S. Berliner, III's sbiii.com ORDNANCE Page 1
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Updated:
24 Jun 2010, 06:55
ET
[Page created 12 Feb 2002;
[original AT&T Worldnet Website begun 30 May 1996.]
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URL:
http://sbiii.com/ordnanc1.html
[was at "home.att.net/~Berliner-Ultrasonics/ordnanc1.html"]
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S. Berliner, III
Consultant in Ultrasonic Processing
"changing materials with high-intensity sound"
|
[consultation is on a fee basis]
Technical and Historical Writer, Oral Historian
Popularizer of Science and Technology
Rail, Auto, Air, Ordnance, and Model Enthusiast
Light-weight Linguist, Lay Minister, and Putative Philosopher
- The vast bulk of my massive Web presence (over 485 pages) had been hosted by AT&T's WorldNet service since 30 May 1996;
they dropped WorldNet effective 31 Mar 2010 and I have been scrambling to transfer everything. Everything's saved but all the links have to be changed,
mostly by hand. See my sbiii.com Transfer Page for any updates on this tedious process.
sbiii.com
ORDNANCE Page 1
This continues on ORDNANCE Continuation Page 2.
Please refer to the HELP section on Continuation Page 3.
INDEX:
On the Main Ordnance Page:
"Jeep" vs. "GP"
(11 Jan 10)
Unindexed ORDNANCE APOCRYPHA, below
On the Ordnance Continuation Page 0:
ORDNANCE APOCRYPHA
(combined here from the Main Page and Continuation Pages 1 and 2 on 18 Dec 2006).
On this Ordnance Continuation Page 1:
MORE ORDNANCE APOCRYPHA
(Moved from Ordnance Page 2 on 12 Feb 2002).
On the Ordnance Continuation Page 2:
RAILROAD GUNS.
SMALL ARMS.
On Ordnance Continuation Page 3:
CALIBER (Calibre).
Anzio Annie
SMALL ARMS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Russian Armor
HELP!
On Ordnance Continuation Page 4:
MISFIRES, HANGFIRES, and JAMS
Drake Cannon
Coastal Defense Guns at Fort Casey
M274 Mechanical Mule
On the Atomic Cannon Page:
ATOMIC CANNON
Atomic Cannon CQ (Seek You = HELP!)
On the Atomic Cannon Continuation Page 1:
Atomic Cannon in Asia!
Ordnance Models Page.
The Ordnance Supergun Page
Comet Metal Products Authenticast Models Page.
-
WWII tank ID plates and nameplates available on cont. page 2!
-
(The Cannons of the Apocalypse) is a site covering all the giant guns of WWI
and WWII; it is absolutely incredible! The only catch is that it is seulement
en français (entirely in French). The Google translation is awful; if you can
struggle through in French, give a go; otherwise just use the cannon shells at the top
and bottom (left is back, right is forward) to navigate and enjoy the fabulous pictures.
You'll find the Paris gun, Big Bertha, the K-5 and K-12, Dora, our 280, and the HARP and
Saddam (Bull) guns, and far more!
As noted on the main Ordnance page, army ordnance buffs should visit the Ordnance Museum at Aberdeen Proving Ground off Routes 40 and I95 just south of Havre de Grâce and the Susquehanna River Toll Bridge - very much worth the time (and allow plenty of that, in proportion to your interest!). There are acres of tanks and armored vehicles, domestic and foreign, of all eras, Anzio Annie, a 280mm Atomic Cannon, a 16" coastal defence gun, a V1 buzz bomb and a V2 rocket, and a great indoor museum with a fine small arms collection! This fabulous museum is an absolute must for the ordnance devotée! More about the Museum and its history is on the main Ordnance page.
Entrance to the Museum is from the main gate on Route 40 just south of Aberdeen and one rides in along an "Avenue of Tanks", the center strip of a divided highway. Among the more classic WWI, WWII, and later vehicles, are this 1941 M3A1 General Grant* (the British General Lee* was a similar tank without the high .50 cal. turret atop the middle 37mm turret) and a 1942 M4A4 Sherman, plus, just for comparison, an M4 sitting outside the Roberts-Glad VFW Post 1727 in Aitken, Minnesota:
(Ordnance Museum Foundation Photos - left and center / Aitken Independant Age - by permission - right)
Note that the return rollers on the M3 are centered above the vertical-volute-spring bogies (as also applied to early M4s) while those on the Aitken M4 are offset to the rear and that the APG M4A4 has the later horizontal spring suspension; these show the three distinct types applied to the M4-series.
