SMALL ARMS VS VEHICLES

 

 

The Gauntlet

Korea, Nov 28-30 1950

 

          By October of 1950 it seemed that the Korean War, begun on 25 June 1950 with a massive surprise invasion of the Republic of Korea (South) by the North Korean People’s Army, was all but over. American and ROK forces had just managed to hold onto the Pusan Perimeter in August but by September 15^th strong enough American and UN military forces had been gathered to launch two powerful counter-offensives by land and sea that soon became runaway successes. The North Korean capital of Pyongyang had fallen, the NKPA had virtually ceased to exist as an organized military force, and in places ROK and US forces had reached the Yalu River.

          Completely ignoring all evidence that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had already joined the fight, General Douglas MacArthur announced and kicked off his “Home by Christmas” Offensive to take over all of North Korea. In spite of UN air supremacy, the Chinese had in fact already infiltrated some thirty CPLA divisions numbering well over 300,000 men into North Korea and were waiting to strike. When they did, their offensive completely destroyed some major UN units of up to divisional strength and sent the rest reeling southwards in retreat.

          The U.S. Army’s 2^nd Infantry Division was one of the American units that was hit hard. Two Chinese Corps of six divisions had hit and decimated the two weak ROK divisions on the UN 8^th Army’s far right, turning the line and outflanking the 2^nd ID, which was soon under attack from multiple directions. Hoping to surround and cut off the 2^nd ID completely, the PVA 114^th Division infiltrated through the mountains to get behind the Americans and sever their only route of withdrawal, the road from Kuni-ri to Sunch’on.

All Chinese divisions of the era were heavy on manpower and small arms, but very light in heavy weapons and artillery while transport was virtually non-existent. In order to move rapidly through the rugged, roadless mountains, the 114^th Division had to leave their few heavy weapons behind and rely entirely upon their organic small arms and light mortars.

The Chinese did not actually build physical roadblocks or obstacles on the road but instead created fireblocks. These consisted of hastily-dug field fortifications manned by troops firing small arms and machine guns. With the road on the valley floor, the Chinese could occupy the high ground on both sides of it and fire down upon it without fear of friendly fire casualties. As their small arms crossfire knocked out jeeps and trucks, the disabled vehicles themselves became roadblocks.

When the hard-pressed 2^nd ID began its withdrawal, it was thought that there was only a single Chinese roadblock covered by a small number of troops. Instead, most of the 114^th Division was dug in on the high ground on both sides of the road for a distance of a little over five miles. American GIs came to call this stretch of road as the “Gauntlet”.

It was the Chinese machine guns that wrecked the most havoc. The vast majority of them were emplaced at ranges of from 300 to 500 yards. The guns were positioned to fire at right angles to the road, generally limiting their fields of traverse to about 30-degrees, and since they were located hundreds of feet in elevation higher than the road itself they could only deliver plunging fire. Even so, their fire proved devastating. The first four American vehicles in the retreating column were tanks, which the Chinese did not open fire on. When the tanks reported no enemy contact, the groups or “serials” of soft-skinned wheeled vehicles started down the road behind them, at which point the Chinese opened up with everything they had.

Some light, mostly 60-mm mortars, were also employed, and the accuracy of the Chinese mortarmen was generally very good, but the troops moving on foot through the mountains had only been able to pack in a limited amount of mortar bombs. The 114^th Division had a small handful of bazookas, but Marshall indicates that only ten or less bazooka rockets were fired at the 2^nd Infantry Division’s vehicles. Nor did the Chinese forces possess or use any artillery or demolitions.

The Chinese infantry’s submachine guns, rifles, and light machine guns combined did not seem to contribute as much to the destruction as the 20-30 heavy machine guns used. These were primarily water-cooled, belt-fed Soviet M-1910 Maxim guns mounted on tripods or two-wheeled Sokolov mounts, firing the rimmed Russian/Soviet 7.62x54R cartridge.

The Chinese gunners seem to have been using standard Type D Heavy Ball, a boat-tailed, lead-core 185-grain FMJ bullet, along the with standard Type T 148-grain tracer bullet which had a higher muzzle velocity and was, despite its lighter weight, supposed to match the trajectory of the Type D ball out to 1,200 meters. No sources mention Chinese use of any kind of armor-piercing ammunition. Marshall’s official report on the action does mention a very limited use of “explosive bullets”, which most likely refers to the 160-grain Type ZP Incendiary Ranging Bullet. A cavity in the nose of the bullet, ahead of the lead core and contained within the full metal jacket, contained an incendiary mixture ignited by a high explosive primer. The old Soviet manuals say the Type ZP was used for fire adjustment and could be used against unarmored fuel tanks on vehicles and aircraft but also noted, “A bullet of this type, hitting personnel, has the same effect as an explosive bullet.”

