Now here's some fun

Note that I have stolen the title to this entry from Argghhhh!

The boys over at Argghhh! have linked to two old US Army training videos from WWII. I suggest having a look at them - they are not that different to movies that I was shown as a young reservist in the mid 1980's. Yes, the Australian Army was still showing black and white movies 20 years ago. They might still be showing black and white training reels today.

We were not shown how to knock out tanks with rifle grenades - we got to use the snot-sucking Carl Gustav for that (when fired, the backblast created a wierd low pressure system around the firer, which was sufficient to suck all the snot out of your nose if you had a sniffle).

The bullet going through the tree into the bucket of water is something that would probably shock most non-"gun headz". That's old news to me, as is the footage of the brick wall being knocked down brick by brick by a machine gun. I watched a bloke chop down a gum tree with his SLR on a live fire shoot once - they demonstrate that in this movie with a machine gun. It simply took the guy with the rifle a bit longer to achieve the same result.

The main learning experience most non-military types would get out of these movies is the lack of fire and smoke when real grenades explode (unless they are smoke grenades) and tanks are hit.

I had to laugh when they demonstrated the white phosphorous grenade and mortar round, particularly given the hue and cry over the Israeli's using WP in Gaza recently. That bit of footage should be extracted and shown to all these human rights types that scream every time WP is used.

But the bit I loved best of all was the narration - a no shit, gutsy voice over effort that pulls no punches. If only Hollywood produced movies like this today........