Hi Leonid:
We are going to have to agree to disagree about Mokume, but there
is a factoid in my head maybe you can elaborate on. I remember
reading somewhere that Army Combat Manual was rewritten after first
encounters with Japanese officers carrying katanas.
Before that manual instructed to block katana with gun barrel.
That proved to be ineffective due to katana slicing through the
barrel, so the manual was rewritten to recommend evasive actions. I
have never questioned that before, so I never took any steps to
verify that. Now, I am going to have take another look.
Fortunately for you, you’ve come to the right place: among other
things, I’m an amateur military historian. WW2 is a little late for
me, I tend to do Pre-WW1 English Army, but many of the principles of
bayonet combat will carry over. I’ve also been studying sword combat
since the age of 14. That was many moons ago. I’m not half bad with a
katana, even still. I haven’t read the prewar, or early war training
manuals for the US, most of this is extrapolated from the English
ones I have read. (WW1 mostly)
In the early days of WW2, American troops in Asia would have been
armed with the 1903 Springfield rifle. No katana ever made is going
to hack through that hunk of angle iron. Mess up the wood, maybe,
but that’s it. I don’t have one, but a friend of mine does. I’ll have
to go measure the barrel. I’m betting it’s about 5/8" to 1/2" thick.
(I do have a couple of WW1 and WW2 British Lee-Enfields, and their
barrels are all a bit above 1/2" in diameter for most of the
length.)
The reason they rewrote the combat manual is probably that the
styles of combat didn’t work out favorably for the allies.
As Kevin mentioned, the way that you survive against a katana is to
get in close, fast. That works if you both have 3 foot razorblades.
A bayonetted rifle is more like a spear: sharp at the tip, but a club
otherwise. So allied troops were trained to fight like spearmen:
stay out at long range, and poke the other guy with the pointy end.
Or failing that, poke him as you come in, swing around, and smash his
face with the butt of the rifle as you run by. That works fine, as
long as the other guy only has a bayonetted rifle too: he’s got
nothing to hit you with once you get inside his blade. Unfortunately,
if the other guy has 3 feet of razorblade, he’s got plenty of
sharpness to spare for you, and you only have a club. This is not a
recipe for health and long life.
Other issues: bayonetted rifles are very heavy, and very slow, as
such things go. Katana are very light, and can be very fast. Once
the katana fighter gets inside the tip of the rifle, it’s game over
unless the rifleman gets very lucky. The other thing about bayonetted
rifles is that they’re thrusting weapons, you can’t really cut with
them. Again, once the katana gets inside the tip, game over. (For
example: the bayonet issued to the British infantry for the Lee-
Enfield during WW2 was a round steel spike, 6" long, with a sharp
point. Looks like a very large nail on the end of the rifle. Doesn’t
even have an edge at all. (I have one of those. I can show you
pictures if you’d like.)
Speaking from the other side, as a trained swordsman, the way you
survive against a spearman is to get in close, under his tip, fast,
and then chop off his arms. That’s something you simply can’t do
with a bayonetted rifle. The Imperial Army was the only major force
that still sent officers into combat with real swords at that point.
(More importantly: it trained them to use those swords too…) So
the early US training manual probably didn’t worry about training
riflemen to defend against swordwielding madmen, it trained them to
defend against other riflemen who’d run out of ammo. (translation:
it was betting that neither one of them was really all that good with
the bayonet.) Against trained swordsmen, that’s a very, very bad bet.
There’s no way you’re going to chop through a rifle with a katana,
but chopping through the forearm holding the rifle would present very
few difficulties at all.
I’m betting that’s a more likely explanation for what was going on.
As a further mental exercise: it would take one hell of a lot of
power to chop through a rifle. Even if the swordsman could generate
enough power to do it, the guy holding the rifle probably wouldn’t be
able to hang on well enough for that to matter. He’d drop the rifle
before you could chop through it.
I actually have a WW2 Japanese officer’s sword, sitting right here by
the desk. It’s a nice sword, but there’s no way it’s going to chop
through a gun barrel. During the war (for them, the war started in
1930), the Imperial Army was minting officers so quickly that they
had factories mass producing drop-forged katana. About 80% of the
swords in the field were these “Shin-Gun-To” (“New Army Swords”) They
cranked out about 200,000 of the bloody things. They’re crap. The
steel is of variable (usually decent) quality, but it’s a solid bar,
not a laminated construction, and they’re not differentially hardened
as the real katana are, so they don’t have anything like the edge-
hardness of a real katana. This is both good and bad. Bad: they’re
not as sharp, Good: they’re not nearly as likely to crack their edges
as a real katana is. Real katana edges are as brittle as glass. Hard
as hell, but very, very brittle. (That’s one of the reasons why
katana blades are laminated: a very high-carbon section for the edge,
and a series of lower carbon back sections to support that edge with
their more springy nature.)
Some officers, either with more money, or older families, mounted up
old swords, and took those to war with them, and that’s what mine
is, an old blade in a IJA shingunto mounting. So it really is a
decent blade. But even that thing won’t chop through a rifle barrel.
(Not that I’m going to wreck it trying.)
About testing katana. In my youth I was quite proficient in Judo.
I thought a lot about my abilities until I met with japanese
wrestlers.
r. 1 mm^2 = 0.000001 m^2 which means that at the point of contact,
the pressure is equal to 5,546,000,000 pascals. In more familiar
units it is equal to 804,379 pounds per square inch. That is enough
pressure to destroy almost anything.
Yes, but as I said earlier, the cutting edge isn’t the issue. It’s
the force required to wedge the cut open far enough to permit the
rest of the (very thick) sword blade to continue into the cut. The
edge can’t get any farther into the cut than the rest of the blade
that’s supporting it, and it takes a lot of energy to push steel out
of the way to allow the blade to advance.
Why then these guys on TV could not do it. Speed is one reason and
blade must meet a barrel exactly. Even slight deviation from the
vertical means significant reduction in force. Unless katana
handled by an expert, results of an experiment are simply not
reliable.
Precisely, which is why they were so painstaking in their research.
To test the myth, they went out and found one of the best Iado
swordsmen in the SF bay area. Then they had him take full-power
swings at a target that was rigged to measure how much energy he was
putting into it. They also used high-speed photography to calculate
the speed of the blows.
From that they built themselves a sword-swinging robot
arm that could deliver exactly the speed and power generated by the
swordsman. Identically, every time, exactly on target.
They tried chopping machine gun barrels. No dice. They tried skinny
little tommy-gun barrels. No joy there either. They tried heating the
barrels up to red hot. Nope. Out of sheer frustration, they tried
amping the robot up to two or three times human strength. Still no
joy, even with red hot barrels.
They wrecked a whole bunch of expensive swords doing this, but no
barrels were chopped. I’d call that pretty conclusive.
(Just for the record, they did manage to break one barrel, but that
was by heating it to red hot, quenching it in water (so it was at
maximum hardness) and then having the robot take a swing at it. The
barrel shattered because it was fully hardened (and not tempered)
but the sword didn’t actually cut it.)
Regards,
Brian.