Even with only ball ammo, the Chinese machine guns took a terrible toll. The U.S. 2^nd Infantry Division suffered 4,037 casualties and lost most of its heavy weapons and approximately a third of its wheeled motor vehicles; the 5-mile stretch of road through the Gauntlet was littered with roughly 500 destroyed or disabled jeeps and trucks, the latter mainly 2-1/2-ton Deuce-and-a-Half 6x6s. Of the American vehicles that did manage to make it through the Gauntlet, Marshall noted that only one truck did not have any bullet holes in it. The Turkish Brigade, ambushed trying to open the southern end of the Gauntlet, lost fully 90% of its jeeps and trucks. It was reported that at least 80% of these vehicles had been knocked out solely by small arms and machine gun fire using 7.62x54R ball ammunition.

The aftermath of the 2^nd Infantry Division running the Chinese “Gauntlet” at Kunu-ri; the road is littered with wrecked and burned-out jeeps, 2-1/2-ton trucks, artillery pieces, and even a Sherman tank.

          Despite the lack of armor-piercing ammunition, Chinese 7.62x54R fire even destroyed numerous American light armored vehicles, primarily self-propelled anti-aircraft gun systems that also delivered significant direct anti-personnel fire in the Korean War. These were the M16 “Quad .50” Multiple Gun Motor Carriage, based on the WWII M3 White halftrack, with a maximum of a half an inch (12.7mm) of armor on the sides and front, and the M19 Gun Motor Carriage, twin 40-mm Bofors AA guns mounted on the M24 Chaffee light tank chassis, with similar armor thicknesses on the hull and gun shields. Originally intended as anti-aircraft weapons, neither vehicle had overhead armor on the crew compartment or weapons turret, and both suffered heavily from Chinese ball-ammo machine gun fire fired from higher elevations.

 

Fast Forward to 5.56x45mm small arms and

Baghdad, Iraq, 2004

“Jason Gillis, a former army staff sergeant, first witnessed the M855’s shortcomings in 2004 on the streets of Baghdad. He was a squad leader with 2^nd BCT, 82^nd Airborne Division, on patrol when a vehicle began speeding toward his unit. After several warnings, ‘both of our M249s opened up instantly, forming a crisscross pattern of tracer that met at the vehicle’s engine compartment and windshield. Within seconds, riflemen and grenadiers were executing magazine changes while the vehicle kept rolling and finally stopped 10 meters from my lead troops,’ Gillis recalled in an email to Army Times. He is now a free-lance writer who often focuses on military small-arms issues. ‘Assuming the driver was most likely riddled beyond recognition, we were all astounded to see the driver emerge from the vehicle completely unscathed,’ Gillis wrote. ‘Closer inspection revealed that the M855 ammunition had failed to effectively penetrate the vehicles windshield despite the fact that over 400 rounds were expended at extremely close range and on target.’ Other soldiers say they like the M855 because it is lightweight, but wish it had more punch. ‘The idea of being able to carry 210 rounds [basic load] is quickly overshadowed by the fact that it takes more than one and even more than two rounds to drop the enemy,’ Staff Sgt. Charles Kouri, 82^nd Airborne Division, told Army Times”

Yet another Iraq veteran offered this observation: “I have had the opportunity to fire an M249 using 62-grain M855 ball ammo into moving vehicles. While eventually having an effect upon the drivers/occupants, the 5.56mm round leaves much (original emphasis) to be desired as far as stopping a small pickup truck heading your way at high speed.”

SMALL ARMS VS AIRCRAFT

 

SAN CARLOS WATER, FALKLAND ISLANDS, MAY, 1982

COLD WAR ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUN

 

A little more than a month after the South Georgia Island battle in which 22 British Royal Marines shot down an Argentine SA 330 Puma medium helicopter and slugged it out with an Argentine Navy corvette, primarily with 7.62x51mm small arms,  a British landing force, escorted by frigates and destroyers, occupied a bay on East Falkland Island known as San Carlos Water. There, British Royal Marines and Paras went ashore to re-take the islands from the occupying Argentine forces. To British seamen who would undergo days of low-level bombing attacks by the Argentine Air Force, San Carlos Water quickly became known as “Bomb Alley.”

When the British began landing their own invasion force at San Carlos Water during the Falklands War, Argentine forces had their turn at bat and once more proved how deadly ground fire could be to helicopters.

