Posted on 03/17/2015 7:09:33 AM PDT by C19fan
Running around the battlefield with a rapid-firing, grenade-lobbing machine gun sounds like something Arnold Schwarzenegger would do in a movie. But in the 1960s, the U.S. Army experimented with one such weapon.
After introducing the crude but functional M-79 in the late 1950s, the ground combat branch saw fully automatic, 40-millimeter grenade launchers as the next logical step.
(Excerpt) Read more at medium.com ...
The M-79 had the same problem. The safety was a simple sliding shotgun type safety, very dangerous in heavy foliage and when maneuvering in rough terrain. Most units required grenadiers to keep the breech open which brought a new problem into play: how to keep the round from falling out of the breach. The M-203 addressed these issues, but was more bulky and awkward.
My main problem with the M-79 “blooper” was that you had to stick your whole head and shoulders out of cover to fire it and then wait interminable seconds to see if you hit what you were aiming at. Meanwhile, everybody on earth is shooting at the dummy with his head and shoulders out of cover.
The “safety slipping” problem was nonexistent - the safety was accidentally slipped when the M-79 gunner carried it over his shoulder like a squirrel hunter.
Has Obama provided these to the Mexican drug cartels yet?
Agree with your observations on firing positions, but not on the “non-existent” safety issue. Bamboo, wait an minute vines and any number of other flora could and did catch the safety.
I’m glad that you didn’t have any problems.
Agree with your observations on firing positions, but not on the “non-existent” safety issue. Bamboo, wait an minute vines and any number of other flora could and did catch the safety.
I’m glad that you didn’t have any problems.
I’m just glad they missed me all those times I had to fire the thing. We’d have been a hundred times better served if we’d had Japanese 50mm “knee mortars”. That thing fires from the prone, is deadly accurate out to 300m, and had a one pound warhead. Supposedly it accounted for 60 percent of our casualties in the Pacific War.
My younger brother served in the army in Vietnam and while he was firing the .50 on top of his track during an ambush, his squad leader accidentally fired his M-79 upward into my brother’s hip. The force threw him out of the track and onto the road and the track just kept going. The ARVN found him unconscious by the road and evacuated him to their hospital where they successfully removed the grenade from behind sandbags.
For some unknown reason, my brother stayed with the army until his retirement. My Marines would never have gone and left him like that.
Wouldn’t an automatic grenade launcher be limited by the number of rounds the soldier could carry?
40 millimeter?
They must mean .40 caliber....
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3268479/posts
Surely...
I had the sad duty of finding and recovering the bodies of two Marines who were killed in an ambush in Northern I Corps after my brigade replaced the 1st Marine Division. The fight was apparently confusing and difficult to sort out when it was all over.
We all like to think that we wouldn’t leave anyone, but some times things just turn ugly.
The American media did at least one front page story on one of those grenade removals, I wonder if it was your brother’s operation?
I don’t know if his operation was covered in the press - all I know was it was a Vietnamese doctor who did the operation. My brother Gilbert is adopted and he’s part Japanese, so they seemed to mistake him as one of their own when they found him. When he woke up after the operation, he yelled “what am I doing with all these g—k’s!?”. It was at that point that they realized that he was American.
He’ll always be my favorite brother.
If you were that far north, you were where we had the NVA to deal with and those were massive fights. The enemy never operated in smaller units than battalions.
Thank you to you and your unit for finding them.
Some people still think to this day that we were fighting a bunch of villagers in sandals and not a well equipped and well trained professional army. After we left, South Vietnam was overrun by 14 divisions, including armored divisions.
We had them in Vietnam. The M42 Duster. This was a twin barrel 40 mm mounted on a tank body. Originally meant for anti-aircraft defense it saw more use as hurling rounds at attacking Viet Cong and NVA.
They must mean .40 caliber....
we're talking grenades here not fire crackers.
During the Korean war the Duster and the Quad-50 traveled together and raked the Chinese hordes.
The M49 Duster was a fantastic and devastating antipersonnel weapon. Two Dusters, manned by army admin troops tore into an NVA battalion-sized ambush that wiped my battery’s supply convoy at the beginning of Tet and was moving to exterminate the survivors. Those two crews were able to chase off the NVA and carry our wounded out. Always wanted to know who those crews were - they were very heroic.
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