LERA - Mad Minute - SMLE 100 Year Anniversary

And what's with the hair?

Battling Bastards of Bataan

"The Battling Bastards of Bataan, No Mama, No Papa, No Uncle Sam, No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces, No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces, And nobody gives a damn!"


Ken Burns has pissed me off...again. And no, it's not the hair although that ought to be plenty, if only because he's got so much more of that I do. My beard's better though. No, Ken stumbled onto his ideal hair style in the 4th grade and has seen no reason to change it.
Don't get me wrong. Ken is a brilliant filmmaker and is possibly the best in the world at what he does. It's not a matter of 'craft' that's got me upset. Let me back up. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Ken's documentary on the "War of Northern Aggression" was on the tube, I watched the whole thing and found myself moved by the emotional tone of the whole thing. Nothing wrong with that. Shows Ken knows what he's doing. However, a few years later, when his baseball series came out, I found myself getting misty about baseball...which I hate. So, I think Kenny has a tendency to tug at the old heart strings a bit much.
Anyway, why I'm pissed is a quote from his new epic "The War". Covering the Japanese invasion of the Philippines and the subsequent abandonment (by that ego maniacal shithead, MacArthur) and surrender of the US forces on the Bataan peninsula, the statement was made that the "Battlin' Bastards" were pathetically equipped with "tin hats" and rifles designed in 1903, "single-shot" rifles, I might add. Maybe he's thinking of the "trapdoor" Springfield - or not thinking at all. Anyway, we'll just pass over the left-handed reference to the "Brodie" style helmet, the "tin hat" the one that served British troops through the entire war without significantly ruining their lives, and go straight to that rifle with the supposed "antiquated" design.
The 1903 Springfield was and is one of the best bolt action rifles in the world. Even so, 1903 to 1941 is a long time. Let's see how everyone else was fitted out.
The average Bataan groundpounders' opposite number in the Japanese army carried an Arisaka Meiji 30, adopted in...wait for it. 1897. Pictured below.
Okay, why stop there. The allies of the Japanese on the other side of the globe were carrying the Gew98 Mauser. Anyone want to guess what the '98' stands for?

Also, those folks from Italy, for their marginal and largely ineffectual part of the war, were making due with a rifle earlier than the Springfield, the Modello 1891 TS. Many of these found their way to the states after the war and was was famously used to kill JFK.
This is fun. let's look at the other side shall we?
The Russians, the battlin' bastards of Lenigrad, Stalingrad, the Crimea and more, were issued the venerable Mosin-Nagant M1891. These went through a few modifications in 1938 and 1944 but remained essentially unchanged and were still used by the Soviets as a sniper rifle into the '60's.Okay, saving the best for last. Well maybe not the best - these things have a Chevy/Ford, Husquevarna/Stihl, Nissan/Toyota loyalty thing going on - but my favorite of the stone-age rifles fielded in the "The Big One", is the Short, Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE The comma is added in the description because it's not the magazine that's short but the rifle itself.
These things are the shit. It was descended from the Lee-Metford of 1888 which was chambered for the brand-new British 303 cartridge in black-powder. It incorporated an improved anti-fouling rifling which proved to be unable to withstand the heat and pressure generated by smokeless powder. The design was then redone in standard Enfield rifling and it served in both world wars (see "masthead" photo) and up until 1956. To be fair, it was modified in 1939 and became the "number 4, Mk 1".The rifle pictured above is actually a number 3. The number 4 had the bolt modified slightly, the forestock shortened and the rear sight mounted on the reciever rather than the barrel.
I first was enamoured of these things when I'd heard about the "Mad Minute" Britan's standard of "musketry" in the first war. Fifteen aimed rounds into a man-sized target at 300 yards in less than 60 seconds. The record was 38 rounds which necessitated three complete reloads of two five-round "chargers" each - and still, done in a minute. At the top of the page, if you've got a minute - ten to spare, you can see the mad minute as performed by...a guy in a red ball cap.
So, love Ken or hate him, he probably doesn't deserve to be hated, be careful of his facts. He tends to prefer "symbolic truth".

"French Nails"

As you can see, I've still got a thing about tanks - as well as the defining debacle of the last century. Above: some Brit Mk IV's. You can see that these have their "unditching beams" prominently displayed so you can see what the hell I was talking about in my last, oh, God, so long ago, post (I've been away to the glorious homeland - Montana, Kevin - more on that later). Another note: Is that guy trying to kick the tank in the ass?
But dammit, I don't sell tanks, so in the interest of keeping the wolf at least on the curb by the mailbox, more knife info.
Field expediency. I love the term. I love the idea. "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without" (a quote I've most often heard from people who do without nothing. But a valid concept nonetheless). "Pieces of string too short to save". That kind of thing.
So, in that vein we embark on yet another of my random prattlings about the equipment used in the debacle mentioned above.
Baffling though it is, in both world wars the thought never occurred to anyone in the "Big Brain Military Procurement" fields that the lads on the ground might want a knife. In the second war the response took the form of the "Theater Knife" a particularly charming chunk of folk art. That is if you could ever get any "folklorists" (English majors) to think about weapons. But, and this as a former folklore geek, I talked about them before (and will again) here and here.
The first war surprised everyone. The grand schemes, the Schielffen Plan, France's Plan XVII, all worked on the assumption that this conflict would be a war of movement. The infantry would break the line and then the glorious cavalry would exploit the breach to wreak havoc in the bad guy's rear - and then we'd all go home for Christmas.
Not so. Machine guns, rapid-fire artillery and barbed wire made stalemate the result leaving nothing to do but pointless massed infantry charges against entrenched machine guns. That is, on the occasions and there were many ("Lions led by donkeys" as Bismarck - I think - said)) that the powers-that-be thought that this time it just might work.
In the meantime, the only consistent offensive actions any of the armies involved could take were trench raids and/or nighttime patrols of no man's land. In both of these situations silence was more important than firepower. Something about noise and muzzle flash while still in full view of those same machine guns that cut your regiment to pieces during the last "big push".
So, it came down to clubs and knives. Primitive weapons, reverting right back to the middle ages. I'll deal with trench clubs at another time. Now the "French Nail" gets center stage.
First off...it's a misnomer. Everyone made knives on the line. Either from files, shortened bayonets or barbed wire pickets. The one that carries the title, that is the one pictured above - with the simple loop handle (low-tech knuckleduster) and the wooden box sheath, was a Brit contribution. They were cranked out by the thousands by the Royal Engineers Workshops in the hope of keeping the lads "...in there battin'".
Of the others pictured below, the classier ones are all French. They seemed to like to personalize them, etching sentiments such as Le Venguer de 1870 (a reference to the earlier Franco/Prussian war) or Le Nettoyeur de Tranchees ("The Trench Cleaner"). I make a version of one of these and, since this entire post is about drumming up business, you can see it here. It's one of my favorites simply because it has absolutely nothing extraneous about it. Just welded steel and part of the handle serves as a belt loop.
Closing now with some pictures of the real deal.


The one to the left is engraved Grande Guere 1914-1918. Obviously added postwar so that Grandpa Pierre, as his memories slowly faded, wouldn't use it as a tent peg.









This one is nice. The belt loop end is shaped into a snake's head.Here we have one of the original "Trench Cleaners" also with a date. This guy apparently got out of the shit in 1917.
Closing now with a picture of the project that rekindled my interest in these things. A set of three, ordered by New Jersey Stu, my most enthusiastic and appreciative customer. Thanks again, Stuart.