Japanese Couldn't Believe He Built a Gun From Aircraft Parts — Until He Killed 20 of Them скачать в хорошем качестве

Japanese Couldn't Believe He Built a Gun From Aircraft Parts — Until He Killed 20 of Them

February 19, 1945. As the first waves of Marines hit the deadly shores of Iwo Jima, one man, Corporal Tony Stein, stepped onto the black volcanic sand carrying a weapon that wasn't supposed to exist. This was the "Stinger." A weapon born not in a factory, but in a maintenance shed in Hawaii. A weapon every expert said would fail. Stein, a Jewish toolmaker from Dayton, Ohio, had taken a Browning AN/M2 aircraft machine gun—a weapon designed to be cooled by 300-mph winds—and turned it into an infantry weapon. He fitted it with a rifle stock and a bipod. Armorers warned the thin barrel would overheat and melt. Sergeants called it a "plane gun" that would jam instantly. Commanders saw a death trap. They were all wrong. What Stein unleashed on Iwo Jima was a storm of fire—1,200 rounds per minute, a rate of fire so devastating it could silence enemy pillboxes single-handedly. That first day, he made eight desperate, barefoot sprints back through enemy fire to the beach, each time to retrieve more ammunition. He saved nine trapped Marines. By the end of that brutal first day—a day that would earn him the Medal of Honor—the Marines who had doubted him were now asking: "Where can I get a Stinger?" The gun that wasn't supposed to work had not only worked; it had changed the fight. Stein's innovation, passed from gunner to gunner, demonstrated the brutal power of suppressive fire in a way doctrine had yet to catch up with. This is the story of how a toolmaker from Ohio, by ignoring every rule in the book, gave his brothers an edge in hell and forever altered the Marines' understanding of firepower on the ground.