A few years ago one of my co-workers mentioned his grandfather was selling many of his guns. Since I like military arms I purchased a very good condition Remington Rand .45 pistol made in 1943.
A few years later I purchased a sealed can of WWII .45 ACP ammunition at a local gun show. It was packed in 1943 or 1944.
Last year I took the pistol and ammunition to our family's 4th-of-July gathering in Oklahoma. Since some of my relatives like war history and military guns, I told them shooting a WWII-era pistol and ammunition would have a special meaning on this date. (My 86-year-old dad was there, and he is a disabled WWII Navy veteran who was on his way to invading Japan when the atomic bombs were dropped.)
We each took our turn shooting a clip or two of ammunition and felt a connection to those American men and their weapons that performed to admirably many years ago in faraway places.
One of my relatives is a police captain and SWAT team instructor for a Tulsa suburb. He loaded up a clip of the old WWII ammo and hit a 100-yard metal gong three out of seven shots offhand. It proved to all of us that a military-issue 1911 firing 70-year-old ball ammunition could be very accurate and deadly in the hands of a trained and deliberate pistol shooter.
