Today is the 33rd anniversary of the creation of the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). The Army Special Operations Forces (ARSOF) component of SOCOM traces its lineage back much further however – all the way back to the early years of WWII in fact. And today’s Throwback Thursday takes a look at a special weapon […]
For anyone with an interest in WWII history, and especially for anyone interested in the history of airborne forces in WWII, today marks a rather special, and poignant, anniversary. On the 15th of April 1945 the town of Arnhem in the Netherlands was finally liberated after 5 years of occupation, and 6 months after the […]
Enjoy this short film from 1961 about commando training for the British Royal Marines. […]
Enjoy this short film from 1960 about parachute training for the British Army’s Territorial Reserves. […]
Next to “operator”, “tactical” is without a doubt one of the most overused words around these days. Everyone who wants to be cool or sound cool slaps the word on their product or their blog. In their latest Blog post, UF PRO breaks it down, keeps it real, and fills in the origins of what […]
Operation Varsity – also known as The Crossing of The Rhine – took place on the 24th of March 1945. Although the airborne component of Operation Market-Garden involved more troops and drops, Varsity was the largest airborne operation of WWII that took place in one location and on a single day. Like the airborne invasion […]
A well-known propaganda photo of German Fallschirmjäger charging from a DFS 230 glider upon landing. The DFS 230 was a Luftwaffe assault glider, developed by the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug (German Research Institute for Sailplane Flight). Hans Jacobs was the lead designer. It was intended for paratrooper assault operations, carrying ten soldiers with equipment or a payload […]
We’ve been looking at HK’s 5.56mm rifles and submachine guns lately, but let’s now turn our attention to the heavy-hitters of the family, the 10- and 20-series light machine guns. A popular concept in military firearms design, development and adoption from the 1950s up to the early 1980s was the idea of modularity […]
We hope you’re enjoying our little trip down Memory Lane with a look back at HK’s 5.56mm weapons platforms from the 1960’s up to the 1980’s. Today we’re going to take a closer look at the baby of the family at that time – the short barrelled HK53 “submachine gun”. A submachine gun in 5.56x45mm […]
If you follow our friends at Soldier Systems Daily you will have seen quite a bit of coverage about the Australian movie “Danger Close” when it was released last year. In case you didn’t get a chance to see it in a cinema, it is now available on Amazon Prime – just the thing to […]