{"id":126488,"date":"2020-07-16T11:37:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-16T15:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gunsamerica.com\/digest\/?p=126488"},"modified":"2020-07-16T11:37:00","modified_gmt":"2023-09-06T16:22:04","slug":"ww2-high-school-geometry-and-the-bar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gunsamerica.com\/digest\/ww2-high-school-geometry-and-the-bar\/","title":{"rendered":"WW2, High School Geometry, and the BAR"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"WW2,
America was covered with a thin patina of WW2 veterans when I was a kid. A local car salesman crewed a PT boat. The guy who owned the shoe store jumped into Normandy with the 82d. A lawyer who lived down the street flew B17\u2019s. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I was born 21 years after\nthe conclusion of the Second World War. When I was young my world was liberally\npopulated with World War 2 veterans. Sixteen million Americans served during\nthe war, roughly eleven percent of the overall population. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
All adult males seemed to dress like this when I was young. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I remember them all\ndressed like the Blues Brothers and clamoring over each other after church let\nout. Upon the final \u201cAmen\u201d these guys scampered outside to burn their Camels\nand Marlboros. Though it reliably kills you young, nicotine is a great anxiety\nmedicine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
Alcohol invariably makes depression worse. Sadly, veterans returning from World War 2 had little else to help them cope. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It was different back\nthen. Clinical anxiety was not a real thing, and folks typically treated their\nemotional challenges unsuccessfully with alcohol. These young men had been\nripped from their homes and families to travel to the other side of the planet\nand fight and die for the cause of freedom. They were just simple men\u2014souped-up\nteenagers juiced on testosterone and patriotism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
Most of us get our images of war from movies and books. Reality is a very different thing. This dead GI was killed during fighting for the Nijmegen Bridge. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These experiences changed\nthem fundamentally. The visions of hellish carnage are beyond anything we\nmodern folk can really imagine. We honestly have no idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
VFW huts like this one were fixtures across America. We didn\u2019t know it at the time, but these were early support groups for veterans returning from the war. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It was not in vogue to\nspeak of such stuff openly back then, so most just kept it bottled up inside.\nThey would disappear to the VFW to drink too much with the only folks in the\nworld who could understand. For the most part, however, to cope they just\nworked hard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An Extraordinary\nFellowship<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"WW2,
There\u2019s no better place to visit than a porch swing in the American Deep South. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I was a bald-headed freshly-minted paratrooper just back from Benning when I first met my wife\u2019s grandfather. My then-girlfriend disappeared off with her grandmother, leaving me on a porch swing with her grandfather for a couple of hours. He had himself been a paratrooper in 1942 until a jump injury moved him to the leg Infantry. He asked about airborne training and was amazed at how little had changed. Then he got a far off look in his eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
It\u2019s tough for the civilized mind to imagine how destructive artillery can be in the Industrial Age. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

He fought as an\nInfantryman in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. He told me what a German\nartillery unit looked like after it had been obliterated by Allied artillery.\nHis description included human entrails draped liberally across trees. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
It can take twenty years to make Master Sergeant today. My grandfather-in-law made it in less than four. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The man had enlisted in\n1940 as a Private and ETS\u2019d in 1945 as a Master Sergeant. It takes a good bit\nlonger than that today. He made rank so quickly because every other person he\nworked for got killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
After fighting as an Infantryman from North Africa up past Monte Cassino the last thing my Grandfather-in-law wanted to do was come home and talk about it. These rugged Marines are slogging through the South Pacific island campaign. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

That evening I enjoyed dinner with my future in-laws. I casually mentioned that I had enjoyed a truly splendid talk with grandpa that afternoon about airborne training, military service, and the war. The conversation stopped abruptly. When I asked meekly if I had said something inappropriate I was told that he had come back in 1945, announced that it had been bad, and declared that he never wanted to speak of it again. To my knowledge, this conversation in 1986 was the first time he had mentioned his time in uniform to anybody. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Most Remarkable Math\nTeacher<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"WW2,
Geometry is tough for a fifteen-year-old with more hormones than brains. Mr. Mullins beat it into us anyway. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

John Mullins was my Tenth Grade Geometry teacher. He was a backwoodsman in his fifties who had taught Geometry and Senior Math ever since he came back from World War 2. He was a thin man with a thick Southern accent who suffered from diabetes at a time when diabetes was still kind of unusual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
John Mullins taught me Geometry with little more than a chalkboard. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Today\u2019s teachers are both underpaid and underappreciated. However, most of the teachers in my well-funded district have access to more technology than launched the moon missions. Tablet computers, networked projectors, classroom Internet, and educational science aplenty enhance the chores of pouring knowledge into the heads of their precious little monsters. By contrast, Mr. Mullins had a chalkboard, a wooden compass, and a wooden protractor. With just these three items that man taught me a great deal of geometry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
Chalkdust gets all over everything. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

