I think some brutality match would be much better. Especially in such division he was in in the last Finnish Brutality, having to run 5km (or something, don't remember the exact value) after each stage in full load.
Yes, but as any NCO worth their salt should know: those pesky recruits we consider to be our children from a mother we never fraternised with, but which we have to care for anyways _will_ always find a way to misuse such things to e.g. nap on duty. Because let's be honest: the majority of us senior/retired NCO's do know all of those tricks for one reason - because we did them ourselves when we were still young and stupid, but were lucky enough to get away with it until the powers that be (in their infinite wisdom) did promote us high enough to understand at long last that with great power comes great responsibility, innit?
The “Eve of Destruction” is a modified 5 ton truck used in Vietnam for convoy protection. The M60 was authorized to be used on it, but one of those soldiers must have had prior naval service because they Strategically Transferred Equipment to an Alternate Location and had one of these naval dual 50 pedestal mounts in the back of their truck, so that when their convoys were ambushed they’d just turn their truck sideways and give the forest (and the VC hiding in it) a broadside.
@@johndododoe1411 Not a "Broadside" unless you're sideways. But seriously turning sideways would mean you could use the full elevation of the guns... otherwise the guys in the cab would be less than pleased.
I live in the Philly area, and sometimes I forget how important this area was to America's industrial and military growth throughout the industrial revolution.
I'm from the west coast and did a driving tour of the east coast. Out of all the cities I went to Philly seemed just depressing. Despite being an old city the downtown was not lively like Chicago or New York. The architecture is nice and I love the history but I would not want to live there. Still better than Baltimore!
I mean, isn't that what a sling is, technically? A strap of material to keep the gun and the operator attached to one another, and to assist with the ergonomics of aiming?
Perhaps the most acrobatic Forgotten Weapons video I have seen. I must commend Ian for his willingness to go below and above and around and below and across the floor and beyond on this one.
Hopefully they let you know take it out to the range. My grandfather served it wwII. He was assigned to a quad 50 crew. I saw pictures of him with it when i was a kid. It was probably the most impressive gun I have ever seen.
@@JohnSmith-yv6eq dunno man, it's much more top-heavy (and heavier in general, that armor plate isn't light at all) than the average MG mounted on a toyota pickup
I find it funny that the M2 Browning evolved from the M1919 which again was based on an air-cooled version of the water-cooled M1917 machine gun. And now it feels like we're back again to the water-cooler M1917 except in .50 BMG.
Much of air cooled or water cooled is a function of rate of fire and sustainability. The water cooled guns typically have lighter barrels, which with water cooling allows them to fire faster, for longer. The air cooled guns have heavier barrels, which slows the rate of fire. The .30 water cooled guns can be man carried, at least for short distances, but by the time you get to 50 cal, the gun and the mount need either a vehicle or a ship to carry them.
There were a small number of water cooled .50s in Army service. Airborne had a few, oddly enough, they were used in a single mount for AA use. Light barrel and bolt for high rate of fire, water cooled barrel for sustainable fire.
This is one of the beautiful parts of massed standardization when you went to make this kind of modification you only have to do it for the one system so you can do it right in fewer total tries.
Ironically they weren't that useful. Heavier AA like the 40mm Bofors were much more effective, or even the 5" dual purpose with proximity fused ammunition. It was discovered fairly early on that light AA wasn't that good. You could eventually take out an enemy aircraft, but likely after it had dropped its bombs.
In the Blues Brothers when they broke into city hall with every cop in Illinois chasing them the national guard showed up and pointed one those guns at the building for some reason. It's only onscreen for a second but you can clearly see it.
My grandfather was part of the 102nd Coast Artillery Brigade (Anti-Aircraft), When I looked it up a while back, his company was armed with the M2(WC) and they had 72 of them in the company. The armory he was stationed at is still in service on Staten Island
Please, please let Morphy's wheel that out to their range so we can see Ian blaze away on it. Though I know that'll never happen, thanks to them for letting Ian show it to us. It's beautifully restored & looks factory mint bar a few dings on the water jackets. Whoever buys it is going to be very, very happy indeed.
It won't be airbrake hoses.Like hydraulic hose, the airbrake hose is too unyielding to offer up ANY comfort to a shoulder. Almost any non-reinforced Heavy-Duty hose would offer sufficient cushioning and therefore do the job.
Wow! That's the same gun my father used during the war. He later moved to the air cooled type. He almost never used the sights, he instead used the tracers and the round sight to get on target. He also put washers in the guns to speed up rate of fire. He shot down a number of Japanese with the guns.
