Archive Category: Weapons & War
WWII German Infantry Weapons
This very interesting 14 minute video demonstrates the functionality as well as the effectiveness of Germany’s infantry weapons during WWII. Listed is a description of the Karabiner 98K, MP40 Machine Pistole, the famous Luger, the Stielhandgranate or better known as the Potato masher both MG34 and MG42 machine guns and more.
The video appears to be a vintage color film that was probably used for training purposes between 1939-1945 (unconfirmed)
Link: YouTube
Building Your Own (Functional) Iron Man Suit
With all the hoopla about Iron Man, DVICE blog wonders if we can actually build a real Iron Man suit. Step one is to check out what history has to offer, and that’s Hardiman exoskeleton for humans:
Before we start building our own Iron Man suit, let’s first benefit from the experience from those who have tried this in the past. In 1965, GE (disclosure: our parent company, bless ’em) was the first to try creating an exoskeleton for humans. But the first iteration went berserk — kicking, bucking and gyrating so much, they never chanced it with a human inside. The project was scaled down to an arm that would be able to lift 750 pounds, enough to load up a bomb onto a plane on an aircraft carrier. Big problem, though: The arm itself weighed 1,500 pounds, far beyond anyone’s capacity to handle it. The idea was scrapped.
Read the rest of the entertaining article here: Link - via Gorilla Mask
Army Study: Bad Recruits Make Good Soldiers
According to an Army study, recruits with criminal, bad driving or drug record (therefore require special waivers to enlist) have more discipline problems and are more likely to drop out because of alcohol problems than those with a spotless record.
No surprise there, but this is interesting: those bad soldiers also earn more medals for valor, stay longer, and get promoted faster!
Gen. William Wallace, commander of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, Va., dismisses the notion that waivers are creating more disciplinary problems in today’s Army.
Instead, he said, when the Army brings in a young person who made a mistake and got past it, most likely "they will be a better person for having made that mistake and learned from it, than perhaps somebody who didn’t make the mistake and didn’t have the opportunity to learn."
Top Secret Military Black Programs Have Spiffy Patches!
Many military programs are "black" or so top secret that they appear only as a single line item in the Department of Defense’s expense report.
But just because they’re secret, it doesn’t mean that they are without style or a sense of humor. Photographer Trevon Paglen has stumbled upon a strange way of documenting these black ops: each and every one of them has wonderfully strange military patches, the kind worn on uniforms:
“It’s a fresh approach to secret government,” Steven Aftergood, a security expert at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, said in an interview. “It shows that these secret programs have their own culture, vocabulary and even sense of humor.”
One patch shows a space alien with huge eyes holding a stealth bomber near its mouth. “To Serve Man” reads the text above, a reference to a classic “Twilight Zone” episode in which man is the entree, not the customer. “Gustatus Similis Pullus” reads the caption below, dog Latin for “Tastes Like Chicken.”
Military officials and experts said the patches are real if often unofficial efforts at building team spirit. [...]
Trevor Paglen, an artist and photographer finishing his Ph.D. in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, has managed to document some of this hidden world. The 75 patches he has assembled reveal a bizarre mix of high and low culture where Latin and Greek mottos frame images of spooky demons and sexy warriors, of dragons dropping bombs and skunks firing laser beams.
“Oderint Dum Metuant,” reads a patch for an Air Force program that mines spy satellite images for battlefield intelligence, according to Mr. Paglen, who identifies the saying as from Caligula, the first-century Roman emperor famed for his depravity. It translates “Let them hate so long as they fear.”
Wizards appear on several patches. The one hurling lightning bolts comes from a secret Air Force base at Groom Lake, northwest of Las Vegas in a secluded valley. Mr. Paglen identifies its five clustered stars and one separate star as a veiled reference to Area 51, where the government tests advanced aircraft and, U.F.O. buffs say, captured alien spaceships.
And now, Trevor has published photographs of these military black ops patches in a book, aptly titled "I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me," which itself is a translation of a patch for a Navy black project.
