Greatest miliary firearms designer . . . ?

Right on Lefty;

Furthermore, while that other guy is climbing out of his spider hole to come at me, (after he hears my... "ping " ?) amid mortar rounds and grenades mind you, I could have loaded three more clips.
This nonsense story needs to come to an end.
 
gotta be hollywood

whoever started the ping thing had no idea how deafening and consuming chaos is...I'm thinking it's the same director that had hollywood hero types pulling pins out of frags with their teeth
 
danbnimble said:
whoever started the ping thing had no idea how deafening and consuming chaos is...I'm thinking it's the same director that had hollywood hero types pulling pins out of frags with their teeth
Click to expand...

We had an idiot in the army that pulled a grenade pin by accident and came walking into my tent with it in both hands. I thought for a second he had gone troppo . Eventually I wrapped around the grenade and handle with tape to hold it down and spent the next half hour getting the firing hammer into correct position to put the pin back in. You should have seen the onlookers scatter when I suddenly cut off the tape!
I could not just throw it out over the wire in camp in a war zone as it would have set off a huge response.
 
As for the ping of the ejected clip -- we see this on the forum all the time.

People are "dug in" to some opinion, and regardless of any counterargument, they will just spin everything to support their notions. There's nothing you could say about a Garand that would be negative for those really "locked in" to their notions. Numerous examples of these biases can be seen here on the forums.

That's one reason these discussions here often get deadlocked, and finally just peter out.

I think the ping can be greatly exaggerated as a negative, yes, but I think it is a negative.
 
I remember someone wrote that when using the Johnson LMG in semi auto the gunners occasionally would fire off eight rounds rapid fire then bounce a discarded Garand clip off their helmet. The enemy thinking they were armed with a Garand would then try a charge and the gunner had 22 more rounds at the ready to cut them down.
Apocryphal tale at best, but it does sound like something a gunner might think up.
The Johnson LMG was so light it probably was more useful in semi auto than full auto fire anyway. A newsreel I saw of one of these in action showed it kicking itself back off a rock wall at every burst, the gunner having little control. The gunner was in a very cramped position though.

The enbloc clip of the Garand is far easier to insert than using a stripper clip to load five rounds at a time. The Enfield magazine holds ten shots but reloading the mag with two five round chargers takes more than twice as long as inserting the eight shot enblock clip.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Reading about the Battle of Midway a few years back, and the author said that Dauntless rear gunners figured out a way to suck Japanese fighter pilots in close. They'd carry an empty ammo can along and when a Zero was coming up on them they'd fire a few rounds then pitch the empty ammo can out. The Zero pilot figuring he had a sitting duck would close right up on the Dauntless and get a face full of .30 cal.

Combat troops figure out "field expedient" fixes for problems pretty quickly.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top