Coyotes will eat just about anything. This makes them a bit
unpredictable at close quarters.
Image: Public domain, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
You never really know how you will respond until you get there. Most of us grizzled gun-toting types fancy ourselves amateur heroes. We imagine that should we find ourselves in the midst of some unexpected life-threatening peril, we might rise to the occasion and do something epically manly. And then there was this guy.
Now before you get all judgy, appreciate that this is everyman. He is both a patient and a friend. He looks like us, and he acts like us. His genus is Redneckopithecus Sapiens, as is mine. He likes guns, and he lives for the outdoors. His experience could have happened to any one of us.
Field Philosophy
I don’t hunt anymore. I used to a great deal and certainly do not harbor ill will toward those who enjoy the sport. It is simply that I don’t much care for venison. Additionally, as I get older, it gets harder and harder to strike out in the predawn darkness for anything less than a house fire. However, back when I was a kid, my dad and I hunted together constantly.
My lifelong tally is a pair of deer and 13 wild turkeys, along with squirrels, doves and rabbits uncounted. I shot a yellow-hued coyote when I was about 12, whose pelt produced $15. Those were 1978 dollars, mind you.
I have accounted for 61 water moccasins from my backyard lake. I’ve kept a record, but that’s hardly hunting. My war against venomous reptiles is more of a lifelong existential fight for survival. I’ve had some bad experiences with poisonous snakes.
Of the lot, turkey hunting comes closest to tripping my trigger. Our Easter and Christmas dinners were never without a wild turkey when I was a kid. It was always a bit of a game to see who first discovered a piece of lead shot in their entrée.
Deer hunting always felt a bit too random. It always seemed bitterly cold when we trudged out in pursuit of deer. Success or failure also seemed to be driven more by whether the beast happened to wander by than any skill on my part. By contrast, chasing wild turkey was an art.
Siting your blind was important, but you conversed with the bird. The mission was to convince him to drop by for a visit. As a guy, your tools that involved mimicking his fairer sex always seemed to be drenched in pathos. The poor randy gobbler just wanted a date, and he got a face full of number fours for his trouble. Back in my prime, when I chased girls myself, I suppose something similar could have happened to me.
What made it hard was the quarry. Wild turkeys are either too smart or too stupid to be terribly predictable. However, the inimitable satisfaction of cajoling a bird close enough to make him dinner was indeed unparalleled.
A coyote about the size of a fairly large dog. However, they are
tenacious in close quarters.
Image: Public domain, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture
The Clinical Presentation
Our hero came to see me for an animal bite to his upper arm. I work in an urgent care clinic. Animal parts are background clutter. There was a bit of torn flesh, but it was mostly bruising. He earned the equivalent of a battle dressing, a tetanus shot and some antibiotics. Along the way, I got the story.
This is a big guy. He had been sitting at the base of a tree during the spring turkey season. He was chatting up a gobbler who was now within sight and moseying his way. The man’s heart rate went up commensurate with the moment as he shifted his shotgun behind the cover of his blind. At that very moment, a robust coyote grabbed him unexpectedly from behind and clamped down vise-like onto his left upper arm.
The man said the visceral shock was indescribable. He was utterly fixated on the approaching bird and had apparently exposed part of his shoulder to the predator as he shifted position. The coyote presumably was also on the stalk and simply lunged at the movement.
The hunter reflexively leaped to his feet. The coyote, for his part, clung on dogmatically. The man said the thing was shockingly heavy as it dangled from his injured limb. As I sat mesmerized by his story, I asked the obvious question, “Did you shoot the coyote?”
He responded, “Heck, no. I screamed like a little girl. My turkey call flew in one direction and my shotgun in another. I just ran around in circles trying to get that blasted thing off of me.”
The bird was gone in an instant. Once the coyote realized his mistake, he let loose and beat feet as well. The man was ultimately none the worse for wear save his sore shoulder and a bit of wounded pride. He indeed lost the turkey, but he gained an epic story.
Lesson: If you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of those who count on you … and the innermost bastion of security is yourself.
The world remembers Sir Winston Churchill as a long-serving British statesman and the Prime Minister who guided an underdog Great Britain successfully through World War II. What few history students learn about him is Churchill was very much a gun guy. He had killed enemy combatants with a pistol, loved to shoot and routinely carried a gun.