Link: NY Times Article by William J. Broad | Trevor’s website - via Kuro5hin
Operation Pastorius
You might not know that German spies landed on the East Coast of the US during World War II. The group of eight men were neither talented as spies nor committed to the Third Reich. All of their actions were either in direct conflict with their orders, or else had nothing to do with their mission. Two men of the group, George John Dasch and Ernst Peter Burger planned to sabotage the mission entirely. The trouble is, when ringleader Dasch visited the FBI, no one would believe the story!
The agents in the building, however, were too busy catching spies to be bothered with every crackpot off the street who happened to know classified details about secret Nazi landings. Dasch was bounced from office to office until finally Assistant Director D.M. Ladd, the agent in charge of the manhunt, agreed to humor him with five minutes of his time. Dasch angrily repeated his story, only to find himself greeted once again with patronizing nods and glances toward the door. Fed up at last, he lifted the briefcase he had been carrying, tore open its straps, and dumped the entire $84,000 of mission funds onto the Assistant Director’s desk. Ladd blinked with astonishment and began to reconsider Dasch’s claims.
The group was rounded up by the FBI. However, the story made public by J. Edgar Hoover had nothing about Dasch turning himself in. Hoover credited “The detective work of the century,” and all eight men were convicted by a military tribunal. Six were swiftly executed, and the two leaders received long sentences. The case served as a precedent for holding terrorists for military tribunals today. Read the entire story at Damn Interesting. Link
When an F-111 Collided with a Pelican …
What happened when an F-111 fighter jet collided with a large pelican? It’s amazing that the pilot recovered the plane and landed safely:
AN F-111 was left "shredded" and incapacitated and was forced to make a spectacular emergency landing after hitting a pelican.
The jet was flying at 900m on a test bombing raid at Evans Head, northern NSW, when a pelican struck the fibreglass nose and was sucked into an engine.
The two RAAF crew are being hailed as heroes by their colleagues for their skilful recovery and landing on April 11. The damage, included a hole in one wing. Aviation experts said flying the plane would have been extremely difficult because the aircraft would have been unstable.
Story by James O’Loan and Alex Dickinson: Article | Gallery - via OhGizmo!
Sarkozy: Fifth Graders Should Learn About the Life of 1 of the 10,000 French Children Killed in the Holocaust
Earlier last month, French President Nicholas Sarkozy proposed that every fifth grader learn about the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazi in the Holocaust.
“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Mr. Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night. He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”
Needless to say, his plan was controversial. His political opponents derided the idea, psychologists and educators claimed that it would traumatize the students. One Holocaust survivor noted:
“It is unimaginable, unbearable, tragic and above all, unjust,” Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor and honorary president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Holocaust, told the Web site of the magazine L’Express. “You cannot inflict this on little ones of 10 years old! You cannot ask a child to identify with a dead child. The weight of this memory is much too heavy to bear.”
I came about this story from a thought-provoking post by Jessica Helfand of Design Observer. She wrote:
Meanwhile, schoolchildren are typically taught history by fact and by date. They memorize key battles and identify significant acts of legislation, a process intended to highlight those benchmarks of civilization with which we should all aspire to fluency. Curiously, the notion that making history human would devalue such learning seems odd, if not entirely oxymoronic: if we read and analyze fiction to come to a better understanding of our own humanity, why would we not derive similar lessons from our own history?
The Cuban Woman Soldier of The U.S. Civil War
We had a story about military doctor James Barry turning out to be a woman before, but apparently that wasn’t the only case of military gender switcharoo. Here’s the story of Loretta Janeta Velasquez, a Cuban-born woman who masqueraded as a male Confederate soldier during the Civil War: Link | More info in Wikipedia.
Improvised Basement Fallout Shelter from The Late 1960s
In 1967, the US Department of Defense, Office of Civil Defense published a 28-page pamphlet on how to harden your home’s basement to help survive against radiation and fallout from a nuclear blast.
Included is a chapter on "improvised" shelters - for those unlucky souls who hadn’t completed their own personal bomb shelter:
If a workbench is not available, you can improvise a somewhat larger shelter area by using furniture, doors, dressers, or other materials.
