Category: History

Alkartasuna SA was a company formed in 1914 by a handful of disgruntled Astra (well, Astra was still called Esperanza y Unceta at that time) employees. This was a difficult time for the Eibar gun industry – demand was low, their reputation for quality was not good (the lack of a central proof house didn’t […]

My good friend Ian over at Forgotten Weapons, get’s to play with some AMAZING toys!!! The RPD was the first belt-fed light machine gun (or squad automatic weapon) developed by the Soviet Union. It was designed in 1944 for the then-new M43 cartridge (7.62x39mm), although wartime exigencies followed by post-war rebuilding prevented it from being […]

The Savage is one of the many revolvers that saw purchase and martial use during the US Civil War – and in this case, martial use on both sides. About 13,000 Savages were bought by the Union army and navy, and another 11,000 were sold commercially. Many of those commercially-sold guns were later smuggled through […]

An unidentified family in the Deep South made the discovery of a lifetime when they found a letter written by Founding Father Thomas Jefferson in which the third president extols the virtues of American independence and hails victory in the War of 1812. (FOX)- “As in the Revolutionary War, [the British] conquests were never more […]

A tunnel in Lithuania that allowed Jewish prisoners to escape to freedom has been discovered at an infamous location called Ponar, decades after they used it to flee the Nazis one night in April 1944. (FOX)- The escapees were part of a group tasked with the horrific job of burning bodies to cover up the […]

The Italian military went into WWI having already adopted a semiautomatic sidearm – the Model 1910 Glisenti (and its somewhat simplified Brixia cousin). However, the 1910 Glisenti was a very complex design, and much too expensive to be practical for the needs of the global cataclysm that was the Great War. In response to a […]

Army Capt. Paul “Buddy” Bucha faked out the enemy while leading a motley crew in Vietnam. (FOX)- The Medal of Honor recipient was hailed as a hero after he made North Vietnamese fighters believe his 187th Infantry Regiment was much bigger than it really was. The combination of bravery and cunning helped him earn the […]

One of the last two surviving members of the Doolittle Raiders — who bombed Japan in an attack that stunned that nation and boosted U.S. morale — has died in Montana, his family said. (FOX)- Retired Staff Sgt. David Jonathan Thatcher died Wednesday in a Missoula hospital. He was 94. He suffered a stroke on […]

A judge in Louisville has given the city the go-ahead to remove an 1895 Confederate monument by dismissing a lawsuit that sought to keep it at its original site. (FOX)- In a written ruling, Jefferson Circuit Judge Judith McDonald-Burkman said the city had the right to remove the stone obelisk near the University of Louisville […]

A 94-year-old former SS sergeant who served as a guard at Auschwitz has been found guilty of more than 170,000 counts of accessory to murder on allegations he helped the Nazi death camp kill 1.1 million Jews and others. BERLIN –(FOX)- The dpa news agency reported that the Detmold state court sentenced Reinhold Hanning to […]