Churchill The Gunfighter
In 1898, at the battle of Omdurman in the Sudan, Churchill was a young cavalry officer. More than half a century later he would tell a biographer, “On account of my shoulder (which had been dislocated in India) I had always decided that if I were involved in hand-to-hand fighting, I must use a pistol and not a sword. I had purchased in London, a Mauser automatic pistol, then the newest and latest design. I had practiced carefully with this during our march and journey up the river.” (1)
Churchill was part of a cavalry charge under way through a gulley when he found he and his comrades were up against a much larger enemy than they had anticipated: an estimated 3,000 fighters who far outnumbered his own contingent. He told one biographer, “I drew my Mauser pistol — a ripper — and cocked it. Then I looked to my front. Instead of the 150 riflemen who were still blazing I saw a line nearly (in the middle) 12 deep of closely jammed spearmen — all in a nullah with steep sloping sides six feet deep and 20 feet broad.” (2)
Churchill was soon amidst a maelstrom of enemy troops, profoundly outnumbered. The great historian William Manchester would later describe what happened to Churchill in those moments, sometimes using Churchill’s own quotes. Churchill saw his men being “dragged from their horses and cut to pieces by the infuriated foe.” Finding himself “surrounded by what seemed to be dozens of men,” he “rode up to individuals firing my pistol in their faces and killing several — three for certain, two doubtful — one very doubtful.”
One was swinging a gleaming, curved sword, trying to hamstring the pony. Another wore a steel helmet and chain-mail hangings. A third came at him “with uplifted sword. I raised my pistol and fired. So close were we that the pistol itself actually struck him.” The dervish mass, he saw, was re-forming. He later recalled, “The whole scene seemed to flicker.” He looked around. His troop was gone. His squadron was gone. He could not see a single British officer or trooper within a hundred yards.
Hunching down over his pommel, he spurred his pony free and found his squadron 200 yards away, faced about and already forming up. His own troop had just finished sorting itself out, but as he joined it a dervish sprang out of a hole in the ground and into the midst of his men, lunging about with a spear. They thrust at him with their lances; he dodged, wheeled and charged Churchill. “I shot him at less than a yard. He fell on the sand and lay there dead. How easy to kill a man! But I did not worry about it. I found I had fired the whole magazine of my Mauser pistol, so I put in a new clip of 10 cartridges before thinking of anything else.”
It occurred to him if he hadn’t injured his shoulder in Bombay, he would have had to defend himself with a sword and might now be dead. Afterward he reflected, “One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse.” He wrote his mother Jennie: “The pistol was the best thing in the world.” (3)
Churchill and his biographer were not the only ones to conclude the 10-shot Mauser saved his life, and neither the saber nor a revolver with five or six shots might have sufficed. There had been little time in the melee, needing one hand to control the reins of his horse, to eject spent casings and insert live cartridges into a wheel gun.
Notes another biographer, Martin Gilbert in Churchill: A Life, “The cavalry charge was over, and the troop dispersed. ‘It was, I suppose, the most dangerous two minutes I shall live to see,’ Churchill told Hamilton. Of the 310 officers and men in the charge, one officer and 20 men had been killed, and four officers and 45 men wounded. ‘All this in 120 seconds!’ Churchill commented. He had fired ‘exactly 10 shots’ and had emptied his pistol, ‘but without a hair of my horse or a stitch of my clothing being touched. Very few can say the same.’” (4)
Churchill The Shooter
Winston Churchill owned a substantial collection of fine guns, including magnificent bespoke shotguns from the finest English makers, and loved to hunt.
No one knew his proclivities in firearms better than his long-time bodyguard, Scotland Yard Inspector Walter Henry Thompson. “Churchill offered to pay me five pounds a week as his bodyguard in a purely private capacity. He gave me his Colt automatic to use — and I may say with pride that I am the only man Mr. Churchill has allowed to handle his guns. He is a first-class shot and takes a jealous pride in his personal armory.”
Thompson added, “Although he recognized some measures had to be taken for his security, he was confident in any real pinch he, Winston Churchill, would probably be able to look after himself, personally. When we were at Chequers, the country home of Britain’s prime ministers, he often went to a nearby range and proved himself a first-class shot with his Mannlicher rifle, his .45 Colt automatic and a service .38 Webley. He was particularly deadly with the Colt and there would have been little chance for anyone who came in range of that weapon with unfriendly intent.” (5)
Just what did Thompson mean by “first-class shot”? “We set up an outdoor range at Chequers and to this he would frequently repair and fire a hundred rounds or so with his Mannlicher rifle, 50 rounds from his Colt .45, or an equal number from his .32 Webley Scott. He gets well onto the target with all three, but with the Colt Automatic he is absolutely deadly … A gun is something he understands entirely.”
Adds Thompson, “Near the war’s end, while practicing with me at outdoor targets, with officers of the guard in competition and firing an old Colt .45, only one of Churchill’s bullets was on the fringe of the bullseye, the other nine being dead center. This target was taken down and marked by me and noted by those who were with him then. Later I had it officially entered and dated, and it is now in the Chequers library.” (6)
The Concealed Carrier
Winston Churchill learned early in his adult life the value of a discreetly concealed handgun. In 1899 during the Boer War, he was captured but managed to escape. A sympathizer furnished him with provisions and a concealable revolver before he sneaked onto a train to get farther out of reach of the enemy. He kept the revolver, described as a six-shot pin-fire. A part of his estate, it sold for 32,000 English pounds at auction in 2002.
Richard Law, one of the leading lights fighting for gun owners’ rights in Great Britain, is a prolific writer and skilled researcher. He discovered when he learned Thompson, Churchill’s long-standing bodyguard, carried a .32 caliber mouse gun, Churchill requisitioned a Colt .45 and furnished it to him.
Later, discovering Thompson was still carrying the .32, a disgusted Churchill demanded the .45 back and stuck it in his overcoat pocket to use as his own. Law’s research turned up photos of Churchill in which a remarkably 1911-looking object is printing under his suit coat or his ulster, in the right hip area.
Bodyguard Thompson is our most thorough source of information on the Prime Minister’s concealed carry habits. In Thompson’s autobiography he said of Churchill, “People ask me if Mr. Churchill, in times of danger, was not usually armed, and this is my answer. He was when he remembered to carry his weapon. He was an unusually fine shot, with either rifle or revolver, and later became deadly with some of the most lethal of the automatic weapons that we were to develop, including the Sten.
He loved firearms and I believe loved the sound of them. He practiced target shooting in the basements of his various residences and never refused to ‘have a shoot’ with me when I felt it was time to check his handling of arms.
Being a good shot is like being a good pianist: One cannot grow rusty and return suddenly to dependable controls. One can leave his guns alone for weeks and, by practicing a few hours each day for several days, recover all his skills, but he cannot recover them immediately. So, while it was all right for Mr. Churchill, in periods when he was not a protected public servant in high office, to ignore this somewhat realistic side of survival, I never recommended it, knowing these periods would be brief.”
Throughout his book Thompson constantly describes himself as carrying two handguns, usually two revolvers.
Unfortunately, he seems to have the curious habit of describing all handguns as revolvers. One gets the inference he is often referring to the pistol Scotland Yard issued for such close protection details: the 1914 Webley .32 auto. Heavy-for-caliber at 2.5 lbs. and with the pointing characteristics of a T-square, this rickety-looking pistol had a reputation as a jam-o-matic and remains a contestant for the ugliest handgun of all time. Churchill himself owned one, and perhaps his experiences with it were part of his concern when he tried to switch his bodyguard to a Colt 1911.
Thompson’s remark quoted here earlier indicates the Prime Minister wasn’t strictly consistent with carrying a firearm. “His sense of personal safety had largely left him, to the extent that he would tire of carrying his revolver and forget it. He’d lay it down somewhere and leave it if I didn’t check it each time. Sometimes when I found him unarmed, I’d have to give him one of my own revolvers. I didn’t like to do this and didn’t often have to. I’m very used to the few that I work with, but it was of course essential that he should not be alone at any time — even in the middle of the night in his own bed — without a revolver in reach … He would draw his gun and pop it into sudden view and say roguishly and with delight: ‘You see, Thompson, they will never take me alive. I will get one or two before they take me down.’”
Fortunately, Winston Churchill never got the chance to find out. There were many Nazi assassination plots against him: During the Blitz, bombs fell near his residences, obviously targeted. In at least one case, Nazi agents parachuted into Britain to kill him. None got close. Between Scotland Yard and the military, all were scooped up before they could get in position to take a shot at the great man.
The Heads-Up Gunner
Winston Churchill liked his automatic weapons. In one of his most famous photos, he is wearing a pinstripe suit and chomping on his ever-present cigar as he holds a .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun with drum magazine and pistol grip fore-end. Adolf Hitler, historians say, despised Churchill with a venom exceeded only by the Prime Minister’s hatred of him. Hitler used the photo of Churchill with the “tommy gun” to claim the English leader was merely a clone of a stereotype American gangster.
Churchill was also an aficionado of Britain’s signature SMG, the Sten gun. He had his own Mark III Sten, which had been presented to him personally, as well as a Thompson in his own battery. He reportedly had one or the other in his limousine, depending on his conveyance of the day. And he shared his appreciation for buzz guns with others he knew were at risk of assassination.
In his excellent new book on the time of The Blitz, The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson focuses primarily on Churchill and those around him. Larson writes, “The queen began taking lessons in how to shoot a revolver. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I shall not go down like the others.’” (7)
Other sources say Churchill arranged for a Thompson — and competent instruction — to be delivered to all the Royal Family. All of them shot it: King George, his consort, and their daughters Elizabeth and Margaret, then 14 and 10 years of age. One source says the Queen Mother liked to shoot rats in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, though presumably not with the tommy gun.
Disproportional Influence
Winston Churchill’s two minutes with a Mauser C96 in his hand during the charge at the Battle of Omdurman had a profound influence that went far beyond his own survival. If you read Churchill, it becomes clear he went to war as a young man seeing combat as a theater for chivalry. The battle of Omdurman changed this for him profoundly. Against a vastly greater force, the English and their allies had decisively prevailed. The enemy had been softened up by massive barrages of British artillery and Maxim machine guns. Winston Churchill rode out of the battle alive only because he had the most modern, high-tech firepower that could be wielded in one hand in the year 1898.
WWI found Churchill as a young member of Parliament, advocating for high-tech warfare. He’s credited with convincing the British government to develop tanks. As Prime Minister in WWII, he consistently funded newer and better airplanes, espionage apparatus and more. The epiphany that brought about those war-winning changes was born in two minutes of shooting the most modern handgun of the day, with his life on the line. And, as we’ve seen, his example of being constantly ready for individual combat against a homicidal foe is an inspiration to every free individual.
Footnotes: (1) Boothroyd, Geoffrey. The Handgun. NYC: Bonanza Books, 1970, p. 397. (2) Manchester, William. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1983, pp. 277–279. (3) Manchester, William, Ibid. (4) Gilbert, Martin. Churchill: A Life. NYC: Henry Holt & Co., 1991, p. 96. (5) Thompson, W.H. “I Guarded Winston Churchill,” Maclean’s, 10/15/51, pp. 10–11. (6) Thompson, Walter Henry. Assignment: Churchill. Arcole Publishing 2018 edition, originally published 1955. (7) Larson, Erik. The Splendid and the Vile. Random House, 2020, p. 130.
With its graceful curves and meticulous machining, the Steyr MP34 represents a perfect blend of old-world craftsmanship and state-of-the-art technology before WWII broke out across Europe.
With its graceful curves and meticulous machining, the Steyr MP34 represents a perfect blend of old-world craftsmanship and state-of-the-art technology before WWII broke out across Europe.
The MP34’s 20- and 32-round box magazines were loaded from the left side of the receiver, and the magazine well had an integral guide for reloads with stripper clips.
The adjustable rear sight was graduated rather optimistically for shooting out to 500 meters, and spent casings were ejected out of the right side of the MP34’s receiver.
Shallow grooves on each side of the walnut stock provided a position for the shooter’s support hand, and a cutout for the charging handle on the right side of the steel receiver served as a safety.
The heavy steel barrel jacket prevented the support hand from getting burned, and its sheer mass also helped keep the gun on target, even during long bursts of fire.
Weapons manufacturing is high art in the Information Age.
Advances in automation and computer-controlled machinery sees produced in breathtaking quantities while maintaining meticulous standards of quality. When combined with modern polymer science, the result is the likes of the M4, Steyr AUG, IWI Tavor and FN F2000. However, the modern state of the art was attained only after generations of mechanical evolution. Hold that thought.
Killer Technology
Historians debate the onset and duration of the Industrial Revolution. Most agree that it occurred between 1760 and 1840. However, the limits of the era were, of their nature, fairly nebulous. The Industrial Revolution was the most seminal cultural event in history since the domestication of animals and the development of agriculture. By harnessing steam and water power, scientists and engineers used this energy to build things en masse.
Although textiles predominantly drove economies, the industrialization of chemistry, metallurgy and machine tools sparked unprecedented advances in engineering technology. And when technology progressed to the point where we might manufacture mechanical contrivances precisely and in quantity, we began building implements with which to kill each other. As measured by sheer volume of blood spilled, World War I was the planet’s sordid introduction to war on an industrial scale.
WWI claimed the lives of 9 million soldiers and another 6 million civilians. During two weeks of the Ludendorff Offensive in 1918, the Germans lost 303,450 casualties. In April of 1918, the Kaiser’s army lost 120,000 troops in less than a month. For the first time in history, man really perfected the art of killing in quantity.
Although small arms and airplanes carry the sex appeal, the cannon was the true killer on the WWI battlefield. About 70 percent of combat deaths in WWI were the result of artillery or bombs. Almost 30 percent came from bullets. About 1 percent died on the cold steel of the bayonet. However, because a soldier’s individual weapon is such an emotionally critical aspect of the combat experience, all of the nations involved strained to produce the best small arms they could afford. And here is where the Germans led the way.
Birth Of The SMG
The Italians first broke ground with their Villar Perosa. However, they typically mounted these tidy little magazine-fed 9mm submachine guns in tandem and used them as air-to-air weapons. The Germans fielded the first practical man-portable submachine gun with the MP18, a product of the Rheinmetall, based in Dusseldorf.
The MP18 fired from the open bolt and fed from the 32-round snail-drum magazine of the P08 Artillery Luger. This handy little machine gun gave German Sturmtruppen unprecedented firepower during the extremely close fighting that characterized the fetid trench warfare of the Western Front during WWI. The MP18 was built around a tubular steel receiver that was meticulously machined into its final form using machines that were likely driven by steam.
The MP18 eventually evolved into the improved MP28. There were other differences. The primary among them was the MP28’s use of double-column box magazines in place of the overly complicated snail drum. During the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s, military gun building really reached a new apogee.
Meet The MP34
“Apogee” is an astronomical term that means the highest point along a continuous trajectory. As it relates to mechanical contrivances, it implies the upper limit of industrial refinement. With submachine guns, the general consensus is that the Steyr MP34 occupies this rarefied position.
Restrictions in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles precluded the Germans from developing man-portable automatic weapons. Specifically, German martial firearms could not possess a barrel longer than 4 inches or a magazine capacity of more than eight rounds. This pretty much restricted the Germans of the Weimar Republic to P08 Parabellum pistols and little else.
Eager to expand the state of the art while perhaps preparing for the coming next World War, Rheinmetall acquired the Swiss Solothurn weapons factory in 1929 and began developing the S1-100, which would later become the MP34.
Although ill-suited for mass production, Solothurn did a crack job of developing and prototyping the gun. Rheinmetall subsequently bought a controlling interest in Steyr in Austria. At the outset of WWI, Steyr employed 15,000 workers and produced 4,000 rifles per day. And, unlike Solothurn, Steyr used the most advanced tooling and techniques of the time. This made perfectly situated to produce military weapons en masse.
The MP34 fell into the sweet spot. At the time of its production, old-world craftsmanship still drove gun building, though modern mass-production techniques ensured a prodigious output. The result is arguably the most meticulously well-built military weapon in history.
What Makes It So Great?
