Category: Well I thought it was neat!

All physicians, no matter their speciality, start out in the Gross Anatomy lab. It is a surreal experience.

I started med school when I was 32. Unlike most of my comrades, I came to the table with a little living already under my belt. By the time I walked into the Gross Anatomy lab my youthful idealism was but an ancient memory.

The long hours and the gore were obviously a given, but the emotional bit really did surprise me. I hadn’t imagined what it might be like to have to tell somebody their kid was going to die. Trust me, that’s not cool.

By contrast, I was also amazed at the sorts of emotional baggage folks will bring to their doctor. One guy dropped by the clinic to tell me he was going off to kill himself and just wanted to say goodbye. There’s a surprising lot of emotion to be found in a small-town physician’s office.

Arguably the most venom I have ever seen has come from spouses spurned. It is simply amazing to see the depths of unfettered hatred that can spawn from a relationship presumably originally based upon mutual love and affection. Such powerful angst can precipitate some remarkably egregious behavior.

The Weapon

The Vought F4U Corsair was imagined from the outset as a carrier-based aircraft. The earliest versions of the plane were designed around a massive 2,000 horsepower 18-cylinder Pratt and Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp radial engine. To extract every bit of available power from that enormous engine it turned a Hamilton Standard Hydromatic three-bladed propeller that was 13 feet 4 inches in diameter.

Little is tougher on an airplane than carrier landings, so the Corsair’s landing gear had to be stout. To be stout they had to be short. To design an airplane structure with short stocky landing gear and a 13-foot propeller necessitated the Corsair’s beautiful gull wings. The graceful gull wing design became the plane’s most arresting feature.

12,571 copies rolled off the lines at both Vought and Goodyear between 1940 and 1953. The airplane saw active service in American hands in WW2 and Korea. New Zealand and France operated the ship well into the 1960’s. During WW2 the Corsair racked up an 11-to-1 kill ratio against the Japanese. The Japanese called it “The Whistling Death” based upon the sound the wind made passing through the oil coolers. The Corsair’s 11-year production run was the longest for any American piston-driven fighter plane.

So Much, So Fast

While the Corsair was indeed a profoundly successful fighter plane, it was also terribly unforgiving. At the time of its introduction, aviation was still in its relative infancy. On December 17, 1903, the Wright Flier had its first serious success. Wilbur Wright had tried to take the Flier up three days prior but merely coasted some 3.5 seconds before stalling the machine and pranging it up a bit. On the 17^th the aircraft flew four separate times. The last flight of the day covered 852 feet in 59 seconds with Wilbur at the controls. That averages out to about 10 mph. A 20mph headwind kept the plane aloft. At the end of this momentous day a gust of wind tumbled the flimsy plane end over end, and it never flew again.

The Flier weighed 745 pounds and sported a 12-horsepower engine. A mere 37 years later the Corsair weighed 14,000 pounds and could cruise at 446 mph. The F4U had a service ceiling of 41,500 feet. Despite the fact that Navy and Marine pilots were meticulously screened and trained to a standard unrivaled anywhere in the world, fully 56% of aircraft losses in the Corsair were not due to combat action. The combination of cutting-edge performance and raw power simply made the Corsair a challenging machine to fly.

The Guns

Early Corsairs packed three AN/M2 guns in each wing.

The armament on a Corsair has little bearing on this tale, but this is a gun website and you rightfully expect firearms-related content. Early F4U’s sported half a dozen Browning AN/M2 .50-caliber machineguns. AN stood for “Army/Navy.” Each M2 weighed 61 pounds and cycled at between 600 and 800 rounds per minute. Each of these six guns carried 400 rounds onboard. B25 Mitchell gunships could potentially carry as many as 18 of these monsters.

We Americans did passionately love our fifties, but by the middle of the war advances in aircraft performance and armor had rendered these beloved weapons somewhat less than ideal. Even the lightweight Japanese Zero was armed with a brace of 20mm cannon. Later versions of the Corsair packed four AN/M3 20mm automatic cannon. Each of these guns carried 231 rounds.

