Category Archives: The Past is Another Country

The Past is Another Country: Combat Shotgun, War of 1812

The designs of Fyodor Tokarev

Typical photo of a TT-33 pistol. Note similarity to the 1911 and other Browning designs, and the absence of thumb or grip safeties.

The Russians, perhaps fortunately for the people who might otherwise still be dominated by Communism, never developed a genius along the lines of John M. Browning. (Kalashnikov, for all the universality of his design, was a one-hit wonder compared to John M., who had paradigm-shifting pistols, sporting and military rifles, shotguns and crew-served weapons in service before he was done). Russia’s versatile designer, their nearest match for Browning, was probably Fyodor Tokarev. Tokarev was working after Browning’s most productive era, and like most gun-aware folks in the middle 20th Century, was aware of Browning’s designs. But he also was able to come up with some original ideas of his own, and in a time — the 1920s and 30s — that the Soviet Union tried to make its name as a beacon of progress, an inventive, well-trained engineer with an interest in self-loading firearms had a guarantee of employment.

The Tula-Tokarev pistol of 1930 and 1933

Tokarev’s first semi-auto design was pretty dreadful: it was a conversion of a Mosin-Nagant, and he was soon back to the drawing board. In the 1920s, he improved the Maxim machine gun and also worked on an auto pistol design. In 1930, the Red Army (as it was still called) adopted his pistol as the Tula Tokarev or TT. It is now called the TT-30 to distinguish it from the later (and much more common) TT-33.

The Tokarev pistol, a short-recoil semiauto, clearly borrows heavily from Browning. The locking system, using a camming lug pinned to the barrel at one end, and retained by the slide stop pin at the other, to pull the barrel down and disengage lugs atop the barrel from the slide, allowing the slide to cycle to the rear. But even here, Tokarev made one great improvement: instead of being restricted to the top of the slide, the Tokarev’s lugs each form an annulus around the barrel. This lets the barrel lugs be made rapidly and cheaply.

That’s not the only advance in the TT. The lockwork was completely unlike any other pistol. For one thing, Tokarev dispensed with a manual safety. For another the feed lips and the lock mechanism including the sear, disconnector and hammer all came out of the pistol all came out of the frame as a single unit for cleaning and maintenance.

Early Tokarev pistols are well-made and, to the surprise of some collectors, any in good condition are well-finished with a deep Prussian blue. While there is a lot of criticism of Russian manufacturing, the fact is that pre-1941 Russian manufacturing could match the nation’s Global rivals for quality. Where the Russians had problems, was manufacturing the vast quantities of small arms required by the enormous Red Army. In the First World War, this embarrassing state of affairs led to Russia having to import weapons from Switzerland, France and United States. Between the wars, Russia industrialized on a massive scale, but the German invasion of June 1941 overran the manufacturing centers of several industrial Soviet republics, and left Soviet industry in disarray.

There were numerous small running changes on the production line during the decades of Tokarev pistol production. One of the most visible was not a specific change, but a general degradation in aesthetics, with rougher machine cuts, less polish, and more manufacturing errors left in the gun, so long as they didn’t affect functioning. In other words, after the disruptions of 1942, the the finish quality of Tokarev pistols declined abruptly, but the pistol remained the simple, reliable weapon it had originally been designed to be. It remained in production for many years after the war, and machinery to produce the pistol was supplied to the entire Communist bloc.

The Tokarev rifle of 1938 and 1940

If the Tokarev pistol was a clever adaptation of Browning’s recoil-locked system to the needs of Russian troops, conditions and especially manufacturing, the Tokarev rifle was something else entirely.

The first version adopted was a submission in a competition to replace the troubled AVS-36. Simonov entered an updated AVS, and Tokarev entered the rifle that would be adopted as the SVT-38. After some teething problems of its own, it was updated as the SVT-40.

