Carbines and More... Detroit July 1967

[painter777]

Photographer: Tony Spina
National guardsman Gary Ciko of Hamtramck watches for snipers as buildings burn on Linwood Street, Detroit, Michigan.
Photographer's Note: "Bottles and rocks were being thrown from rooftops and windows. As I edged along the buildings to avoid flying debris, I captured this young National Guardsman's look and stance, so expressive of the event's tension and fear. This became my lead photograph for the story. It was used all over the world and was part of the entry that won the Pulitzer Prize for the Free Press."



More in the next post...
CH-P777

---------- Post added at 05:15 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:11 PM ----------

National Guardsmen are pinned down by sniper fire at the McGraw police station in Detroit's 6th precinct.
Courtesy Detroit News Collection.



Next post to include link and 'Some' of the picture numbers of interest.

CH-P777

Information

Warning: This is a relatively older thread This discussion is older than 360 days. Some information contained in it may no longer be current.

[painter777]

Police officers and National Guardsmen prepare to search an African American man under suspicion of looting carrying a concealed weapon (a knife in his back pocket), Detroit, Michigan.





On this link below, troll through the pictures. Pictures of interest listed start on page 3, but all pages are interesting:
26019 Tracked PC/MG and Carbine
26024 300% increased,shows I cut stock carried by GI in the street, with 2 GI's on his left
26028
35812 'Machine Gun' What Make?

LINK: Walter P. Reuther Library Detroit's 1967 Civil Unrest

My Father had a big job going in downtown at this time with a lot of heavy equipment there. We drove up to check on the equipment but was stopped at a check point. I was young but could remember seeing the smoke rise as we drove north to get there from our home in the Downriver area. After things settled down he found in a trash dumpster boxes of M1 carbine mags that had been thrown away. Later he found out a National Guard Unit had been stationed near there in a school and believed they had discarded them. We had tickets to see the Tigers play the Orioles, but that game was cancelled/rescheduled. We never went, it would have been my first time seeing them play. The next year-68 the Tigers won the series.
I've read where live ammo was taken away from the 82nd and 101 because of too many shooting incidents, blanks and tracers were issued instead.

CH-P777

[painter777]

I've read where live ammo was taken away from the 82nd and 101 because of too many shooting incidents, blanks and tracers were issued instead.

It was because of the 'Over Reaction' by the National Guard that the decision was made not to supply (or limit) live ammo to the Airborne Units.
Here is a little more of what I found about the addition of the 82nd and 101st:

By late Sunday, looting had reached Mack Avenue on the East Side, roughly five miles from where it had started, moving Gov. George Romney to call in 400 state troopers and activate the Michigan National Guard. West of Woodward Avenue, from Highland Park to the Detroit River, 8,000 Guardsmen accompanied first responders and patrolled areas of turmoil. Though trained in handling weapons, they were unequipped to deal with urban conflict. The mostly white Guard overreacted to intense situations on the West Side, which led to needless casualties and death.
The intervention of the State Police and National Guard, as well as a curfew instituted between 9:00 p.m. and 5:30 a.m., were not enough to prevent the situation from escalating. On Monday, July 24, Gov. Romney requested federal troops, and soon members of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were stationed around Detroit’s East Side. Many of the men were familiar with intense combat situations from active duty in Vietnam. The fact that the East Side came under control much sooner than the West Side has been attributed to the soldiers’ experience in the field, their racial integration, and their lack of live ammunition.
As tanks rolled through the city and widespread food shortages took their toll, the chaos began to dissipate. Sniper fights, fires, and small outbursts of violence continued sporadically until July 27, when the conflict officially ended.

The End

[painter777]

After things settled down he found in a trash dumpster boxes of M1 carbine mags that had been thrown away. Later he found out a National Guard Unit had been stationed near there in a school and believed they had discarded them.

The 'He' above refers to my Father when he was allowed in to the area after things started settling down to check on his Dozers,Excavators.. etc.

