Author: Grumpy
The son of a Czarist-era Imperial Russian cavalry officer, Mitch WerBell III suffered from a deplorable excess of personality. WerBell’s life reflected the synergistic combination of an audacious will, an insatiable thirst for chaos, a truly gifted mechanical insight, and some fortuitous timing. The cumulative result was adventure beyond the capacity of normal folk to comprehend.
In 1942 WerBell joined the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, and was dispatched to the Pacific to coordinate underground operations against the Japanese. While operating covertly in China alongside the likes of John Singlaub, WerBell was once paid with a five-pound bag of pure opium. After the war WerBell returned to Athens, Georgia, to dabble in advertising.
Wearing a tie and advertising sundries for a department store ill-suited the former special operator, so WerBell closed his PR firm to start building sound suppressors. Hiram Percy Maxim had patented and marketed the first commercially successful sound suppressors for firearms soon after the turn of the century. Such trinkets saw sporadic use during WW2, but the state of the art was rudimentary by modern standards. WerBell’s suppressor designs laid the foundation for the remarkable devices available to US shooters today.
SIONICS
Werbell’s suppressor company was called SIONICS. This stood for “Studies In the Operational Negation of Insurgents and Counter-Subversion.” His first efforts orbited around suppressing the M16 rifle.
The state of the art as regards materials science and engineering has advanced substantially since the 1960s. Nowadays if you want to eat at the cool kids’ table at your local firing range you need to have something stubby, round, and sinister hanging off the snout of your favorite black rifle. Back then, however, sound suppressors for high-velocity rifles were radical things indeed.
In addition to their M16 offerings, WerBell also built cans for bolt-action rifles as well as the M14SS-1, a suppressor for the M14 battle rifle. WerBell was ultimately credited with 25 separate suppressor designs as well as the “WerBell Relief Valve,” a nifty little trinket designed to vent high-pressure gases. WerBell also pioneered the use of exotic materials like titanium in sound suppressors, something that is quite commonplace today.
In 1967 WerBell formed a partnership with Gordon Ingram, the father of the M10 submachine gun. They melded WerBell’s sound suppressor technology and Ingram’s tiny little inexpensive submachine guns into something even greater. The M1911A1 pistols then in US service were getting long in the tooth. WerBell and Ingram envisioned tens of thousands of Ingram submachine guns stacked in US Army arms rooms around the world. With visions of fat government contracts aplenty, they went to work marketing these things.
Mitch WerBell was a player blessed with some seriously magnetic charisma. Most spies are like that. WerBell secured 29 investors at $7 million apiece to capitalize his enterprise under the umbrella of Quantum Ordnance Bankers. He eventually merged Quantum with SIONICS to create the Military Armament Corporation. Thus the MAC10 was born.
The Gun
The term MAC10 eventually made it into the English lexicon. The American rapper Dedrick D’Mon Rolison adopted the stage name “Mack 10” and parlayed himself into a brand that eventually sold 11 million records. The term “MAC10,” however, was never an official moniker used by the Military Armament Corporation in their promotional efforts.
Gordon Ingram was a World War 2 veteran with a knack for engineering. His first modestly successful submachinegun design was the Ingram M6. Launched in 1949, the Model 6 looked like a Thompson SMG in dim light but was built around an inexpensive drawn steel receiver. The M6 included a novel two-stage selector in the trigger. Like the Steyr AUG assault rifle, an abbreviated pull on the trigger produced semiauto fire, while a full pull was rock and roll. Alas, the planet was covered in a thin patina of WW2-surplus SMGs at the time, and commercial sales were disappointing.
Ingram developed the M10 in the late 1960s. His mission was to create an efficient and compact SMG using advanced mass production techniques. The upper and lower receivers of the M10 were pressed out of sheet steel stock. The bolt, trunnion, and fire control parts required machining, but the gun was exceptionally cheap to produce in quantity.
Original M10’s were available in both 9mm and .45ACP using a common lower receiver. The magazine wells were unique to each gun. Ingram subsequently scaled down the M10 to fire .380ACP and titled it the M11. The .45ACP M10 cycled at 1090 rpm, the 9mm version ran at around 1250, and the M11 fired at a blistering 1500 rpm.