The SVT used a short-stroke piston design and a tipping bolt. In fact, it is uncannily like the Semi-Automatic FN (SAFN) rifle that John M. Browning’s protegé, Dieudonne Saïve, was developing for FN at the same time, but the SAFN, which would be delayed by the war, was fed by stripper clips. As a rule of thumb, the SAFN was more robust and had a better implementation of the gas system.

The SVT, being chambered for a powerful rimmed cartridge, was one of the earliest uses of a fluted chamber to avoid cartridge adhesion, which was a problem in prototypes. (indeed, even with the flutes it can be a problem with an SVT, especially a rusty one. Be prepared to knock out steel cases with the cleaning rod, after the extractor merrily tears a divot out of the cartridge rim).

The SVT was designed with great attention to ergonomics. It was designed to be light and handy, which it was, despite its length. The stock, barrel and gas system were all places where weight savings was paramount. The receiver was also rather light, but the bolt and bolt carrier are massive hunks of steel; just looking at them makes you think thoughts like Stakhanovite overproduction, Five-Year Plan, and, of course, Chelyabinsk Tractor Works. Think that if you may, but most Tokarevs were made at Tula. (Izhevsk is in the number 2 spot).

It fed from a 10-round box magazine with a latch that would be emulated by the AK, as would be its sights. It had a compensator and ventilated handguards which give it a unique, and somewhat menacing, appearance. One delightful feature was a small hole at the rear of the receiver, which allows the weapon to be cleaned without risking damage to the muzzle crown.

All SVTs were, originally, grooved for scope mounts, which may make them the first gun in history to have this feature. The scope mount was quite unnaturally high, and allowed use of the iron sights below the scope. Despite the provision for an optic, the SVT never had sniper-level accuracy.

The SVT did not survive the war. Wartime production called for more Mosin-Nagants and cheap subguns, and it took too much time and skill to build, test, and train with the SVT. Some 15,000 were captured and pressed into service in Finland, and others in German service. Today, there are believed to be seven to fifteen thousand Tokarevs on the US civilian market.

Tokarevs Today

The Tokarev pistol and rifle have not been in military service for many years. Pistols survive here and there as second line or personal weapons, but they’re not good choices for self-defense, particularly not the Russian ones with their absent manual safeties. The rifles, amazingly, were carried on the books of the Civil Guard of Finland as late as 1958. At that point, the Finns withdrew the old guns, most of which had been carefully maintained, and sold them to Interarms, which in turn sold them in the United States. If you encounter a Tokarev with the Finnish SA marking, and no import marks, it probably came from this batch.

More recent Tokarev imports include pistols modified to have a thumb safety, and rifles that were arsenal refinished somewhere. The pistols with safeties came from China (pre-1989) and Romania. These late-import guns can be distinguished from the earlier batches by the import marks, and in the case of the rifles, many of them have blued bolts, something they never did back in the USSR.

There are occasional rare variants of both guns: examples being the Tokagypt 58 9mm pistol, and the SVT-40 carbine version.

The ATF from time to time places obstacles in the path of surplus pistol importation, but there are many more Tokarev pistols than rifles in the country than Tokarev rifles. Both Chinese and Russian-made examples were sought-after souvenirs in Korea and Vietnam, and a wartime bringback is the most likely source for an example that is not import-stamped. It was also possible at one time for GIs to bring back personal firearms acquired overseas on an ATF Form 6, but it’s unclear if they ever admitted a Tokarev this way. Nowadays, military judge advocates have done their best to stamp out the concept of war trophies, and they tend to to approve the import of cartridge firearms, so there is a fixed supply of military Toks of both kinds.

Tokarev lived to nearly 100 and was honored on his death with a statue on his grave and a plaque explaining his importance as a gun designer.

This week, we hope to take an in-depth look at a Tokarev pistol and rifle.

