Published 3 years ago
The footage you are seeing here was colorized by an artificial intelligence program. It re-paints an image showing troops from the 70th Infantry Division lobbing rifle-launched grenades at German positions.
I'm not entirely sure of the location or time of this battle, but regardless of that fact, the footage is pristine. It is not often that you come across footage from World War Two that looks as good as this, and it's for that reason that I decided to share it today. Colorized pictures are hard enough to come-by, as it often takes individual artists dozens of hours worth of work to get something accurate, but now that AI is getting into the mix, I'm excited to see the thousands of hours of footage re-worked and upscaled to HD, the same as this.
Fun fact for the day though. In this video, you can see a member of the 70th ID lobbing what appears to be a 60mm mortar round from the end of his rifle. Prior to this, I did not know that this was something that was possible, or even done. Traditionally speaking, rifle-mounted grenades were not uncommon in World War Two. A lot of Soldiers had grenade-mounts on the end of their rifles with a special gas system that enabled the troop to fire the grenade off in the same fashion as a modern-day grenade launcher.
What's amazing about this however, is the fact that the traditional grenade-mounting system has been modified here with what seems like bailing wire to enable the Soldier to fire a much larger explosive device from the end of his barrel. In this case, it appears to take the shape of a 60mm mortar round. It's hard to tell the actual size of the round itself, but that seems to make sense based off of the size of the explosion (far larger than a hand-grenade) and the rough shape of the round fired off of the end of the rifle.
I could be wrong on that bit however, and I'd love to hear your thoughts down in the comments section. I can for sure say it's not a hand-grenade that's being fired off of the end of that rifle though. What do you guys think?
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