The folding stock on the MAC guns has been rightfully maligned, but it yet remains better than nothing. Deployment involves squeezing the butt assembly and rotating it down before extending the twin struts. On the tiny M11, in particular, the stock is too short for anyone beyond about the 7th grade. However, the thing still serves much the same purpose as might a Pistol Stabilizing Brace today and is moderately effective as a result.
The real magic back in the 1970s was the sound suppressor. .45ACP and .380ACP are both naturally subsonic, so sound-suppressed MACs in these calibers were relatively quiet. The 9mm version was still pretty loud in the absence of expensive subsonic ammunition. The sound suppressor also gave the operator something handy upon which to cling while unleashing chaos.
Ingram designed a nylon strap that served as a forward handhold. Mine has a .380-caliber hole shot through it from one fateful day when I was running my M11 one-handed. For reasons I have never understood, Ingram used extremely coarse threads to interface his guns with WerBell’s cans. Care must therefore be exercised lest the suppressor loosens in use. I have partially gutted a MAC10 can myself by inadvertently allowing the suppressor to unscrew a bit on the range.
The M10 weighed 6.26 pounds empty. This is almost as heavy as an unadorned M16A1 rifle. However, all the MAC SMGs were indeed preternaturally small.
The Hard Sell
WerBell toured Vietnam with his suppressors and Ingram’s SMG’s in tow trying to sell American combat commanders on his exotic weapons. While the novelty of the things created ample buzz, the innate impracticality of the guns prevented truly widespread sales. Special Forces units got their hands on a few, but the vision of tens of thousands of M10’s stamped with “US Government Property” on the side never materialized.
The real nail in the coffin was a US government ban on the export of sound suppressor technology. The suppressor was a major selling point for these guns, and an inability to supply suppressors just castrated the potential international market. With Uncle Sam tepid and rich oil sheiks off the menu, the Military Armament Corporation imploded.
The Rest of the Story
While the Military Armament Corporation was not the cash cow WerBell had hoped, that doesn’t mean the former-spy sat idle. WerBell developed a training center that offered an 11-week course on counterterrorism techniques. He also developed Defense Systems International, a company that brokered weapons.
Throughout it all, Mitch WerBell got into all manner of mischief. In the 1950’s he provided military guidance to the Batista regime in Cuba as well as Rafael Trujillo, the dictator-in-residence in the Dominican Republic. In 1966 WerBell planned and organized Operation Nassau. This op involved an armed invasion of Haiti by disaffected Haitian exiles against Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. As invasions go this one was unique in that it was rumored to have been financially supported by CBS News. CBS naturally got exclusive rights to film the whole thing. The FBI broke up the whole sordid mob before D-Day. WerBell avoided being charged with whatever it is somebody gets charged with when he aspires to overthrow an impoverished Caribbean nation state.
The hits just keep coming. WerBell dabbled in a tidy little insurrection in the Bahamas as well as another in Panama. His attempted coup in Panama against their dictator Omar Torrijos fizzled in 1973, but Torres died in a plane crash under suspicious circumstances five years later. In 1979 WerBell publicly asserted that Coca-Cola had paid him $1 million to provide security for their executives in Argentina, a claim Coke denied.
There were allegations that WerBell had been present at the site of the JFK assassination on November 22, 1963. He was tied to marijuana smuggling alongside Gerry Hemming, another larger-than-life character and CIA asset tied to Cuban insurrection and Lee Harvey Oswald. WerBell plotted a coup in Guatemala in 1982 that also failed.
The weirdest of the lot was a rumored hit sponsored by Larry Flynt, the lunatic publisher of Hustler Magazine. Flynt purportedly paid WerBell $1 million to kill Hugh Hefner, Frank Sinatra, Bob Guccione, and Walter Annenberg. All four men were apparently considered threats to Flynt’s porn empire. A copy of the check from Flynt was eventually made public, but WerBell died a month after receiving it.
There were subsequent allegations that Flynt had poisoned WerBell with digoxin at a cocktail party at Flynt’s LA estate. WerBell, then 65 and working as a security consultant for Flynt, died several days later at the UCLA Medical Center. The details will likely never be known for sure, but Mitch WerBell was undeniably one serious piece of work.
