Personalized 1911s from the WW1 American Expedition to Siberia 

Cool.

With that information maybe someone could track the guys name down. or at least a likely person.

especially as he was still a pow after the actual war had ended, seeing as the engraving says 1920 well unless they left him there for the bolcheviks i guess

That's good to know. I do have a few .999 silver coins and my family's cuckoo clock needs repair. May as well get two birds with one stone and get get some custom grips for my new 1911 Stupid bad signal made my message post three timee

It's not... that well-executed. It's relatively crude. I doubt he was involved in the clock trade.

it’s like he can only ever fail to disappoint

That's the power of Gun Jesus at work.

"Today on Forgotten Weapons we're going to take a look at the first stone axe ever made by a human. Obviously historical details are somewhat sparse on the inventor himself, but at least we get to take a look at the axe head itself, as the original handle has been lost to time. It is unmarked, as was common of the time since neither alphabets nor numbers had been invented yet..."

@@andersjjensen I hear Ian's voice in my head when i read it😅

I was just a gun shop today and they had a beautifully ugly lever action thing up on the wall. If I recall correctly it was something of a labor of love for the fellow that made it. I think it was a Marlin something or another.

Thanks for the update and for sharing your pistols with Ian. You've got some terrific historical artifacts.

@@levergatRapha or worse... destroyed.

@@levergatRapha As a semi auto, it couldn't be converted (semi auto "long weapon" ban came in a decade prior to the handgun ban). Hopefully it was exported, rather than "deactivated".

@@levergatRapha Pretty much, with a few strange contraptions based on semi autos. That's why (pre covid travel ban) I spent 6-8 weeks in the US every year to keep my proficiency with handguns. By heck I'll be rusty once i get over again...

@@levergatRapha We just banned the VZ58 and a couple others here in Canada. A lot of people were super pissed about how that went down. It's starting to look like handguns are going to be the next to be banned, sadly quite a few of the political parties here are pretty anti-gun.

@@Sn0ws519 At least the Czech Republic made some progress.. putting a right to defend yourself with a gun into their constitution (last year I think it was). Vz58 is easy to ban because it looks just like an AK to the general public so as soon as you get to the "lets ban assault weapons" phase youre going to lose these handy guns too.

Man you know what? That's fair.

M1911 - A century of service. And ready for hundred years more...

That's a beautiful story, thanks for sharing

The Lord’s caliber

Still the best fighting pistol ever invented.......

Yeah you haven’t heard of it because they don’t like to teach the exploits of american imperialism and all matter of foreign meddling

Canadians and Brits did as well, although I think they were in the Murmansk area.

@@minuteman4199 Yes a lot of countries got involved in the Russian civil war, also Japan, Greece, France etc.

I believe American soldiers were stationed in Murmansk and Archangel too. Russian civil war was really big thing that is largely forgotten now. Also other related wars and fightings are not well remembered these days. For instance, in Baltic states there were several forces operating; Red Russians, Freikorps, locals trying to fight for the independence and some smaller forces too. Also Royal Navy was operating there. I only recently found out that Royal Navy was conducting operations against St. Petersburg area and was using then Finnish area as base for their operations. That really wasn't teached in our history classes here in Finland.

@@dzejrid Kings and Generals also did similar videos on those two units...

You're pretty good

Actually, they buff your damage by 50%

Well. they do kinda give a moral boost for many users. That's an tactical advantage in my book :)

When I worked at a county courthouse in the US, one of the older bailiffs (police assigned to protect a judge) was a US Marine veteran and former PMC. He was kind but tough, and carried a .45 1911 with his Marine Corps uniform's insignia affixed to the grips.

@@UltraSuperDuperFreak isnt this supposed to be a mgs3 reference? smh

I think WW1 is probably the best example of that. It started in out nationalistic fervor, but that died out after the first year or two. By the time us Americans got to Europe, the general soldiery was tired of fighting a stalemated meat grinder of a war so yeah, the opportunity to essentially sit out the war in a relatively decent POW camp where no one was going to order you into a suicide charge across No Man's Land and there was no risk of getting killed in a massed artillery barrage was a very welcome chance for those that were captured.