* - Uh, oh! Icks (1945, pp. 52 & 111/140 - see Ordnance Bibliography on Page 3) reverses these and says the American tank with the third turret was a Lee and the British tank was a Grant - that's not how I remember it nor how the Museum labelled it.
This is the Ordnance Museum from the air, looking north; the main building is in the upper left, the "Avenue of Tanks" along the road from the main entrance is out of sight at the bottom left, the 16" coastal defence gun (marked "A") in the lower left center, and Anzio Annie ("B") and the Atomic Cannon ("C") just off the image to the left as marked.
(altered from Ordnance Museum Foundation Photo)
Here is Anzio Annie (the 280mm German "Leopold" K5 railroad gun - see also below) before she came to APG:
(Ordnance Museum Foundation Photo)
and as she sits on a scrap of track now:
(Ordnance Museum Foundation Photos)
[More on Anzio Annie on Page 3.]
See also the The Patton Museum of Calvary and Armor at Ft. Knox in Radcliff, Kentucky; it features the evolution of Armor and includes exhibits of armored vehicles.
MORE ORDNANCE APOCRYPHA
[Additional unindexed Ordnance apocrypha was moved from here to:
Ordnance Continuation Page 0 on 18 Dec
2006.]
GE made an armored boxcab locomotive in Oct-Nov 1918, too late to see service in France and I didn't
seem to know anything about it! As a railroad nut, as well, and especially
as an early boxcab locomotive "expert" (freak?), I should.
Well, I finally ran across a photo of that 1918 Army unit, on page 140 of "Diesel Locomotives: The First
50 Years - A Guide to Diesels Built Before 1972, by Louis A. Marre, Railroad Reference Series No. 10,
Kalmbach Publishing Corp., 1995, ISBN 0-89024-258-5.
Further, a correspondent reports that one of the Canadian National Railroad's early diesel locomotives may
have ended up pulling an armored train during WWII on the West Coast of Canada; he's not sure if it's one of
the two boxcab engines in a rail museum south of Montréal (which I'd visited many years past, couldn't find
hide nor hair of recently, and finally located at St. Constant/Delson - check my
BOXCABS page for news). However, a Canadian correspondent writes that it just ain't so; we shall
see.
See Ordnance page 2 for RAILROAD GUNS and
ATOMIC CANNON.
See Ordnance page 3 for Russian Armor, with a link to a Dutch site and a
Kiev museum with a twin-122mm-turreted armored railcar,
and HELP!, where I post inquiries (or offers) solely at my own
discretion.
Chrysler did an enormous
amount of war work in the 1940s, but their 1940s
Heritage pages have errors:
For the 1940s, they state that war production included "Pershing tanks and 40mm trailer-mounted antiaircraft
guns". They produced thousands of M3 Grant/Lee and M4 Sherman tanks, which won the war; the Pershing
only came along at the very end. The 40mm towed mount was not trailer-mounted but had integral
retractable road gear.
I could swear I had this up on these or the Chrysler pages but can't find it,
so here we go again (in both places):
Speaking of Chrysler, as noted on my Chrysler page 2, when engines were hard
to come by during WWII, Chrysler also fitted one of the M4 Sherman medium tank series (the Canadian
Sherman V) with the really-strange A57 motor made from five (5) readily-available Royal 6
L-head engine blocks and heads, arranged in "W" fashion [ _\|/_], with a common
crankcase and crankshaft, sort of like a weird cross between a radial and an in-line aircraft engine; here,
courtesy of David Zatz's allpar.com site, it is at the Walter P. Chrysler
Museum:
(Bob Sheaves photo courtesy of D. Zatz - all rights reserved.)
[Image artificially lightened by SB,III to bring out
detail]
[The photos from Don Dingwall's former Canadian AFV site (now a
commercial AFV markings site), two old WWII photos of an A57 changeout (from the Public Archives of Canada)
have vanished (as has Don's Sherman page)
and can not (so far) be replaced.]