In 1865 a German chemist named Justus von Liebig started Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company in the UK. Liebig subsequently opened a factory in Uruguay to process beef extract products that were later sold under the trade name Oxo. One of their most popular offerings was tinned corned beef. The company marketed this stuff as Fray Bentos, so named after the Uruguayan town where the factory operated.
Fray Bentos corned beef was food for the Common Man. The company also produced glue in the same facility. Fray Bentos was delivered in one-pound tins that were easily portable. This made Fray Bentos ideal fodder for soldiers in the field. During the Boer War and later in World War 1 Fray Bentos was surprisingly popular among British Tommies. In fact, the term “Fray Bentos” made it into the informal military lexicon as a slang term for anything that was good. Now hold that thought.
The Setting
In July of 1917, the Allies launched the Battle of Passchendaele. This orgasmic bloodbath orbited around a campaign to wrest the ridges south and east of the Belgian city of Ypres in West Flanders from the entrenched Germans. Passchendaele lies on the easternmost ridge past Ypres, some five miles from the Bruges to Kortrijk railway. Seizing the Passchendaele Ridge would cut the main supply route for the German 4th Army and facilitate a continued Allied advance that was hoped might turn the tide of the war. The Battle of Passchendaele was a really big deal.
Launching a major campaign in Flanders in 1917 was not without controversy. The terrain was abysmal, particularly given the unusually heavy rains, and opinions were divided at the strategic level as to the wisdom of this grand plan. However, to the beleaguered troops on the ground little of that mattered. Their world was distilled down to a few yards of blood-soaked mud.
The Details
Tank F41 was a male Mark IV serial numbered 2329. While they enjoyed a common basic chassis, male and female Mk IV tanks differed in their primary armament. Male tanks sported a brace of 6-pounder cannon along with supporting machineguns. The female sort bristled with machineguns alone. The commander of F41 was Captain Donald Hickling Richardson. With the approval of his eight-man crew, CPT Richardson had christened their mount Fray Bentos. In combat, they all felt a bit like tinned meat.
The crew of Fray Bentos was a cross-section of British culture. The second in command was 2LT George Hill, while the senior NCO was Sergeant Robert Missen. Lance Corporal Ernest Braedy was the only other Noncommissioned Officer. Gunners included William Morrey, Ernest Hayton, Frederick Arthurs, Percy Budd, and James Binley. At 0440 on August 22, 1917, these nine men left the line of departure with infantry support as part of an attack by the 61st Division near St. Julien. Their subsequent three-day ordeal became the stuff of legend.
The Fight
As Fray Bentos approached the Somme Farm they came under withering German machinegun fire. SGT Robert Missen, the gunner manning the port 6-pounder gun, silenced these Boche positions in short order. This was just the beginning of SGT Missen’s remarkable day.
At around 0545 with 2LT Hill at the controls, Fray Bentos approached Objective Gallipoli, an arbitrary map reference included as part of the overall scheme of maneuver. A German machinegun slathered the tank with machinegun fire, and one round found its way through the driver’s slit. This 8mm Maxim bullet struck 2LT Hill in the neck and knocked him out of the driver’s seat. CPT Richardson immediately took his place, but the terrain was ghastly.
It’s tough for the civilized mind to visualize what this place was like. Trenches, barbed wire, poison gas, machineguns, and death defined the World War 1 battlefields. The earth was churned into chaos by countless tens of thousands of rounds of artillery. The rains had transformed the soft Belgian dirt into a sticky, deadly quagmire. There were numerous anecdotes of infantry troops wandering off from the accepted tracks and simply being consumed by the mud. It was for this sordid world that the tanks had been developed in the first place.
The Mk IV tank was a 28-ton behemoth that spanned some 26 feet from front to back. These massive tanks sported half-inch steel armor and were driven by a 105 BHP Daimler-Foster 6-cylinder inline sleeve-valve 16-liter engine. The Mk IV carried 70 imperial gallons of petrol and had a top speed of 4 mph. Over rough terrain, its operational range was around 35 miles.
