Category: Hard Nosed Folks Both Good & Bad
The Wooden hand of Captain Jean Danjou the most sacred icon of the FFL.
The Battle of Camarón, (30 April 1863). Was a defensive action fought with suicidal courage during France’s ill-fated intervention in Mexico. The Battle of Camarón founded the legend of the French Foreign Legion.
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About 6 years ago, I had an accident at the range. We talked about it at the time, but didn’t say what the gun involved was, in order to keep the discussion focused on safety and first aid issues. Well, I think it’s been long enough now that there’s no reason to keep it obfuscated.
The rifle I was using was a reproduction 1860 Henry in .45 Colt. I loaded the magazine tube about half way to get a few shots on camera for b-roll, and just dropped the follower instead of gently lowering it down onto the top cartridge. When it hit the rounds in the tube, the top two detonated, spraying powder and some brass shrapnel out the open slot in the magazine tube. I got a bunch of powder sparkling up my face, but my shooting glasses protected me from any eye injury. One piece of cartridge case about a centimeter long hit me right about at the top of the sternum, and embedded itself in the flesh. We weren’t filming at the moment, so there is no video of this happening.
We had a first aid kit on hand, and knew how to use it. Fortunately, the injury was actually pretty minor, although we didn’t know that at the time. I was fully conscious and responsive, and I held pressure on a bandage over the injury while Karl drove us to the nearest hospital.
One hears unpleasant stories about hours-long waits in emergency rooms, but if you walk in with a trail of blood down your chest, someone tends to take a look at you right quick! After an x-ray and a CT scan, they determined that the shrapnel was not in a position to do any real damage, although it would cause more tissue damage to remove than to just leave it alone. So I got a couple stitches, and was sent on my way. It’s a small enough piece (and non-ferrous) that no, I don’t set off metal detectors. 🙂
While my experience here is simply a single anecdote, it does bring some significance to the periodic trials reports of tube-magazine detonations in trials or in service. The ammunition that exploded here on me had flush-seated primers, and flat-faced bullets. This was not a pointy bullet lined up with a proud primer. “Not only can malfunctions be stranger than we think, they can be stranger than we can think.” (Werner Heisenberg, probably)
8,000 miles South of the UK and 400 miles east of Argentina lie the Falklands Islands. The UK has held possession of the Falklands since 1833, and the islands are liberally populated with British subjects, some three thousand or so by 2006.
Starting with British Captain John Strong in 1690, various despots, regents, and tin pot administrators alternately claimed, occupied, or stole this desolate piece of dirt. At 4,700 square miles, the Falklands enjoyed a fair amount of space. However, its brutal Southern latitude made it an inhospitable sort of place. One of the first commercial endeavors back in the early 19th century actually involved the exploitation of feral cattle.
Now fast forward to 1982, and the nearby Argentines had their sights set on the windswept rocks of the Falkland Islands. The British had long since passed the apogee of their remarkable empire. Perhaps they wouldn’t notice if Argentina’s military junta government dispatched a few thousand troops to snatch up the Falklands. Sadly, Argentina’s Leopoldo Galtieri woefully underestimated the Iron Lady’s resolve. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was having none of that.
Buildup for War
With 8,000 miles of open ocean across which to stage a proper response, the Brits knew that air superiority during the upcoming amphibious counter-invasion was going to be critical. British Sea Harriers would bear the brunt of the air-to-air responsibilities. However, every Argentine airplane that could be neutralized was one less that the Harrier drivers would have to burn out of the sky.
On the Northern aspect of the western Falklands chain lies Pebble Island. This forsaken spit of dirt was home to some twenty-five English subjects and another 2,500 very English sheep. Since the Argentine invasion, the Pebble Island Aerodromo Auxiliar Calderon airfield also housed six FMA IA 58 Pucara twin-engine turboprop ground attack aircraft, four T-34 Turbo Mentor counterinsurgency attack planes, and a single Coast Guard Skyvan transport. Servicing, supporting, and defending these eleven aircraft were about 150 Argentine Marines and aviation personnel.
The Plan
22 Special Air Service Regiment was the foundation of the world’s modern Special Operations units. 22 SAS hearkens back to the Second World War and its first flamboyant commander, LTC Archibald David Stirling. Stirling’s mob of misfits tormented the Nazis from North Africa across Italy and occupied France. Subsequent generations of SAS men were shooting and scooting back when special operating wasn’t cool. In 1982 D Squadron 22 SAS Regiment stood ready to visit their own unique brand of chaos upon the Argentines.
The plan was audacious. After an eyes-on recce conducted by Boat Troop of D Squadron 22 SAS via Klepper canoe, it was determined that there were severe headwinds near the target area. This would ultimately limit the amount of time the commandos could spend on the objective. The operational objectives were therefore reduced from the destruction of the garrison to simply neutralization of the aviation assets.
The Mission
On the night of 14 May 1982, forty-five SAS D Squadron operators inserted via two Westland Sea King HC4 helicopters under cover of darkness. A single HC4 has the capacity to lift up to 28 combat-equipped troops. Members of the aforementioned Boat Troop provided approach navigation.
The SAS strike force landed six clicks from the airfield and unloaded some one hundred L16 81mm mortar bombs, demo charges, and a buttload of L1A1 66mm LAWs (Light Anti-tank Weapons). The SAS operators carried American-made M16 rifles along with a disproportionate number of M203 grenade launchers.
SAS operators are notorious for their simply breathtaking capacity to tab. Tab is short for Tactical Advance to Battle. This is British slang for a forced march across hostile terrain. The SAS assault force successfully infiltrated the airfield, avoiding the Argentine sentries on duty. They eventually set charges on seven of the Argentine aircraft without being detected.
On cue, the SAS operators blew the charges and opened up on the parked aircraft with small arms and LAW rockets. At the same time, naval gunfire from the British destroyer HMS Glamorgan joined in targeting the nearby fuel stores and ammo dump. The preponderance of their ordnance expended, the SAS raiders exfilled to the PZ (Pickup Zone) where they were extracted by the waiting Sea Kings to the HMS Hermes.
The Weapons
The standard British Army rifle at the time of the Falklands War was the L1A1 SLR (Self-Loading Rifle). This Anglicized FN FAL was used across Her Majesty’s armed forces. However, the SAS opted for the US M16 for its lightweight and high-capacity magazines. Today’s SAS operators wield Canadian-made versions of the M4 Carbine made by Diemaco.
The M16 has served in sundry guises for more than half a century in the US military and should be established dogma to anybody frequenting GunsAmerica. The M203 was the only component of the US Army’s long-running 1960’s-era Special Purpose Individual Weapon (SPIW) program to see adoption. Pronounced “Spew,” the SPIW had to have the coolest acronym in modern military history.
First adopted in 1969, the M203 fired the same 40x46mm grenade as did the standalone M79 break-open grenade launcher. The M203 mounted underneath a standard M16 and allowed the grenadier ready access to an automatic rifle in addition to the single-shot grenade launcher.
The 40mm grenades fired by these weapons operate on the High-Low Propulsion System first developed by the Germans during World War 2. The Germans referred to this concept as the “Hoch-und-Niederdruck System,” and it allows a relatively-heavy, low-velocity round to be safely fired via a handheld weapon.
The L1A1 LAW is a single-shot disposable 66mm unguided antitank weapon. Originally an American contrivance, the US designation was the M72. The solid rocket motor was developed in 1959 at Redstone Arsenal, and the M72 first saw service in 1963. The M72 replaced both the M31 HEAT (High Explosive Antitank) rifle grenade and the cumbersome M20A1 Super Bazooka.
The L1A1 LAW consists of a telescoping aluminum tube within an external fiberglass cylinder with pop-up front and rear sights. When collapsed and sealed the LAW is waterproof. A percussion cap firing mechanism ignites the rocket, and a mechanical setback safety built into the warhead does not arm the piezoelectric detonator until the rocket has accelerated out of the tube.
To fire the L1A1 LAW you pull the safety pin and remove the spring-loaded back cover. This allows the front cover to drop away as well, while the rear cover pivots down to serve as a shoulder brace. Grip the front and back of the weapon and extend it briskly. This movement releases the spring-loaded front and rear sights to deploy. Put the weapon on your shoulder, pull the striker handle forward to arm the mechanism, point the thing at something you dislike, and squeeze the trigger bar.
Firing the LAW is nothing like the movies. The entirety of the solid rocket motor is consumed prior to the rocket’s leaving the launch tube, and the open back of the tube makes the LAW essentially recoilless. The backblast, however, is subsequently ferocious.
Once the weapon is fired, six folding fins deploy to stabilize the rocket in flight. Muzzle velocity is 475 feet per second, and the thing makes a simply incredible racket.
Max effective range is 200 meters, and later versions of the standard HEAT warhead will burn through about 12 inches of rolled homogenous steel armor. The LAW rockets used in the Pebble Island raid weighed about 8 pounds and cost about $750 apiece. Though augmented in US service in 1987 by the Swedish AT-4, the LAW remains in use around the world today.
