Minigun, just because

Sometimes I miss playing with cool military toys! Enjoy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BPNEFyWeBs

Guy

I miss "Direct Fire" with 105s, 155s and the 8" Howitzers, ha!

preacher":1qtg4g0g said:

I miss "Direct Fire" with 105s, 155s and the 8" Howitzers, ha!

Click to expand...

As a young First Lieutenant I was in charge of putting on a "Final Protective Fire" demonstration, on Okinawa. We had one of the old 155mm howitzers right there in our company defensive position!

About 800 meters out, the target was a conex box... Those arty guys blew the snot out of that box with a first round hit!

It was a pretty good "mad moment" with everything firing from M-16's up to the 155.

A Japanese Admiral was the senior person viewing the demonstration. I asked him if he had any questions about our defensive preparations and he replied "Lieutenant, I have seen this before, long ago."

Oh my! A rare WWII survivor from the Japanese military machine... Then 40 years later, I'm giving him a demonstration on how a defensive position is prepared? Right... those guys were masters at that!

Later, I was able to spend a day hiking around on Iwo Jima, and went into a WWII Japanese bunker, where there were huge holes, facing the sea. Looked up the history and one of our cruisers had come in to around 800 yards and applied direct fire, I think with 8" guns, to silence that bunker & arty position. Direct fire with big guns is scary stuff!

Tankers get to do a lot of that!

Guy

Awesome video. When I was on our SRT team I had issued to me an H&K fully auto .223. It was a hoot to shoot.

Guy- in Germany we got all set up for a Corp "Time on Target". We got everything set up and they left a Gunner & Section Chief ( E6) on each gun, trucked the rest of us to our respective part of observation bleachers all around the Impact Zone. At the "precise time", 80 rounds of 8" arty all hit within 2 minutes of an area the size of a football field, which had a bunch of old trucks, and stuff. It sounded wonderful! before the 2 minutes were up we were all standing & cheering ( ah, to be 19 again!) when the smoke cleared there was ....nothing. I can't imagine what WW1 bombardments were like! "Steel on Target, Sir"!! ha

80 rounds of 8" in that size area must have been impressive!

Guy, a very good friend of mine (on the job with me) spent a good number of hours in a chopper flying over the Vietnam jungle as a door gunner with first an M60 and then a minigun. He commented that the minigun cleaned your "ammo can" out quickly but certainly did cause the people on the other end to duck their heads. I served as a point man on my DE's forward 3"X50 mount and pulling the trigger certainly didn't help your hearing and although it wasn't an overly large round it was very impressive on the receiving end. On a cruise down to South America we played "target ship" with a heavy cruiser from the Chilean Navy. The cruiser touched one of her (I believe it was an 8" gun) off from about 4-5 miles away. I saw the puff of smoke through my binnoculars, actually heard the round as it closed in and then watched as it hit the water about 2-300 yards in front of us on a perfect direct line off our bow. I was impressed to say the least. (some things you never forget).