Category: All About Guns
Our world is littered with heroes if only we know where to look.
Hidden in Plain Sight
Mr. Roberson was an unassuming old guy who looked like everybody’s grandfather. Whenever he came to the clinic he always wore the same uniform—a pair of bib overalls over a pressed collared shirt buttoned at the neck and wrists along with a dapper ball cap. When first I saw him as a patient it was for arm pain.
My friend carried fragments from a German Stielhandgranate in his arm for more than half a century.
I asked him to unbutton his sleeve so I could take a look and noticed a mass of scars on his forearm. I innocently inquired as to the source. He quietly explained that he still carried fragments from a German potato masher grenade left over from World War 2.
This quiet farmer who lived down the road from me had done some truly amazing things.
It turned out that Mr. Roberson was my neighbor down the road, and he ultimately shared a lot of stories. A literal lifetime before this unassuming Mississippi farmer carried a Browning Automatic Rifle as a member of the 5th Ranger Battalion in World War 2.
On June 6th, 1944, he landed in the first wave on Omaha Beach fighting alongside the 116th Infantry Regiment. We’ve all seen Saving Private Ryan. That was his unit. That was this man.
My buddy endured some unspeakable hardships.
Mr. Roberson told me when he first met Patton the General was railing that Eisenhower was not moving fast enough.
He lost two toes at the Battle of the Bulge and barely survived the Huertgen Forest. He met General Patton twice. He said Patton was as profane and flamboyant in person as the movie made him out to be.
Mr. Roberson’s worst moment in World War 2 was actually on the troop ship coming home.
When the war was finally over he rode a packed troopship back across the Atlantic, encountering a vicious storm en route. He said that was the most terrified he was throughout the war. He said that storm was worse than D-Day because he was afraid the ship would capsize and he would drown.
When he finally got home his mother threw a party. Friends and family came from all around to celebrate his safe return. When everyone finally went home he found that his mom had left his bedroom exactly as it had been before he had gone off to war. She bid him good night, changed into her nightclothes, and went to bed herself.
Bitter combat in Europe inevitably changed a man.
As he lay there in the darkness he told me that he just couldn’t do it. After nearly a year under fire, he found that he could no longer sleep above ground. He tipped out into the backyard, retrieved a shovel from the woodshed, and quietly dug himself a hole. His mother subsequently heard the noise and went out in her nightgown to investigate.
When she came upon her young son curled up in that hole in the backyard and realized for the first time what he had been through she fell to her knees and wept. As I sat there in the clinic across from this soft-spoken old guy I was struck speechless.
The BAR in Action
The Browning Automatic Rifle was a bulky but effective support weapon that was generally well liked despite its flaws.
Mr. Roberson told me the BAR was just sinfully heavy but a superb fighting weapon. He was a small-statured man, and his BAR weighed 19 pounds. However, these were no ordinary men.
The BAR provided a formidable portable base of fire on a patrol.
At one point Mr. Roberson was crouched in a roadside ditch along with a small reconnaissance patrol counting German tanks as they roared by mere feet from where he was hidden.
After a group of enemy armored vehicles passed a German officer and his driver puttered up on a motorcycle equipped with a sidecar and stopped right in front of him. The officer stood up in the sidecar and began scanning the area on the opposite side of the road through a pair of binoculars. I’ll relate what happened next just as Mr. Roberson told it to me.
The Germans used sidecar-equipped motorcycles for reconnaissance and courier missions during WW2.
“I was hidden in the grass, and that German officer was peering off in the opposite direction. I thought to myself, ‘Those sure are some nice binoculars.’ I looked to the right and then to the left, and I didn’t seen any more German tanks. So I jumped up with my BAR—Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam…got ‘em both!”
“My Lieutenant ran up to me screaming, ‘Roberson! Have you lost your mind? Every Kraut in Germany is gonna be on top of us now!’ He chewed my butt something fierce, and we had to bug out pretty fast.”
