WWI

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And At The Eleventh Hour The Guns Fell Silent

November 11, 2018 by 2 Comments

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H. G. Wells called the Great War or World War I the “war to end all wars.” We know that was a mythical false hope. Indeed, it can be rightly said that the Treaty of Versailles created the conditions that led, in no small part, to World War II.

The Armistice that ended the fighting on the Western Front went into effect at 11 am Paris Time on November 11, 1918. At that time, fighting was to cease. However, as I noted in a post a few years ago, fighting continued and men still died right up to until that time. Private Henry Gunther of Baltimore continued fighting to the end and was killed at 10:59 am as he charged a German machine gun nest. He was officially the last Allied soldier to die in combat.

Thus, this recording released by the Imperial War Museum in London is all the more eloquent as it begins with artillery fire and ends with the sound of birds singing. It comes from a recording made in the American sector near the River Moselle just before and after the eleventh hour.

So on this Veterans Day, the 100th anniversary of the Armistice ending fighting in World War I, let us remember all those living and dead who served in our country’s armed services.

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The Remington Model 10 Goes To War

September 1, 2017 by 1 Comment

I stumbled across a video on the John Pedersen designed Remington Model 10 pump shotgun. The model featured in the video was the trench shotgun made for the American Expeditionary Force in WWI. Remington made approximately 3,500 of these shotguns equipped with a 23-inch barrel, a bayonet lug, and a wooden handguard or heat shield on top of the barrel. This shotgun was the lesser known trench gun used in that war. The Winchester Model 1897 was the shotgun that is more widely thought of when you say trench gun.

A copy of the original owner’s manual for the civilian version of the Model 10 is here. While only 3,500 of the military trench guns were made, Remington made approximately 275,000 of these shotguns from 1908 until 1929.

What makes this shotgun so interesting in my opinion is that it is a bottom ejecting shotgun like the more well-known Ithaca Model 37 or the Browning BPS. That combined with a simple, Garand-style safety, and you have a shotgun that can be used by everyone regardless of dominant hand. Add the long “pig sticker” bayonet and you have a very potent and deadly firearm for defending or attaching trenches.

Given that so few of these shotguns were made as trench shotguns and given that many of those were converted to riot guns, I’d hesitate to say what one of these would be worth nowadays except to say “a lot”.

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US Sniper Rifles From WWI And WWII

September 18, 2016 by 3 Comments

Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons has recently published a series of videos on the sniper rifles used by the US Army and US Marine Corps in World Wars One and Two. One of the more interesting observations was that the Army had to start from scratch in WWII while the Marine Corps, who supposedly never throws anything away, pulled stuff out of storage.

From his WWI description:

The United States had two primary types of sniper rifles during World War One, although both were based on the M1903 Springfield rifle.


The most common optic used was the Warner & Swasey “Telescopic Musket Sight”, a rather clumsy prismatic optic mounted on the left side of the rifle, on a detachable rail. The model 1908 W&S offered 6 power magnification, which was reduced to 5.2x in the 1913 model in an effort to increase field of view. These optics were also used on the M1909 Benet-Mercie light machine gun.


The second type is the Winchester A5 scope, an excellent commercial scope available at the time. Although usually associated with the US Marine Corps, several hundred of these were also issued by the Army. The A5 was a much more tradition type of optic, mounted centrally above the bore and preferred by competitive marksmen.


The third rifle we are looking at in this video is a very interesting example of a competitive rifle from the pre-WWI period. It is a 1903 Springfield fitted with a commercial A5 scope and Mann bases. This is the sort of rifle that would have been used by the career military shooters for competition, and would likely have accompanied many such men overseas in the American Expeditionary Force. Woe to the German who found himself in the sights of such a man with a rifle like this!

From the bolt-action sniper rifles of WWII:

The primary sniper rifle used by the United States in World War II was the M1903A4 Springfield, a version of the exisiting 1903A3 with the iron sights removed and replaced with a Weaver 330C scope (adopted by the military as the M73B1). This was a low-power optic, but was centrally mounted on the rifle to avoid and of the windage issues caused by prismatic scopes.

The 1903A4 was the US’ first truly mass-produced sniper rifle, with more than 28,000 being manufactured during just two years of the war (1943-44). The rifle was taken out of production when the M1C sniper adaptation of the Garand was formally adopted, although production of the M1C would be delayed until the end of the war. The 1903A4 would remain in service after WWII, with later scopes being approved as replacements for the M73B1 (in this video, we will take a look at one equipped with an M84, the optic adopted for the later M1D).

The US Marine Corps, of course, had to be a bit different, and adopted their own sniper rifle variant in 1941, a 1903A1 fitted with an 8 power Unertl scope. These scopes were a tradeoff, being significantly more fragile than the M73B1, but also being much better for long range precision shooting. The USMC, taking much pride in their culture of marksmanship, was happy to make that trade, and the rifles served well throughout the war.