The music of a 30° V-12; the beauty of human interactions

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We love airplanes, and the most loved airplanes of all have to be the fighters of World War II. Small enough and simple enough to be manageable — just — by a modern pilot who’s fortunate enough to be very well-resourced; but the pinnacle of that piston engine airplane technology, just before it was supplanted forever by the jet turbine. The best of the planes of each nation either had bulky, twin-row radial engines, or 30° V-12s with overhead cams and dry sumps. (Auto manufacturers would take decades to catch up with 1944 plane-engine technology). Nobody copied anybody else: it was a mechanical designer’s version of convergent evolution.

The most beautiful, and according to the lucky men who have flown them all, the sweetest-handling, of the WWII fighters was the Spitfire. Spitfires were iconically British, of course, but they were flown by Americans as both fighters and as reconnaissance planes. (Bob Hoover, a name you should know, was one of those Spitfire pilots).

This award-winning short documentary follows the descendants of a flight surgeon who was a rare movie-camera owner, as they track down a Spitfire recon pilot who features in the doc’s most dramatic home movie.

Did that make you grin, or what?

(Well yeah, except for the Euro-beep-and-bang music. He explains in the comments what he was thinking. His movie, his call… you’ll probably watch this more than once, and the second time you’ll know when to hit the mute button — that’s your call).

One warning: this short, Spitfire 944, may be taken off YouTube by the copyright assignee. It is available on ITunes for two bucks.

Bet you never heard of Walter Mess

More Finnish Archive Rarities!

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A Simonov AVS-36 was rare everywhere except, it seems, in Finnish captivity. Many of the photos in the Finnish Army photo archive (which is the source of these) include captured AVS rifles, either being used by Finns, or, more often, in piles of captured stuff. That’s what this picture is, and it rewards an embiggening click with a relative close-up of four of the rare AVSes, along with one ringer (a relatively common DP light machine gun). Only one of the AVSes has its 15-round magazine in place, and they all show the bare-metal triggers of the type (the bolt and bolt carrier was also bare metal, same as a Tokarev or, for that matter, a Mosin). The AVS also had a unique flash hider or muzzle brake of a type not seen on any other Russian rifle.

The rare auto rifles are propped in front of an impromptu sculpture of “found objects,” specifically Mosin-Nagants and M1910 Maxim guns. Off to the right, you can see the wheels of a Sokolov mount for another Maxim; in the background, the logistic background of the Winter War, skis and poles. (All that’s missing is an ahkio, a Finnish human-drawn sled, or the shorter Norwegian version, the pulk). The Scandinavian armies rely on ski troops, and on mass-mobilizing reserves. Prior to World War II, they also relied on neutrality, which turned out to be a false hope; now most Scandinavian countries seek allies. It seems to be working. The last two invasions of Scandinavian countries were Russia’s successful but pyrrhic war against Finland, and Nazi Germany’s invasion of Norway and Denmark, which turned into a tar baby for the Germans. (True, there was fighting between the Germans in Norway and the Finns after the latter withdrew from their alliance with Germany in 1944, but that wasn’t really an invasion in the way the others were).

Our next photo is a pair of pairs of weapons. These DA (Degtyaryev Aviatsiya) machine guns were used as defensive weapons on Russian bomber and liaison planes; that’s why they have the cartridge bags. Stray brass bound up in airplane control cables could lead to a bad day. It’s the same basic machine gun as the DP used in rifle units and the DT used in armored vehicles; the aviation and tank versions usually used a double-depth pan magazine instead of the slim 47-rounder of the ground forces’ version.

Once again, click on the picture to see it at full size, or go to the Finns’ excellent archive yourself. Many of the SA-Tuva archive are bleached, or desaturated like this second picture, or flecked with dust like the first one. That doesn’t really matter; the original photos were generally professionally composed and shot with quality equipment onto glass negatives, we think, or at least with view cameras (like a Speed Graphic). So they are clear enough; these aren’t soldiers’ snapshots, but professional photogs’ work. They also are a priceless historical archive, bringing to us today primary documentation about a war that is now all but a legend.