Mr. Roberson then looked at me with a mischievous grin and said, “But I still got them binoculars!”
The Gun
The BAR went on to become a legend among American Infantrymen.
The gun that Mr. Roberson carried across Western Europe was originally designed in 1917.
John Browning was the most prolific gun designer in human history. He held 128 patents at the time of his death.
The esteemed firearms luminary John Moses Browning created the BAR as a tool optimized for an obsolete mission. Back then it was felt that a self-loading selective-fire rifle-caliber gun that could be run from the hip would be the key to getting Allied troops up and out of the trenches.
The BAR was originally known as the Browning Machine Rifle and was intended to be used for walking fire across the blood-soaked battlefields of WW1.
Early BAR web gear even included a metal cup on the side that would support the buttstock during this “walking fire.” In practical application walking fire didn’t work out so well.
The French Chauchaut has been rightfully denigrated for its sordid performance during WW1. It was in actually well ahead of its time.
At the time of its introduction, US Doughboys were wielding French Chauchaut and M1909 Benet-Mercie machine guns. In fact, in 1917 the US Army only possessed 1,110 machineguns of all sorts. In response, John Browning developed the BAR, first called the Browning Machine Rifle, along with the M1917 water-cooled belt-fed machinegun.
John Browning demonstrated both the BAR and the M1917 belt-fed machinegun during a public exhibition in Washington DC.
Browning personally brought examples of both to a public firepower demonstration at Congress Heights in southern Washington DC before military leaders, congressmen, senators, foreign dignitaries, and the press. He left with a contract for 12,000 BARs.
After some initial teething troubles, US industry began rolling out BARs at an impressive rate.
Most of America’s arms manufacturers were already operating at capacity producing weapons for our Allies embroiled in combat in Europe. As a result, production of the BAR was hastily contracted out to Colt, Winchester, and Marlin-Rockwell. The first batch of 1,800 included some out of spec parts. However, once the initial kinks were ironed out we produced roughly 9,000 guns per month.
1LT Val Browning, John’s son, was the first Allied soldier to fire the BAR in anger.
The first BARs arrived in France in July of 1918, and they entered combat in September. The first BAR fired in anger was wielded by 1LT Val Browning, John Browning’s son. The gun saw extensive use in the Meuse-Argonne offensive and roundly impressed those who encountered it on both sides of the line. Though the BAR was in action less than two months before the war ended, it created a lasting impact.
Details
The design of the BAR evolved substantially over time.
The BAR was a selective-fire, gas-operated, long-stroke piston-driven gun that fed from a 20-round box magazine. The limited capacity of the magazine and the lack of a quick-change barrel along with its prodigious weight were always the gun’s greatest weaknesses.
The BAR saw fairly extensive use among both allied and enemy forces during the Vietnam War.
The BAR saw several upgrades over the decades and was used extensively in World War 2, Korea, and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam. The M1918A2 sported a fire selector that offered two rates of fire and a removable bipod.
The Prohibition-era gangster Clyde Barrow was a big fan of the BAR. He had three of the big guns in his car the day he was killed. The whereabouts of these three BARs today is unknown.
The gun was also looted out of National Guard armories by motorized bandits during the Prohibition Era. Clyde Barrow was a serious fan.
The Colt Monitor stemmed from an effort to make the BAR lighter and more portable. Though they were available for unrestricted civilian purchase most of these specialist weapons went to the FBI. One was purportedly used in the ambush that killed Bonnie and Clyde.
The Colt Monitor Automatic Machine Rifle was introduced in 1931 and included a lightweight receiver, pistol grip, shortened barrel, and Cutts compensator. Only 125 were produced, but you could have bought one through the mail or over the counter at your local hardware store for $300. That’s about $4,600 today.
The BAR up close seems to be too big for normal humans.