@@Maria_Erias The last six months of the war? Maybe. Before that? Not at all.

The problem with this thinking is that Russia was a shambles by late 1917 and stayed that way until well after the Peace of Riga in 1922. Starvation, war crimes by both reds and whites, and disease took a heavy toll on everybody, including POWs. Hence, Ian's reference to the relative gratitude of the German POWs in Vladivostok at falling into the hands of the Americans.

Oak leaves and acorns is a *very* common and traditional theme in German and Central European wood carving going back centuries. The fact that this was an Army doctor, with about zero Naval connection, argues against your supposition that this has anything to do with Navy Medical Corps, especially since there are numerous examples all using more-or-less the same design, differing only in the engraving in the silver inlays and the shape of those inlays. This guy was obviously production lining these grips.

I understand that oak leaves and acorns also symbolize strength

@Conor Hanley If they are deployed in a forward combat area, they can carry a side arm.

I must say not the worst outcome you could have gotten under the circumstances. I wonder if that ever happened with Russian weapons as well.

@@alexwieland-ducher8792 prolly not. You were given a weapon and you had to return it at the end, so what's the point in having it carved?

There are plenty of carved hunting rifles and such though, that were made by exquisite masters for a few bottles of vodka after the fall of the USSR

I had a .45 in the 80s that was stamped M1911 in one font and then handstamped A1 MOD out to the side in a larger font. The serial number was 05911. I signed it out alot.

C Co 1-27th Infantry (mid 80’s)

👍

Good gravy! I wonder if it was the same guy....

@@TimberwolfCY I wish I had a way to find out. Other than the soldiers named it was unsigned.

@@justindunlap1235 Like the pistol grips, it's unlikely the prisoner was allowed to work on an intact rifle- the stick was more likely removed first, and the prisoner may have carved his name or initials inside somewhere.

Recoiless Rifles aren't.

@@shawnr771 This is true

Very good question. You would think an artist would sign his work.

We are in accord. It would be great if the artist had signed his work!

I think exactly the same (because the carver mostly put his inital at the "invisible" side of his work, today too)

My first thought. I bet he put his initials on the back...

Grips would definitely be easy to do without having the pistol in hand since they're fairly standardized. But at the same time being a POW to the US in a place like (the wrong side of) Siberia during the middle of a civil war (especially if you're able to trade your services)... its kind of one of those situations where you're in pretty much the best place you could possibly be. Escape across the entirety of Siberia would be effectively impossible and anyone else who might pick you up along the way would be far worse even assuming they didn't just shoot you on sight. You've also got not only the communist revolution in Russia at the time but the Warlord era in full swing in neighboring China as well. Your only other easily reachable escape country would be North Korea which at the time was still under control of the Japanese Empire. I'd be more than happy to hangout in Vladivostok and carve some grips.

Everyone says that, because it is

He might not have done the wood work if he didn’t smoke/chew tobacco

@@alexwest2573 weird way of justifying smoking

@@alexwest2573 I' d bet there was a whole supply chain, like cigarettes against food, chores and so on. The carver was quite surely a member of a group, and in normal circumstances the group profited, and he too. don't think he did latrine police or such.

Even if he didn't smoke I bet he could have bartered the tobacco to his fellow prisoners for other goods.

I mean, that is partly correct. The US forces aren't there to physically intervene on any side, hell they're the only forces that prevented the Japanese from taking the Russian Far East...

@@axelpatrickb.pingol3228 But they actively helped the White Army in the fight against the Reds. They even took part in the repression against the local people, which supported the Reds (ironically, this made the Reds even more popular among the people). Nevertheless, the interventionists pursued their own interests, and not the interests of anti-Bolshevik forces. The invaders sought to remove from the jurisdiction of the central Russian government the national borderlands under the rule of puppet governments, which contradicted the interests of both the Reds and the Whites.

