Author: Grumpy
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A Martini converted into a 22LR
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EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. — Billy Gunderson, a six-year-old Make-A-Wish Foundation participant, was just days away from graduating from the Army’s Ranger school when the cadre informed the youngster he was a “day-one recycle,” meaning that he would have to re-start the 61-day leadership school from the beginning.
“Rules are rules,” said Staff Sgt. Jesse Garner, a Ranger Instructor. “Students can only eat when we say they can and that little maggot was stuffing his face without permission. I don’t care if it’s a chocolate pound cake or the fucking handful of pills I caught him choking down after the final patrol.”
“Besides, he’s never going to grow up to be a man if he can’t overcome a little adversity,” Garner added.
Billy’s parents say he told the Make-A-Wish foundation several months ago that all he ever wanted to be when he grew up was a Ranger. So when the foundation contacted the Ranger Training Brigade at Fort Benning, Georgia, the unit leadership was eager to enroll Billy in the next open class.
“We were excited to help little Billy achieve his wish, but as a point of pride, we refused to do some half-assed afternoon of obstacle courses followed by a bullshit tab presentation,” Col. Christopher Hammonds, commander of the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade, told Duffel Blog. “If little Billy wants to earn his tab, he’s going to have to go through the same shared misery as the rest of us — extreme hunger, sleeplessness, and having to watch some droning dipshit take a dump on your terrain model while you brief your platoon.”
Sources say Billy’s Ranger school experience got off to a bumpy start after he recycled Darby phase once and the school’s storied “mountain phase” twice — the first time failing a patrol and the second for tripping over his IV line, which alerted the opposition force of his platoon’s location while they were emplacing an ambush. This time, Billy was just two days away from graduating when he received the crushing news.
“I thought for sure he would make it through this phase,” one of Billy’s Ranger school classmates told reporters. “He knew more about patrolling than some of the Ranger Instructors. They all called him Yoda because he’d already been here for a few months—and probably because he was only like three feet tall and looked like death.”
Friends say Billy remains optimistic about eventually graduating from the school, but he told reporters he was confused about why he could only eat one meal a day, sleep just a couple of hours, and have artillery round simulators tossed at him to achieve his “wish.”
“I love bears and cougars and camping with my dad,” Billy said as he packed his duffel bag for the bus ride back to Georgia. “But why do I have to do all of this stuff to be a park ranger?”
“I guess it is pretty cool that they gave me a rifle, though, and I’ve learned a lot of bad words.”
Whiskey Fueled Tirade is an Army guy, distilled spirit consumer, and throw-away COA composter. He identifies more with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, but sometimes we’re stuck with the name our parents gave us. If you have a favorite whiskey, recommend it to him on Twitter @FueledTirade
Standard Manufacturing is proud to announce the new SG22 semi-automatic pistol. The SG22 is chambered in .22LR and possesses the classic styling and design elements of the quintessential guns of yesteryear. This John Browning design features a 1911 style magazine release, comfortable wood target grips, smooth action, and adjustable sights, making the SG22 ideal for target shooting.
The Master Gunsmiths at Standard Manufacturing hand make each SG22 individually machined from solid blocks of steel to the highest precision tolerances, not modern manufacturing techniques. Each gun requires many labor-intensive hours of polishing, stoning, and fitting.
Only the most experienced gunsmiths can accomplish this; as such, very few gunmakers in the world have the capability or craftsmen to make a gun of this level. We anticipate a great deal of demand for this limited production model, at the time of this printing, the retail price of the Standard Manufacturing SG22 starts at $999 and can be purchased through your local gun shop, through all major distributors, and directly from us.
Specifications
- Caliber: .22 LR
- Barrel Length: 6 5/8″
- Magazine: 10 Round
- Sights: Fixed Front & Adjustable Rear
- Grips: 2 Piece Walnut
- Finish: Case Colored or Blued
- Overall Length: 10.25″
- Weight: 2lbs with unloaded mag
The son of a Czarist-era Imperial Russian cavalry officer, Mitch WerBell III suffered from a deplorable excess of personality. WerBell’s life reflected the synergistic combination of an audacious will, an insatiable thirst for chaos, a truly gifted mechanical insight, and some fortuitous timing. The cumulative result was adventure beyond the capacity of normal folk to comprehend.