I’ve only fired a BAR once, and I recall that the gun seemed absolutely massive. The impressive weight and length did help keep those finger-sized .30-06 rounds under control, however. The weapon fired from an open-bolt and was adequately reliable despite egregious battlefield abuse. Quite a few WW2 dogfaces discarded their bipods to make the gun lighter and more maneuverable.
War, Geometry, and Life
The world where I was raised was liberally populated with combat veterans from World War 2.
The world when I was a kid was absolutely littered with WW2 veterans. 12% of the population served, and those guys came back from all that pain and gore ready to build and create. That is one of the biggest reasons the fifties were such prosperous times in America.
My high school geometry teacher used one of his wartime BAR anecdotes to illustrate mathematical principles.
My high school geometry teacher was a WW2 Infantrymen, and he interrupted class one day to relate a war story about mathematics.
While wielding a BAR in Europe he once surprised a German officer on horseback. The Wehrmacht soldier galloped away and he stepped out into the road and emptied the magazine of his BAR from the hip. When the smoke cleared the BAR was empty, and the German officer escaped unscathed. My teacher used that anecdote to illustrate some forgotten mathematical concept about probability. I don’t recall the particular theorem, but I clearly remember the war story.
Denouement
Most of us today have no idea what it cost to purchase our freedom.
Friends, we really have no idea. In 1945 PTSD wasn’t a thing. These guys, all sixteen million of them, left their homes to fight and die on foreign battlefields so that we could have the freedom to go to church, post stuff on the Internet, and gripe about the government. I once asked Mr. Roberson if he ever struggled with memories from the war. Well into his eighties this is what he told me—
Absolutely nothing about freedom is free.
“It used to scare my poor wife to death. I would wake up in the middle of the night sweaty and screaming, dreaming about the things I’d seen and the stuff I’d done. My wife’s been dead for fifteen years now, and I still wake up like that sometimes even now. But once I realize who I am and where I am and that I’m safe at home, I just laugh and laugh.”
How did we as a nation make men such as this?
Mr. Roberson died quietly of pneumonia five years ago. How can we ever hope to be worthy of a legacy like that?
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BY JOHN TAFFIN
By the winter of 1956–57 John had the first three early Ruger single actions offered —
the .22 Single-Six, the .357 Blackhawk and the .44 Magnum Blackhawk.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.” — Robert Frost.
Anyone who cannot look back down their personal Road of Life and see many, many roads — which ones were chosen and the effect it had on life — has just not been paying attention. I will say there’s no such thing as chance or coincidence. Everything happens for a reason. We may not understand the reason at the time, we may never understand it but it’s always there.
Beginning
The first fork in the road I remember came in fourth grade. One day my teacher said she would like me to spend a couple weeks with the fifth graders. After those two weeks she asked if I would like to go into the fifth grade permanently. There was the choice. Should I stay on the road marked fourth grade or did I fork off into the fifth grade? I chose the latter. For the rest of my school days, I was always one grade ahead and graduated after 11 years, instead of 12. Was it a good or bad choice?
I was not ready for college by any means and lived in the area containing the general offices and main plants of five tire companies. I had just turned 17 and after graduation, went to the office of one of the tire companies. I took the test required, scored high and told I could have my choice of any job. They then looked at my birth date and informed me they could only hire people who were at least 18 years of age. There’s a reason there somewhere and I soon found it.
Another Change
A construction company was hiring order boys and I got the job. The salesman would write up the orders and we would go all over the building to fill the orders and bring them to the shipping department where they would be delivered the next day on a fleet of eight bright red Reo trucks.
Because of this job I met a fellow who would become a lifelong friend and he introduced me to the best gun shops and gun shows. His name was John also and is now a retired LEO living in Florida. Because of him I bought my first .22 Marlin 39A and soon followed it with the .22 Ruger Single-Six. Then came the .38-40 Colt SAA, .45 Colt SAA, .357 Blackhawk Flat-Top, .44 Magnum Blackhawk Flat-Top and others. At the time I kept a running gun tab at Boyle’s Gun Shop.