We have still not examined all of the archival photos, but they do seem to be primarily ground forces’ photos. The Finnish air forces had a similar qualitative superiority to the vastly more numerous Russians, and the quality seems to have come entirely from personnel. The Finns had a variety of foreign-built, hand-me-down equipment, some of which (Gladiator, Buffalo) had horrible records in their native air arms.

Are you Finnish with Russian weapons?

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If you’re not, the guys in these pictures are. The pictures are courtesy of SA-Kuva, which is Finnish for Finnish Army Photo — the army archives there have just released a large quantity of wartime photos. (If you have a Russian-spec Mosin or other ex-Russian bangstick with the stamp “SA” in a rectangle, you have an artifact of a Finnish tactical victory over their would-be slavemasters from the USSR). The captions are, alas, in Finnish, a language little spoken this side of the Gulf of Bothnia.

These pictures are reprinted here with permission. Don’t forget that you can click to enlarge them even further. First up we have MG gunners training(?) with what looks like some kind of training rig. The Finnish caption is: “IT-tykki lossin luona. Vuosalmi. 1939.12.18.” OK, so our translation is: AA-gun alongside cable, at Vuosalmi (a town on the coast), 18 Dec 39. Note for general use that an IT-tykki is an AA gun, and a TT-tykki is an AT gun.

Here’s another picture, this one showing a Russian BT-5 tank that has fallen into the clutches of the Finns. Can’t make heads nor tails of the caption, though: “Hovista 0,5 km etelään kenttäkanuunan yhdellä laukauksella suoralla suuntauksella tuhottu hyökkäysvaunu. Syskyjärvi 1940.01.10.” Out of that, we get the date (10 Jan 40), the place Syskyjärvi, and a reference to 0.5 kilometers. It may be in the caption, but in English we can’t tell whether the tank was knocked out, or just abandoned by bugging-out Russians.

And next up, we have two truly classic weapons: the Russian knock-off of the Krupp anti-tank gun, here in 45mm, and the Finnish soldier standing over it armed with an ex-Russian semiauto rifle. Original caption: “Ryssiltä vallattu hv-tykki etulinjassa suomalaisten käytössä. Kollaanjoki. 1940.01.01.”

The rifle is a very rare one, a Simonov AVS-36. It was a select-fire rifle chambered for the 7.62 x 54R cartridge, and fed from a 15-round magazine. Soon after its adoption, it was supplanted by the Tokarev SVT-38 and -40 rifles, which were made in both semiauto (SVT) and select fire (AVT) versions. Tokarev rifles are noteworthy when encountered, but compared to AVS-36s they are as commonplace as Mausers. Interesting note about these Russian interwar rifles — when you do find one that is not a post-’68 import, it will probably have an SA stamp, as Finland sold off their stocks before the GCA of 1968 required imported milsurps to be marked with the importer’s name and city. They are, at least the semiauto Tokarevs are, a rare GI bringback, as they were used occasionally as captured weapons by the Germans, and occasionally by ragtag Chinese formations in the first year of the Korean War.

The Russian units that hit Finland, and got creamed, are widely reported, based on contemporary Soviet propaganda, to have been second-string units. But their heavy armament with state-of-the-Red-art semi-auto rifles — most of which wound up in Finnish custody, as did the surviving Ivans — argues to the contrary. These were first-line units with first-line equipment. What benefited the Finns was the recently concluded military purges, which eliminated almost everyone in the Red Army at the rank of Colonel or higher — and intimidated the living Lenin out of the survivors. The new, high-tech arms pushed into surface by the brilliant Tukhachevskiy before his murder were too much for an army purged of its best and brightest to maintain, and the Russians reverted to WWI weapons, supplemented by hastily adopted submachine guns. (Which had been part of Tukhachevskiy’s reforms, but were simple enough for a dumbed-down service to grasp).