Remove doors from their hinges and place them over supports in the corner of your basement having the best protection. The supports for the table can be chests of drawers or anything that can take a heavy load. Use two or three doors over each support for this shelter to provide sufficient strength to carry the heavy loads placed on them.
Place bricks, concrete blocks, earth- or sand-filled drawers, books, a collapsible swimming pool filled with water, etc., over the doors to provide an overhead shield. Use anything with weight that can be moved. The heavier the material, the more the protection.
Yup: your kid’s ghetto pool (as my wife calls it) could double as a fallout shelter! Link (towards the bottom) - Thanks Derek!
Armed America: Photos of Gun Owners in Their Homes
Jim and Nicky with his Taurus .38 snub nose special, Colt 380-Auto, Pony Pocketlite and Sig Sauer P232 .380. (Photo: Kyle Cassidy)
Jim: When I was diagnosed with cancer I found myself and my family in need of protection. I was too old to fight, too sick to run, and since cancer took my vocal cords, I couldn’t yell for help. I purchased my first ever firearm.
Freelance writer and photographer Kyle Cassidy traveled 15,000 miles taking photos of gun owners in America and asking them this simple question: "Why do you own a gun?" Some of their answers were surprising.
Two years later, he compiled his work in a book titled Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes. Link - via One Large Prawn
The Sheep Incident
Thousands of sheep died one night in 1968 in Skull Valley, Utah. Army officials got busy drafting a denial. They had been testing Cold War chemical and biological weapons, one of which was called VX.
VX was a triumph among the biological warfare community. Odorless and tasteless, it’s three times as toxic as Sarin. In initial trials, this over-acheiving compound was also found to be highly stable, enabling long shelf life and environmental persistence. VX works by blocking chemicals in the victim’s body from functioning. It prevents the enzyme acetylcholinesterase from allowing muscles to relax, resulting in the contraction of every muscle in the body. Exposure to a minute or diluted dose of VX will cause muscle twitching, drooling, excessive sweating, and involuntary defecation, among other unpleasantries. Exposure to a lethal dose — about ten milligrams — will cause convulsions, paralysis, and eventually asphyxiation due to sustained contraction of the diaphragm muscle. Unless the affected skin is cleaned and an antidote is administered immediately, a single drop of liquid VX will kill a person in around ten minutes
The sheep were not the only animals who died near the Dugway Proving Grounds. Read the rest of the story at Damn Interesting. Link
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Clearly this will be the hot toy for Christmas 2008. Here’s Magpul Industries official site, which is worth the trip for a fun desktop wallpaper. Via StrategyPage.
Previously: Maxblaster Flashlight.
Legendary Doctor James Barry Was No Man!
New Scientist has a very interesting article on Dr. James Barry, a pioneering military surgeon and Inspector General of Military Hospitals in Canada in the early 1800s. Barry was medical reformer who fought for better food, sanitation, and proper medical care for soldiers, civilians, prisoners and lepers (He once won a duel to get a leper colony built.)
Funny thing was: there was no such man as Dr. James Barry - "he" was actually a "she" and her name was Margaret Ann Bulkley:
The flaw in the scheme was that no British medical school admitted women. If Margaret was to qualify as a doctor, she would have to masquerade as a boy for three whole years.
The disappearance of Margaret Bulkley and the appearance of a young medical student called James Barry was carefully orchestrated. The Bulkleys were unknown in Scotland, so they planned to establish themselves there as aunt and nephew. Du Preez discovered that they traveled to Edinburgh by sea, rather than stagecoach. Newly enrolled at university, the freshly minted "James Barry" wrote to Reardon: "It was very usefull for Mrs Bulkley (my aunt) to have a Gentleman to take care of her on Board Ship and to have one in a strange country." This indicates precisely when the metamorphosis of Margaret took place, says du Preez. She must have had to board the ship already dressed as a boy, or risk shipboard rumours following them to Edinburgh.
