What is this SMLE sight? (Updated on page 2)

I don't really care about value as i won't sell it anyway. I might shoot some just to get the 'i'm shooting collector stuff' feeling!

Unlike some folks here, I was not around to shoot the cool stuff back in the '70s, so it's my little revenge.

*cough*smellie where are you*cough cough*
 
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Right here, my son: fear thee not!

The DI Z 19xx stuff is Defence Industries (Canadian) World War Two ammo and it is proper Mark VII Ball specs: 3-piece composite bullet at 2440 ft/sec MV. It ALSO features noncorrosive, nonmercuric priming AND it is the nicest handloading brass you will find anywhere: it takes standard .210" Boxer primers. The rims are ALL either right at Max (.063") or are so close that it isn't even funny. Bullet jackets are (generally) mild steel plated with cupro-nickel or gilding-metal. In good condition, this stuff will still shoot very well, but we have found that if you 'bump' the bullets just a touch, just enough to set them back a few thou, that this often improves the accuracy by giving you a more even shot-start hold of the neck to the bullet. There is still a bit of this to be found on the gun-show circuit, generally for about $25 or so for a box of 48, so it would be no huge sacrifice to use some of it. Hang onto a sealed box, should you have one: they aren't making any more of this. And hang onto that brass: it is the best you will ever find!

As to the really old stuff, it also is Canadian-made, Cordite-loaded, but it is Berdan-primed, corrosive AND mercuric: sort of "the worst of all possible worlds". And the Cordite is Mark I, so it burns SUPER hot: 58 percent nitroglycerine! Great stuff if you have a heart condition, though: chewing on the Cordite will speed things up quite remarkably, possibly even enough to kill you! (BTW, eating Cordite was a shooting offence during WWI.) That said, likely it still is sure-fire but I certainly wouldn't bang off any myself. Once upon a time, I had a stash of 1907 stuff but, when I was out of town working, my little brother got into it, shot it ALL off and then b*tched because it didn't shoot to point of aim in MY P-'14 (s/n W305)! Well, it wouldn't, would it? It was (as yours) loaded with a 215-grain bullet with a cupro-nickel jacket and had an MV of 2060 ft/sec! No possible way would it line up with sights which were set for an entirely different loading. Likely this is why this ammo was downgaded to MG practice: everything built since 1910 was sighted for the Mark VII loading. Still, this is VERY collectable stuff, ESPECIALLY in sealed packets and WITH the MG downgrade printed on them.

You have some real prizes there.

Congratulations!
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Actualy nothing wrong with mecuric primers if you flush the barrel with boiling hot water. Thats why Canada used armourers funnels. Cordite is another matter since it burrns hotter than flake powder and causes throat erosion.
 
Ummm.....Dumb question Smellie, why would anyone want to eat cordite? And does the stuff taste so good the army was afraid of the infantry eating ALL their cordite,hence the corporal punishment?.....I just don't get it, It would take more than two guys to hold me down if eating gun powder was a hazing thing.....let alone eating it voluntarily!
 
My guess is it was something many were tempted to do before a medical exam in order to be declared unfit for service. Nitroglycerine will mess up with the heart rate.
 
Sardaukar said:
Yeah, I was also curious about the cocking knob but now that you mention it the trigger is also intriguing.

It is local and seems to be very reasonably priced, but I won't bother the seller about it until after Christmas, so I won't have more info for a few days.
Click to expand...

I have an 1918 no1 mk3* with the same cocking knob.
 
Eating Cordite was classed in with SIW (Self-Inflicted Wound) and was regarded as prima facie evidence of LMF (Lack of Moral Fibre): cowardice.

Nitroglycerine is a powerful heart stimulant. Cordite has been used in emergencies as medication for angina and other heart problems, but it is so powerful that it can PRODUCE a violently-irregular heartbeat and high blood-pressure. So you eat Cordite, get chest pains, go to the MO and he writes you off for 'bad heart' and you go home while the other 12,000 guys in your division stay behind and get shot at. (I keep a Cordite round with the bullet loose in my first-aid box because you can't even buy a simple nitroglycerine pill in this country without a prescription.) If the Sergeant figures out what's going on, he tells the Captain and the Captain puts you on a fizzer (charge) for LMF/SIW and you get to face OUR bullets instead: 11 in the rifles and 1 in the revolver.

To say that someone would "eat Cordite" was regarded as one of the ultimate insults and well worth loosening a few teeth for: it was an out-and-out accusation of cowardice.

"Now take your Number 6 Pills; we're going Over The Top in 40 minutes. You can have your Number 9 Pills if we get back."

Hope this helps.
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Yes indeed.Helpful as always Smellie,however you'll now please explain #6 and #9 pills? Just a guess on my part,but weren't hand grenades referred to as "PILLS" by commonwealth troops during first war era? i.e."pillbox" {bunker} The #9 has me stumped though buddy:D?
 
In the Great War, the MO or his assistant would go down the Line before an attack, handing out Number 6 Pills. They bunged you up so that you didn't sh*t yourself from the pounding of the artillery or just from sheer terror.

After the attack was over, the MO came down the Line and passed out Number 9s. They loosened things up so you could clean out your bowels.