In 1942 WerBell joined the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, and was dispatched to the Pacific to coordinate underground operations against the Japanese. While operating covertly in China alongside the likes of John Singlaub, WerBell was once paid with a five-pound bag of pure opium. After the war WerBell returned to Athens, Georgia, to dabble in advertising.
Wearing a tie and advertising sundries for a department store ill-suited the former special operator, so WerBell closed his PR firm to start building sound suppressors. Hiram Percy Maxim had patented and marketed the first commercially successful sound suppressors for firearms soon after the turn of the century. Such trinkets saw sporadic use during WW2, but the state of the art was rudimentary by modern standards. WerBell’s suppressor designs laid the foundation for the remarkable devices available to US shooters today.
SIONICS
Werbell’s suppressor company was called SIONICS. This stood for “Studies In the Operational Negation of Insurgents and Counter-Subversion.” His first efforts orbited around suppressing the M16 rifle.
The state of the art as regards materials science and engineering has advanced substantially since the 1960s. Nowadays if you want to eat at the cool kids’ table at your local firing range you need to have something stubby, round, and sinister hanging off the snout of your favorite black rifle. Back then, however, sound suppressors for high-velocity rifles were radical things indeed.
In addition to their M16 offerings, WerBell also built cans for bolt-action rifles as well as the M14SS-1, a suppressor for the M14 battle rifle. WerBell was ultimately credited with 25 separate suppressor designs as well as the “WerBell Relief Valve,” a nifty little trinket designed to vent high-pressure gases. WerBell also pioneered the use of exotic materials like titanium in sound suppressors, something that is quite commonplace today.
In 1967 WerBell formed a partnership with Gordon Ingram, the father of the M10 submachine gun. They melded WerBell’s sound suppressor technology and Ingram’s tiny little inexpensive submachine guns into something even greater. The M1911A1 pistols then in US service were getting long in the tooth. WerBell and Ingram envisioned tens of thousands of Ingram submachine guns stacked in US Army arms rooms around the world. With visions of fat government contracts aplenty, they went to work marketing these things.
Mitch WerBell was a player blessed with some seriously magnetic charisma. Most spies are like that. WerBell secured 29 investors at $7 million apiece to capitalize his enterprise under the umbrella of Quantum Ordnance Bankers. He eventually merged Quantum with SIONICS to create the Military Armament Corporation. Thus the MAC10 was born.
The Gun
The term MAC10 eventually made it into the English lexicon. The American rapper Dedrick D’Mon Rolison adopted the stage name “Mack 10” and parlayed himself into a brand that eventually sold 11 million records. The term “MAC10,” however, was never an official moniker used by the Military Armament Corporation in their promotional efforts.
Gordon Ingram was a World War 2 veteran with a knack for engineering. His first modestly successful submachinegun design was the Ingram M6. Launched in 1949, the Model 6 looked like a Thompson SMG in dim light but was built around an inexpensive drawn steel receiver. The M6 included a novel two-stage selector in the trigger. Like the Steyr AUG assault rifle, an abbreviated pull on the trigger produced semiauto fire, while a full pull was rock and roll. Alas, the planet was covered in a thin patina of WW2-surplus SMGs at the time, and commercial sales were disappointing.
Ingram developed the M10 in the late 1960s. His mission was to create an efficient and compact SMG using advanced mass production techniques. The upper and lower receivers of the M10 were pressed out of sheet steel stock. The bolt, trunnion, and fire control parts required machining, but the gun was exceptionally cheap to produce in quantity.
Original M10’s were available in both 9mm and .45ACP using a common lower receiver. The magazine wells were unique to each gun. Ingram subsequently scaled down the M10 to fire .380ACP and titled it the M11. The .45ACP M10 cycled at 1090 rpm, the 9mm version ran at around 1250, and the M11 fired at a blistering 1500 rpm.