To protect Margaret’s secret, the pair cut themselves off from friends and family. Only the conspirators knew who they were and where they were. From now on, Margaret kept herself to herself, always wore an overcoat and lied about her age to avoid questions about her smooth chin and high voice.
How To Stop a 500-Foot Monster
Movie monsters are getting bigger and tougher over time, and it may take new technologies to defeat them. Danger Room takes a look at the new and improved monsters, and the weapons the military should use to defend humanity.
It’s difficult to make accurate assumptions about 500 foot-tall fictional monsters whose very existence violates the laws of physics. But it’s liable to have skin, scales or other outer with protective blubber or equivalent covering several feet thick. This will absorb anything except apart from an armor-piercing round. Flesh, like water, can stop virtually any projectile within a few feet – that’s why you need something very exotic like a supercavitating round if you want to go through a lot of it. Those supercavitating Russian APS underwater assault rifles might be handy here… but you’d need a lot of rounds to have any effect.
Link to part one, link to part two. -via Metafilter
Man didn’t know he lived above a bomb shelter
When Scot Simpson bought his circa 1953 house in Charlottte NC, little did he know that he would find an 8-by-12-foot bunker buried beneath his lawn mower shed.
“The bomb shelter was built about 1960 or 1961″, said Earle Heath, who still lives next door. Heath was 12 or 13 back then. “The owner of the house was in the construction business”, he said, “and sent workers over to dig the hole and pour the concrete”.
That would have been just before the Cuban missile crisis, when many Americans feared nuclear Armageddon.
Simpson would like to get rid of the poured concrete and steel bunker, but doesn’t know what’s involved in getting rid of it.
Source: Charlotte Observer
Military Operation on Urban Terrain (MOUT) Training Facilities
Photo: NATO Exercise Cooperative Osprey 1996, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina
Bryan Finoki of Subtopia blog has an interesting post about "mysterious simulacrums of urban space":
… ghostly MOUT (Military Operation on Urban Terrain) training facilities where entire pseudo landscapes and quasi architectures are designed solely for the purposes of being conquered and reconquered, over and over again to help prepare the armed forces for counter-insurgency warfare in cities abroad–life inside a simulative architectural loop; landscape as militaristic prop.
The article goes on to talk about the "Mecca" of military urban training: a mysterious camp called CAMOUT being built deep in the middle of nowhere, USA:
So, what will a quarter of a billion dollars get you? Well, reading on we learn CAMOUT, if completed as planned, will include 1,560 buildings (some as high as five stories) in seven separate districts: the urban core (as previously described), east and west stadium districts, a hospital district, an ‘old town’ which will actually be modeled on Sadr City (a suburb of Baghdad), and finally an industrial district as well as a diplomatic district. “A city like no one has ever seen,” it will be “bisected by a river, already in place, that’s up to 80 feet wide in some spots,” even though in reality we are told it will contain absolutely no water. “Some areas will have buildings that have been reduced to rubble and there will be shanty towns around the city” …
US Military: War is Good for Iraqi Teens’ Self-Esteem
Hooray for war! If any one ever asked you what the Iraq war is good for, tell ‘em this study by the United States Military Academy: it is good for the self esteem of Iraqi teenagers (if they’re still alive …)[Re-reading my intro, I agree that it was a bit snarky. It's never my intention to denigrate the US armed forces - they have my respect, support, and admiration for doing a difficult and dangerous job. Get back home safely soon, guys.]
Here’s an interesting study by the US Army on the effect of war on the psyche of Iraqi teens:
For obvious reasons, few social science researchers have ventured into Iraq since the American-led invasion. However, in 2004, a year into the hostilities, the US Army funded a team of Iraqi interviewers, based at the Asharq Centre for Polls and Marketing Research, to go into ten neighbourhoods of Baghdad to survey the concerns and self-esteem of 1000 teenagers.
The results showed that rather than damaging their sense of self, the war appeared to have bolstered the teenagers’ self-esteem, especially in those who felt most strongly that their country was under threat. [...]
