B17 bailout exits
While everyone is showing THEIRS off I might as well show mine. The top is the .380 and the bottom the .32. Nearly useless. 100 year old hunks of metal. I think they had to gnaw them out of used horseshoes with their teeth.
The one to the side is really useless. It's a cheap wartime production gun, not even a Colt. Made by Ithaca. They were so bad they didn't get to make many. This one was obviously just for show so they gave it to a kid in the Eight Air Force who wasn't smart enough to be a pilot or a navigator or bombadier. They just let him shoot the guns on the very lowest part of a B17, down in the ball turrent. Hell, in 30+ missions he never even shot this pistol once. Even when they got shot down over France and collected up by drunk Frenchmen he didn't get to shoot it, though they were surrounded by German soldiers. It was such an awful gun that the French didn't even take it from him and he still had it when the American advance liberated the village he was hiding in. Still had the bullets they gave him for it in England, some old coppery looking St Louis Arsenal 1943 slugs when he gave it to me 60 years later. Hardly a combat war pistol at all.
So there, you cheap, old pistol people! Hell. I got cheap old pistols too!
5 comments:
Yep, so old and so cheap that I will make you pay the freight to ship them to me (Let me know your address so that I can send you a copy of my C&R).
You don't store them in those plastic bags, do you?
The pistol: cheap as hell.
The history is a whole 'nother matter.
That's a great story.
Jerry beat me to it... And yes, that is a great story! That makes that cheap old pistol priceless...
Drool.....
I have one like that, the even more common Remington Rand, issued to my dad at Westover Field, Mass in 1944 - it traveled via B-24 to Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, Wales, and on to Marrakesh where it was finally fired at the range, 5 magazines worth! From there to Naples where it was later stuffed in a dufflebag and booked on a liberty ship back to the states.
It has had 35 rounds through it, there are 15 rounds left in the box of ammo he was issued with it.
7 of those are going to be fired in salute of the old Tailgunner when he takes his last ride. I hope it is quite a few years hence.
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