George Chinn

Back in September (8th) a thread (Allied guns) ran rather acrimoniously on the subject of a synchronised parabellum observers gun with Chinn cited as source for the information. My view was that the technical and practical difficulties involved made this highly unlikely. A current thread (11mm Vickers) suggests that Chinn was imprecise. I wonder if Chinn was innacurate in his wording? Could it be the case that in the early part of the war when synchronisation was being developed and the Fokker E111 did not exist a fixed synchronised fwd firing parabellum would have been described as the observers gun, because the observer in many types occupied the forward seat. When the crews swopped seats in later designs then this became the pilots gun.
Ideas!!!!!!!!!!

andy

That's the thread I'm refering to, but I'm sure you already know that.
Chinn was a good researcher, but like a lot of other "historians" he was not a precise writer in the Hemingway tradition. That one perfect sentence always eluded him.
After rummaging through patents that didn't make the inventor anything, I'm not surprised at much of anything and there is very little that hasn't been tried in some form.
You may be right about the terminology and what he was refering to. We'll never know, and that's the tragedy of that kind of reporting. However, after 50 years of muddling through gun writers verbiage, I expect the worst and hope for the best at every new lead.

[PeterL]

If photographs are acceptable in this context then there is one in the Fokker Eindekker profile (Profile Publications 1967) showing a fixed Parabelum on a Fokker M5. Of course this does not prove that it was ever fired or indeed flown.

hth

Peter L

Alex Imrie has photos of the M5K/MG in his book
Pictorial History of the German Army Air Service,
(1977).
He says that Fokker demonstrated the M5K/MG in air to ground firing trials before Idflieg.
He also says that early production E1's were equipped with this weapon untill the 08/15 became available. The second photo shows Fokker giving
instructions to a pilot of Feldflieger Abteilung
25 at Stenay prior to flight in the same aircraft. What I would like to see is a photo of an E1 with an LMG 14.

andy