The AN/M3 was an Americanized version of the Hispano-Suiza HS.404 gas-operated, delayed-blowback 20mm gun used across all fronts during WW2. The AN/M3 cycled at 650 rpm and fired a roughly quarter-pound projectile. These shells packed a high explosive incendiary filler behind a No 253 Mk IA Direct Action (Percussion) fuze.

What Became of All Those Planes?

At peak production during World War 2 American industry was churning out some 8,000 warplanes a month. The sheer volume of sundry stuff produced in this country has never been rivaled before or since in all of human history. With the end of hostilities all of those magnificent aircraft were suddenly superfluous.

P38 Lightnings, B25 Mitchells, P51 Mustangs, and B17 Fortresses were undeniably sexy cool, but they were not designed for efficiency. Their immensely powerful engines guzzled fuel and oil. Maintaining these large complicated machines was expensive. At a time when the planet was covered in the detritus of combat, nobody really wanted these things. Nowadays a restored WW2-era fighter plane might set you back a couple million dollars. Back then, however, most of them were simply scrapped. A shockingly large number of military aircraft were flown straight from the factories to the scrapyards. Makes a guy kind of ill to think about it today.

There was supposedly a three-year period wherein folks could pick up surplus warplanes cash and carry under the auspices of the War Assets Administration. I have read that a series of disposal fields was established across the country where anyone with a little folding money could freely purchase a Mustang, Thunderbolt, Lightning, or Corsair, bereft of guns of course. After a while the program was hemorrhaging capital and the remaining inventory was turned into beer cans. For that brief period, however, a fully operational Corsair could be had for a bit north of $1,000. That’s about $12,400 today.

The Murder

I have read the following story from two sources in print. I was unable to find any reference to it online. If you know it to be apocryphal then try to suspend your skepticism and just enjoy the tale.

This isn’t the murderous wife-slaying oil tycoon from our story. This is Larry Hagman playing JR Ewing from the cheesy TV show Dallas. However, the parallels remain the same.

The murderer was a Texas oil tycoon, part of the nouveau rich made ridiculously wealthy by the recent global hemoclysm and its insatiable demand for petroleum. His wife was a shrew of sorts, the kind of woman who gravitates toward this kind of man and then becomes intolerable in short order. She had grown accustomed to the trappings of wealth, and he had grown weary of her company. Arguments became the norm, and they grew distant as a result.

The man assuaged himself with a mistress. He had money, and that reliably attracted pretty girls. Had the guy been blessed with a bit more insight he might have appreciated that it was this very romantic calculus that had landed him in his current sordid state. Alas, this time-tested technique seldom if ever satisfies, yet humans have monotonously pursued such from the very dawn of time.

For her part, she craved adventure. Women had only earned the right to vote some 27 years previously, and gender emancipation was just finding its level. Thanks to the demands of total war, women had been granted opportunities to experience the workforce and the world that might have been unimaginable a mere decade earlier. Once that genie was out of the bottle there was no putting it back. In this young lady’s case, she liked to fly.

She had possession of a Taylor Cub and fancied herself quite the competent pilot. On the occasion of her birthday her husband purportedly threw a party. On the surface at least they were still the perfect happy power couple. Friends and relatives came from all around to the expansive ranch to celebrate. Imagine her delight when she found that her husband had gifted her an F4U Corsair fighter plane of her very own.

The Killing

Everything in the universe is physics. If you open the throttle on a 2000-horsepower engine swinging a 13-foot prop all that torque has to go someplace. When Corsair pilots were on approach to an aircraft carrier they typically put their props to flat pitch and cranked in 20 degrees of right rudder trim, compensating for the tendency to crab with left rudder pedal. This way if they had to advance the throttle suddenly for a go-around the engine torque wouldn’t roll the big plane inverted with catastrophic result. Apparently nobody explained that to this oilman’s wife.

As the story goes the delighted woman climbed aboard, fired up that big Pratt and Whitney Double Wasp, and lined up on the grass runway on the ranch. When she pushed the throttle forward to take off in front of her accumulated guests the big fighter purportedly ground looped and exploded, quite effectively rendering the oil man a widower. After the requisite period of mourning the clever killer allegedly married his girlfriend, likely to start the entire sordid process over anew. And that, my friends, is how a put-upon Texas oil tycoon supposedly murdered his wife with a surplus Corsair fighter plane.

