To everyone bitching about Texas Roadhouse allowing that dog who was deployed twice, to eat a steak in the restaurant on Veterans Day, I’d rather sit next to him than rowdy, bratty kids all day long. I can guarantee that dog is cleaner and more quiet. He isn’t up being allowed to run around like he (and his parents) were raised in a barn!
Petmatchmaker Rescue South supports Texas Roadhouse, Veterans and all Military Working Dogs.
This is Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Soviet Sniper During
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Pavlichenko (center) with Justice Robert Jackson (left) and US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington DC in September 1942. Thanks Wiki! Grumpy
Beginning with the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), the squad automatic weapon is a vital platform that continues to evolve as it serves militaries worldwide.
The infantry Soldier’s lot is seldom a happy one. But, it is often full of quiet satisfaction at a hard job well done. Those who command the foot Soldier understand there must be a sensible organization and reliable tools with which to work. In the early 20th century, the organization of the infantry shifted heavily to use of the squad. The squad is a group from nine to as many as 14 men. A junior NCO—corporal or sergeant—commands the infantry squad. There are generally three of them in a platoon, which is commanded by a lieutenant. Since most of our data comes from experience with American infantry, that is what I have described. And while other armies might do things a little differently, there are some parallels in the types of armament employed.
In the early part of that century, the machine gun was all the rage. Various makes and models evolved almost simultaneously from heavy, crew-served guns that initially were used almost as artillery, to lighter guns a single man could carry. A full-automatic gun of that size and weight would have a powerful appeal if included in the infantry squad. In the World War I era and the following decade, virtually every army in the world was set up like this.
As if by mutual agreement, the guns used had similar features. For one thing, they almost always fired the same ammunition as that nation’s service rifle. Further, that ammo was fed into firing position from a sheet-metal box magazine. There were a few models that fed from metal strips. Some models had a semi-automatic trigger system, but all had a full-auto mode. All weighed about 20 pounds empty, while the heaviest ran to 25 pounds. Part of that weight came from a bipod, and all were meant to be fired from a buttstock in the prone position. Tactics involved in deploying the squad auto varied, but everyone prized the stable, full-auto accuracy—enough to give the gunner an ammo bearer. Over time, the squad auto became a specialized form of light machine gun.
Tactics involved in deploying the squad auto varied, but everyone prized the stable, full-auto accuracy—enough to give the gunner an ammo bearer. Over time, the squad auto became a specialized form of light machine gun.
The thousands of French and British soldiers who went to war in 1914 used a variety of automatic rifles with mixed results. When American troops entered the conflict in 1917, the French High Command insisted that the Yanks surrender their early Browning Automatic Rifles (BARs) for the notoriously unreliable French Chauchat machine gun. One of the first problems addressed when the French set about modernizing a post-World War I army was its squad auto. This time, that country’s armories came up with a fine product, and one that lasted for decades.
The gun was the Châtellerault Fusil-mitrailleur (FM) Mmlle 24/29, a 25-pound brute chambered for the French 7.5 mm cartridge. This round was developed in the 1920s, but closely resembles the 7.62 NATO, developed in the 1950s. The FM 24/29 had two triggers, one for semi- and one for full-auto mode. A series of bolt and automatic rifles used the same round. That beefy squad auto—the FM 24/29—served French infantry units through World War II, Korea and two protracted colonial wars in French Indo-china and Algeria. It was a heavy, but reliable gun that solidly anchored the French squad for decades. Some authorities have noted resemblances to the BAR.
British infantry went through a similar series of steps to develop a proper squad auto, and in the end, just bought one. The Bren gun was designed and initially manufactured in Brno, Czechoslovakia. British ordnance looked at everything available and chose this venerable warrior, building their versions at the Enfield arsenal, hence the Bren name (Brno, Enfield).Like the French 24/29, the Bren uses magazines loaded into the top of the receiver, which might seem odd to American eyes, but makes shooting prone easier. Bren gunners learned to load their magazines with great care in order to make the rimmed .303 cartridges feed properly.
