BBC News Magazine reports on a salvaged Spitfire that crashed into a peat bog in the early years of World War 2. The anaerobic environment left it is a remarkable state of preservation. Amazingly, with some work, six of the plane's guns were in good enough condition that specialists in the Irish Army were able to assemble a working model. In the test, the gun spit a belt of ammunition (the article doesn't specify how many rounds were fired but the Spitfire had 300 rounds per gun) without a hitch.
The WWII guns firing after 70 years buried in peatThe article concludes with this observation:
The machine guns will now be made safe and join the rest of the aircraft on permanent display in Londonderry, where Wolfe was based, a city on the edge of Europe that played a pivotal role in the war.
When I got the to part about rendering the guns "safe" I asked myself, what the hell happened to the English? Seventy years ago brave men and women kicked Nazi butt at the Battle of Britian and turned the tide of WW2 in Europe. Today, their grandchildren live in dread of pointed kitchen knives.
I swear, if the modern British were to locate Arthur's tomb and unearth Excalibur, they would grind the edges flat in name of "safety".
H/T to Grant Cunningham among other.
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