The Finns fought not one, but two wars against the Russians (1930-40 and 1942-44), and they beat the Russians in battle after battle. Man for man, they were by far the better army, but in Stalin’s pungent phrase, “quantity has a quality all its own.” In both wars, the Finns were overwhelmed and agreed to humiliating concessions.

But the Russians didn’t get what they wanted — a return of Finland to Russian suzerainty, as it had been prior to the collapse of the Empire.

Hat tip: Alan Taylor’s In Focus blog at The Atlantic.

Dolphins bring steampunk torpedo home

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The grinning grey guy in the photo is one of the Navy’s marine mammals, from the Space and Naval systems Center, Pacific, and the hero of this piece. This marine mammal or one of its cohorts at the center turned a mine-hunting exercise into an archaeological expedition this March.

Deep in the cold Pacific, the dolphin found a manmade object. Unlike recent marine weapons, like the dummy mines the critter was seeking, the 11-foot long torpedo was made of brass and had a certain steampunk sensibility. It was quickly identified as a Howell torpedo, one of fifty experimental torps made, and expended, before Robert Whitehead made the weapon truly practical. The Howell was one of the first self-propelled torpedoes, or as the terminology of the gaslight age called them, “automobile torpedoes,” of the 19th Century. It and its followers would revolutionize Naval warfare in the next century, making it possible for an invisible threat to blockade a warring nation. (Submarine warfare fell short of cutting off England, twice, but it crippled the defense industries and economy of Japan, and starved out more Japanese garrisons than ever ended on the point of Marine bayonets). But most of the 50 Howells have slept with the fishes for over a century. Including one that interposed itself into a marine mammal minehunting exercise in March.

A Navy dolphin training to look for mines off the coast of San Diego found a museum-worthy 19th-century torpedo on the seafloor, military officials said.

The brass-coated, retro wonder of technology was one of the first self-propelled torpedoes used by the U.S. Navy. Just 50 of these so-called Howell torpedoes were made and only one other example has been recovered; it sits in the Naval Undersea Museum in Keyport, Wash., outside of Seattle.

Here’s the picture of the lovingly over-restored example from the Undersea Museum. Beautiful, isn’t it? (The museum site says it has the only Howell in existence, but it wasn’t correct even before the dolphins’ find off Coronado this spring. We think this is the only post that will show you three extant examples of the Howell, and we hesitate to say all three because the USN might have another one ratholed in some museum… or a warehouse where some Chief parked it in 1890 rather than be caught short). Here’s the real Undersea Museum example:

The news stories all have the count wrong, but there’s apparently a third example at the Navy War College museum. Some of the stories misidentify this photo as the Undersea Museum example, but WeaponsMan has it right. We think, we link, you decide:

via Navy dolphin finds 130-year-old torpedo | Fox News.

In shape, it resembles a modern torpedo, although with more learned about hydrodynamics in the last 130 years, the pointy nose isn’t used any more (it’s counterintuitive, but has more drag than a blunt one). The Howell pointed the way to the future but its numbers were pretty limited: range of less than 1/4 mile (although some sites say 700 yards), speed a mere 25 knots, and warhead 100 lbs of guncotton. The propeller on the nose (visible only on the Undersea Museum’s Howell) was a safety device that armed the fuze. The Howell seems archaic today, and it is. But in 1870 it was a harbinger of what was to come. This photo of the recovered torp shows its propulsion end:

See what we mean about steampunk sensibility? Shortly after this photo was taken, the torp was reimmersed in water to prevent corrosion, at least until it can be properly treated by preservation specialists. Its bronze structure is in surprisingly good shape for over a century in salt water, but that’s bronze for you. Durable stuff. Torpedoes today have amazing capabilities in terms of speed, stealth, autonomy, and/or operator guidance from the launch ship/sub/aircraft (two of which platforms did not exist when this torpedo was invented), but they all descend from primitive 19th Century torpedos like this one.