And then we have the legendary BAR, a gun first used in the last year of the First World War. Compared to the Bren and FM 24/29, the magazine on the bottom reloads quicker—just
tap the magazine catch in the front of the trigger guard and the magazine falls free. The “B” in BAR stands for Browning and yes, that is legendary John Moses Browning. The gun came from the same brain as several other machine guns, as well as a couple different pistols and even some shotguns you might have heard of.
American infantrymen have long since dropped the BAR and replaced it with the M14, a fine rifle that turned out to be a poor squad auto. When the M16/M4 and the 5.56 mm NATO cartridge were adopted, the situation was again confused. Just recently, the military procured yet another squad weapon from SIG Sauer to replace the venerable M249 SAW.
Once again, we’ve got a new batch of fightin’ iron.
August 24, 1940, was a Saturday. The Battle of Britain had been roaring in the skies over England for six long weeks. On this particular day a young Luftwaffe fighter pilot named Hans Joachim-Marseille found himself on his first combat sortie over the hostile island.
Joachim-Marseille was 21 years old, little more than a souped-up child. Of French Huguenot ancestry, the boy was the product of a difficult upbringing and a broken home. Influenza had nearly killed him when he was young. Joachim-Marseille went by Jochen to his friends.
Jochen completed fighter pilot school in Vienna in November of 1939. His instructors consistently rated him as a superlative natural pilot, but his social life threatened to put an end to his flying career before it got started. In retrospect, young Jochen was likely trying to fill some kind of void with women and alcohol. There were times he missed missions because of his excessive social pursuits the night before.
Fighter aircraft at the beginning of World War II were terrifyingly dangerous machines. They were immensely powerful, but aviation technology had been advancing at a breakneck pace. Most everything about combat aircraft of this era was still essentially experimental. As a result, young men strapped into these heavily-armed planes ready to meet death.
Fighter tactics were and are learned skills. German pilots fought in pairs called Rotte. Two pairs operated as a four-plane unit called a Schwarm. The lead pilot of the Rotte was responsible for everything out front. His wingman continuously cleared the rear to avoid an airborne ambush. It was beaten into combat pilots that you should never leave your wingman. As soon as young Jochen spotted his first British fighter plane, however, he broke formation and dove in the attack.
Joachim-Marseille had drawn Bf 109 E tail number 3579 for the mission that day. The “Emil” as it was called by its crews represented the state-of-the-art in fighter aircraft at the time. Jochen firewalled the throttle, totally fixated on his target.
The enemy plane was a Supermarine Spitfire. This particular example was flown by an experienced British pilot who was none too keen on falling to German guns. What began as a diving ambush evolved into a free-wheeling aerial melee wherein both pilots fought for their very lives.
The battle lasted a mere four minutes, but four minutes is an eternity in aerial combat. With the nimble Spit vying for position on his tail, Joachim-Marseille pulled a tight chandelle wherein he described his minimal turning radius while climbing. This was a difficult maneuver in combat.
Successful air combat is all about energy management, and a chandelle left the plane relatively slow and disadvantaged. In this case, however, Joachim-Marseille ended his turn at a greater altitude. He momentarily centered the British fighter in his REVI gunsight and squeezed the trigger.
His plane carried a pair of 20mm MG FF cannon in the wings along with a brace of rifle-caliber MG-17 machine guns in the engine cowling. He also carried a third 20mm firing through the propellor hub. The combined firepower of these five guns chewed into the hapless Spitfire. Jochen connected with the Spit’s Merlin engine, and the stricken plane rolled inverted before plunging into the English Channel.
Joachim-Marseille was then bounced by a gaggle of Spitfires bent on revenge. He dove his nimble Messerschmitt down to wavetop level and made a beeline for Calais and home. Once on the ground he was severely castigated. Though he had been successful, his lack of discipline in the air put his mates in jeopardy.
