In message , Fred the
Red Shirt writes
(BUFDRVR) wrote in message
...
Wrong. The French were using larger than .50 calibre weapons against
troops in
SE Asia a decade before Ed began straffing troops there.

I'll take your word for that. What ammo was used?

20mm HE from Bearcats, at the very least.

Explosive rounds with a mass under a certain limit (Hague or St.
Petersburg, can't recall offhand): technical war crime. (One of those
ignored issues because everyone found 20mm+ cannon so useful for
shooting at "stuff" and therefore also fired them at people _outside_
trucks, trains, cars, tanks, ships etc.)


There was a prohibition against firing rounds weighing less than, IIRC,
400g (just under a pound) at people. This led to the interwar selection
of 1.1" for the US light antiaircraft gun, to keep the shell 'legal' for
firing at manned aircraft. It appears to have been gently allowed to
fall into abeyance, like only-recently-rescinded laws about it being
legal to shoot Welshmen with bow and arrow in certain British towns
after the hours of darkness, when everyone discovered how useful 20mm
cannon were.

But more relevant, there is no reason at all why firing ball rounds from
a .50 machine gun at enemy combatants should be less than lawful.
There's a persistent myth that it's illegal to fire .50" at people, and
it just isn't true.

It might be possible to claim that firing 'explosive bullets' of under
the proscribed weight is a war crime, which would make every 20mm
strafing run an atrocity: but by the time of Vietnam this fell into
"long-accepted custom" with every nation that could strafe troops having
done so with 20-23mm cannon.

The law was written around the idea that undersized low-velocity
explosive bullets with a few grains of black powder as burster and
unreliable fuzes were excessively injurious to people and ineffective
against hardware. Time rapidly produced much more effective
small-calibre rounds that *were* effective against machinery and
vehicles.

--
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
Julius Caesar I:2

Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk