#WorldWarTwo

On 3 July, the ranges at Bisley, the UK’s historic home of shooting, hosted a very special shoot. Vickers Machine Guns fired 16,000 rounds of ammunition with a crowd of nearly 1,000 people gathered to watch. It had been 20 years since the last time this many Vickers Guns had fired together. The event was held to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the disbandment of the Machine Gun Corps – the British Army’s corps of expert machine gunners formed in 1916 which disbanded in July 1922.

A few weeks ago while doing some research in the UK’s Imperial War Museum online archive I came across a couple of intriguing photos that sent me down a rabbit hole. The STEN gun is undeniably one of the iconic weapons of World War Two but most of its variants were severely lacking in the ergonomics department. The supremely utilitarian STEN didn’t really have a dedicated place to hold the front of the weapon. Some soldiers held the barrel nut, some held the trigger mechanism housing and some held the magazine itself. It wasn’t until the STEN MkV that a front pistol grip was added.

The Netherlands’ National Military Museum has unveiled a new display including the pistol carried by Adolf Hitler’s right hand man in the Netherlands during World War Two.

Fans of classic war movies like A Bridge Too Far and the excellent series Band of Brothers will be as excited as I was to hear that a major project to create a show exploring the history of World War Two’s airborne troops has been launched. Paratrooper is writer/director Lance Nielsen’s passion project, he hopes that with the support of a crowdfunding campaign he can kick-start production of a TV show that will delve into the stories of fighting men from both sides – many of which have never been seen on screen before.

Back in September TFB reported that Poland had officially renamed its new MSBS 5.56x45mm infantry rifle the ‘Grot’. The move to rename the MSBS came as Poland increased its orders for the new rifle.

While exploring the Springfield Armory Museum’s online archive I stumbled across an interesting experimental modification made to an M1918A2 BAR. The archival entries don’t offer much information but the photographs show an experimental kit developed to enable the BAR to be mounted on a tripod.

Your chance to own a semiauto reproduction StG-44 is coming soon: Hill & Mac Gunworks recently announced that the first of their Sturmgewehr rifles would be shipping before the end of this month. In an announcement made through the latest InRange TV Question & Answer Session with the company, HMG founder Mac Steil explained that series production of the Sturmgewehr has, at long last, begun, and that the first rifles will be shipping to pre-order customers before the end of August. Further, he stated that HMG would be publishing a Sturmgewehr release calendar, so that preorder customers could figure out when exactly their rifles would ship based on their preorder dates.

The M1 Carbine is a lightweight, handy weapon that is well-liked by many. One of its weakest points for many people, however, is its cartridge: The .30 Carbine caliber is regarded by some as being too weak to be a true intermediate caliber round fully capable of effective 300m fire. Still, the .30 Carbine is short, so maybe there is another caliber out there that could fit into an M1 Carbine’s action while giving it a little more punch… It turns out that during the late 1940s and early 1950s, at least one Spanish small arms designer felt the same way, and invented the gun in the Forgotten Weapons video below:

This post is part of two others, about a recent range outing with some very historically interesting small arms, the DeLisle commando carbine, the M50 Reising submachine gun, and the Russian PM1910 Maxim heavy machine gun. All of these are NFA items (either Class III or suppressed) and the owner was extremely kind enough to take me out and blow over a thousand rounds through his small arms.

This post is part of two others, about a recent range outing with some very historically interesting small arms, the DeLisle commando carbine, the M50 Reising submachine gun, and the Russian PM1910 Maxim heavy machine gun. All of these are NFA items (either Class III or suppressed) and the owner was extremely kind enough to take me out and blow over a thousand rounds through his small arms.

Many would consider this next round to be the first intermediate cartridge ever, and while that isn’t really true, it is one of the most influential rounds of all time, and perhaps the most influential intermediate round ever developed. I am talking of course about the Nazi-era Kurzpatrone 43 Spitzgeschoß mit Eisenkern, or as it is more commonly called, the 7.92×33 Kurz. This round became the model – in one fashion or another – for numerous intermediate rounds developed all around the globe after World War II, including the promising .280 British, and ubiquitous 7.62x39mm Soviet, as well as several others we’ll discuss in later installments.

If you read the previous two installments on how to order from the CMP, then you have a good idea about how to get eligible, fill out your paperwork, and send in your packet for a Field- or Service-Grade M1 Garand rifle. Now what? Once the waiting is done, and your rifle arrives at your doorstep, you have received a shiny new example of Patton’s “deadliest rifle in the world”.

The Fedorov Avtomat is an important milestone in the history of modern small arms. With the Federov, for the first time, an individual soldier could possess automatic firepower in a package small enough to move and fight with, while at the same time not significantly compromising the range or effectiveness of the bolt-action rifle. However, the weapon fell out of favor during the Soviet era, and was never produced in large numbers. By way of WeaponsMan.com (H/T to Hognose), we are brought yet more details of the Fedorov’s story, written by Alexander Vershinin for Russia Beyond The Headlines:

Reproduction firearms have always occupied a portion of the shooting market, for a variety of reasons. Many competitions are based around old firearms, such as the Single Action Army Shooting Society in the sport of cowboy action shooting. Other shooters simply want to have firearms that are faithful reproductions because they want to shoot them much more than they could an actual hundred year old or so firearm, or because they are too expensive to risk. However, reproduction scopes are not very well known, and thus Hi-Lux optics company has filled that void by manufacturing reproduction scopes. One of the primary reasons they are doing this is for the CMP Vintage Sniper Rifle competitions where competitors compete with original or reproduction firearms. Many of the older scopes have degraded in quality over the years, or are extremely expensive, some of the Unertl scopes for the Springfield 1903 have reached eight thousand dollars for example. Thus, Hi-Lux has made faithful reproductions of such scopes as the M8 USMC Sniper scope (the long Unertl scope that you’ve probably seen from Saving Private Ryan), the M40 USMC 39×40 (greenish tint body, used during Vietnam on the Remington 700s), and William Malcolm Vintage Telescope Rifle Scopes, used on such competition designs as the Browning High and Low Wall rifles (even longer scopes, almost the length of the rifle, from the 19th century).

These pictures and video were published on War History Online in two separate articles over the course of the past six months. The images and video are absolutely astounding. It seems that a duo of treasure hunters or artifact seekers, using commercial metal detectors have an excellent grasp of the battles on the World War Two Eastern front, and use that knowledge to discover all kinds of stuff still laying around. Some of it is still visible at ground level, while most of it is just barely covered with soil. You see one of them scrapping out an STG44, barely a couple inches below the surface, and in another clip a PPSH41 and an MG34 spare barrel. They certainly have the history knowledge down, but I hope they know a thing or two about high explosives, as they very foolishly/bravely are yanking out mortar ends and other ordnance out of the ground.