The Rest of the Story
As a result of intense shelling by the HMS Glamorgan the defending Argentines remained under cover for the most part throughout the raid. Presuming the attack to be the opening salvoes in a general invasion, the Argentine commander ordered the runway destroyed. The Argentines detonated prepositioned area denial charges underneath the runway and cratered it. Shrapnel from these charges injured one of the SAS operators. The Argentinian commander was subsequently killed by British small arms fire during the attack.
The original plan had the assault force redirecting their fire on the Argentinian garrison after ensuring the destruction of the attack aircraft. However, after exfilling the wounded man the ground force commander made the decision to return to the Hermes. This on-the-spot decision no doubt ultimately saved a great many lives.
The Pebble Island raid accounted for all eleven aircraft as well as the ammo and fuel dump and was considered a rousing success. Considering that destroying airfields full of Axis aircraft during WW2 was considered a bit of an SAS specialty, the Pebble Island raid seemed fitting.
Sadly, CPT Gavin John Hamilton, the ground force commander, was killed three weeks later while on a covert reconnaissance mission some forty miles behind Argentine lines. Colonel Juan Ramon Mabragana, the commander of the Argentine Commando unit that killed CPT Hamilton, later described him as “the most courageous man I have ever seen.”
Who Dares Wins.
Bulala Taylor, Hard Man Of The Veld
His nickname meant “Killer” in the Zulu language, and he was proud of it, signing himself Alf Bulala Taylor. If you’ve seen the film Breaker Morant, the Intelligence Officer and Native Commissioner is played as a kind of sinister eminence by John Waters.
Taylor was as responsible as any man for the killing spree that went down in the remote Northern Transvaal in the depths of the Boer War’s guerrilla phase in 1901. Somehow, Harry Morant and Peter Handcock were blown to hell by a firing squad, while Bulala Taylor returned festooned with campaign medals to his Avoca Farm in Rhodesia, his mixed-race wife and their eight children.
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Alfred Taylor was a pioneer, a scout, a soldier, a cattle rustler, and a very, very hard man. In their book Breaker Morant: The Final Roundup, Joe West and Roger Roper offer the most complete history of Taylor’s remarkable Frontier Partisan life that I have seen. It was an epic.
He was born in Dublin to William and Charlotte Taylor. For unknown reasons, William Taylor, a solicitor by occupation, hied off to Texas, where he died in Gonzales County in 1877. That’s damned interesting, because Gonzales was the epicenter of the Sutton-Taylor Feud, the biggest, costliest feud in the bloody history of Reconstruction Texas. The deadly gunman John Wesley Hardin was an ally of the Taylors in the feud — and the Irish solicitor William Taylor was apparently kin. The circumstances of his death are not clear — nothing to indicate it was feud related; nothing to indicate it wasn’t.
After his father’s death, the teenaged Alfred went to sea, working around Africa to Calcutta, India. On one of these voyages, he jumped ship and eventually made it into the hinterlands of South Africa’s gold country. In 1885 in the Transvaal, he was “commandeered” into a Boer Commando fighting Koranna raiders.The Koranna or Griqua people are of mixed race, the progeny of early Trekboers and indigenous peoples. They had a propensity for cattle raiding, and that, of course, brought them into conflict with Boer farmers, who harried them hard across the veld. Taylor participated in the hard-fought 1885 campaign, which seems to have been his first taste of combat and killing. He was good at it.
Boer Commandos fought numerous small wars in the 19th Century.
The next year, Taylor left a job assembling machinery for a hunting expedition with no less a legendary figure than Frederick Courteney Selous. Taylor had found a congenial life on the South African frontier. In 1887, he committed fully to his frontier world, marrying Phoebe Clark, the daughter of an Englishman and a Tswana mother.
Phoebe Clark, Mrs. Bulala Taylor.
By this time, he was visiting the wild lands north of the Limpopo River and the court of King Lobengula of the Ndebele, then called the Matabele. This warrior people gave him the name Bulala for his toughness and skill fighting with a stick. Bulala was, without question, a badass of the first order.
Taylor seems to have been a part of every aspect of the early pioneering and conquest of Rhodesia, and was present at Lobengula’s capitol, Bulawayo (Place of the Slaughter) in 1888, when Cecil Rhodes’ agents secured the Rudd Concession, which gave him the right to exploit the mineral resources of Mashonaland. That was the legal opening (or cover) Rhodes required to take the country that would bear his name.
Taylor and his wife established a farm in Rhodesia, which he named Avoca after a river south of Dublin in his native Ireland — an interestingly sentimental gesture. He fought in the Matabele War of 1893, and served with Plumer’s Scouts in the Matabele/Mashona uprisings of 1896/97.