The limited range and speed stemmed from the Howell’s mechanism: it had no on-board motor per se, simply a flywheel that was spun up to 10,000 RPM by shipboard equipment. The flywheel (F in the blueprint at this article’s end) weighed 132 lbs. — more than the torp’s warhead. It was, practically, a clockwork torpedo.

One vessel that carried the torpedoes was the torpedo boat Stiletto, here discharging a Howell circa 1890 (sorry, this image is only available in this little size). Remember: archaic now, but it was the high-tech of its day.

There were many competitive designs flowering at the same time. The Whitehead (1868, Austria) was powered by compressed air. The Fish (1871, USA) was armed with 100 pounds of explosive (dynamite) and powered by compressed air, but was the first driven by screws. (The sole survivor Fish is in the Navy War College museum in Newport, RI, which also hosts a surviving Howell). The Howell was made from 1870 or 1871 to 1889 in Rhode Island, and was designed by a Naval officer, Lt. Cmdr. John A. Howell.

Before this flowing of invention “torpedoes” were what we’d now call surface mines, floating explosive charges. (that’s what the torpedoes that Farragut famously damned were). After the US Civil War, the 19th Century’s flowering of metallurgy, power, and power transmission made the set-it-and-forget-it torpedo a real possibility, and inventors worldwide flocked to it. The US finally replaced the Howell with an improved Whitehead design. (Whitehead was American, but first succeeded in the Hapsburg Empire, in part because he’d married into the nobility there).

More news stories at the New York Daily News (describing how one dolphin found the target, another confirmed it, and human EOD techs classified it as the Howell), and the Los Angeles Times (with great background on the find and the Navy marine mammal program, which trains dozens of bottlenose dolphins and sea lions). .

The Howell torpedo has been recovered and is undergoing preservation. The dolphins have a more uncertain future: the Navy program is threatened by budget cuts and the advancing capabilities of underwater remote operated vehicles.

Update

The Navy Press Release, upon which the various news articles must have drawn, did properly identify the found Howell as one of three survivors (and listed the museums the others were in correctly, when when the museums themselves didn’t know about each other’s torpedoes). The press release has many fascinating details on the marine mammal program, and also notes that the Howell was marked “No. 24″ and is bound for the Washington DC Navy Yard, where Navy preservation experts will preserve and analyze it.

Bravo Zulu to all involved,including the dolphins. Somebody throw them a fish!

The Past is Another Country: Evans Rifle

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The Evans Rifle was made in several versions in the late 19th Century. It had a patent date of 1868, but production of several versions lasted from 1873 to 1879, when the company went paws up. It doesn’t look like the classical lever-action rifle — after all, this was the high-tech of the day, and they were inventing the classical lever-action as they went — but to our eyes it’s beautiful.

But what sold nearly 15,000 Evanses into a market saturated with war surplus guns wasn’t the eye appeal, but the firepower. It was the assault rifle of its age, toothsome enough even today to make, say, Mike Bloomberg wet his bed: a .44 caliber, black-powder repeater with a 34-round magazine. It resembles a hammerless Spencer, but is larger (and it has a hammer, just an internal one. Like the Henry/Winchester and unlike the Spencer, operating the lever charges the rifle and cocks the hammer. The guns were available as rifles and carbines in several levels of finish. The weapon does not appear to be as robust as its contemporary Winchester lever-actions (which had their own issues).

It was designed by a dentist, Warren R. Evans, with the help of his brother, and until the rise of Bushmaster, it was the only rifle mass produced in the state of Maine, at Mechanics Falls, to be precise. (Bushmaster is gone, decamped to Ilion, NY when a five-year stay-put guarantee to the former owner ran out; its former plant is now home to Windham Weaponry, which reminds us, we have something to say about them, soon).

The magazine forms the load-bearing structure of the butt, with wood trim above and, in the later models, below, to make it resemble a traditional rifle. The magazine is the most unusual feature of the Evans, and is often described as a rotary magazine. It isn’t, really; you see rotary magazines in the Savage 99, the Johnson 1941, and the Ruger 10-22, and you can see they’re nothing like the Evans. The Evans mag is more properly called a helical mag; it moves the cartridges towards the breech with an Archimedean screw. In this, it resembles the Calico, the Russian Bizon,or various Chinese and Nork AK mags.

