The Maersk Alabama, the American-flagged ship captured briefly by pirates in April, came under fire again early Tuesday morning off Somalia’s coast, but evaded the attackers.
Four men in a skiff sped within 300 yards of the container ship, firing automatic weapons in an attempt to board it, according to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. A security team aboard the Alabama fired back and managed to fend off the attack, the Navy said.
The onboard security detail was a private contractor, not a military detachment, according to a Fifth Fleet spokesman…
In the attack, the Alabama’s crew also took evasive maneuvers and used a new technique to repel pirates: a so-called long-range acoustic device, which emits high-pitched sounds painful to the human ear.
Crewman of the Maersk Alabama probably know that it will go very hard on them, if they ever fall into pirate hands again. The pirates ought to realize that this crew won’t go down without a fight.
A whiff of grape should drive the lesson home.
Good job! It is far past time that honest citizens lay back and take it from the thugs and be good little victims. Congress needs to issue letters of marque to all US flagged M/V, and outfit them with some 5″ guns. Or at least some 40mm.
And have the Navy outfit a few Q ships just to make it interesting.
This report is obviously a lie. We all know that if you shoot at pirates it just makes them angrier and then they come and kill you with your own guns and then kill everybody else too. Newspaper told me so.
Anyway, wonder who the contractor is and what they were carrying.
One would hope a Barret, a fixed Ma Deuce, and a couple or five 40mm grenade launchers..
Heck, even some gunnades or carronades and stands of grape would be helpful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0Cn-btAkeI
How about this guy? “Go get the Roach…..”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeDq_tCCj3o
Or hit their base of operations, old school:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aaql3QNa9_Q
Thanks for the old school response.
What lesson was learned and by whom? Same ship got approached; check. BUT did that same ship have any means of self defense that got used to terminate the threat? Nope. Did any pirates suffer from this? Doesn’t sound like it. Just sounds like they got lucky that they saw the threat earlier.
I don’t see what lessons we’ve taught. I see no news about the various individuals caught being tried or punished and I therefore wonder that their homeboys might have any more word on that topic so as to discourage them. But even if they got prison time, that is not the same as making immediate shark bait of them ‘to encourage the others’ as it were.
OOPS, my bad….read the part, too late, about private guards, shots fired, and other deterrents being used. Excellent changes….bigger weapons and better results to follow, I hope. I stick with the benefits of turning pirates into shark bait in home waters, however.
Ah, for a slow-looking MV with pop-up Bofors guns…
Q-ship, anyone?
Oh yes! A few letters of Marque as well.
If I owned an MV, speaking as one with no technical understanding of cranes and steel cables and moments of inertia, I would ship a cargo unit full of rocks every trip.
Any zodiac which speaks my ship without proper regard for manners and customs of the sea etc, could find herself slightly under a dangling box of rocks with a loose seal on one end and an angry crane operator on the other.
If the cargo unit fails to make port, I could be okay with that. I’d ship a new unit full of rocks every time.
Lex … Clear things up for this civilian, please. By a “whiff of grape” you don’t mean a sniff from a glass of cabernet. You mean a judicious application of grape-shot, don’t you? Is grape-shot an assortment of small lead pellets packed into a metal container of some sort? I know it was popular during earlier wars at sea and elsewhere, but I’m just trying to sort all these weapons out in my mind …
Marianne
Marianne, Grape is an intermediate sized load. It is 9 balls, about 1/3 caliber for the size gun it will be used in. There are 9 balls, in three layers of three, bound together by rings and plates with a bolt. You can see examples here: http://www.civilwarartillery.com/
It was developed by the someones navy for taking out rigging and clearing decks. In the Civil War it was kind of popular as a load for the 12 pounder Napoleon. At about 500 yards you could fire on a limbered gun, and have a good chance of taking out half the horses and damaging the gun carriage and limber. If you were lucky, one ball would hit the limber box and cause the rounds there to explode.
What you described is Cannister. For the 12 pound Napoleon, figure about 96 balls of about .69 inches. Some had fewer but larger iron balls. Turned your smoothbore into a large shotgun. At the Wall during Pickets charge some of the Federal guns were loaded with double and triple cannister. It literally swept holes in the Confederate line. Several people wrote of seeing nothing but grey smoke and a red mist when they were discharged at under 20 yds. into the massed troops. And then finding shoes, and chopped meat mixed with wool.
There was also a canister round developed for the M-48 MBT, 90mm gun. I recall that it held upwards of 5,000 devilish little killers called flechettes… obviously a great anti-personel round…used by both the Army and the Marines to great effect in the heavy vegitation of RVN…not sure if a similar round has been developed for the Abrams…do know I would not want to be down range of one of them. Best
Yea, Snake… the 152mm gun-launcher on the Sheridan also had those nasty little critters. Cleared away large portions of foliage and fauna.
I have a handful of those little buggers in a box on my desk. Look like a blued finishing nail with 4 forged leaf-shaped fins on the tail.
Reminds me of my favorite turret command: Gunner! Target! 500 yards! Ambulance in the Open! Lawyers Dismounted! load Flechette!
respects,
Snake-
There has indeed, M1028 Canister Round. ~1150 Tungsten balls building a 120mm shotgun.