While the Mk IV was designed to get the British troops up and out of the trenches, life inside these early tanks was unimaginably horrible. The vehicles were cramped, miserable, and noisy. The Mk IV had no suspension, and direct fire from German artillery would burst a Mk IV like a grape. Even under peaceful circumstances, the buildup of fumes and carbon monoxide from the primitive gasoline engine would reliably sicken the crew. In combat, the interior of an operational Mk IV grew stifling hot and resembled hell.
Driving a Mk IV was not like operating a modern armored vehicle. These primitive tanks were all but unmanageable over truly rough terrain. While CPT Richardson struggled mightily with the controls, Fray Bentos slid inevitably sideways until it was well and truly ditched. With that, now deep behind German lines, Tank F41 became a pillbox.
The Ordeal
Soon after 2LT Hill was hit, gunners Budd and Morrey were hit as well. Mk IV tanks carried external ditching beams for just such eventualities. These heavy wooden timbers could be affixed to the tracks that spanned the entire periphery of the vehicle. Then by gunning the engine this beam would make its way around the tank and theoretically pull the heavy vehicle out of the quagmire. However, to affix the ditching beam one had to be outside the tank. With uncounted German soldiers surrounding the disabled vehicle at a range of some 30 yards, this was easier said than done. Regardless, SGT Robert Missen and LCPL Braedy tried it anyway.
SGT Missen dove out of the tank on the starboard side, while LCPL Braedy performed the same maneuver to port. Braedy was cut to pieces immediately and died on the spot. Realizing his mission to be hopeless, SGT Missen returned to the tank. Both quick-firing 6-pounder cannons then went to work and effectively silenced the offending German machineguns.
By 0700 the supporting British infantry had been forced to fall back, leaving Fray Bentos alone, disabled, and unsupported. The Germans smelled blood and moved in for the kill. The British crew responded with fire from their 6-pounder cannon and Lewis guns as well as individual rifles and pistols.
Fray Bentos carried a basic load of 332 rounds for the two 6-pounder guns along with its three amply-supplied .303 Lewis guns. Individual weapons included SMLE (Short-Magazine Lee-Enfield) bolt-action rifles and Mk VI Webley revolvers. By the standards of the day, Fray Bentos was a formidable war machine. When they designed and equipped her nobody imagined that this isolated tank would have to stand alone and be disabled in combat for three days. However, that’s just what she did.
Things Get Worse
SGT Missen later related, “The Boche were in an old trench close in under the front of the tank and we could not get the Lewis onto them owing to the angle of the tank, but we shot them easily with a rifle out of the revolver flap in the cab.”
At this point the British presumed the tank to have been overrun and began firing on it as well. SGT Missen, a man with some truly epic stones, volunteered to exit the tank and brave the concentrated fire from both sides so as to, “Go back and warn the infantry not to shoot us as we should sooner or later have to clear out of the tank…I got out of the right sponson door and crawled back to the infantry.” By the time SGT Missen left on his suicide mission every member of the crew save Gunner Binley was badly wounded.
The remaining crew flashed a white rag from one of the portholes on the British side of the tank. This action combined with SGT Missen’s miraculous trek across no-man’s land finally curtailed the British fire. Throughout it all the Germans attacked the disabled tank time and time again. This went on from the 22d, all day of the 23d, and well into the 24th of August. Throughout it all the valiant crew of Fray Bentos continued to fight back with every weapon at their disposal.
Epilogue
By 9 pm on the third day, CPT Richardson concluded that further resistance was futile. Despite their cumulative grievous wounds the crew removed the firing locks from the 6-pounders to disable them and retrieved all three machineguns. Under the cover of darkness, CPT Richardson and his crew eventually made their way back to the positions of the 9th Battalion of the Black Watch. There they left their Lewis guns to be used by the Black Watch gunners.
Ernest Braedy’s body was never recovered. Gunner Percy Budd was killed in action a year later in August of 1918 at age 22. The rest of the crew miraculously survived the war. The 60-hour ordeal of Fray Bentos saw them become the most highly decorated Allied tank crew of the war. Their extraordinary story of valor, devotion, and brotherhood served as inspiration for the epic 2014 David Ayer WW2 movie Fury.
