Recoilless rifles...

[Bob Wright]

Yaworski mentioned the 57mmRecilless Rifle in another thread and reinded me of an early attempt to develop a recoil less gun.

During World War I the Navy developed the Davis Gun, which I believe was 75 mm. This gun was mounted in the nose of a navy seaplane, angled to fire downard at about 45*. This was an anti submarinne weapon attempt.

The recoil less system was that the gun was actually two 75 mm guns mounted to fire in opposite directions, back to back. Recoil was dampened as the forward firing barrel fired simultaneously with the rear facing barrel. The rear facing barrel fired a slug of concrete calculated to weigh the same as the explosive round. The gun apparently worked very well except that the rear firing gun's blast damaged the high wing of the airplane. Fortunately the war ended before too many planes were damaged.

Bob Wright

 

[Mobuck]

IIRC three grunts with a 106MM recoilless rifle mounted on a JEEP saved a skinny little knothead who was running for his life. Knothead dropped into a ditch and they fired 3 rounds of flechettes at 300 yards directly over him. After that, no one was chasing him anymore.

 

[eveled]

Here is photo documentation of another anti submarine effort.

Ernest Hemingway on his boat the Pilar was given fuel rations to patrol for U-boats. With a Tommy gun.

 

[Hvymax]

Years ago I was part of a prototype team developing a Man Portable 20mm rifle. It was a quadruple slide setup. A slide on a slide etc with about 2' of travel. It still rolled me like a midsize car. I wish we could have seen what Nikonov was doing at the same time because I bet that would have worked.

 

[vito]

Back in 1963 I attended R.O.T.C. summer camp which was essentially basic training for future officers. I had the opportunity to fire a number of weapons that I otherwise would never have had a chance to do so, including a flame thrower and a recoiless rifle (I believe it was a 75mm but it might have been the newer 106mm). We had a target set out about 1,000 yards away. Everyone had the chance to fire the spotting round, which if I recall was a 50 caliber rifle, and a few of us had the luck to be able to fire the full round of the recoiless rifle. I was amazed how easy it was for a person who had never fired that weapon, myself, to hit the target on the first shot at that distance. I was very impressed. Having one of those weapons now would be a nice way to resist the attempts by anyone coming to seize my property!

 

[Wvfarrier]

The Carl G is probably the military weapon I enjoyed the most

 

[Hankus]

As a PFC fresh from AIT my battalion went to a “heavy weapons” range up near the DMZ in Korea. I got to detonate a Claymore and fire both sub-caliber LAW (.22LR tracer of all things), but also got to fire the full-blown 72mm LAW and the AT-4. Fun times!