WWII

Doris “Dorie” Miller was supposed to have been a girl. Born October 12, 1919, to sharecroppers Connery and Henrietta Miller, he got the name Doris when the midwife assisting with his delivery became somehow convinced he would be female.

It may have been ugly, almost impossible to cock, and “rubbish, really,” but the PIAT gun was also a fierce weapon against Nazi tanks.

During WWII, a man from Nepal held off more than thirty Japanese troops, while armed with just a knife and Lee Enfield rifle. This is the story of Lachhiman Gurung and his rifle.

The British Sten gun was effective at close range, cheap, and easy to make, but nearly botched the assassination of one of Hitler’s henchmen.

The Thompson Submachine Gun was a weapon respected by Prohibition-era gangsters before being toted across Europe by American soldiers in WWII.

The Victory .38 was a wartime version of the original Smith and Wesson Model 10 first introduced in 1899. The gun was variously known as the S&W Military and Police or the S&W Hand Ejector. Total production exceeded six million copies. While civilian variants typically sported a deep blue finish and a variety of barrel lengths, the Victory model was bred purely for combat.

The primary weapon of the infantryman is the rifle. Yes, at this time there were also submachine guns, pistols, anti-armor weapons, and machine guns. But these weapons were all intended to support the rifleman as he took or held ground. Interestingly enough, most of the armies in the Second World War were using either the same rifle their fathers carried in the First World War or a variant thereof.