Living on a diet of bully beef and hardtack will bung ANYONE up. My old friend Sgt. Angus Kellie lived on that for 6 years (1915 - 1921) and there were only three things in this world that he HATED: Field Marshal Haig, "Fray Bentos" brand corned beef and Camels. Angus even had sympathy for Johnnie Turk, but not for that unholy triad above. Angus was at Gaza, the Fall of Jerusalem, the Battle of Armageddon (1918) and rolled into Damascus with his 6-inch How Mark VIII behind his Holt Tractor just a few days after Feisal and Lawrence had taken the place.

But just imagine, an entire Army livng on a diet so restricted and so unhealthy that the entire Army requires medication continually! These are the things that the books don't mention.

Now take your pills like a nice boy!
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Wow!:O HOLY EYE OPENER BATMAN!.....Tell ya what,If I promise not to sh1t my pants or if I do,I promise not to bother anyone else with MY problem. Then can I for-go the #6's and only come to ask for a #9 every now and again when the hard tack gets to me?
I'm thinking probably not! Take your pills and shut the F**k up! Right!
You know what else I'm thinking? This generation is too soft and if time-warped to 1914...well..no need for WW2. We'd have lost the first one and been speaking German.
By the way I'm including myself in "this generation".......OUR ancestors were HARD man, If you know what I mean?:D
 
Plinker, you can include me in there, too. I knew a few of those men, actually had several for friends, despite the difference in ages.

Normally, they would never talk about the War, but if you got them relaxed and they knew that you were honestly seeking knowledge, they would open up a bit. The one thing that never ceased to amaze me was the sheer level of privation those men lived under, and with, and for so very long. Take just that, then add in the level of casualties, then think about the actual fighting and the conditions it was undertaken under....... and you begin to wonder why any of them returned home even remotely sane.

The recent film "Passchendaele" gives an idea what it must have been like, but even that was very clean when you compare it with the original newsreels. Kirk Douglas's 1960s production "Paths of Glory" is about the French Army in the events leading up to the Mutinies; it's rough, but even that isn't bad enough.

Here's a point to remember: when you're digging a trench, the dirt has to go somewhere. You heap up dirt in front, some of it in sandbags, and that's the parapet. But you still have a lot of dirt, so you throw it behind your trench; that's the parados. The French lost 300,000 men at Vimy Ridge and the enemy fire was so bad that they couldn't even take the dead out for a proper burial, so they stuffed a lot of them into the parados and lived just a few feet from their own decomposing buddies. The British had a go at the Ridge, but they just generated more casualties. Then it was the Canadians' turn. By that time the trenches were pretty beaten-up and a whole new trench system had to be dug.... and it was..... sometimes right through the remains of French soldiers who had died there 2 years before. And the rats were huge... and you know what they had been eating.

Small wonder those men wouldn't talk much about it. When I went to interview my old friend Pte. Rollie Hart (Nfld. Regiment, 1914 - 1919) regarding the War, it was supposed to be just about the LAST day, what it was like for him. He was born on November 11, 1896, so the cease-fire took place on his 22nd birthday. He said many times that the War had ended on his birthday, not the other way around, and he offered the opinion that the only reason it ended was because he was such a helluvva nice guy. "There was no other reason for it to end," he would say, "We all thought that it was going to go on forever." When I turned up at his house to do the actual interview for the newspaper, Rollie met me at the door with a 40-ouncer in his hand. He dropped the cap into he woodstove and pointed toward the empty 26 on the table and said, very quietly, "A man has to be drunk to tell the truth of it. I'm only half drunk, so I'm only going to tell you half the truth."

That was 59 years after the shooting stopped.

Yeah, you can put me in with the modern generation. Those men were HARD. They had to be, just to survive. And then they came back and built this country.. and look at it now.
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Yep;raise a glass and shed a tear,they're gone now. Robbie Burns day was yesterday and at the risk of sounding obtuse I'll change one of his toasts {a wee bit} "Here's tae them,and those wat like them!.....Dame few,an their deed!

Gone but not forgotten and always appreciated.
 
The history, the REAL history, what really happened, already has been sanitised and rendered politically correct by the CBC, the National Film Board and Pierre Berton.

I'm letting out some of what I know about it from talking with men who were there, but I'm doing it HERE, where people might care. The rest of the country either doesn't care, or calls you a liar, or tells you that nobody wants to hear that stuff.

Perhaps they don't WANT to hear it, but it's something that they SHOULD know.

It was real and the men were real; they were our own grandfathers and great-grandfathers and we cannot POSSIBLY appreciate enough what they went through..... for a dollar a day, plus 10 cents combat pay.
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I once bought a small book titled 'Lettres de Poilus', it was a collection of letters from Poilus, French soldiers from the front. Of course it was sanitized, if not by censorship, simply by the natural care of not making the family worry.

I remember on in which a man was telling his sister-in-law that her husband, his brother was dead. He assured her that he didn't suffer, having been shot in the head. He also assured her the he made the Boche pay for it, as he 'shot 5 or 6 of them that night'.

I was reading that in the bus, imagining a simple man dragged to war, with his brother resting dead next to him, with his head blown up, in a maze of trenches, in a night lit by flares suspended on parachutes above the scene, popping shots at the expense of exposition, avenging his brother in what one can imagine to be a 'f**k it all' moment.
And then writing to the wife. It's the only time I shed tears in a bus.

Big shoes to fill indeed.

I think I'll watch 'All Quiet on the Western Front' again soon.

I recommend reading the Tales told to me by a WWI veteran sticky in the OT.

And smellie, thanks for sharing all this knowledge with us youngins'.
 
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