First Lieutenant Carlos Estoban was in command of a platoon of men from C Company of the Argentine Army’s 25^th Infantry Regiment. Argentine Army infantry regiments were, at the time, composed almost entirely of conscripts, young men required to serve their one-year stint in the military to form a solid base of reservists. The conscripts had only begun their year of training in February and thus had only a few weeks of a real military training and service before their unit was rushed off the Falklands.

Estoban’s platoon numbered approximately forty men and, with the exception of his NCO squad leaders, they were all young, inexperienced, and only partially trained. They were armed entirely with Argentine versions of the FN FAL. The standard rifle was the FM FAL, FM designating the Fabrica Militar de Armas Portátiles Domingo Matheu, the small arms factory in Rosario where the Fabrique Nationale design was license-built. This standard FAL had polymer furniture and full-auto capability. They also had as their Squad Automatic Weapons the Argentine version of the FN Model 50.41 heavy-barreled FALO known as the FMAP. All weapons used the standard 20-round magazine.

The Royal Marines No. 3 Commando Brigade Air Squadron had Aérospatiale/Wessex AH1 Gazelle helicopters operating from the landing pads of Royal Navy ships. Successor to the famous Alouette series of light helicopters, the Gazelle entered service in 1973, was used by at least 23 countries around the globe, and up-graded versions remain in service to this day. Specifically for the Falklands conflict, these light 5-seat multi-role (utility, reconnaissance, attack) helicopters had been hastily fitted with improved armament and survivability features that were tested off Ascension Island en route to the Falklands. These included 12-tube pods for French-manufactured SNEB (Societe Nouvelle des Etablissements Edgar Brandt) 68-mm (2.68-inch) spin-stabilized unguided air-to-ground rockets, pairs of forward-firing 7.62x51mm GPMG machine guns, flotation gear for ditching at sea, and the addition of some armor plating to protect critical components. With a maximum payload of just over 2,000 pounds, however, the Gazelle could not carry much armor and for the sake of visibility the nose of the bird remained essentially a large plexiglass bubble and the sides of the crew cabin were largely plexiglass panels as well.

 

On 21 May, Gazelle XX411, crewed by pilot Sergeant Andy Evans and gunner Sergeant Eddie Candish, was escorting a Royal Navy Sea King HC4 helicopter that was carrying an Army Rapier anti-aircraft missile launcher via sling load to be emplaced ashore. The helicopters drifted too far inland towards Estoban’s position. Realizing the mistake first, the pilot of the Sea King banked back away towards the bay.

Before the Gazelle could follow suit, Estoban’s platoon opened fire on it with their 7.62x51mm automatic rifles and SAWS, scoring numerous hits all over the aircraft. Only the skill of Sergeant Evans as a pilot kept the bird from crashing. Although wounded himself by the small arms fire, he managed to limp the mortally wounded Gazelle back down to the bay where he was able to bring the chopper down quite gently onto the surface of the water. As Sergeant Candish helped to pull the wounded pilot towards shore, Argentine rifle fire splashed the water around them.

While Lieutenant Estoban pulled his platoon back up the hill to higher ground, another escort Gazelle, XX402 flew in along the hillside, parallel to the ridge, and unexpectedly approached to within 50 meters of the Argentine infantrymen. Again, the platoon raised every weapon skywards and unleashed a hail of fire at the helicopter and, at such close range, shattered the bubble canopy and peppered the entire airframe and engine with 7.62mm bullets, and most likely killed both pilot Lieutenant Francis and gunner Corporal Giffen in their front cockpit seats. The riddled Gazelle fell from the sky like a rock and crashed heavily onto the hillside, almost at the feet of the Argentine soldiers. The chopper’s low altitude and self-sealing, crash-resistant fuel tanks prevented an explosion or fire.

Soon after, a third Gazelle, XX412, appeared. The pilot spotted the Argentine infantry and banked quickly away; again, Estoban’s platoon blazed away at the helicopter. Although the engagement range was much longer, and the Gazelle was soon out of range, it was still badly damaged, even though it was hit by a grand total of only fourteen 7.62mm rounds.

A British after-action report noted: “He lost a blade off his tail rotor, had twelve shots all the way down his tail boom, and one through the cockpit as well but managed, remarkably, to struggle back to Gallahad [ship they were flying from], vibrating like hell, to give us our first, very good and accurate, contact report.”

 

21 May 1982. A platoon of Argentine infantry armed only with FN FAL rifles and heavy-barreled SAW versions of the same shot down two British Royal Marines’ Aérospatiale/Wessex AH1 Gazelle helicopters and heavy damaged a third in a matter of minutes.