The researchers said their finding was consistent with Social Identity Theory, which predicts that people will seek to maintain their sense of self when their identity is under threat. It’s also consistent with research on mortality salience, showing that people tend to shore up their sense of self when reminded of, or threatened by, risk of death.
Link (Photo: Staff Stg. Sean A. Foley [wikipedia]) - via Mind Hacks
Trivia: God’s Own Catapult and Bad Neighbor Trebuchets
In the Siege of Acre in 1191, Richard the Lionheart constructed two trebuchets that he named "God’s Own Catapult" and "Bad Neighbor."
Things flung during a medieval siege included: rocks, fire bomb, carcasses of animals and people (to spread disease and demoralize the enemy), and burning sand. Now, hobbyists build trebuchet mainly to chuck pumpkins.
Food Fight: Wars Acted Out by Fighting Countries’ Food
Stefan Nadelman’s short film, titled "Food Fight," is an abridged history of war, from World War II to present day, "acted out" by food of the countries involved. It’s a little American-centric, but still … Stefan said "Watch as traditional comestibles slug it out for world domination in this chronologically re-enacted smorgasbord of aggression."
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Boing Boing TV
Here are the cheat sheet of the breakdown of the food/country characters: Link
Hawaiian Axe Made with Shark Teeth and Other Fearsome Weapons of Yore
Trifter has a pretty neat post about some gruesome weapons from the past. I like this one, the Hawaiian Throwing Axe, made with … shark teeth!
This Hawaiian Throwing Axe was a deadly hand held weapon that could be used at both short and long range. This weapon was made out of wood and shark teeth had the power to take men’s limbs off. This weapon was mainly used when opposing Hawaiian armies closed upon each other. They were then thrown at the opposing troops to help soften enemy ranks before close combat. They could also be used in hand to hand combat and had the muscle to rip open skin as if it was butter. This was a very dangerous weapon and is not something you would want to go up against.
Link - Thanks jon jason!
WWII Japanese Propaganda Film Starring Mickey Mouse
Over at Cartoon Brew, there is a YouTube clip of a 1930’s wartime Japanese cartoon, featuring characters ganked straight out of Disney.
Watch the brave Japanese warrior doing battle with "Mickey Mouse" army:
David Gerstein and Cole Johnson found this delightfully primitive 1934 Japanese cartoon about a war in 1936(?). Clearly inspired by Hollywood cartoons of the era, one can read plenty into the fact that the brave Japanese warriors are doing battle with a “mickey mouse” army. Says Gerstein:
Maybe it’s a “Nutcracker Suite”-inspired thing? Dunno if the “Nutcracker” was known in Japan in the 1930s, and this uses pre-”Nutcracker” classical themes, but it does have a mouse kingdom trying to take over a toyland-like world. What’s great, though, is that the mice are obvious Mickey clones, and at about 1:45 a cat lead briefly mutates into Felix. The music over the main and end titles sounds like it belongs with a 1930 Terrytoon or Van Beuren, doesn’t it?
Link (with historical account of the cartoon in the blog’s comment) - Thanks Widgett Walls!
Licorne Atomic Bomb Test: Beautiful and Scary
Photo: Pierre J. [Flickr]
There’s something scarily beautiful about an atomic bomb explosion … this one is from the nuclear test "Licorne", where the French Army detonated a 914 kiloton thermonuclear device in the Mururoa Atoll on July 3, 1970. It was the fourth nuclear test and largest.
More info on Licorne can be found at the Atomic Forum:
Licorne was a test of an experimental thermonuclear device for the TN-60 warhead; the fourth thermonuclear test conducted by France. The nuclear device was suspended from a balloon, which was filled with 14,000 cubic meters of helium, 500 meters (1600 feet) feet over the Dindon testing sector. 3,700 men stationed on Mururoa were evacuated for this test.
Newly appointed Minister of Defense Michel Debré observed the test from the De Grasse along with 12 representatives from the French press. The De Grasse was positioned some 30 miles from Mururoa for the shot.