See my comment below about the British deployment.

@@tonylife94 Supporting the killing of commies. Always a good thing.

@@frankbass7561 Yep. The Reds won because of this kind of thinking. Especially when anyone could become a "commie" in the eyes of the White Army.

@@tacticalmattfoley Here's where modern tech wins... shove a borescope up the mag well and see if there's a hint of anything visible through the frame cuts.

Good to know

That's not true. The Russian Far East includes the Primorsky Krai (translated in full as Maritime Territory), the Vladivostok is its the administrative center. So the Vladivostok is definitely in Siberia.

@@alinanet94 im not quite convinced with that info, there is siberian federal district and far-east federal district, and Vladivostok is the part of the last one

@@danilromanov275 saying that Vladivostok is not in Siberia is like saying "Los Angeles is not in the western part of the USA, it's in California" or "Paris is not in the western Europe, it's in France". Siberia is a geographical region, its borders do not match with the borders of the Siberian Federal District.

@@alinanet94 Speaking of geographical regions, Russian Far East is a legitimate one, spanning on the 36% of the russian land - the eastern part. Including Vladivistok. So cut this crap about Siberia, John Snow

You are fascinated by murderers and marauders, by bloody path that they carved through Russia?

@@paganec666 They were abandoned by their allies and had nowhere to go except around the entire world to get home while everyone around them was trying to kill them, so yeah, I'm very impressed with their success.

@@TheWhiteDragon3 Czechoslovakians been under French command and should be evacuated through Vladivostok port, they wasn't abandoned they had weapons and supplies though all travel time

@@paganec666 Take a wild guess why they seized weapons and supplies. The reds viewed them as the threat to their power base, and the white army warlords were paranoid of them.

@@TheWhiteDragon3 What? They been fully equipped and seize additional arms and food by sacking local arsenals along they way and they actually FOUGHT for whites. They shelled dozens cities and town with artillery, committing execution of pro civilian bolshevics supporters count of the dead goes for thousands

Thank you , Mike .

the entente intervened in the russian cival war at the time. there are a couple of videos on it, its very interesting i would recomend researching it

> Awesome! I had no idea Americans had troops in Russia at that time! US troops also had "an expedition" into north region of Russia where they actually fought the Red Army. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Russia_intervention

Your question sort of answers itself, really. The simple answer is, it really *wasn't* all that hard to nick things from the Military at this time. Think about it. In one case, we have an officer, and not only an officer, but a doctor. Doctor comes back to the US, and goes through out-processing, which probably meant signing a bunch of paperwork and hopping on the train home. Nobody is searching officers for contraband, so that pistol just comes home in his duffel. The other guy was a PFC, so his is a little harder, as PFCs are not routinely issued pistols, but the expedition to Siberia was a complete mess from start to finish. I'm quite sure that anything and everything was available and he just picked one up, perhaps as part of guard detail for the POWs. Then it was just a matter of keeping his mouth shut about it and keeping it in the bottom of the duffel. There are *loads* of bring back 1911s and S&W and Colt 1917s that simply were written off as "lost in combat" that Doughboys simply kept on discharge. Military record keeping wasn't exactly a model of efficiency at the time, and even today the Army loses guns. I mean, they know about them now, but they still lose some every year. Most are lost in things like training accidents and the like-lost in the ocean, fallen out of aircraft, destroyed in vehicle accidents, that sort of thing, but every year more than a few simply...vanish. GIs have a long and colorful history of stealing anything from oranges to bulldozers and cargo planes, so it's not surprising.

@@cammobunker Different country, but my grandfather got issued a Norwegian Colt by accident during the panicked scramble in 1940. He stood in the wrong line and got issued officer's kit, then realized his mistake and quietly sidled over to the line for enlisted and got issued a rifle as well. Pretty sure many militaries through the ages have lost track of weaponry in wartime.

@@cammobunker what about bulldozers and cargo planes?)