The Evans was not, then, an evolutionary dead end, although it was dormant for a century. There is some proof those later inventors were aware of it (two Calico patents cite Warren Evans’s patent). There’s never been a reproduction, even though at the time the gun was well-received and was endorsed by none other than Indian fighter Kit Carson. Fortunately for collectors, Evans Rifles are well-represented on the market. With about nine to twelve main variations, a complete collection of Evanses is not an unattainable goal, for someone that wants to have a really unique collection.

Several antique dealers have Evanses in stock; as pre-1898 antiques they can ship without legal formalities to most states and even some foreign nations. One such dealer is antique-arms specialist Jimmy Amburn, whose Evanses can be seen here; he also informs us he has an extensive supply of spare parts.

The Evans fired one of two proprietary .44 caliber cartridges, and this article (whence we lifted the magazine photo) has some vintage case-making and loading rules of thumb. We’d be very surprised if anyone has fired one of these in a long time. Then again, if we had one, or Ian at Forgotten Weapons did, you bet your life we’d shoot it. With a string, first time.

An Evans is reportedly a challenge to the gunsmith’s art. One of its little peculiarities is that it has quite a few screws and almost no two are the same length — but they are all the same diameter and thread. This kind of design is just asking for bad assembly, given the sheer quantity of Bubba The Gunsmiths who have had the chance to handle these in the last 1.2 centuries or so. This may be why Evans rifles in pieces, or pieces of Evans rifles, are less rare than intact examples. The springs are also prone to fatigue and overload failure, and the mechanism in general is intolerant of Bubba’s gorilla-grip approach.

The Past is Another Country: Caption this picture

Here’s RR on 23 November 83. Some time close to that date, this Weapons Man had just wrapped up Phase II of SFQC, the Light Weapons MOS phase, in which we messed around with a lot of guns, too.

The original caption of the picture, per the Reagan Library, is not terrifically informative: “11/23/1983 President pointing a rifle out a window while flying aboard Air Force One during trip to California.” The picture can be retrieved from this gallery here, and if you really need an 8×10 glossy, they can hook you up — for a price.

The picture was taken upon the old, 707-based Air Force One. And the gun appears to be an old, probably Howa-made (or maybe Sauer-made?) Weatherby Mark V, although the digital picture doesn’t really scale up enough to be sure.

Generally, we’re not real big fans of clowning around with guns. There’s something appealing about this picture, though. Maybe he was aiming at Yuri Andropov!

The last reunion of the Doolittle Raiders

Before the war, Jimmy Doolittle was probably the most famous pilot in the Air Corps, except maybe for Lindbergh (who was the one reserve officer never activated in the war, by the personal order of the president; so he was unable, unlike Doolittle, to add to his legend). But while the Lone Eagle conquered the Atlantic and pioneered air routes to and in the Americas, Doolittle won races, set records, and perhaps most importantly, proved the feasibility of flying by reference to instruments. Doolittle could fly anything, and wring the maximum performance out of it. So when the Air Corps wanted to surprise Japan with a beyond-sane-range bombing raid soon after Pearl Harbor, they gave the mission to him.

At the end of the mission, the aircraft were all lost. Some crews were interned by the unfriendly Russians; some were captured by the Japanese — and murdered. Some were killed, many injured, and the survivors not in captivity were struggling through a Nationalist Chinese E&E net.

Looking at his bleak future, then-Colonel Doolittle told the men of his crew, ”They’re probably going to court-martial me,” for the failure of the mission. One of his loyal gunners contradicted him instantly: “No sir. They’re going to give you the Medal of Honor. And make you a general.”

And that’s exactly what they did. The attack might have been a futile pinprick, but it was bold and daring and caught the admiration of the public.

