doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com How much shooting can a game gun take?

Not wishing to enter the US vs UK debate . . . but I do recommend a recent book about Churchill during the Blitz: "The Splendid and the Vile" by Erik Larson (author of "The Devil in the White City" among other books). Makes it clear how bleak things looked for the Brits, when they stood alone against Hitler after the fall of France and before Hitler made the colossal error of attacking the Soviet Union.

You are absolutely correct but isn't that the fortunes of war, one side makes a mistake and the other benefits that is not news.
Though the one person in the whole conflict who did not get the recognition that he truly deserved was Admiral Karl Doenitz. If Hitler had listened to him England would have been on its knees in little under a year and the war won. He was only taken notice of in the closing stages of the Battle of the Atlantic so it was all to late by then.
To draw a line under this I would like to say the one thing that saddens me is if you do visit a German war cemetery it is devoid of visitors and if there are, they are usually relatives of the allied side. Over the years I have personally come to the realization that soldiers killed in battle no matter what side are all equal in death.

Two things, first on the US/UK generals front, do any of you listen to the excellent UK podcast "We Have Ways of Making You Talk"? It is done by the two most entertaining historians I have ever listened to. All about WW2, and they cover this topic exhaustively.

Second, on the wearing out of guns, I will say this as an anecdotal response . . . my battery (I would imagine like most of yours) is a mix of guns from different eras. English pre-WW2, Belgian pre-1980, Spanish post-1990, and very recent Italian. True, I baby the old Brits in terms of loads, and less so the others (although I shoot more gentle loads than any of them are made for), but my repair frequency has been just as high for the Spanish and Italian as the English.

Great discussion.