What's new
British Ordnance Collectors Network

Join over 14,000 collectors of inert military ordnance. Get expert identification help for shells, fuzes, grenades, and more — plus access our classifieds marketplace and decades of archived knowledge. Free to register, takes seconds.

37mm Cow gun cases

Excellent images Gordon,Both rare headstamps i would think. Many thanks for the info,and all other input.
 
World war 2 dated Cow gun round.
Mk IV gun case (rather than the pre 1920's Mk III gun). The shoulder on the Mk IV guns case seems to be a little more pronounced than on the Mk III guns case.
Projectile is a 1942 dated AP.
Just need a No.5 primer to finish the round.

COW gun Mk IV base.JPGCOW gun Mk IV detail.JPGCOW gun Mk IV.JPG
 
Interesting - I didn't know they made the ammo in WW2.

I read in some document in the national Archives years ago that when trying to see if they could make any use of the few dozen COW guns they had at the start of WW2, the RAF decided that it wasn't worth fitting them to aircraft, because they only had a limited ammo supply (and what they had was of dubious quality since it had been in store for decades). So they used them for close-in defence of airfields, presumably reasoning that they'd hardly ever fire in that role anyway.
 
Top