The folding stock on the MAC guns has been rightfully maligned, but it yet remains better than nothing. Deployment involves squeezing the butt assembly and rotating it down before extending the twin struts. On the tiny M11, in particular, the stock is too short for anyone beyond about the 7th grade. However, the thing still serves much the same purpose as might a Pistol Stabilizing Brace today and is moderately effective as a result.
The real magic back in the 1970s was the sound suppressor. .45ACP and .380ACP are both naturally subsonic, so sound-suppressed MACs in these calibers were relatively quiet. The 9mm version was still pretty loud in the absence of expensive subsonic ammunition. The sound suppressor also gave the operator something handy upon which to cling while unleashing chaos.
Ingram designed a nylon strap that served as a forward handhold. Mine has a .380-caliber hole shot through it from one fateful day when I was running my M11 one-handed. For reasons I have never understood, Ingram used extremely coarse threads to interface his guns with WerBell’s cans. Care must therefore be exercised lest the suppressor loosens in use. I have partially gutted a MAC10 can myself by inadvertently allowing the suppressor to unscrew a bit on the range.
The M10 weighed 6.26 pounds empty. This is almost as heavy as an unadorned M16A1 rifle. However, all the MAC SMGs were indeed preternaturally small.
The Hard Sell
WerBell toured Vietnam with his suppressors and Ingram’s SMG’s in tow trying to sell American combat commanders on his exotic weapons. While the novelty of the things created ample buzz, the innate impracticality of the guns prevented truly widespread sales. Special Forces units got their hands on a few, but the vision of tens of thousands of M10’s stamped with “US Government Property” on the side never materialized.
The real nail in the coffin was a US government ban on the export of sound suppressor technology. The suppressor was a major selling point for these guns, and an inability to supply suppressors just castrated the potential international market. With Uncle Sam tepid and rich oil sheiks off the menu, the Military Armament Corporation imploded.
The Rest of the Story
While the Military Armament Corporation was not the cash cow WerBell had hoped, that doesn’t mean the former-spy sat idle. WerBell developed a training center that offered an 11-week course on counterterrorism techniques. He also developed Defense Systems International, a company that brokered weapons.
Throughout it all, Mitch WerBell got into all manner of mischief. In the 1950’s he provided military guidance to the Batista regime in Cuba as well as Rafael Trujillo, the dictator-in-residence in the Dominican Republic. In 1966 WerBell planned and organized Operation Nassau. This op involved an armed invasion of Haiti by disaffected Haitian exiles against Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. As invasions go this one was unique in that it was rumored to have been financially supported by CBS News. CBS naturally got exclusive rights to film the whole thing. The FBI broke up the whole sordid mob before D-Day. WerBell avoided being charged with whatever it is somebody gets charged with when he aspires to overthrow an impoverished Caribbean nation state.
The hits just keep coming. WerBell dabbled in a tidy little insurrection in the Bahamas as well as another in Panama. His attempted coup in Panama against their dictator Omar Torrijos fizzled in 1973, but Torres died in a plane crash under suspicious circumstances five years later. In 1979 WerBell publicly asserted that Coca-Cola had paid him $1 million to provide security for their executives in Argentina, a claim Coke denied.
There were allegations that WerBell had been present at the site of the JFK assassination on November 22, 1963. He was tied to marijuana smuggling alongside Gerry Hemming, another larger-than-life character and CIA asset tied to Cuban insurrection and Lee Harvey Oswald. WerBell plotted a coup in Guatemala in 1982 that also failed.
The weirdest of the lot was a rumored hit sponsored by Larry Flynt, the lunatic publisher of Hustler Magazine. Flynt purportedly paid WerBell $1 million to kill Hugh Hefner, Frank Sinatra, Bob Guccione, and Walter Annenberg. All four men were apparently considered threats to Flynt’s porn empire. A copy of the check from Flynt was eventually made public, but WerBell died a month after receiving it.
There were subsequent allegations that Flynt had poisoned WerBell with digoxin at a cocktail party at Flynt’s LA estate. WerBell, then 65 and working as a security consultant for Flynt, died several days later at the UCLA Medical Center. The details will likely never be known for sure, but Mitch WerBell was undeniably one serious piece of work.
