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Re: New toy!
Made up that the Vickers fan club is alive and well. The rate of fire seemed to many blokes we were supporting to be a bit slow, but it was set not to zip through ammo supplies, we are after all airborne troops and can only fire what we jump with. Some may remember a daft preparation we were involved with for a Bn jump in to (I think ) Radfan (22 did it eventually), we paraded with kit and after each parade we were given yet another liner of ammo, my 'personal weapon' was a .303 (as a No 1 on the Vickers with tripod, dial sight and other bits of shit hanging off me). No complaints, but was not looking forward to a long 'prepare for action'. We could greatly increase the rate of fire by fiddling round with the recoil spring, less asbestos packing on the barrel, and some other stuff til it sounded like the Kraut WW2 MG, but pissed through the ammo. Had to watch that if it overheated the steam from the condenser tube/can gave your position away. I think that the WW2 SNCO's we had trained us to a very high standard. German army general came to watch us live firing on Salisbury at night, 6 guns hit every target, we dismantled and reassembled 17 piece locks blindfolded, and changed barrels during firing with hardly a change of firing rate. Kraut figured it was as good a demo he had ever seen of machine gun fire and handling and he went through WW2 in Russia. Some hat CO's were pissed off. We took a pride in what we did.
Made up that the Vickers fan club is alive and well. The rate of fire seemed to many blokes we were supporting to be a bit slow, but it was set not to zip through ammo supplies, we are after all airborne troops and can only fire what we jump with. Some may remember a daft preparation we were involved with for a Bn jump in to (I think ) Radfan (22 did it eventually), we paraded with kit and after each parade we were given yet another liner of ammo, my 'personal weapon' was a .303 (as a No 1 on the Vickers with tripod, dial sight and other bits of shit hanging off me). No complaints, but was not looking forward to a long 'prepare for action'. We could greatly increase the rate of fire by fiddling round with the recoil spring, less asbestos packing on the barrel, and some other stuff til it sounded like the Kraut WW2 MG, but pissed through the ammo. Had to watch that if it overheated the steam from the condenser tube/can gave your position away. I think that the WW2 SNCO's we had trained us to a very high standard. German army general came to watch us live firing on Salisbury at night, 6 guns hit every target, we dismantled and reassembled 17 piece locks blindfolded, and changed barrels during firing with hardly a change of firing rate. Kraut figured it was as good a demo he had ever seen of machine gun fire and handling and he went through WW2 in Russia. Some hat CO's were pissed off. We took a pride in what we did.
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