Hans Joachim-Marseille’s patterns of misconduct eventually landed him a posting to North Africa where his Bohemian proclivities might be better muted. While there, he found his stride, ultimately shooting down 158 Allied planes. All but seven of these were scored against the British Desert Air Force. No other Luftwaffe pilot claimed as many Western aircraft downed. All of his combat flying was in Bf 109s.
During the course of three sorties in a single day in September of 1942, Joachim-Marseille managed to down seventeen enemy aircraft. He was eventually awarded the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds. Joachim-Marseille was arguably the first of the Experten, the cream of the Luftwaffe fighter arm that was to be the scourge of the skies over Europe and North Africa. Thanks in no small part to Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine, he became known as Der Stern von Afrika or “The Star of Africa” as a result.
On September 30, 1942, Joachim-Marseille was flying a brand-new Bf 109 G-2 on a Stuka escort mission. His flight encountered no enemy aircraft, but Jochen’s engine began smoking on the return flight. His wingmen guided him back to friendly lines so that he could bail out of the stricken plane.
Jochen rolled his Messerschmitt inverted per protocol and jettisoned his canopy. However, the smoke apparently disoriented him such that he let the plane enter a steep dive. He eventually cleared the aircraft at around 400 mph and struck the vertical stabilizer on exit. The blow either killed him outright or rendered him unconscious and unable to activate his parachute. Hans Joachim-Marseille was 22 at the time of his death.
The German Bf 109 Messerschmitt was the most-produced combat aircraft in history. Nearly 34,000 of them were built between 1937 and 1945. The last Bf 109 variants were not retired from combat duty with the Spanish Air Force until 1965.
The Bf 109 incorporated a variety of radically advanced features. The inverted-V Daimler-Benz engine was fuel injected, which rendered the plane immune to negative-G flight conditions. By contrast, the Merlins on opposing Spitfires were carbureted and would therefore lose power in the negative-G flight state. The Messerschmitt also had leading edge slats in the wings that deployed automatically due to gravity and enhanced the nimble plane’s turning radius.
The landing gear mounted to the fuselage. This kept the wings thin and slippery. It also made the wings easier to remove for servicing at the expense of an unusually narrow ground track. An inordinate number of Bf 109s were lost to ground handling accidents as a result.
The Bf 109 advanced through a wide variety of upgrades that increased performance and enhanced armament. Despite its relatively advanced age, the late-war Bf 109K still had a rate of climb superior to that of the American P-51D as well as the British Spitfire Mk XIV and the Hawker Tempest. A total of 25 Czech-built Bf 109s served with the fledgling Israeli Air Force during their War of Independence in 1948.
The Bf 109E Werknummer 3579 that Joachim-Marseille flew on his first combat mission was later damaged in combat with Jochen in the pilot’s seat and bellied in at Calais-Marck. After subsequent recovery and rebuild in Antwerp, the plane was issued to JG77 operating out of Alakutii, Russia. The plane was once more damaged in combat and rebuilt again, this time in Norway, before being returned to the Russian Front.
In August of 1942 with LT Kurt Hammel at the controls, 3579 was forced down near the FLOT (Forward Line of Troops) where it was abandoned. The wreckage was recovered in the Summer of 1992 by the Russian Aircraft Recovery Group and moved to Moscow. It was then purchased by an American company and rebuilt into flying condition. In 2014 the plane was sold and moved to its current location at Biggin Hill Aerodrome outside London.
This priceless aircraft with its extraordinary connection to one of the Luftwaffe’s greatest fighter pilots is awe-inspiring up close. The plane looks like it just rolled out of the factory and is frankly a thing of extraordinary beauty. Special thanks to www.flyaspitfire.com for the priceless opportunity to study it up close.
It was six feet tall and 163 lbs. without a gram of extraneous body fat. Though I didn’t enjoy it, I did a weekly 10k run with my mates in boots with a rucksack and M16. I was in the best physical condition of my life and believed myself to be both bulletproof and immortal. Then I met the Pig.
A proper 15-mile forced march was about the hardest thing I have ever done. On this particularly fateful day, I don’t recall whose dog I had inadvertently kicked to deserve what happened to me. This was, however, the day I got tagged to lug the Pig.
The “Pig” was the M60 belt-fed General Purpose Machine Gun (GPMG). Back in my day, we used M60’s as SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapons). Nowadays, our 5.56mm SAWs are relatively lightweight, portable and mean. By contrast, the Pig weighed 23 lbs. empty and fired a 7.62x51mm round the size of my little finger. The Pig would cut through walls, chew through ceilings, ventilate cars and reach out to truly serious ranges. It was, however, indeed still a pig. At the end of that horrible road march, I thought I’d died.
The M60 GPMG wanted so badly to be awesome. Rising from the ashes of World War II, the M60 reflected the U.S. Army’s effort at developing a truly state-of-the-art light machine gun. We fought the Second World War with the Browning M1919A4. This beast ran like the Energizer bunny, but it weighed 31 lbs. and was a veritable mass of sharp corners. The M1919A4 was also designed to be fired off of a separate M2 tripod, an awkward piece of kit that itself weighed another 16 pounds. The subsequent M1919A6 tried to morph the gun into something more portable, but it was yet a pound heavier. We could do better.
The M60 began life as the experimental T44. In what has got to be the coolest job in the history of jobs, American firearms engineers took the belt-fed mechanism from a captured German MG42 and grafted it onto the action of an FG42 paratroop rifle. The resulting frankengun served as the basis for the M60 action.
The M60 orbited around a stamped steel receiver for both economy and weight management. The Germans had shown the world with their MG42 that you could indeed stamp out a GPMG that was rugged enough to thrive on the modern battlefield. Though M60 receivers were ultimately found to stretch a bit, this part of the design performed fairly well.
The M60 featured a gas piston-driven action that fed ammunition in M13 disintegrating links solely from the left. The gun fired from the open bolt and was exceptionally simple to operate. Lock the bolt to the rear, put the gun on safe, open the top cover, and place the ammunition belt in the feedway link side up or “brass to the grass.” Close the top cover, point the gun at something you dislike, flick the safety off, and squeeze. Repeat as necessary. As seems always to be the case, however, the devil was in the details.
The M60 was an air-cooled design intended for sustained fire applications. Running lots of belt-fed rounds through a machinegun creates astronomical amounts of extraneous heat. Getting rid of all that thermal energy is the Achilles heel of any sustained fire weapon system. The generally accepted solution on a gun like the M60 is a quick change barrel system.
You can cut spirals or flutes into a barrel to increase its surface area and subsequently its capacity to dissipate heat. However, if you want this thing to shoot for a while you need mass. Making your barrels heavy is one of the reasons the Pig and I got along so poorly that torrid afternoon at Fort Benning. Certain aspects of the M60’s design were just fatally flawed.
The bipod on the M60 was located at the far end of the gun. This location optimized stability and control. However, in the case of the Pig, this meant that every spare barrel had its own dedicated bipod. For the sorts of guys who might break the handles off of their toothbrushes to help conserve weight on a long patrol, any extraneous mass was the unforgiveable sin.
Additionally, certain components of the M60 gas system had an annoying tendency to come apart at high round counts. As a result, the gas cylinders on our guns were always held together with safety wire. In practice that was not a particularly onerous problem, but it didn’t inspire confidence.
Swapping barrels on the Pig was indeed fast and intuitive. Lock the bolt back, throw the barrel release lever, snatch out the barrel using the handy but heavy carrying handle, and lock a fresh tube in place. Easy peasy.
The M60 was intended from the outset to be everything for everybody. Uncle Sam wanted one gun that could serve in a variety of roles. In the final analysis, there were only three versions that saw widespread service back in my day.
The standard ground gun featured a rubber-coated steel handguard and buttstock with a folding shoulder rest. This weapon served in most conventional roles to include vehicle mounts. In Vietnam, particularly early in the war, helicopter door gunners frequently hung a standard M60 from a bungee cord and used it for suppressive fire. Innovative gunners sometimes chopped the barrels short or affixed a spare pistol grip to the forearm with pipe clamps. It was a common practice to wire a C-ration can to the left aspect of the feed tray to enhance feeding.
The M60C was used in fixed mounts aboard helicopter gunships, most typically in dual fixtures on each side of the aircraft. The C-model was hydraulically charged and electrically fired via solenoid. The C-model guns used the same basic chassis as the ground guns. However, their barrels lacked bipods, front sights, and carrying handles.
The M60D was the standardized pintle-mounted aerial version of the weapon. The D-model dispensed with the forearm and included a spade grip with twin ring triggers in lieu of the buttstock assembly. The M60D included a folding ring sight as well. The barrels on our D-models still carried their own bipods so you could use the gun on the ground in a crisis.
I did not have a homogeneously positive experience with the M60. Most of the guns I was issued seemed fairly finicky. We trained to fire five to eight-round bursts and remain ever mindful of barrel heat. I recall having to fiddle with the guns more than I should have to keep them running, particularly in an austere environment.
I was once signed for twenty-four D-model M60s to be used as door guns on my tactical aircraft. Despite being spotlessly maintained and perfectly lubricated there never seemed to be more than about six that really ran well. Failures in training tended to diminish confidence in the weapons. Given that the mission was to provide suppressive fire going into and out of hostile landing zones that always seemed a wee bit disturbing.
When the Pig ran, it ran well. The sedate 550-rpm rate of fire encouraged ammunition efficiency, and the heavy .30-caliber chambering carried plenty of downrange thump. Running the gun was both fun and exhilarating. Humping it, however, particularly for a skinny guy like me, not so much.
Running a belt-fed machinegun out of a moving helicopter is an incomparable rush. It also embodies a fair amount of unexpected physics. When the aircraft is in forward flight and the guns fired out the sides each screaming bullet becomes its own little flying machine.
The 22” barrel on the M60 is rifled one turn in twelve inches. The bullet leaves the gun’s barrel at around 2,800 fps. That means it has a rotational velocity of 2,800 revolutions per second or about 168,000 rpm. The bullet turns clockwise as viewed from the firer. When fired in forward flight out the right side of the aircraft the airflow across the bullet creates a low pressure area on the top that actually draws the projectile upward. Smarter folks than I call this the Magnus Effect. On the left side of the aircraft this low pressure area is formed underneath the bullet and pulls it down.
The end result is that to hit a target on the right the gunner aims intentionally beneath it and lets the bullets fly up to impact. The opposite is true on the left with the bullets plunging precipitously toward the ground. The practical effect when doing this for real firing tracers is frankly surreal.
The M60 will forever be associated with Sylvester Stallone and John Rambo. The 1982 action movie First Blood established its own film genre. A fun fact is that Stallone co-wrote the screenplays for First Blood as well as the next four sequels.
In the first film, Stallone’s put-upon Vietnam-era Special Forces veteran character eventually takes up an M60 and uses it to shoot the bejeebers out of the small town of Hope, Washington. Along the way, Rambo even runs his M60 one-handed, albeit on a sling. Just punch “First Blood M60” into YouTube if you haven’t seen the juicy bits. However, should this be the case I sure wouldn’t admit that to any of your guy friends.
For the most part, the M60 has been supplanted in U.S. military service by the M240-series of belt-fed guns. Upgraded versions like the M60E6 still soldier on in certain select units, however. Despite its warts, the Pig yet remains one of the coolest looking automatic weapons ever contrived.