In 1865 a German chemist named Justus von Liebig started Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company in the UK. Liebig subsequently opened a factory in Uruguay to process beef extract products that were later sold under the trade name Oxo. One of their most popular offerings was tinned corned beef. The company marketed this stuff as Fray Bentos, so named after the Uruguayan town where the factory operated.
Fray Bentos corned beef was food for the Common Man. The company also produced glue in the same facility. Fray Bentos was delivered in one-pound tins that were easily portable. This made Fray Bentos ideal fodder for soldiers in the field. During the Boer War and later in World War 1 Fray Bentos was surprisingly popular among British Tommies. In fact, the term “Fray Bentos” made it into the informal military lexicon as a slang term for anything that was good. Now hold that thought.
The Setting
In July of 1917, the Allies launched the Battle of Passchendaele. This orgasmic bloodbath orbited around a campaign to wrest the ridges south and east of the Belgian city of Ypres in West Flanders from the entrenched Germans. Passchendaele lies on the easternmost ridge past Ypres, some five miles from the Bruges to Kortrijk railway. Seizing the Passchendaele Ridge would cut the main supply route for the German 4th Army and facilitate a continued Allied advance that was hoped might turn the tide of the war. The Battle of Passchendaele was a really big deal.
Launching a major campaign in Flanders in 1917 was not without controversy. The terrain was abysmal, particularly given the unusually heavy rains, and opinions were divided at the strategic level as to the wisdom of this grand plan. However, to the beleaguered troops on the ground little of that mattered. Their world was distilled down to a few yards of blood-soaked mud.
The Details
Tank F41 was a male Mark IV serial numbered 2329. While they enjoyed a common basic chassis, male and female Mk IV tanks differed in their primary armament. Male tanks sported a brace of 6-pounder cannon along with supporting machineguns. The female sort bristled with machineguns alone. The commander of F41 was Captain Donald Hickling Richardson. With the approval of his eight-man crew, CPT Richardson had christened their mount Fray Bentos. In combat, they all felt a bit like tinned meat.
The crew of Fray Bentos was a cross-section of British culture. The second in command was 2LT George Hill, while the senior NCO was Sergeant Robert Missen. Lance Corporal Ernest Braedy was the only other Noncommissioned Officer. Gunners included William Morrey, Ernest Hayton, Frederick Arthurs, Percy Budd, and James Binley. At 0440 on August 22, 1917, these nine men left the line of departure with infantry support as part of an attack by the 61st Division near St. Julien. Their subsequent three-day ordeal became the stuff of legend.
The Fight
As Fray Bentos approached the Somme Farm they came under withering German machinegun fire. SGT Robert Missen, the gunner manning the port 6-pounder gun, silenced these Boche positions in short order. This was just the beginning of SGT Missen’s remarkable day.
At around 0545 with 2LT Hill at the controls, Fray Bentos approached Objective Gallipoli, an arbitrary map reference included as part of the overall scheme of maneuver. A German machinegun slathered the tank with machinegun fire, and one round found its way through the driver’s slit. This 8mm Maxim bullet struck 2LT Hill in the neck and knocked him out of the driver’s seat. CPT Richardson immediately took his place, but the terrain was ghastly.
It’s tough for the civilized mind to visualize what this place was like. Trenches, barbed wire, poison gas, machineguns, and death defined the World War 1 battlefields. The earth was churned into chaos by countless tens of thousands of rounds of artillery. The rains had transformed the soft Belgian dirt into a sticky, deadly quagmire. There were numerous anecdotes of infantry troops wandering off from the accepted tracks and simply being consumed by the mud. It was for this sordid world that the tanks had been developed in the first place.
The Mk IV tank was a 28-ton behemoth that spanned some 26 feet from front to back. These massive tanks sported half-inch steel armor and were driven by a 105 BHP Daimler-Foster 6-cylinder inline sleeve-valve 16-liter engine. The Mk IV carried 70 imperial gallons of petrol and had a top speed of 4 mph. Over rough terrain, its operational range was around 35 miles.