An observer described the Licorne detonation as being a “a stupendously beautiful pillar of fire piercing a perfectly symmetrical mushroom.” Six hours after the explosion, Debré and the visiting correspondents returned to the main base on Mururoa. Debré reportedly swam in the Mururoa lagoon during this time to make the reporters think the radiological effects of the nuclear tests were harmless (Source)
World War I Draft Cards of Celebrities
All males in the United States born between 1872 and 1900 were required by law to register for the draft. Out of the 24 million World War I Draft Registration Cards, here are 50 of the most famous, infamous, and interesting, as compiled by the National Archives: Link - via Boing Boing
This one above is the draft card of Harry Houdini, who signed his middle name as "Handcuff"!
E-2C Hawkeye LEGO Airplane
Photo: Mad physicist [Flickr]
Ralph Savelsberg built some amazing LEGO models of military airplanes:
Created with no special pieces, it has movable wings and retractable landing gear, just like the rest of its companions: one Russian plane, the SU-27 Flanker, and two classic US aircraft, the E-2C Hawkeye and the now infamous F-15.
Gizmodo has the interview with Ralph and a neat photo gallery: Link
Samurai Dog Armor
Pink Tentacle reports:
This suit of dog armor — identified by antique Japanese armor dealer Toraba.Com as the only known and certified authentic example of its kind — is believed to have been created for the pet of a wealthy, high-ranking and presumably eccentric samurai or daimyo (feudal lord) in the mid to late Edo period (mid-18th to mid-19th century).
Spencer Burns at Yachigusa Ryu wonders why this innovation didn’t occur during the fifth Tokugawa shogunate, when Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (1646-1709) "prohibited the harming of dogs and ordered the establishment of dog kennels, [thus earning] the nickname of ‘dog shogun.’"
The Sun Gun
During World War II, Nazi scientists worked at a secret lab in Hillersleben to develop weapons of mass destruction. One of these proposed weapons was the Sun Gun, a space station that would focus the sun’s rays on the enemies of the Third Reich! Read the story at Damn Interesting. Link
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Don’t mess with the Peruvian batmans, er … anti-riot police. Here they were marching in a military parade to celebrate Peru’s Independence Day in Lima last year.
Link (Photo: Pilar Olivares/Reuters) - via Gizmodo
On Halloween, I betcha the guys dress up in this.
World’s Strangest Tanks
Here is a huge list of some of the world’s largest and strangest tanks ever built. You’ll need to scroll down a bit to see them all.
Link: Ramugita (deleted - shame on this blog for copying)
Original Links: Part 1 and Part 2 at Dark Roasted Blend
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Meet the AA12, the world’s first (and scariest) automatic shotgun, built by Jerry Baber of MPS.
From Discovery Channel’s FutureWeapons:
It’s a gun that could end up rewriting the rules of urban warfare. I’d like to introduce you to the shotgun for the 21st century, the AA 12. The Auto Assault 12 is a fully automatic, gas operated, low recoil, 12 gauge shotgun designed specifically for the military. One blast from the shotgun is terrifying enough, but the AA12 delivers an incredible rate of nearly 300 rounds a minute.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - Thanks Adam Fuhrer!
The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein
After his capture, Saddam Hussein was interrogated by an American he knew only as "Mr. George." More than a year later, FBI agent George Piro spoke to Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes about his time interrogating one of the worst dictators in history:
"I purposely put his back against the wall. And then mine against the door, psychologically to tell him that his back was against the wall in the interview room. And that I stood between him and the door, psychologically. Between him whether it’s to go back to his cell, freedom, whatever he was projecting to be outside of that door. I was kind of that psychological barrier between him and the door," Piro recalls.
Just weeks after being pulled from a hole in the ground by U.S. Special Forces after a nine-month manhunt, Saddam Hussein was placed in the hands of George Piro.
Piro says he called the former dictator "Mr. Saddam," and that Hussein began to call the agent "Mr. George." "Over time though, in private, it changed to just Saddam and George," Piro remembers.
It’s a fascinating glimpse into the mind of Saddam: Link