The photos
which formerly were posted here
were taken when Sherman V s/n T-146576 "ANT" of the A Squadron, the Calgary Regiment, was
being serviced with a Scammell wrecker of the 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade at their workshop in October
1943 (probably on the toe of the Italian boot in Calabria shortly after the landing). In the first
photo (how often do you get to look into the empty engine compartment of an M4 these days?), you
could clearly make out the bottom left and intermediate left flat heads, with their exposed spark(ing) plugs and the
giant radiator to the right; this latter showed all too well in the lower photo,
hiding the entire rest of the engine (will you look at the slack in that track?). Don noted that ANT
was one of the original tanks that came to the Italian front from the UK with the regiment; I assume that the
dented idler wheel is from the right track and may well have something to do with why the engine needed
replacement. {Actually, this looked more like heavy repair than a changeout to me.}]
{These photos, and possibly more, have been located,
courtesy of the Library of Canada,
and should reappear here shortly.}
Can anyone out there please supply a Chrysler or Ordnance
cross-section drawing or diagram of the A57 engine?
Chrysler's Dodge Division made all sorts of vehicles during the WWII (including a very odd
amphibian truck, the Cheetah); perhaps their most famous vehicle was their
¾-ton truck, used variously as a personnel carrier, weapons carrier, ambulance, radio truck, and
open command car. My personal favorite was always the closed vehicle, like a giant station wagon, which
became known after the war in civilian guise as the Dodge Power Wagon
"Carry-All". I always wanted one, couldn't justify one, and never did get one until, at a
Greenberg's Train Show on 23 Mar 2002 in Stony Brook, Long Island, NY, I casually asked a dealer in
military models if anyone had ever made a model of that particular body style. His response was, "You
mean like that one?" and there it was in all its glory in (I assume) 1:35 scale; far too much cash changed
hands and:
(02 Oct 2004 Photos by and © 2002 S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved;
replacing 25 Mar 2002 photos which vanished.)
This is a custom French model by Verem S.A. of Beuil, France, with a Dodge WC53 resin body on a chassis marked:
DODGE WC54 1/5 1989 solido
MADE IN FRANCE
it had fine decals on it which were curling up and I was rather angry until the dealer assured me that this
was a 10-year-old collectors item and that Solvaset or equivalent would soften the decals and snug them back
down since they were not brittle. The Solvaset caused the decals to disintegrate, so, collectors item
or no, I removed the lot since I am neither a collector nor a purist (at least not in this regard) and they
were very poorly applied in the first place. This dealer also told me that the dark paint vs. the lighter
paint had to do with commercial models; horse puckies! The Solido grille, wheels, and underbody are also that
lighter shade (exaggerated in the photos) and so is the sprue of long and short whip antennae
(which don't fit the socket) included in the box, which is hot stamped "REF. V 4006 DODGE WC53".
Regardless, I have it and I love it and, even if I can't ride around in it, I can enjoy the sight
of it in front of me every day.
Verrrry interesting! Just how is either side door to open?
That same dealer, who turns out to be Carmelo Sancetta, d/b/a Northern Spur Trains, was at the Greenberg show at Hofstra University on 23 Oct 04 and, while not on the Net, accepts mail orders:
Carmelo Sancetta
P. O. Box 1286-M
Bay Shore, New York 11706-0537
631-666-6855
He says stock on the Carry-All is getting very low.
See the Dodge Power Wagon section
for much more on these vehicles.
[Additional unindexed Ordnance apocrypha was moved from here to:
Ordnance Continuation Page 0 on 18 Dec
2006.]
(19 Dec 06)
(Ordnance apocrypha continued on
Ordnance Continuation Page 1)
More on the 280mm Atomic Cannon - continued:
Hal Hildebrecht (haltrvlr@aol.com) from
Cleveland, Ohio, wrote 27 Sep 02 that he was with the 868 FA BN at Fort Bragg and
Baumholder, Germany, from 1953 to 1956 with the 280mm Atomic Cannon, serving as
driver, cannoneer, artillery mechanic, and finally Section Chief. He used to fire
the piece with a 3' rope and then ride the carriage back into battery (nuts, just like
me!) and is still surprised he can hear anything today. He wrote again on
03 Oct 02 that may he have started the "Atomic Annie" nickname by painting names
and pictures on all the battalian guns, Atomic Annie (with a witch riding a shell), L'il
Ajax, Ye Olde Ironsides, etc. His gun appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in
October, 1953, and the name may have stuck from that.
Hal sent pictures but I couldn't download them; stay tuned.
Hal is the guy who has a copy of that picture of an inverted 280 with all the wheels in
the air, after turning turtle in Germany; can't wait to see it again after all these years!
