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Contributing Member
Haiti
I'd bet that it was a mixed up story. The first sale by the Brits was the LL guns, most of which were in warehouses. The government stipulated that only UK dealers could bid on them, so Cummings bought the defunct Brit firm of Cogswell & Harrison to buy them. There has always been an undocumented assertion that some M1s were issued to guard air bases, but I've never seen that in writing. It's possible that these were bought separately from the warehouse guns, most of which were minty when they came back. It's also possible that "some" of the Brit guns were sold to Haiti et al, but IMO the bulk came into the US. They were EVERYWHERE at the time, even Sears Roebuck.
Cummings did have CIA connections and fronted for them in supplying arms to people we couldn't openly associate with.
Real men measure once and cut.
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01-01-2014 02:32 PM
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Legacy Member
I have read a few good articles regarding Sam Cummings and Interarmco. One was "Arsenal on the Potomac" by William Armistead, published in the Oct. 1959 edition of "GUNS" magazine. The other was "America's Biggest Arms Merchant" by William B. Edwards. I believe this article was also in "GUNS", but not sure as the copy I have does not have the magazine noted. This article speaks of the various deals Cummings did with a number of countries. One such deal was described as follows " Cummings' most important single deal recently involved German war surplus machine guns. When the West German Army was organized, to Cummings fell the pleasantly profitable task of rearming them. From his New York foreign trade zone warehouses, Cummings sold a large quantity of MG 42's, the fast firing, efficient German light machine guns. This was his pride and joy, for they were all new. He had picked them up in "some European country where they were dumped when the Germans left after WW 2." Now, through the irony of the international trade in arms, they were sold back to the Bonn government."
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