The army would also pair the twin 50s with a semiautomatic 37mm as a halftrack mounted CGMC ( Combination Gun Motor Carraige) antiaircraft gun. The first ones used the water cooled guns, as the M15 CGMC. Later versions switched to the air cooled .50s as the M15A1 CGMC.
@@traitorouskin7492 on the same mount. I've seen 2 configurations. One with the 50s to the side and slightly above and one with the 50s to the side but slightly below.
@@traitorouskin7492 on the M15 CGMC, the water cooled .50s were mounted above the 37mm. The M15A1 reversed this, and placed the .50s below. I believe this was at least in part to reduce stress on the mount. The air cooled guns also eliminated the need to provide water, as well as the maintenance requirements of the cooling jackets.
If I bought this, I would take better care of it than my family. 😂😂😂 No, seriously, it would definitely be babied. Like the Pharaohs of old, it would be buried with me and join me in the afterlife.
These were effectively obsolete for naval AA use when the war started. The .50 cal is too short ranged in an AA role to reach an aircraft before it has dropped whatever explosive payload it is carrying. Even the 20 mm Oerlikon gun (which Texas has in abundance) is mostly good only for shooting at planes as they drop. If you want to prevent a plane from dropping explosive items on you, you want a quad 40mm Bofors gun mount or better yet (though too late for WWII) a 3 inch/55 automatic twin mount with VT proximity fused ammo.
I was always curious about this version, after Ian told in a video that the M2 had heavy barrel (the standard one), air cooled (seen in airplanes), and water cooled configurations. Now it's here, and it's glorious
Wow I guess I assumed that it was just the mount. With the 2 transferable M2s is crazy. I guess if you can afford this you might actually be able to shoot a volume of .50 cal worthy of a water cooled MG
Oh man....gonna keep my eye on this auction cause it comes with that mount and 2 fully transferable water cool .50's this is gonna be awesome to see!! Hopefully we can get some footage of this setup roaring away from either you or the new owner. 400 round mag dump!!
Great content as always, but I can’t wait for you to get your hands on and film one of the quad .50 mounts! I’d love to see the mechanical elements that make that work!
I remember reading that the water cooled 50 cals you were able to have water continuously pump in instead of relying on a condensation can I guess that was an option for the Navy being on ships I wonder if they had the same type of setup for the 1917 Browning water cooled 30 cal.
Yup, someone is gonna end up paying over 100 grand for this and he's gonna love every minute of firing it. Too bad he probably won't have any aircraft to shoot at, but I guess if you can afford a pair of rare transferrable watercooled Browning .50 cal machine guns, you can afford a budget of target drones to shoot down with it as well. Where would it be safe and legal to fire something with the range and lethality of .50 BMG up into the air though? Seems like you'd need a spotting drone just to be sure your "range" was actually safe xD
I remember a bit of mind-bending when I first saw a water-cooled .50... I wish you had gone a bit into the cooling system; was there an evaporator can on the mount??
Those are designed to be used on ships, they just pump sea water right trough the cooling jackets. When they were mounted on land they pumped water from the sea, in the case of coastal defenses, from rivers or even out of the local water pipelines.
Yestertech is always fascinating. Everything is thought out, the engineering is detailed and precise, the quality of manufacture is high, which are all typical of American industry during this era.
I had a mark 22.5 hbt that was later reclassified as a mark 2.54 hat because they put shoe laces on the right rear side. Then a new general renamed it as a mark 1, KA which stands for 'kick-ass' but was later changed to....
This is one of the best explanations I have seen on an antiaircraft ring sight. The ring sight, combined with the adjustable crosshairs and tracers loaded as every fifth round in the belt, made calculating the lead much more intuitive and less reliant on precise sights and math that went into teaching gunners and making sights. Since most of the planes were attacking the ship, lead was often not the problem it could be for ground-based antiaircraft guns pass shooting high-flying planes. Dad told me in WW II some duck, and bird hunters had high hit rates the first day and got better fast, while some never hit a target.
A lot of the air gunners who shot waterfowl and skeet during civilian life proved very adept at deflection shooting of enemy aircraft from their bombers. Your dad probably met a few similar anti-aircraft sharpshooters.
Fired one at the last Albany machine gun festival in 2017. Being sprayed with this blackish water all over my face and clothing was a cool red badge of courage experience.
I get the feeling the "armor plate" was more about psychological protection rather than physical protection. That and the belt system helped keep a sailor in position when an enemy aircraft was shooting right at them.