His pants were always\ncovered in yellow chalk dust. I can only imagine how this must have frustrated\nthe man\u2019s wife when he came home in the evenings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
Guys like Mr. Mullins invested their entire lives in service to their country and their community. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not God\u2019s gift to\nsmart people, but I was the STAR Student for my high school. I picked Mr.\nMullins as my STAR Teacher. When I bumped into the man in the hallway and\ninformed him of that fact he broke into a broad grin, wiped his chalk-covered\nhands on his pants, and shook mine in appreciation. I\u2019ll never forget that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
In his prime, I suspect Mr. Mullins was indeed a hard man. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Mullins was a relatively unemotional man not prone to outbursts. However, one day something touched him off and he kicked the wastepaper basket hard enough to stove it in on itself. The ferocity of this display scared the living crap out of us. We attributed it to his blood sugar. In retrospect, I suspect it went deeper than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only the Good Things<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"WW2,
The combat vets I have known are always quick to share the goofy stuff. The darker things, not so much. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In my experience, those old guys almost never share the dark stuff. They\u2019ll speak of the funny times or the inevitable silliness that ensues when thousands of young men are packed together with a common purpose. They saved the real stories for their buddies at the VFW or just never spoke of them at all. In the case of Mr. Mullins, he once interrupted class spontaneously to relate a tale of combat in Europe in WW2. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
At almost four feet long and tipping the scales at nearly twenty pounds the M1918A2 BAR is an absolutely enormous gun. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For Uncle Sam\u2019s own unfathomable reasons the BAR was reliably issued to the smallest man in the squad. Troops would align in formation by height. Giving the 19-pound BAR to the shortest guy in the unit supposedly made the gun a smaller target in combat. In practical use, once the bullets started flying such stuff just found its own level. The BAR went to whoever best wielded it in support of the squad and platoon mission. In this case, that was Private Mullins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
Much of the Germans\u2019 wartime logistics was horse-drawn. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Mullins and his mates were fighting across France, and life was dangerous, chaotic, and short. In modern mobile warfare front lines can be nebulous things. Amidst the fog of war, a German courier astride a beautiful white charger came trotting down a forested French road as my future Geometry teacher and his fellows hid in the brush nearby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
Great men like John Mullins used weapons like the Browning Automatic Rifle to win World War 2. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Mullins stepped out into the track, his BAR held at the hip and oriented toward the surprised Wehrmacht soldier. Mr. Mullins said he did not necessarily intend to kill the man but rather wanted to take him prisoner and secure his dispatches. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
Most everybody in that era was familiar with horses. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

He told us he was most\ntaken with the beauty of the enemy soldier\u2019s horse. All folks of that era\nappreciated a nice horse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
The BAR deftly wielded was a fearsome weapon. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Nazi soldier, for his\npart, wanted nothing to do with that plan. He wheeled his terrified mount around\nmasterfully and took off from whence he came at a hard gallop. Mr. Mullins, now\nincensed by the Kraut\u2019s impertinence, triggered his massive Browning, emptying\nthe 20-round magazine in a single long burst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
It\u2019s tough to hit a moving target with a handheld automatic weapon under the best of circumstances. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Engaging a galloping horse\nfrom the hip is not a standard course of fire taught on Army ranges, so Mr.\nMullins said he just rolled the big gun around in a circle as he unloaded at\nthe weapon\u2019s cyclic rate. When the bolt slammed home on an empty chamber and\nthe smoke cleared Mr. Mullins said the German rider was disappearing into the\ndistance, terrified but otherwise unhurt. Mr. Mullins used the experience to\nrelate something about mathematical probability. I don\u2019t recall anything about\nprobability, but I\u2019ll never forget the BAR story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Moses Browning\u2019s\nMachine Rifle<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"WW2,
Here is John Browning\u2019s son Val, an Ordnance officer during World War 1, firing an early Browning Automatic Rifle at Hun trenches in 1918. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