I once had the privilege of meeting an elderly British woman who had been tortured by the Gestapo. A British SOE (Special Operations Executive) operative during World War 2, she had been captured while serving undercover in occupied Europe. By the time they got her to Gestapo headquarters, they had already broken her legs.
What followed was tough to hear. At the time she was young, pretty, and a trained nurse. The Germans stripped her naked, tied her to a chair, and pulled her teeth. They tore strips of skin off of her back with pliers, betting each other cigarettes who could flay the longest. They put her in front of a big clock and then crushed each of her fingers using a hammer and steel plate—one finger every fifteen minutes on the dot. If she would divulge the names of the other underground members in her cell they promised they would stop.
Amidst the expansive pantheon of loathsome personalities to have slithered across the earth from the dawn of human history, the Nazis were among the worst. I was a soldier when I met this lady. As I listened enraptured to this grandmotherly woman describe in coldly dispassionate terms what these animals did to her, I wanted to go dig up their cold rotten corpses and urinate on them. How could anybody do such inhuman stuff?
The truly amazing thing was that it wasn’t so terribly uncommon. Ours is a violent, cruel species. You take susceptible personalities and put them in positions of absolute power and it brings out the worst of our primal natures. That fact is actually the true impetus behind the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, but that’s a conversation for another day.
While the existence of such darkness has been a lamentably consistent component of the human experience from the very beginning, so also has been the light. My English friend was rescued by her Resistance buddies and obviously survived the war. Hers was ultimately a warm, happy, successful life. Those underground operators were in this case the avenging angels, bringing quick justice to a group of monsters who simply needed killing. On January 20, 1943, a Belgian aristocrat named Jean de Selys Longchamps performed a similar service. However, in his case, he used an airplane.
Portrait of a Patriot
Baron Jean Michel P.M.G. de Selys Longchamps was born on May 31, 1912, in Belgium. Longchamps was the grand-nephew of the Belgian King Leopold III. Raised in the Old World Belgian aristocracy, Longchamps pursued a career in the military as did most of his breeding. By the onset of WW2, he was a 28-year-old cavalry officer with the 1st Regiment des Guides, an elite light cavalry unit first mechanized in October of 1937. Like so many of the Western European military formations, Longchamps’ unit was swept up in the unstoppable hurricane that was blitzkrieg.
By late May 1940, Longchamps and the tattered remnants of his once-proud Belgian cavalry unit were pressed into the salient at Dunkirk. Most all of us have at least seen the Christopher Nolan movie of the same name. The Allies called it Operation Dynamo. Over the course of eight days, some 800 British military and civilian vessels evacuated 338,226 Allied troops across the channel and back to Britain. Among those 338,226 soldiers was Jean de Selys Longchamps. Roughly 40,000 troops of the French First Army sacrificed themselves in a delaying action to allow the evacuation to succeed.
The Next Phase
Driven by a white-hot rage, Longchamps pursued further opportunities to fight. He made his way back to the continent but was captured by the Vichy authorities and interned. Escaping from a French POW camp he again crossed the channel and volunteered for the RAF. Despite being too old, he forged the pertinent documents and was accepted for flight training. He subsequently transitioned into Hawker Typhoons.
While posted to No 609 Squadron, Longchamps regularly flew missions against German targets in occupied Europe. Throughout it all, he kept up with events back home in Belgium through his many contacts on the mainland. While serving with the RAF he received the heartbreaking news that his father had been tortured to death by the German security services. In response, Longchamps planned an elaborate operation to strike Gestapo headquarters in Brussels. His RAF commanders rejected the request, claiming it was too risky. On January 20, 1943, Jean de Selys Longchamps did it anyway.
The Operation
Longchamps took off early that Wednesday morning alongside his wingman Flight Sergeant Andre Blanco on a mission to strike a railway junction near Ghent in Northern Belgium. Longchamps’ Typhoon fighter was packed with all the ordnance it could carry. He also took along an ample sack of small British and Belgian flags. The railway attack complete, Longchamps directed that Flight Sergeant Blanco return to base.
Flying solo and low-level to avoid German radar and air defenses, the Belgian pilot navigated his heavy fighter to Brussels. Longchamps knew the city by heart. He dropped down into the urban streets, following the Avenue De Nation to the Avenue Louise. His target was a prominent 12-story building the Gestapo had used as a headquarters since 1940.