 

Once more, as with the Royal Marines on South Georgia Island, all this damage was done entirely with only 7.62x51mm FAL rifles and lead-cored M80 ball ammunition, and the riflemen were not crack Marines or Commandos but ordinary conscripted infantrymen with only about 45 days of military training. These losses and damage on the first day of battle led the British, who were soon to be desperately short of helicopters after the MV Atlantic Conveyor was sunk, to use their remaining Gazelles to haul supplies for the ground troops and evacuate casualties. They were deemed too vulnerable to small arms fire to be used as attack helicopters and the pilots had already reluctantly admitted that they did not think that their unguided 68-mm SNEB rockets were accurate enough to be used in close proximity to friendly troops.

JETS

 

Expecting to face Argentine Air Force attacks, the British ships and landing force were to protect themselves primarily with surface-to-air missiles, in which great reliance was placed. The majority of the Royal Navy destroyers and frigates protecting the landings were still armed with Seacat missiles. Introduced in 1962, these slow, subsonic, manually-radio-guided missiles were considered obsolete against modern jet aircraft by the end of the 1970’s. Only the destroyers carried the newer, faster radar-guided Sea Dart missile, which performed much better against fast and/or low altitude targets. Ashore, the British Army emplaced a battery of their new Rapier missile launchers. The terrain offered poor sites for these weapons, most of them experienced unserviceability problems with their somewhat delicate electronic systems after the launchers had been pounded as deck cargo for weeks in the stormy South Atlantic, and virtually all of the spare missiles were lost when Argentine aircraft sank the MV Atlantic Conveyor. The other British Army missile system ashore was the Shorts Blowpipe shoulder-fired MANPAD, which was one of the worst weapons of this type ever fielded.

Additionally, the Argentine Air Force pilots were well-trained and aggressive and adopted tactics designed to negate the effectiveness of the British SAMs. The aircraft came in over the land, low and fast, to mask themselves from radar and missile tracking until the last minute when they reached the bay, and these close-in approaches left the defenders a very short time to react. They also came in numbers and in waves intended to confuse or overwhelm the tracking and guidance abilities of the defensive missile systems. The Royal Navy suffered considerable losses from these attacks.

On the first day, 21 May 1982, Argentine Air Force Douglas A-4 Skyhawks and Dagger Mirage-5 jets mounted seventeen sorties against the British ships, hitting and damaging HMS Ardent and Argonaut. Bad weather prevented strikes the next day, but Argentine low-level attacks continued for the next four days after that. Two Type 21 frigates, Ardent and Antelope, and the Type 42 Destroyer HMS Coventry were sunk, and eight other ships were damaged in the air attacks. On May 25^th, an Argentine Super Etendard fighter hit the roll-on/roll-off container ship SS Atlantic Conveyor with two Exocet missiles and sank her as well. Lost with the ship were vital supplies, ammunition, spares, and a large portion of the British invasion force’s heavy-lift helicopters, including one Lynx, six Wessex, and four Chinook helicopters.

If not for some problems with the fuses on the Argentine Air Force’s 500- and 1,000-pound bombs, British ship losses would have been far heavier. Since the aircraft attacked at such low levels, the bomb fuses had to carry delays long enough to allow the planes to clear the blast zone before exploding. Several bombs penetrated into one side of British ships and flew out the other before exploding, and a total of thirteen bombs that achieved direct hits failed to explode entirely. If even half of those duds had exploded, the course of the war could have been dramatically changed.

When it quickly became apparent that the surface-to-air missiles alone could not protect the fleet, the handful of old 20-mm Oerlikon and 40-mm Bofors automatic cannon left on the warships almost as an afterthought were suddenly worth their weight in gold. After the first few air raids, the rails of both the naval and merchant vessels in San Carlos Water were lined with Royal Marines and sailors armed with every last available machine gun. The vast majority were belt-fed 7,62x51mm GPMGs (FN-MAGs), although a handful of magazine-fed L4 Brens are also seen in photographs, and even some L1A1 SLR rifles. In one account, a sailor noted that the SLR could be used with a 30-round L4 Bren magazine and that the safety sear could be jimmied with a small piece of metal to make the SLR fire on full automatic. The frigate HMS Argonaut (F56) was equipped with Seacat missiles and two single-barrel 40-mm L/60 Bofors anti-aircraft guns. Before the air attacks had even begun, Captain Kit Layman had the crew bolster these air defenses with an additional seventeen weapons, a few 20mm Oerlikon light anti-aircraft cannons and the remainder GPMGs, mounted wherever possible and manned by midshipmen, cooks, signalers, and anyone else who could be spared. Ashore, the Paras and Marines set up their GPMGs and a handful of Browning .50-caliber heavy machine guns on anti-aircraft mounts.