John Browning was the most prolific firearms inventor in human history, holding some 128 gun patents at the time of his death. We have discussed the development of his eponymous automatic rifle in this venue before. Here\u2019s the link\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heroes Hidden in Plain Sight: The Browning Automatic Rifle<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
The \u201cimproved\u201d M1918A2 added three pounds and a fair amount of superfluous fluff to an already bulky firearm. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The gun Mr. Mullins\ncarried was the M1918A2. On paper at least, the M1918A2 was improved over the\noriginal M1918 with the addition of a two-stage fully automatic fire selector,\nredesigned furniture with a lengthened buttstock, a massive folding bipod along\nwith a shortened tubular flash suppressor, and few other minor trinkets.\nRealistically this just made the gun three pounds heavier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
The complicated bipod was usually the first thing to go. Many period photographs show American GI\u2019s wielding their heavy Brownings without the cumbersome bipods. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Many to most of the cumbersome bipods were removed and left with the company cooks. The heel-mounted monopods on the buttstocks got binned in short order as well. Where the original M1918 was a selective fire with a three-position fire selector, Mr. Mullins\u2019s gun eschewed the semiauto function in favor of a selectable full auto rate of either 400 or 600 rpm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
No matter how you look at it, the BAR is a big, powerful gun. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The BAR is almost\nunimaginably bulky and heavy. Packing one of these beasts from the truck to the\nfiring line is a butt whooping. I cannot imagine toting that thing all the way\nacross Europe. Alas, those were some undeniably hard guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
These citizen soldiers ultimately pushed back the Japanese Empire and obliterated the Nazi scourge. Afterward, they just came home and starting building stuff. We all benefit from their hard work and selfless service today. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Mullins eventually died of complications of his diabetes. We lacked the tools to manage this pestilence back then that we have now. However, with only those three simple tools this dedicated educator taught me enough Geometry to get me through Mechanical Engineering school as well as a lot of other complicated stuff later on. As a nation and as a people we owe those old guys a debt that can never be repaid. Sometimes it behooves us to just be still and ponder how awesome they all were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"WW2,
The BAR was a holdover from a previous era. However, it remained a formidable combat tool. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"WW2,
Everything about the BAR is meticulously executed. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"WW2,
BAR includes a user-selectable rate reducer in the fire selector. All the way forward is fast. The middle position is slow. To the rear is safe, but there is a spring-loaded detent that must be pressed to safe the gun. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"WW2,
They were indeed the Greatest Generation. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Buy and Sell on GunsAmerica!<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a nation and as a people we owe those old guys a debt that can never be repaid. Sometimes it behooves us to just be still and ponder how awesome they all were.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":66,"featured_media":126489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_specdata_upc":"","_specdata_placement":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[257,772],"tags":[132,102,752,636,1800,1323],"featured":[],"hunt365":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-126488","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-historical-guns","8":"category-will-dabbs","9":"tag-buzz","10":"tag-feature-articles","11":"tag-historical-guns","12":"tag-history","13":"tag-veteran","14":"tag-world-war-ii"},"yoast_head":"\nWW2, High School Geometry, and the BAR<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"WW2, High School Geometry, and the BAR - Will Dabbs\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/gunsamerica.com\/digest\/ww2-high-school-geometry-and-the-bar\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"WW2, High School Geometry, and the BAR\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As a nation and as a people we owe those old guys a debt that can never be repaid. 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However, shooting guns and claiming it was work seemed like a pretty sweet hustle. As a result, Will serendipitously transformed an avocation into a vocation. Raised in the Mississippi Delta, Will flew UH1H, OH58A\\\/C, CH47D and AH1S helicopters operationally as an Army Aviator. He is SCUBA-qualified and has parachuted out of perfectly good airplanes at 3 o'clock in the morning. Will has summited Mount McKinley, Alaska, six times\u2026always at the controls of an Army helicopter, which is the only way sensible folk climb mountains. Will has delivered sixty babies and occasionally wrung human blood out of his socks. He is married to his high school sweetheart and has three awesome adult children. Turn-ons include vintage German machineguns, flying his sexy-cool RV6A airplane, Count Chocula cereal and the movie \u201cAliens.\u201d www.word-monkey.com Experience: -Professional Writer-thousands of publishing credits for dozens of titles -Mechanical Engineer\\\/Practicing Physician -Instrument-rated Commercial Pilot -Sunday School Teacher\",\"sameAs\":[\"http:\\\/\\\/www.word-monkey.com\",\"https:\\\/\\\/www.facebook.com\\\/will.dabbs.9\",\"https:\\\/\\\/www.instagram.com\\\/drwildmanmd\\\/\"],\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/gunsamerica.com\\\/digest\\\/author\\\/willdabbs\\\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO Premium plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"WW2, High School Geometry, and the BAR","description":"WW2, High School Geometry, and the BAR - Will Dabbs","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/gunsamerica.com\/digest\/ww2-high-school-geometry-and-the-bar\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"WW2, High School Geometry, and the BAR","og_description":"As a nation and as a people we owe those old guys a debt that can never be repaid. 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