The Hawker Typhoon was powered by a Napier Sabre liquid-cooled sleeve-valve piston engine producing some 2,180 horsepower. With a maximum speed of 412 mph, the Typhoon made quite a lot of noise. When canalized through the tight thoroughfares of downtown Brussels the racket would have been penetrating. This noise brought the German officers at Gestapo headquarters out of their offices and to the windows facing the Avenue Louise.
The Typhoon weighed some 13,250 lbs fully loaded and was a legendarily stable gun platform. Jean de Selys Longchamps aligned his deadly airplane with the façade of the target building, centered the glowing pipper of his gunsight, and squeezed the trigger on his control stick. The four 20mm Hispano Mk II cannon mounted in his wings chewed into the building at an aggregate rate of nearly fifty rounds per second.
The Weapon
The Hawker Typhoon was heavy for a fighter. As a result, it struggled in one-on-one combat with Messerschmitts and Focke Wulfs. However, the Typhoon was an absolute tank of an airplane. It excelled at precision ground attack missions.
Fully loaded the Typhoon could carry eight RP-3 three-inch unguided air-to-ground rockets and two 500-pound bombs. The RP-3 could be fitted with either a 60-pound HE warhead or a 25-pound solid-shot armor-piercing load. RP-3-equipped Typhoons extracted a fearsome butcher’s bill against everything from German tanks to U-boats.
The Typhoon’s primary armament was the Hispano Mk II 20mm autocannon. The British began WW2 arming their fighters with as many as eight rifle-caliber .303 Browning machineguns. This system offered simply breathtaking close-range firepower, but it yet remained fairly ineffective against armored aircraft at anything but intimate ranges.
We Americans did love our .50-caliber machineguns. The Browning M3 recoil-operated, belt-fed .50 armed most all US combat aircraft of WW2. However, with the advent of faster, more heavily-armored enemy planes, even the venerable fifty seemed a bit inadequate.
The answer was the Hispano-Suiza HS.404. Designed by Marc Birkigt in the 1930s, the original 20mm HS.404 weighed 108 pounds and was eight feet long. The British version of the HS.404 used on the Typhoon was the Hispano Mk V. This was a gas-operated, delayed-blowback design that cycled at around 725 rpm. The US variant was built by International Harvester, was slightly smaller and shorter, and was designated the 20mm M1 Automatic Gun.
All of these 20mm weapons fired roughly quarter-pound projectiles charged with a high explosive filler and detonated via a direct-action contact fuse. The most common Mk I round also included an incendiary component. There was a ball round and Armor-Piercing/Tracer version as well.
The Rest of the Story
Longchamps chewed the face of the Gestapo headquarters to pieces. His cannon fire was so precise that the surrounding buildings remained undamaged. In that single pass, he killed four high-ranking German officers and wounded dozens more. Among the dead were the station chief, a reprobate monster named Muller, and the local Chief of the SD, SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Alfred Thomas. Good riddance.
On his egress, he sprinkled little British and Belgian flags across a variety of Belgian villages as well as the Royal Palace at Laeken. He also dropped a few over the garden of his niece, the Baroness De Villegas De Saint-Pierre. Half an hour after the attack in Brussels, Longchamps landed safely at his base at Manston in Kent, England. Both the Germans and his British superiors were livid.
The Nazis undertook the expected reprisals, further incurring the ire of an oppressed people uniformly buoyed by the audacity of the attack. Longchamps’ RAF commanders demoted him to Flight Officer and reassigned him to another squadron. However, when the true impact of his bold unconventional attack became known they awarded him the British Distinguished Flying Cross.
Herman Bodson, a member of the Belgian resistance during the Second World War, recalled: “The day of the attack was a day of joy. That week, while the news was told around the country, was a week of joy.” It seems true vengeance, even a relatively little bit, was indeed fairly sweet.
Tragically, CPT Longchamps was killed seven months later on August 16, 1943, when his Typhoon, damaged on a combat mission over Ostend, crashed on landing at RAF Manston. He was an epic hero.