While the Mk IV was designed to get the British troops up and out of the trenches, life inside these early tanks was unimaginably horrible. The vehicles were cramped, miserable, and noisy. The Mk IV had no suspension, and direct fire from German artillery would burst a Mk IV like a grape. Even under peaceful circumstances, the buildup of fumes and carbon monoxide from the primitive gasoline engine would reliably sicken the crew. In combat, the interior of an operational Mk IV grew stifling hot and resembled hell.
Driving a Mk IV was not like operating a modern armored vehicle. These primitive tanks were all but unmanageable over truly rough terrain. While CPT Richardson struggled mightily with the controls, Fray Bentos slid inevitably sideways until it was well and truly ditched. With that, now deep behind German lines, Tank F41 became a pillbox.
The Ordeal
Soon after 2LT Hill was hit, gunners Budd and Morrey were hit as well. Mk IV tanks carried external ditching beams for just such eventualities. These heavy wooden timbers could be affixed to the tracks that spanned the entire periphery of the vehicle. Then by gunning the engine this beam would make its way around the tank and theoretically pull the heavy vehicle out of the quagmire. However, to affix the ditching beam one had to be outside the tank. With uncounted German soldiers surrounding the disabled vehicle at a range of some 30 yards, this was easier said than done. Regardless, SGT Robert Missen and LCPL Braedy tried it anyway.
SGT Missen dove out of the tank on the starboard side, while LCPL Braedy performed the same maneuver to port. Braedy was cut to pieces immediately and died on the spot. Realizing his mission to be hopeless, SGT Missen returned to the tank. Both quick-firing 6-pounder cannons then went to work and effectively silenced the offending German machineguns.
By 0700 the supporting British infantry had been forced to fall back, leaving Fray Bentos alone, disabled, and unsupported. The Germans smelled blood and moved in for the kill. The British crew responded with fire from their 6-pounder cannon and Lewis guns as well as individual rifles and pistols.
Fray Bentos carried a basic load of 332 rounds for the two 6-pounder guns along with its three amply-supplied .303 Lewis guns. Individual weapons included SMLE (Short-Magazine Lee-Enfield) bolt-action rifles and Mk VI Webley revolvers. By the standards of the day, Fray Bentos was a formidable war machine. When they designed and equipped her nobody imagined that this isolated tank would have to stand alone and be disabled in combat for three days. However, that’s just what she did.
Things Get Worse
SGT Missen later related, “The Boche were in an old trench close in under the front of the tank and we could not get the Lewis onto them owing to the angle of the tank, but we shot them easily with a rifle out of the revolver flap in the cab.”
At this point the British presumed the tank to have been overrun and began firing on it as well. SGT Missen, a man with some truly epic stones, volunteered to exit the tank and brave the concentrated fire from both sides so as to, “Go back and warn the infantry not to shoot us as we should sooner or later have to clear out of the tank…I got out of the right sponson door and crawled back to the infantry.” By the time SGT Missen left on his suicide mission every member of the crew save Gunner Binley was badly wounded.
The remaining crew flashed a white rag from one of the portholes on the British side of the tank. This action combined with SGT Missen’s miraculous trek across no-man’s land finally curtailed the British fire. Throughout it all the Germans attacked the disabled tank time and time again. This went on from the 22d, all day of the 23d, and well into the 24th of August. Throughout it all the valiant crew of Fray Bentos continued to fight back with every weapon at their disposal.
Epilogue
By 9 pm on the third day, CPT Richardson concluded that further resistance was futile. Despite their cumulative grievous wounds the crew removed the firing locks from the 6-pounders to disable them and retrieved all three machineguns. Under the cover of darkness, CPT Richardson and his crew eventually made their way back to the positions of the 9th Battalion of the Black Watch. There they left their Lewis guns to be used by the Black Watch gunners.
Ernest Braedy’s body was never recovered. Gunner Percy Budd was killed in action a year later in August of 1918 at age 22. The rest of the crew miraculously survived the war. The 60-hour ordeal of Fray Bentos saw them become the most highly decorated Allied tank crew of the war. Their extraordinary story of valor, devotion, and brotherhood served as inspiration for the epic 2014 David Ayer WW2 movie Fury.