The second thing happened after I had been there a few months. The boss came to me and said, “I want you to be foreman of the men charged with unloading everything that comes into the building.” I’m just 17 and was asked to be the foreman of men, the youngest of which was about 32. These men were all black working for minimum wage as there were few real opportunities for black men yet in the 1950s.
I was told my job would be to assign them to their various tasks and just stand there with a clipboard to check off everything. I was only 17 but smart enough to realize these guys were not going to work for me if I didn’t do anything but stand there with a pencil.
So I worked right alongside of them and two things happened: I gained their respect and with hard work, built myself up to the point I could pick up 500-lb. bars of pig lead or put a 200-lb. keg of nails on my shoulder and walk up three flights of stairs and back down again. Now I can barely pick up a fork and forget stairs.
John’s first centerfire sixgun and first Colt Single Action was a 4-3/4″ .38-40 purchased in 1956,
followed by the first 2nd Generation Colt Single Action to appear in his area, a 7-1/2″ .45 Colt.
Another Road
I was working hard every day, paying my Mom room and board, buying everything I needed for myself and definitely buying guns. I was as happy as happy could be.
It was my habit to go to church with my mother. The church had a large youth group but no one ever approached me. I found out later it was because I looked older and my Mom, who had been a teenage bride, teenage mother and teenage widow all in the space of less than two years, was now in her late 30s. She looked younger and I looked older so they thought I was married — to my mother!
One particular morning my mom wasn’t feeling well and I arrived at church early where an usher put me into a Sunday school class. At the same time, there was a young girl who went to church with her father on the other side of town. This particular day she and her father had an argument so she came to my church. She normally only came to the Sunday night youth group but when the usher shoved me into Sunday school class, there she was.
Up to this time I had no time for girls. All my expendable money went for guns and shooting. I had never dated through high school and this young blonde made a real mistake — she paid attention to me. One look at her and I was totally smitten by the young girl who now is known as Diamond Dot. Was it coincidence we both wound up in the same spot at the same time? We were married the following February, now going on 62 years ago.
Hook Of Kismet
We were both earning about $200 a month and wanted to have a family. This meant Dot would have to quit her job and we would have to live on half this amount. I loved my job but had to find something different. How was this going to happen?
We had been out shopping on a hot Saturday afternoon and decided to stop by the apartment to put the milk and meat in the refrigerator. In the 1950s many cars were set up so you could start it, remove the key from the ignition and it would still keep running.
I did a very stupid thing — I took the key out, left the motor running and handed the keys to Dot. I don’t have the slightest idea why I would leave the car running since we didn’t have air conditioning anyhow. Dot placed the milk and meat into the refrigerator, came back out and I asked her for the keys. I could tell by the look on her face what just happened. The car was running and the keys were in the locked apartment!
The back door of our apartment opened onto a balcony-type porch about 10 feet off the ground so we rarely locked it. All I had to do was shinny up the porch post, go in the back door and retrieve my keys. I could still shinny in those days.
As I got up to the banister and prepared to step over, I put my foot on a clothesline hook to help me over. I was wearing moccasins and the sharpened hook went into the bottom of my foot. Blood was flowing, so I wrapped it in a towel, retrieved the keys, went back out to the car and had Dot drive me to the hospital to get bandaged and a tetanus shot. I was told I would have to be off work for at least a week. Was there a reason for all of this?
Reasons
I found out on Monday morning when Dot called me from her office at the factory to tell me they were hiring. Since I was now over the age of 18, I was hired making three times what I had been making. Now we could start a family of our own. If Dot had not left the keys in the apartment perhaps none of this would’ve happened.
The downside to my new job was unlike the one I loved, I hated every minute in the place. I worked the night shift six days a week and there was simply no joy in going to work — but as I have tried to teach my children and grandchildren, there are things in this life we do, not because we want to, but simply because we have to.
I dreaded going to work and my only thought was “Why am I here?” Was there really a reason? Had I taken the wrong fork in the road?
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