Ian Fleming conjured his fictional MI6 agent 007 based upon his personal experiences as a spy during WW2. The name James Bond was pirated from that of an obscure ornithologist of the day. Fleming wanted his secret agent to have a name that was both pedestrian and unremarkable.

Bond originally carried a .25ACP Beretta 418. According to the novels he kept the weapon “skeletonized” with the grips removed. This seems like a great way to accumulate pocket lint to me. Additionally, the .25ACP is hardly a proven man-stopper. Apparently, I’m not the only guy in the world to draw that conclusion.

A British firearms enthusiast named Geoffrey Boothroyd wrote Fleming and gently explained that he felt that the Beretta 418 was really more of a lady’s gun. A friendship ensued, and, with Boothroyd’s guidance, Fleming swapped out the 418 for the iconic Walther PPK. In From Russia with Love, 007 attempts to draw his suppressed 418 only to have it catch on the waistband of his trousers and nearly get him killed. That served as an impetus to justify the change.

Fleming later described the PPK as “hitting like a brick through a plate glass widow.” Oddly, that’s not been my experience with the .32ACP round. That literary construct clearly involved a spot of poetic license.

In appreciation of the technical assistance, Fleming wrote Boothroyd into the narrative as Bond’s armorer. In the films his character was rolled into Bond’s longsuffering quartermaster Q. According to the backstory, Q’s given name is Geoffrey Boothroyd. By the early 1960s, the American version of Q was hard at work in Southeast Asia conjuring up special ops gear in the real world.

Gadgets Galore

There are few more equipment-intensive human undertakings than deep penetration special operations missions. Spaceflight or deep-sea diving, perhaps, but most other pursuits pale in comparison. A major modern gear manufacturer had its genesis when a Navy SEAL had a piece of kit fail while traversing a minefield in Iraq. That guy swore if he survived he’d go home and do it better.

During the Vietnam War modern special operations were just finding their legs. There was certainly no shortage of audacity and bravery in WW2 and Korea. It was simply that those awesome old guys in the OSS, Rangers, and Airborne had to write their own manuals. When MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam—Studies and Observations Group) stood up in January of 1964 the need for specialized weapons and equipment became acute.

Art Imitates Life

Conrad “Ben” Baker was part of General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters staff during WW2. A savant at navigating and energizing the military procurement system, Baker served in the Pacific supporting the Engineers. By 1963 he was stationed in Okinawa alongside Special Forces Captain David Watts as part of the Counterinsurgency Support Office (CISO). Baker served as Deputy Director of CISO from 1963 until 1972. He drove procurement for special operations forces in theater throughout the Vietnam War.

Ben Baker was technically a REMF. If you aren’t familiar with that term then Google is your buddy. However, in contrast to many comfortable rear-area support pogues, Baker took his job very, very seriously. He made more than 80 excursions downrange to forward base camps deep in the suck to find out straight from the users just what they needed to accomplish their dangerous unconventional missions. Along the way, he laid the foundation for modern practical military procurement.

The key to Baker’s effectiveness was his willingness and enthusiasm to accomplish the mission independent of military bureaucracy. By living and working near the front Baker could remain responsive. Unfettered from the cumbersome Army procurement system, he just did whatever it took to get the gear his guys needed. In his own words, “We had no ‘must buy American’ mandates. Our job was to get the best supplies needed for our troops, plain and simple.”

By sourcing gear in places like Australia, Japan, and Thailand, Baker got the stuff the special ops guys needed into their hands when and where they needed it. A few examples included Seiko watches, custom gloves, machetes, ammunition pouches fitted to support the specialized weapons used by SOG operators, jungle sleeping bags, ponchos and liners, replicas of enemy equipment and uniform items, and rucksacks that were appropriately scaled for small-statured indigenous troops.

Baker’s best-known creation was the SOG knife. We’ll explore that in detail in a moment. However, what really had the most profound impact was likely his PIR indigenous rations.

Native Montagnards were raised on a totally different diet from that of their American advisors. As a result, eating American combat rations typically caused intestinal discomfort and often outright diarrhea. In a combat zone, this was a really big deal.