He also still has his 1958 Renwal model and sent a slew of pix; unfortunately, the
lighting was poor, so I'll only show a representative few, cropped and at much lower
resolution:
(Cropped and altered from photos by H. Hildebrecht - all rights reserved)
(Cropped and altered from photos by H. Hildebrecht - all rights reserved)
There is a kit on eBay as I write this (03 Mar 03), Item #3117941072, already over
$150.00(!) with 8 hours to go! Ludicrously, it's listed under
"Toys & Hobbies:Models:Military:Air! Hot, maybe.
Here's a stein from C Battery, 265th Field Artillery Battalion in Baumholder, 1955-58:
[eBay Item #2160347750 - photos by, and with permission of, A. W. (seller), NL - all rights reserved.]
The stein is 9" high and bears the shield of the 265th, reading "Optimus Peromnia".
Incidentally, the 280 (11") is an odd caliber; the U. S. Army has (or had) a standard
series of gun carriages and gun motor carriages in which the long gun and
corresponding short howitzer shared all components except barrel, ammo, recoil, and
equilibration. They are (or were):
Gun How.
3"/76mm 105mm (4.1")
105/120mm (4.1/3.7") 155mm (6.1")
155/175mm (6.1/6.9") 8" (203mm)
8" 240mm (9.5")
Those last two monsters were never in volume production, especially not as S.P.s
(although operating and firing those brutes was impressive, to say the least!).
Gotta admit, though, I'm not REALLY sure where the 155mm Howitzer fit in there.
Not at all incidentally (it wasn't called the Atomic Cannon or Atomic Annie
for nothing you know, this is what it was all about:
(Photo courtesy of Les Canons de l'Apocalypse - all rights reserved)
This was on 25 May 1953, when gun #9 fired the only live round ever, a 15 Kiloton
weapon, at a distance of 17 miles (27 km) at the Nevada atomic test site (as best as
I recall, this was the idiotic exercise where real, live (then) soldiers participated and
were sent into the base of the mushroom cloud {wonder how they are today? -
SB,III}.
I worked on the 175mm gun at Aberdeen in the early '50s, both as a towed mount
almost identical to the 280 (when deployed), just a good bit smaller, and as an S.P.
(or possibly still called a G.M.C. - Gun Motor Carriage); the latter was fitted in a
beefed-up 155mm gun carriage, the old experimental model with a fully-enclosed
armored cab on an armored chassis (wonder where my scale model went?) and was
the T-162 (I believe). They and their 8" howitzer equivalent never were
adopted (nuclear protection ceased to be a major factor) and smaller, lighter,
unarmored, open S.P. mounts were standardized - the M-109 (155mm gun), M-107
(175mm gun), and M-110 (8"/203mm howitzer). The whole point of the 175
was to fire a miniaturized atomic shell and we called her the "Baby Atomic Cannon"
(some Baby!) and the enclosed mount was supposed to have provided blast, flash,
and radiation shielding (HA - shows what they knew!).
If anyone out there has photos of the old enclosed 175 (T-162?),
PLEASE send it/them to me!
[Looks like I found "her" (there apparently were three T-162 units built) at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma;
pictures should follow,]
(24 Jun 2010)
I found three fantastic sites with coverage of the 280 and of AFVs and also one with
coverage of superguns; I started a
separate page on the latter. The sites are:
Les Canons de l'Apocalypse (The Cannons of the Apocalypse), in French, as noted above,
AFV Database, and
JED Military Enthusiasts Directory
and
Encyclopedia Astronautica - Gun-Launched.
There were superguns on rails in our Civil War; the Confederates had a monster
naval rifle on a rail car that operated on the newly-fledged Richmond & York Valley
Railroad (later the West Point Branch of the Southern):
It was a rifled and banded 32 pounder (15") weighing over 3 tons and was
apparently the first railroad gun to see combat. Countering that was the
Union's "Dictator," a 13-inch mortar operated around Petersburg just before the
Appomatox surrender and it fired a 200 pound shell some three miles or more:
(Cropped images and data from Southern
Railfan.)
The ORDNANCE page had to be split; this is a continuation of the ORDNANCE Main Page
and, in turn, continues on ORDNANCE Continuation Page 2 and
ORDNANCE Continuation Page 3.
LEGACY
What happens to all this when I DIE or (heaven forfend!)
lose interest? See LEGACY.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
See Copyright Notice on primary home page.
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