No4 barrel burst.... Peter?

[Peter Laidler]

The Board of Enquiry after the event found out what happened and it was this. The rifles that were 'live' were taken onto the firing point and a couple of other 'live - serviceable' rifles were at the back of the firing point together with a few DP rifles, used for what we call 'background activity' One of the rifles on the firing point wouldn't fire so the instructor stood behind the firer took it off him, cleared it and shouted to one of the Cadet NCO's at the rear.... 'bring me another rifle over.....' which he did.

What neither of them did was to check that the 'new' rifle was serviceable....., and in this case, it wasn't because it had a xxxxing big hole through the barrel, top to bottom. BUT, the BOLT was serviceable, unlike the bolt in the rifle that had failed to fire. Already, you can see that this isn't a good mix. As we say, it's an accident just waiting to happen. And the first round it fired WAS an accident where the Cadet lost a couple of fingers. They are still in orbit around the sun!

The Board of Enquiry established that prior to the actual shooting, half the group had sat around in a circle and started to clean the rifles and bolts while the other half had filled some Bren magazines and cleaned/oiled the bren guns. Then they changed over and the Bren filling half finished off cleaning and oiling the rifles and asembled them.

Unfortunately, due to 'lack of adult supervision', a DP bolt with a welded up bolt face and therefore no striker protrusion was placed into a service rifle. This rifle wouldn't fire. But because of this, a DP rifle went onto the firing point with a serviceable bolt and fired.

There's two threads to this story 1) think hard before you invade Russia and 2) check your rifle before you shoot it.

Anyway, humour aside, I think they saved the lads badly mangled fingers but they are badly disfigured.

After that an urgent signal went out to rapidly convert the RAF spec DP rifles to the current L59 specification that are safe. I bet you wonder how I know this don't you......................?

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