Baker consulted nutrition specialists in-country in both Laos and Vietnam to determine the sorts of foods that would be amenable to long-term storage and use by indigenous troops. The end result was pouches of pre-cooked rice fortified with Vitamin B. Baker sourced the rice from Taiwan and included seasonings derived from mutton, fish, beef, and squid. When Baker approached the US Navy food research lab with the problem he was told it would take between 2 and 3 years to develop the rations and packaging required to get this food into the field.

Ben Baker wasn’t satisfied with that answer. He took the problem to private industry outside the military procurement system. He sourced his first 30,000 meals for a dollar apiece. By the end of the war, CISO had deployed 66 million PIR rations.

Ben’s Blade

Combat troops of all stripes need a good knife. Special operators can live or die by such steel. As the Vietnam War was ramping up SOG men clearly needed something other than the GI-issue bayonet. Ben Baker used his dad’s Marble Gladstone hunting knife as a template.

Those first SOG knives took inspiration from the classic American Bowie. This field-proven design was renowned for its strength and effectiveness. Baker contracted for the first 1,300 SOG knives from the Japanese trading company Yogi Shokai in Okinawa for $9.85 each. As you might imagine, original copies go for a bit more than that these days.

Before the war wound down Baker had designed both 6 and 7-inch combat knives for the SOG teams. He designed a prototype dive knife as well, but very few of them were made. The basic SOG knife remains popular around the world among soldiers and woodsmen even today.

Q’s Weapon

During his many forays downrange Ben Baker typically carried a selective-fire M2 carbine mounted in an M1A1 side-folding paratrooper stock. This compact weapon was easy to carry, particularly in and out of helicopters. When fitted with a 30-round magazine the rifle actually offered more on-tap firepower than the early M16 variants sporting their 20-round boxes. The M1A1 was a specialized adaptation of the then-revolutionary WW2-vintage M1 Carbine.

David “Carbine” Williams designed the gas system. Williams was doing time for the murder of a government agent when the warden gave him access to the prison workshop and responsibility for maintaining the guards’ weapons. I can’t really see that happening today.

John Browning’s half-brother Ed actually initiated the design. David Williams picked it up after his death. Several companies floated proposals in response to a request from the Army for a new light rifle in 1940. Winchester did not originally plan to participate as they were occupied developing a .30-06 M2 rifle intended to be a follow-on weapon to the M1 Garand. Once they decided to play, Winchester bodged together the M1 Carbine prototype in a mere 13 days.

The M1 Carbine fired a 110-grain bullet out of a straight-walled cartridge that looked more like an elongated pistol round than rifle fodder. Through a standard 18-inch Carbine barrel this round flirts with 2,000 feet per second. WW2-vintage Carbines fed from 15-round box magazines, though extended 30-round mags were developed at the very end of the war.

The M1A1 Paratrooper Carbine was developed in May of 1942 for use by Airborne forces. The M1A1 used the same basic chassis fitted with a side-folding wire stock. All 150,000 or so wartime M1A1 Carbines were produced by the Inland Division of General Motors.

The M2 Carbine was the same basic Carbine configured for selective fire operation. Interestingly, the government actually issued T17 and T18 conversion kits that could be used to convert M1 Carbines into the full auto M2 sort in the field. The conversion requires nine parts that can be installed without a great deal of fuss. The M1 Carbine is one of the few semiautomatic weapons in common use in America that can be converted to full auto simply by dropping in parts.

American industry produced some 6,121,309 Carbines via ten major contractors. At the height of production, we were making 65,000 Carbines a day. Once we got spooled up the Axis really never had a chance.

The Rest of the Story

Those first SOG knives featured the technical appellation “Knife, indigenous, RECON, 7.” They are both expensive and highly coveted by knife collectors today. Originals are essentially unobtainable nowadays, and quality replicas command a decent price as well.

Ben Baker was a dedicated and gifted soldier whose forte was getting the right gear into the hands of those who needed it by any means necessary. Though not technically a special operator himself, he was inducted as an honorary member of the US Army Special Forces Regiment. At the time he was only the 12^th non-SF individual to be so honored. He passed away in December of 2019, a legend among American special operators everywhere.