While the Army did adopt the M1C Garand semi-automatic rifle for sniping in 1944, according to Ian it never saw action during the war. It would make its debut in action during the Korean War.

Thanks to Ian for doing these histories of US sniping rifles as used during the world wars. If you want to help support the work he does, he has set up a Patreon account which can be found here.

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At The Eleventh Hour

November 11, 2015 by 2 Comments

Today, November 11th is Veterans Day. It is a day in which we honor all of veterans. To which I would like to offer my sincere thanks to all who have served in our armed forces.

However, this post will be about an earlier time. Before 1954, November 11th was known as Armistice Day. It commemorated the armistice which ordered the cessation of hostilities and ended World War I. The telegram below shows the orders received by Allied units on the Western Front.

Found on Tumblr

Thus, at “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918, the war ended.

You would think that with the cessation of hostilities scheduled for 11 am that most soldiers and most units would do everything in their power to avoid any contact with the opposing forces. You would be wrong. There was still fighting that November morning and men still died.

The last British soldier to die was George Edwin Ellison who was shot while on patrol in Mons, Belgium at 9:30 am. He is buried near Mons and his grave faces that of John Parr who was the first British soldier killed in 1914.

At 10:45 am on the November day, Augustin Trébuchon became the last French soldier to die. Because the French were embarrassed for having sent soldiers into battle without knowledge that the Armistice would begin that morning, they listed the date of death as November 10th. This was corrected in 1998.

George Lawrence Price, a Canadian soldier, was killed by a German sniper at 10:58 am. He had been in a house near Ville-sur-Haine, France and had been warned about snipers in the area.

While the United States did not enter the war until 1917, we had the last soldier to die during WWI. He was Private Henry Gunther of Baltimore who died at 10:59am. Gunther was assigned to Co. A, 313th Infantry Regiment, 79th Division.

From Obit of the Day:

Private Henry Gunther, of Baltimore, had learned of the planned cease fire at 10:30 a.m. He and his company remained pinned down by German machine gun fire waiting for the minutes to pass.

But in a surprise to his compatriots – and the Germans – Private Gunther scrambled out of his foxhole, rifle in hand, and began to charge the gun battery. The Germans pleaded with the 23-year-old to stop his charge reminding him that the war was soon to end but he continued running and firing his rifle. They had no choice but to return fire.

Private Henry Gunther died at 10:59 a.m. on November 11, 1918. The last soldier killed in action in the conflict later called World War I.

Although he never gave a reason for his actions, Pvt. Gunther was recently demoted from sergeant to private after a letter critical of Army life was intercepted by military censors. A German-American, he was already under some level of suspicion this did not aid his cause. He would tell his fellow soldiers that he wanted to “make good.”

Following his death Private Gunther was returned to the rank of sergeant and awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. His body was returned home and buried in Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery in Baltimore.

More on Sgt. (then Private) Gunther can be found at the Baltimore Sun.

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For Those Who Don’t The .380 Auto Isn’t Powerful Enough

June 28, 2014 by

If you don’t think the .380 Auto aka 9mm Browning isn’t a powerful round, show me another pistol cartridge that was used to start a world war. For it was with a FN Model 1910 chambered in .380 Auto (or 9mm Browning to be more precise) that Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg 100 years ago today in Sarajevo.

Princip did it in the name of Yugoslav nationalism. He was a Bosnian Serb. As a result of the assassination, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia a month to the day after the Archduke was assassinated. A few days later Germany which had declared support for Austria then declared war on Russia and the rush to war spiraled out of control. Barbara Tuchman describes this spiraling out of control in her book The Guns of August.

Princip’s FN Model 1910 is now a part of the permanent display at the Museum of Military History in Vienna, Austria. How it got there is a story unto itself.

So while the cartridge debate rages on as to which cartridge has enough power, none save the .380 Auto can say they helped start a war, let alone the War to End All Wars.

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A Way To Commemorate The War To End War

January 29, 2014 by 3 Comments

World War I was first called the war to end war in August 1914 by H. G. Wells. It was thought that defeating “German militarism” would bring about an end to war. How naive some were at the beginning of that brutal and horrible war which introduced tanks, planes, and chemical warfare to the arsenal of battlefield implements.

Also introduced to more widespread use in World War I was the 1911 pistol which first saw use in the latter stages of the Moro Rebellion in the Philippines. While originally only manufactured by Colt and the Army’s Springfield Armory, the need for more pistols saw other manufacturers given contracts to make the 1911. Included in this list of manufacturers was Remington-UMC.


To commemorate the 100th anniversary of World War One, Remington is teaming up with Turnbull Manufacturing to reintroduce a historically accurate Remington-UMC 1911. They will only be making 1,000 sets which include the 1911, the holster, 2 magazines, a lanyard, and mag pouch. I don’t know how much this commemorative set will be but I guess it won’t be cheap. According to the comments, you will be able to order this through your local Remington dealer.

Nice!