It Is Fun to Learn
Reader Heinrichs, retired Canadian horse officer, kindly forwarded this delightful link re the history of the assault rifle after I expressed my general ignorance the other day.
The term is politically charged in the US due to efforts to ban weapons based on their war-like appearance and magazine capacity. Small arms scholar Anthony G. Williams — specifically a cartidge expert — gets technical, and very esoteric. Did you know the first selective fire infantryman’s service weapon was built by the Ivans in 1916? I did not know that. I thought the Fritzes got the prize with the Sturmgewehr, but what the heck do I know. Federov Avtomat pictured above. And here’s the Sturmgewehr below. Isn’t she a beauty? Guns are about killing, guns are about engineering, guns are about history. We’re not supposed to like them, but it’s hard not to if you’ve had much exposure to them or had to rely on them.
Ultimately, guns are about the men and women who carry them, and the stories they have to tell. I spoke to a grizzled old American paratrooper once who snagged a Sturmgewehr in Normandy or Belgium or some place like that and loved it. Very popular with the Yanks, who didn’t have anything like it, he said. A lot of very finely engineered German firepower when he needed it.
Here’s the paratrooper’s tale from the Herald archives, June 5, 2004:
D-Day lives in the memory of Berge Avadanian.
He was a 25-year-old paratrooper, a sergeant with two jumps and five months of fighting in Italy behind him as the plane approached Normandy before dawn on June 6, 1944.
“It was nothing new to me,” said Avadanian of Waltham. At 85, he still talks with the matter-of-fact, sometimes-bitter tone of someone who survived 462 days of combat.
“There were a lot of younger guys. Just boys, going in for the first time. I tried to cheer them up. I said, `Hey, I wonder how the Red Sox are doing. I bet they’re getting beat.’ Sixty years later, I’m still waiting for them to win,” he said.
He remembers seeing just a couple of cows when he landed in a farmer’s field. He linked up with other paratroopers, and on the outskirts of Ste-Mere-Eglise at dawn, he killed a German. Then he saw the corpse of a young lieutenant he’d last seen in England having his hair cut, dangling from a tree, his throat slit.
“I’m ashamed of myself. I saw that and I didn’t run over to cut him down,” Avadanian said.
He remembers winning $750 at poker from his friend John Everhardy in England in the tense days before D-Day, as they waited to go. Everhardy was dead within a week, killed beside him.
“John was my best friend,” he said. “He still owes me that $750.”
Avadanian jumped into Holland and was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. He lived to help liberate the Wobbelin concentration camp and accept the surrender of 136,000 German soldiers. He met the Russians on the Elbe River.
As the 60th anniversary of D-Day nears, he said, “If God would allow me to be born again, I would pray to God to put me on that same road to Normandy. It was the most gratifying thing I have ever done. I was so proud to be fighting for my country.”
You have to love the spirit. Avadanian died on June 6, 2005, a year and a couple of days after I spoke to him. He was a combat American, recipient of a Silver Star, Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts. There’s really no shortage of Americans like him, we’re learning once again, who step up when called, do what they have to do, endure what they have to endure, and would do it all again. Here is Avadanian with his Sturmgewehr, copy shot archived by the Herald:
Avadanian was with the 82nd Airborne’s 505th PIR, coincidentally a unit I briefly ran around with in the middle of the night in a Serb village in Kosovo in 1999, chasing incidental AK fire. (Somewhat related to the Sturmgewehr, though if you read the history at the link, not a direct copy, with some significant differences.)
This started out as a simple informative link about the history of the assault rifle, and only inadvertantly ended up being about a man who carried one, but I’m glad it worked out that way and hope you have enjoyed learning about both.
Topics: guns, history, military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:49 pm Comments (1) on Tuesday, May 27, 2008
One Response to “It Is Fun to Learn”
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May 28th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Thanks for the link and the story, Jules — both are fascinating!