Antarctic Tests Of New American Rifle

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28178, 17 January 1957, Page 12

Antarctic Tests Of New American Rifle

[From BRIAN O’NEILL, “The Press” correspondent with the United States Navy’s Antarctic Expedition.}

McMURDO SOUND, January 11. A new type of high-powered rifle is being tried out in the Antarctic with a view to its adoption by the United States armed services as a standard survival weapon for air crews flying in the Arctic. The .22 calibre rifle weighs only 2Jlb, and collapses into a 14in hollow plastic stock. The man who is carrying out tests with the weapon is a navy doctor, the task force flight surgeon (Captain Earland E. Hedblom. of Colorado), Dr. Hadblom is well qualified as a judge of small arms, being one of the top pistol and rifle shots in the United States.

The rifle to be tested was developed in a Los Angeles machineshop by an aircraft company patent attorney and engineer whose hobby is guns. After production of a successful experimental model the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation manufactured 30 copies of the model, called Armalite (for “light armament”), one of which was given by the Department of Defence to Dr. Hedblom for tests and a performance report. Unlike almost any other rifle, the bolt-action Armalite can be mass-produced on an assemblyline. Its simplicity feature is the barrel. It discards the traditional drilled steel barrel. In place of the drilled barrel is a stainless steel liner tube which is swaged < forced by machine) into the aluminium alloy barrel. Tests on Seals To test the rifle in the field Dr. Hedblom plans to go sealing with

a small group of New Zealanders stocking up Scott Base with supplies of dog meat. The group will be headed by the leader of the advance party aboard the icebreaker Glacier, Dr. John F. Findlay.

When he goes back to New Zealand Dr. Hedblom wants to try his hand among Dominion marksmen. He does not know whether he will be eligible but he would like to enter at Trentham when the national rifle championships are held there. He has a match rifle with him, and is “tuning” it in the hope of being permitted to compete.

Dr. Hedblom, if an entrant, will be a formidable opponent. Last winter he won three individual pistol medals, including his second gold medal, in the United States national trophy individual pistol matches. He was officer in charge of the Navy team for the second consecutive year. He entered the rifle competition for the first time and placed in the sharpshooters’ class in the grand aggregate match. In his match-winning performances he used six pistols and three rifles. ■ Plays “Sweet Potato” A full-blooded Swede, Dr. Hedblom is one of the task force’s more colourful personalities. Deep voiced and precisely spoken, he favours cribbage. beards, hot ginger, Colt ,45’s, and solo music. He plays a “sweet potato” and brings the house down when he produces the scarlet, pear-shaped pipe and whistles the first few bars of a cheeky melody during movie intermissions in the Glaeier’s wardroom. He has had his shrill-voiced instrument since he was a schoolboy. Dr. Hedblom wears the aviator’s wings of a flying flight surgeon and regularly goes aloft in one of the Glacier’s helicopters to keep up his monthly flight time.

The task force cold weather expert, he one night left out a bull-throated roar of disapproval when the commentator in a documentary film being shown to the Glacier’s officers said that beards grown in polar regions were responsible for lowering body heat. Dr. Hedblom is very sensitive about beards in general and his own beard in particular—a straw-berry-tinted upper lip and chin growth after the style of Van Dyke. Argument on Beards In an argument with another naval officer on the subject of beards in Wellington recently no less a person than Sir Edmund Hillary was called in to adjudicate. The other officer had remarked that gentlemen just didn’t wear beards and in defence Dr. Hedblom held up the Everest knight as a gentleman who had worn one. When the other officer said he did not believe Hillary had ever worn one, the mountaineer himself was called out from a hotel party and asked personally. Hillary agreed he had been bearded on Everest and Dr. Heblom, who likes to be right as much as anyone, felt that his own gentility, by inference in question, had been vindicated.

In the little spare time he has on the Glacier’s present cruise, Dr. Hedblom is working on two books. He intends to publish the first medical text on polar medicine and he is rewriting the American navy’s manual on small arms. Of the latter, he snorts. “Some job for a doctor.” but one notices he revels in it.