After the war, Doolittle went to work for Shell Oil, flying around the world with his sidekick (the equally celebrated, equally deserving Englishman, Douglas Bader), and his men met for reunions that got smaller and smaller over the decades. Now, the last nonagenarian Raiders are holding their last public reunion. Stars and Stripes:

EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. – At 97, retired Lt. Col. Richard Cole can still fly and land a vintage B-25 with a wide grin and a wave out the cockpit window to amazed onlookers.

David Thatcher, 91, charms admiring World War II history buffs with detailed accounts of his part in the 1942 Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, in which he earned a Silver Star.

Retired Lt. Col. Edward Saylor, 93, still gets loud laughs from crowds for his one liners about the historic bombing raid 71 years ago Thursday that helped to boost a wounded nation’s morale in the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

Cole, Thatcher and Saylor – three of the four surviving crew members from the history-making bombing run – are at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle for a final public reunion of the Doolittle Raiders. They decided to meet at Eglin because it is where they trained for their top-secret mission in the winter of 1942, just weeks after the Japanese devastated the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.

The fourth surviving raider, 93-year-old Robert Hite, could not make the event.

via Famed World War II aviators hold final reunion – U.S. – Stripes.

The Raiders gave up their regular reunions after the 60th Anniversary of the raid in 2002, but the last survivors gathered one last time at Eglin this year. One tradition the Raiders have maintained is the set of goblets and an associated death tontine. The raiders’ website explains:

In honor of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, the citizens of Tucson, Arizona presented a set of 80 sterling goblets to the Raiders following WW II. In turn, they were presented to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs by General Doolittle on behalf of the surviving members of the Raiders for safekeeping and display between reunions.

The silver goblets are housed in a special glass-enclosed trophy case which is guarded by two Airmen. In addition to the goblets, the case contains a bottle of brandy to be used by the last two remaining Raiders at the last reunion to toast their departed comrades. Many of the goblets are already turned upside down for the men who were killed in the raid or who have since died.

At each reunion, the Raiders hold a brief ceremony to honor those who have passed away. This emotional remembrance often marks the passing of additional Raiders during the year since the last reunion.

Each goblet is inscribed twice with a Raider name – both right-side up & upside-down – so that the names are always readable.

The brandy was bottled in 1896 — the year of James H Doolittle’s birth. And the four survivors plan to meet privately to open it this year, rather than wait until two of them are gone, and maybe the last two can’t drink. They will drink a toast to the 76 raiders who have preceded them into history.

The raid required some unusually flexible adaptations of weapons technology. To get the maximum range out of bomber aircraft, and to enable them to fly from aircraft carriers, which only launched and recovered smaller, single-engine planes at the time, the planes had to be lightened — so they discarded most of the B-25′s defensive armament, and the gunner that operated it. They even reduced the offensive armament, fitting an extra fuel tank in the bomb bay in place of bombs. And finally, they planned to attack at low level. Given that, the classified Norden computing bombsight, the pride of the Air Corps, wouldn’t be effective (it had a hard-deck limit of 4,000 feet MSL coded into it); and adding in the high risk of capture, there was no percentage in bringing it. Instead, the crews themselves developed what was called the Mark Twain bombsight or the twenty-cent bombsight; a Captain Greening was responsible for the math and the design, and the airframe sheet metal techs fabricated the sights with hand tools.

Right after the attack, the story of the raid was told in Lt. Ted McClure’s book, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Still a good read today, and it was made into an excellent movie. Since then the story has been told many times, and while some of these tales may be more accurate, it’s hard to beat the immediacy of the story of Ted, his crew, and his plane, The Ruptured Duck.

It will be a sad day when the last of these men are no longer with us. Time never relents. But for today, take a breath of fresh air and rejoice that you are sharing that with four surviving Doolittle Raiders. Theirs was an important role in ensuring that the liberties of their fathers were passed on to us, their sons and grandsons.