Good for demolishing walls and clearing streets.
And waterfowl.
Ah, yes, the “Beehive” round. Nasty, and effective. Take out a bunker like nobody’s business.
Joe in N Calif. The HMS Victory video is very cool, but that is “rolling fire” not a broadside. All of the guns go off at once in a broadside. I think the effect would be the same on the pirates
.
Actually, I think it is a rolling broadside, useful when ‘crossing the T.” But, thank you.
I’d say these are “rolling fire”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONpMTGOnCBU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcgCP0fEuFY (note the CS Navy reenactors on the left of the line here)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6Mlas11xWA
How about grenades with 1 second fuses, slid into a mason jar with the lever held only by the jar? Keep a couple of cases, let ‘em start climbing up the ladder, drop them in the boat….
And one of these days, those pirates are gonna try to grab a Chouest boat, the Cajun Navy, and find themselves a world of hurt. Every one of those boats are floating armory’s.
Snake, Concur- a 105 mm beehive round will put a chill in things. The 120mm canister is a pretty good round to make the peace too.
Ah the beehive round; I was taught, although never saw, that a 106 mm recoiless rifle (useless on a ship) would put a small metal dart in every square foot of a football field. Supposedly useful for flegling 11H infantrymen to use for perimeter defense in Viet Nam. That would definitely skewer a boatload of Somali pirates–sorta pre tenderize them for the sharks.
And as for the newspaper ninnies–let them stand guard on some ships off the Somali coast, and then I’ll take their advice.
What is the effective range on that round? My guess is about 500 yards – is that close?
Heh: http://piratesofsomalialive.com/
Letters of Marque are no longer an option. Western Europe prohibited them under the Treaty of Paris; the U.S. prohibited them fifty years later in 1907 under the Hague Convention.
As always, thank you all for the answers to my question about ‘whiff of grape.’ The one about the ‘red mist’ was particularly vivid. Ughh. Sounds rather like this war’s IEDs.
I really regret that Letters of Marque are no longer a [legal] option. If we didn’t have such a pantywaist White House, it might be a good solution for the merchant ships against the pirates. I hate that the pirates can attack our shipping, and even silly people on private yachts [what in the ever-lovin' world were those folks doing yachting in such dangerous waters?] Some folks have an ‘instinct for disaster’ as my husband and I have often said. And then it takes a lot of good people having to go into harms’ way to rescue them.
Marianne
One of the most useful rounds against a sailing vessel was known as “bar and chain” shot. It was a 24-36 in bar of iron, cut lengthwise, and the two pieces connected by about 6 feet of iron chain. The whole was placed into a canvas bag and fired at a slight elevation, at the first opportunity.
The idea was that the bag would be shredded by the force of the initial blast, and the bar halves would go whizzing downrange, slowly rotating on the chain as it stretched out to it’s full length.
The round was quite effective against rigging, sails, spars, and men aloft.
The whole ideas was to cripple the warship before you closed to solid shot/shell range by destroying it’s means of controlling the sails and spars. Do that, and it’s akin to taking out the engineering spaces on a steam ship.
“U.S. prohibited them fifty years later in 1907 under the Hague Convention.”
IIRC we never actually signed the Hague Convention.
Flechette or Beehive round contained a series of metal plates; the little darts (flechettes) were tied together by a string and then coiled in a circle on the plate. Range was set by gunner; minimum range was 100 yards (you needed some time to get good spin on shell). Shell burst, the darts spun out on string due to centrifugal force. You basically had multiple strings of razor edged darts each 100 yards long. Number of strings was equal to number of plates in the round. I don’t know what maximum burst range was that you could set. But if you could burst one on or near a pirate boat, you’d certainly make pre tenderized shark bait of the crew.
I was trained on the 106 mm recoilless rifle; told that my life expectancy in combat on the North European plain would be ~45 seconds or so. Basically it was an antitank weapon with a real premium on hitting and killing a tank with your first shot. Expected range to target was less than 1000 metres since it was a direct fire weapon. If you missed or if you simply hurt but failed to kill, you certainly got the tank crew’s attention and those fellows carried machine guns. And the backblast from a recoilless rifle certainly let everybody in the neighborhood know exactly where you were.
I think that the flechette or beehive round for the 106 was an afterthought for the Viet Nam war–not many tanks to kill there, but there was a need for perimeter defense. A flechette round in a 105 mm howitzer could clearly reach out a lot further, but I ask you–who masses infantry anymore?
There were many types of dismantling shot, or, to give it it’s proper name, landridge. One of the nastier ones was a steel globe segmented longitudinally into 3 segments, like orange peels, that were fastened together with 3 foot lengths of chain, radiating out from a central steel ring. Upon firing, the ball would come apart into it’s contituent segments, and would rotate around the ring, making, in effect, a rotary lawnmower blade sailing across the deck of the target vessel, slicing ratings and sailors as it proceeded.
Two links about old school stuff:
http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924030896819#page/n0/mode/1up
http://books.google.com/books?id=lHcNBLcgVSQC&lpg=PA37&ots=TfpGUlyK1K&dq=grapeshot%20weight%208%2012%2016&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Enjoy.