A woman who was a teenager during the 1896 uprising recounted in a 1969 interview that she witnessed Taylor killing the M’limo, a spiritual leader who incited the Ndebele rebels.
“Wait!,” you say. “Frederick Russell Burnham killed the M’limo!”
Yeah, it’s confusing. The white Rhodesian settlers of the day never really understood the M’limo phenomenon, and historians haven’t been able to untangle it since. For our purposes, it’s best understood as an oracular cult. Multiple people could and did act as a kind of spiritual conduit for the voice of M’limo, which is essentially the voice of god or a god. These oracles were understood by the settlers to be coordinating the Rebellion, so killing “The M’limo” was thought to be a way of ending the uprising.
At any rate, a very fat native man named Dallamon — not clear whether he was Matabele or Mashona — was brought into custody at the Mangwe Fort near Taylor’s farm. Taylor reportedly took him out to a granite outcropping and shot him in the back with a revolver. It took seven rounds to finish the big man.
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When hostilities broke out between Briton and Boer a couple of years later, Bulala Taylor was a blooded and seasoned Frontier Partisan warrior and scout. He was enlisted among the Rhodesian troopers who rode to the aid of Queen & Country, and he rode in interesting company, including Kitchener’s Fighting Scouts, led by the great frontiersman Johan Colenbrander.
Kitchener’s Fighting Scouts.
Taylor was engaged in deep patrols into the Northern Transvaal, and he had a very successful war, including tracking down the 150-man commando of Commandant van Rensburg.
He ended up assigned to the Northern Transvaal as an Intelligence Officer and a Native Commissioner, on account of his knowledge of the country and its native inhabitants. These seem to have been civilian appointments, but Taylor was known as Captain Taylor, and he was accorded the authority of a military commander by troopers serving in the region.
West and Roper report that:
Taylor was very successful at producing intelligence, but there was concern about the insensitive, often brutal, way he went about his duties as a native commissioner. There were also grave suspicions that many of the cattle captured from Boer farms were being driven north toward Avoca farm at Plumtree in Rhodesia.
The man was a buccaneer.
He was implicated in the execution of prisoners, and was an instigator of several of the acts of the Bushveldt Carbineers that got Breaker Morant and Peter Handcock executed. When Captain Percy Hunt was killed (and, it was believed, mutilated) by Boers — the episode that sent Morant on a killing spree — Taylor exhorted the men to take no prisoners.
A take-no-prisoners collection of hard cases. Bulala Taylor is second from right in this photograph of the Bushveldt Carbineers. Peter Handcock is at the far left, next to Harry Harbord “Breaker” Morant (dog at feet). Captain Percy Hunt is at center in peaked hat.
Taylor was eventually tried for allegedly ordering the killing of six Boers who were coming in to surrender, and for the execution of a black native who warned a Boer Commando of a British patrol. In the first instance, Taylor was acquitted, because he didn’t have actual command authority. In the second, he blandly stated that he attempted to fire a warning shot over the head of the native spy and accidentally killed him. Whoopsie-daisy!
The military court bought it.
Taylor returned to his Rhodesian farm. Maybe he wasn’t a hero, exactly — he was too rough and dark a character for that — but he certainly was not shunned for his multitude of crimes. He went on to serve with Rhodesian forces in France during World War I, and he lived happily with Phoebe and his large brood on Avoca From until his death in 1941 at the age of 78.
Justice and history are both capricious.
Bulala Taylor in later life. He paid no price for his cruelty and his crimes.
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I’ve seen Alfred Bulala Taylor portrayed as a virulent racist, slaking a psychopathic blood lust. That’s well wide of the mark. He wasn’t exactly a Lewis Wetzel or a John Townsend a John Joel Glanton or a Ben Wright.
None of those men was able to sustain stable human relationships or work within an organized system or society. None of them could abide a settled life. Taylor was a family man, a successful soldier and a successful farmer. Bulala is best understood simply as an especially hard man, willing to use violence and to rustle cattle when it suited his purposes. He was no more racist than most of his contemporaries, and in fact, worked pretty well with indigenous people, marrying into a Tswana chiefdom. Exerting authority through cruelty and fear was not exactly uncommon among the tribes of Southern Africa themselves….
He was a tough man, not too concerned with the niceties of the law — and would have been as at home in, say, New Mexico or Arizona Territory in the late 19th Century as he was on the South African veld. He could have ridden with Al Sieber and Tom Horn.
West and Roper sum him up simply and accurately:
“He was an original Rhodesian and typical of the hard cases that were at the forefront in Africa in the late 19th Century.”