He said that dumpster looked as though the assorted magazines had been dumped in like from a loader bucket. He had said there were other things like smoke smelling National Guard helmets, full and empty K ration boxes, small canvas bivy tents..etc All kinds of odds and ends but most smelled from burned debris that had also been dumped in.

I've read reports that the National Guard confiscated guns and ammo from local stores that sold them.

Here is part of a statement from Richard Crabb, the owner of The Busy Bee Hardware. Below it a link to the story.

"Busy Bee sold Thompson machine guns — the same weapons Eastern Market store owners armed themselves with. When the Crabbs arrived at the store, a group of national guardsmen emptied out all their guns and confiscated the ammunition.
They did return the inventory after things settled, but not all of it."

Story Link: Looting, fires and fright: Shop owners remember 1967

My Father said there were numerous types of magazines, but that he sifted through and grabbed the Carbine mags as they were the only ones of use to him. I'm sure over the years he sold/swapped and traded most of them away. Are the ones I have that were with his Carbines any of these? I can't say for sure. Were these from local shops or discarded by the Nat Guard..... Can't answer that either. But according to him there was a lot of good gear there that had been buried over with debris.

Charlie-Painter777

[Bruce McAskill]

The machineguns are M 60's Charlie.

[lemaymiami]

.... and this was just a dress rehearsal. I went into the Army in January, 1968, made it through basic training then went to my assigned training station along the east coast. I was going to be a clerk typist in an interesting field and was waiting for my class to form up (hundreds of us doing whatever made work while waiting for different classes to form up). Then in March, Martin Luther King was assassinated and the urban CONUS went on fire... They took seven of us wannabe clerks into a room and said "you remember that job we were going to teach you?... You got it right now. We'll be training you later." That was my introduction into the place where all the intel reports were collected from around the country as the inner cities burned... We manned telex machines where we received reports coming out of every big city - often, after all police and fire had withdrawn from conflict zones and just allowed them to burn.... the place we worked was going 24-7 for about three months after the assassination.

It was one crazy year and I was there - long before Watergate and all the stuff that came later... I'm wondering whether anyone will write an accurate account of the country's response to those very real threats. It was an eye-opener for me at age 19, to be thrust into that world of unrest. We've never seen anything of that magnitude since, thank heavens. Army and marine armories were being raided - there were accounts of heavy machine gun fire coming out of a few inner cities... The country was being torn apart - but we survived....

[wd4ngb]

I am originally from the west side of Detroit, Redford Township, and was in Nam when this happened. I didn't know anything about this, and returned in October. I went downtown the 1st morning to get some new tires on my car since I planed on doing some traveling while on leave. I was shocked at what I saw, and asked the guy at the tire shop about it. He looked at me odd, and said where in the hell have you been? I told him I had just returned from Nam the day prior, so he told me about it. He said something along the line of, "that explains it, since I had a bigger battle to deal with". He then put my new tires on, "At Cost", so I felt pretty good. I did not face any of the bad treatment that most of the guys received in 68, and latter.

I think Detroit has been in decline ever since then, but may be making a slow turn around in recent years.

[painter777]

Since the bankruptcy,
The BIG $$ is going in to The Downtown Development.
100's of miles of surrounding neighborhoods are left to decay.
Or being demo'd after being bought up by foreign money.

Precinct 9: 6.32 homicides per 10,000 people, it is the city’s most dangerous precinct.

These maps overlay reported crimes:
Where are Detroit's most dangerous police precincts? | MLive.com

If you head out to the outer surrounding suburbs, they are booming with new home builds.
Especially the southern and northwestern areas.

[browningautorifle]

Detroit July 1967

Black day in July...I was across the border watching the black sky and light of the firs after dark. Cobo Hall stood as a huge black shape against the burned out city shell...long time ago.

[Brian Dick]

I was a little kid on a farm in Kent Bridge, Ontario but remember it on the Detroit News every night. Little did I know that I'd be wearing the uniform of the 82nd Airborne just short of 20 years later!