The MP34 was a blowback-operated, select-fire submachine gun. It was alternately chambered for the 9x19mm Parabellum, 9x23mm Steyr and 9x25mm Mauser cartridges. A smattering intended predominantly for South American markets even fired John Browning’s .45 ACP round. Most of the guns fired Georg Luger’s 9x19mm round, however.
The MP34 fed from the left side via 20- or 32-round magazines that canted slightly forward for optimal feeding geometry. A sliding switch on the left side of the receiver served as a selector. The generously perforated heavy steel barrel shroud sported a bayonet lug. The magazine housing incorporated a novel device where an empty magazine could be locked in place 90 degrees out from the typical feeding geometry. So oriented, ammunition could be quickly loaded into an empty magazine by way of eight-round stripper clips from above.
The bolt of the MP34 sprouted a generous rattail out its back, which telescoped into a recoil spring assembly in the buttstock. A beautifully machined top cover pivoted upward to grant access to the gun’s entrails. Big chunks of forged steel accounted for the exhaustive machining. That machining included everything about the gun, even the magazine well and buttplate.
The rigid cocking handle reciprocated with the bolt and locked into a safety slot in the manner of the later MP40 when necessary. The sights were fully hooded or otherwise well protected up front, and the rear sight was meticulously adjustable for elevation. The gun cycled at about 600 rpm on full-auto and weighed 9.9 pounds fully loaded. Turning the barrel out with a wrench facilitated easy replacement or caliber changes.
Infamous Users
From the outset of World War II, the Germans never had enough weapons to go around, especially when it came to submachine guns. The Nazis embraced the concept of the pistol-caliber automatic weapon while drawing guns from various eclectic sources. Nowhere was that more overtly manifest than with the Waffen SS.
Meaning “armed SS,” the Waffen SS was the military wing of the party’s Schutzstaffel organization. Developed as an offshoot of Adolf Hitler’s personal bodyguard detail, the SS was expected, at least early in the war, to be racially pure and physically near perfect—or perfect in the eyes of Hitler and the Nazis. As the war took a downturn for the Nazis, they eventually accepted some “non-Aryan” groups of people into their ranks. By war’s end, the SS was almost completely unrecognizable from its pre-war origins.
Before the Waffen SS proved itself on the battlefield, its members had to scramble for small arms. As a result, the SS was the most prolific user of the MP34 during WWII. The gun figured prominently in the early blitzkrieg campaign across France and the Low Countries. As the war ground on, it became obvious that the exigencies of total war were incompatible with the lofty standards of workmanship demanded of the MP34. By 1945, the MP34 was no longer found in frontline units, having been supplanted by the MP40 submachine gun and the truly advanced MP44 (or StG 44) assault rifle.
How It Shoots
The MP34 is heavy, but its mass means the gun is remarkably controllable. It’s pretty easy to keep the gun on target even during long bursts of fire. Firing single shots, the gun remains delightfully accurate out to the effective range of the 9mm Parabellum cartridge. So long as I did my part with a test sample, I could keep my rounds on a man-sized target while firing in semi-auto until I got tired of it.
The Steyr MP34 is also more maneuverable at close ranges and indoors than almost any modern rifle-caliber assault rifle. Magazines last a long time as well, given the gun’s sedate rate of fire. Singles and doubles are easy with a disciplined trigger finger. While the gun fires from an open bolt, the bolt closes after the last round fires, so the manual of arms involves manually locking the bolt to the rear before swapping out the 20- or 32-round magazines.
State Of The Art
The Nazis make the world’s best cinematic villains for good reason. Amidst a sea of morally corrupt scoundrels populating Earth’s long, sordid and bloody history, few can compete with Hitler’s henchmen for unfiltered racist impiety. For all of their depravity, however, German engineers contrived some of the most interesting and effective weapons in World War II.
Some scholar lost to history once opined that art was where you found it. As it relates to small arms, it’s not a great logical leap to consider the MP34 a seminal form of mechanical art. Sporting graceful curves and a design philosophy of using three parts when one might otherwise suffice, the MP34 is remarkably gorgeous and darkly effective. In the hands of the worst bad guys in modern history, this classic Steyr submachine gun earns its top spot in military weapons history.
Finally, I’d like to give special thanks to World War Supply for the period replica gear used in the production of this article. It wouldn’t have been the same without it.