Pretty cool. I've never seen one. As a former Navy Gunner's Mate, I don't remember one of those at the gun school in Great Lakes Illinois. My gun for eight years was a "Ma deuce". Been in a hot gun situation a couple of times. I'm curious what the sustained fire rate is with the water jackets.
Browning demonstrated them to the Army by firing two sets of 20,000 rounds without a jam. He then fired them continuously after that for 48 minutes and 12 seconds. If watered properly the sustained fire rate AND service life is practically indefinite. The air-cooled service life is a recommended 3,000 rounds.
Every time I see a certain auction house is having an Extraordinary Gun sale, I always take a look at the catalog to see what I hope Ian does videos of. This is definitely one I had marked.
@@leewilkinson6372 If only this was a WW1 weapon instead of WW2, we could hope to see a certain someone use his patented plastic pokey part. Though I doubt this would fit in the light box.
most likely not, remember, you have to have someone lifting and racking that case loaded with 250 cal rounds...I would guess the whole case loaded would tip the scales at around 90 lbs ( 30 lbs/100 rnds) so your looking at 75 lbs in just rnds add on 10 - 20 lbs for the ""case"and clips and there you have it 90 ish lbs and to hoist it up nearly over your head to load it too...
Some people might never heard of this game but I think Brick Force got inspiration from this for their turrets in game R.I.P Brick Force. Shitty p2w game but still my childhood
I understand the FAA won't let you mount guns to aircraft (or fly with them mounted, specifically) but I wonder how the Coast Guard would feel about you mounting this to your pleasure yacht 🤔
US vessels over a certain size are eligible to be called up as a naval auxiliary during times of war. With this dualie mounted on the foredeck, your former super-yacht would be ready for service on day one.
I'm not even jealous. I just want to watch it at the range. Watching 2000$ in ammo just disappear would be fun on it's own. Assuming they think 400 rounds is enough for one day.
They had semicircular platforms around the gun a gunner could stand on. Was kind of like a bench around a tree type of a deal. If you were firing elevated you could be on the deck or depressed up on the platform.
I’ve studied WW2, I think, since I was able to read. I knew all about ships’ armament, but I really never knew just how sophisticated these .50 cal. Guns were. I guess I just assumed they were only guns mounted on a traversing platform. And having served in the Army, I was used to the simple M2 guns standard to that service. I did not know, for instance that the “spider” sights had any kind of specific calibration. Thanks for sharing. P.S. What does an apparatus like this typically cost? I’m assuming-past the fact that there are not one, but TWO machine guns, that the bids will near the seven-figure threshold. Can you clue me in?
@@justforever96 I know someone who collects guns like these. The auction price of the item is only the beginning. There are two schools of thought here: "It was made to stand up to abuse, so let's go fire it;" and, "when it's gone, it's gone." The person I know belongs to the latter group and spends far more in a given year making sure their gun vault is temperature and humidity controlled like a wine cellar than they do on ammo. Taking a machine gun out was a special occasion to celebrate that item, not just an excuse to dump mags (although we did that too). God this was years ago though. My point is that someone who spends a quarter mil on an MG might easily spend another 100k or more on just the room that they store it in over the course of their lifetime depending on the type of collector they are.
In the Pacific against Kamikaze attacks you either knocked planes out of the sky or you went to the bottom of the sea. So people were pretty motivated. This is the smallest armament they'd be using. They'd also use 20 and 40 mm auto cannons and the 5" guns too. The 5" guns could score hits because they used proximity fuzes. For most of the war only the Navy got to use those. They were top secret.
I think an even cooler .50BMG mount was the quad M3s in B-52s controlled by the MD-9 visual and radar sight system. For the early models, the tail gunner sat back with the guns and, if the aircraft was going down, ejected the quad 50s before he could eject himself.
I'm still surprised the military doesn't use water cooled 50s. Would be a great vehicle weapon. With the water cooling (or an updated version [gallium?]) you could really crank up the fire rate.
Looks awesome. I got to see one of the quad .50s on display at an air/military museum recently (it was dismounted). It is pretty impressive with 4 x Ma Deuces, but this dual mount is still impressive itself. The big jackets on the barrels do it for me.
Ian, I've only very recently become aware, probably Tank Chats or Inside The Chieftain, of dual .50s mounted atop tanks, we're all familiar with the single AA .50 mount but the videos I watched was the 1st time I'd seen that configuration, I doubt any are still around, but was wondering if you were familiar with them and would they be worth a video as I'd bet they're pretty likely forgotten
Sometimes sailors didn't. I heard a story about one after a firefight that said, It's hot then jumped overboard. And no they didn't go back and get him either. He was never seen ever again.
