into at the local Costco. They are not hipsters; they are not edgy. They look normal!
This is what makes all of this so striking. These slightly downmarket Texan and Midwestern prairie home companion women have, historically, been the only thing holding this rickety old country together.
March 26, 2023
Germany Invades Hungary – WW2 – Week 239 – March 25, 1944
World War Two
Published 25 Mar 2023Germany occupies Hungary this week to prevent any possible Hungarian defection from the war, the Soviets continue pushing back the Axis in Ukraine, pressing them ever more toward Romania, the Japanese advance on Imphal and Kohima continues, but Allied attacks in Italy and Japanese ones on Bougainville come to their ends.
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March 5, 2023
MacArthur and Nimitz Go Head-to-Head – Week 236 – March 4, 1944
World War Two
Published 4 Mar 2023The American attacks against the Admiralty Islands are successful, but this causes real tensions between commanders Douglas MacArthur and Chester Nimitz. Much of this week is taken up by planning and meetings on both sides — Adolf Hitler plans the occupation of Hungary, Josef Stalin plans new offensives in Ukraine, and the Allies plan to reconfigure their whole front in Italy. It’s all the prelude to an explosion of action.
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February 24, 2023
“… they are all weedy, weird sylphs who are essentially un-people, without any wisdom or sense”
Elizabeth Nickson on the current cohort of raised-in-a-vat, cloned “leaders” of most of the western world:
Easily the most destructive cohort in the culture is the financially secure, semi-educated female on the cultural left. She reads nothing but literary fiction, is a book and knitting club member and knows absolutely nothing about the real world. But she is “bold” and “powerful” and never shuts up. Her views are confirmed, amplified and imposed by corporate media, for whom she is the aspirational shopper from whom all wealth flows.
It is the opposite of a virtuous circle. Ignorant protected women of all colors are courted by corporations because she makes 90% of buying decisions (and less fortunate women emulate her). Corporations force the press to slavishly pander to her every stupid whim and deep feel of the month so their adverts work like charms.
All the above leaders [Jacinda, Trudeau, Nicola, Rishi, and Macron] are manufactured in some MKULTRA facility to appeal to her ignorance, her prejudices, her over-weening self-regard. With the exception of the vegetable in the White House, they are all weedy, weird sylphs who are essentially un-people, without any wisdom or sense. They’ve lived their lives in classrooms and meeting rooms. They serve as pretty, platitudinous ciphers on which to project a profound political ignorance and emotional immaturity.
Our girl, for she has never grown up, has abandoned adult responsibility to luxuriate in narcissism.
She is ruthlessly used by the vicious communist left (as described below) and she has no idea who or what they are. She is the stupidest person on the planet.
And Michelle Obama? If you are thinking of running, think again. Because the hell we will unleash on your ignorant self will make Jacinda tremble with PTSD.
Let someone far less impassioned and far more knowledgeable than me describe Ardern’s humiliating failures below. The damage she caused to her people, to her party, to her country’s economy was as titanic as her ego. Every single other leader listed in the head of this piece is following the same dictated-from-above public policy initiatives. Their fate and that of their citizenry will be the same.
By their fruits ye shall know them.
If you want to know more about the rise and fall of Justin Trudeau’s New Zealand counterpart, Elizabeth’s post includes an extensive discussion of Jacinda Ardern’s career from Dr Muriel Newman of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research.
February 19, 2023
The Destruction of Monte Cassino – Week 234 – February 18, 1944
World War Two
Published 18 Feb 2023The Allies bomb the monastery atop Monte Cassino in Italy, but just to the Northwest it’s the Germans attacking them at Anzio this week. In the Soviet Union, the Axis break out of the Korsun Pocket, but at great cost, and in the Pacific comes a major Allied raid on the Japanese base at Truk and landings on Eniwetok Atoll.
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December 18, 2022
A Super Bomber to Break Japan – WW2 – 225 – December 17, 1943
World War Two
Published 17 Dec 2022This war has now lasted as long as the Great War did, but there’s no signs of it slowing. The Soviets have three offensives going on on the Eastern Front, in Italy the Allies are attacking at San Pietro and over the Moro River, in the Pacific there are Allied landings on New Britain, but in Pacific Command, the big talk is all about a new super bomber.
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