May 1982: Argentine Air Force tactics, numbers and low-level flying often befuddled the surface-to-air missiles used on British Royal Navy warships defending the British landings at San Carlos Water. After the first few attacks, the railings of the British ships in the sound were soon lined with every available 7.62x51mm NATO GPMG General Purpose Machine Gun.

 

The Argentine pilots’ low-level strikes, while befuddling some of the missiles, also brought them within small arms range. In video footage of these attacks, one can hear the slow thudding of the 40mm and 20mm cannon first, then, as the aircraft get closer, a rapidly swelling crackle and stutter of machine gun fire as the planes come within small arms range. Other footage shows shells and bullets kicking up white geysers of water around Argentine jets racing in at wavetop height.

Instead of the usual mix of 1-in-4 tracer to ball ammunition, the belts and magazines of the British machine guns and rifles were loaded at the maximum ratio of 1 tracer to 1 ball round. For the Argentine pilots, flying through long streams of highly visible tracer bullets was at least distracting if not intimidating, forcing them to resist the urge to evade the fire while trying to line up on their targets. It was in fact demonstrated that any kind of flying pyrotechnics were distracting to attacking pilots and decreased their efficiency in delivering air-to-ground weapons, so that even hand-held signal flares were fired off in front of attacking aircraft.

Two Argentine Air Force A-4 Skyhawks make a low-level attack run on British ships in San Carlos Water. Bullets and shells can be seen striking the water around them and the black puffs of exploding 40mm shells and tracer bullets are visible in the air. 

 

It was for this reason that, in the late 1940’s the U.S. Air Force developed the M21 “headlight” tracer bullet for the .50-caliber BMG. The standard M1 tracer bullet was modified by replacing the usual tracer composition entirely with a strontium peroxide igniter compound, increasing visibility from the front by a factor of three and giving the appearance of a ball of fire. The intention was to make the enemy think that he was under fire from a much larger-caliber weapon, such as a 20-mm cannon, rather than just small arms, and, it was claimed, “…the psychological effect is pronounced.”

During the 10-week course of the Falklands War, British small arms fire, entirely 7.62x51mm in caliber, was credited with shooting down six Argentine aircraft: three SA 330 Puma medium helicopters, an FMA IA 58 Pucará (an Argentine armored turboprop ground-attack aircraft), as well as two “fast-movers”, a Douglas A-4 Skyhawk and a Dagger Mirage-5. This is an impressive score considering the short duration of the conflict and the fairly limited number of aircraft used by either side.

A course put out by the US Army Air Defense Artillery School at Fort Bliss, TX, noted: “While your intent in firing is to kill the attacking aircraft using small arms, it will result in a low probability. However, the use of coordinated group firing, using all organic weapons to make the pilots aware that they are under fire, can disturb their concentration and cause them to miss their target or abandon their attack. The pilots should be made aware that they are under fire from the ground.

Nothing is more disturbing to a pilot’s concentration than flying into a hail of tracers, and if practical, tracers should be used.”

As evidence of this, on the night of January 26, 2009 near Kirkuk, Iraq, two U.S. Army Bell OH-58 Kiowa scout helicopters, attempting to avoid sudden streams of tracer from hostile ground fire, collided with each other in mid-air and crashed, killing all four men on board. A similar incident had previously occurred just after dark on 15 November 2003 when two U.S. Army Sikorsky UH-60L Blackhawk helicopters transporting members of the 101^st Airborne Division were flying over a residential section of Mosul, Iraq. One Blackhawk, attempting to dodge a sudden spate of ground fire, pulled up quickly and collided with the other chopper. Both helicopters crashed, leaving 17 men dead and five wounded.  

  These aircraft were technically not “shot down” by small arms fire, but evading tracer fire from the ground still caused the destruction of four helicopters and 21 deaths.

For engaging hostile vehicles and aircraft, especially with a 7.62x51mm battle rifle, one or two rifle magazines, readily identifiable on the exterior and/or kept in a separate ammo pouch, can be carried loaded with a mix of AP, API, and tracer ammunition. While still far from a real anti-aircraft weapon, such an ammunition mix at least ensures that any actual hits on an aircraft are more likely to damage it since such rounds penetrate deeper and have a greater chance of reaching something vital, in addition to the incendiary action and the psychological effect of the tracers.