"You can never have enough guns . . ."

That timeworn hypothesis was proven true with the outbreak of the Korean War (25 June 1950 - 27 July 1953) when North Korea invaded South Korea in a surprise attack. South Korea was caught unaware and disastrously short of small arms. The situation was more than a little reminiscent of the dire straits Britain found herself in after the Battle of Dunkirk when her army abandoned tens of thousands of rifles on the beach.

As a stopgap measure, the United States supervised the conversion of World War II surplus Type 99 Arisakas for issue to the South Korean Army. Chambered in caliber 7.7 X 58 mm (7.7 Jap), approximately 126,500 short and 6,650 long Type 99 Rifles were re-chambered under U.S. Army Ordnance Corpssupervision at the Tokyo arsenal to fire the U.S. Military M2 30-06 Springfield cartridge. Besides re-chambering, Type-99s were fitted with an elongated magazine well, and armorers cut a notch in the top of the receiver ring. Both measures accommodated the .30-06 Springfield round's 1/3 of an inch greater overall length. A second notch cut in the bolt face accommodated the U.S. Army's five-round stripper clips. In a final step, the imperial chrysanthemum emblem was ground off the receiver ring, and steel parts were phosphate coated.

The Pentagon wisely commissioned a Training Manual for its converted Arisaka Type 99 rifles and addressed their care.

• Inspection of the Type 99 rifle
• Disassembly of the Type-99 into its major groups.
• Re-assembly of the rifle
• Care and cleaning
• The functioning of the breech mechanism
• Precautions in handling

As expected, this instructional book names each Arisaka rifle part and details what it does. Illustrations show those parts in mechanical drawings. The bayonet is covered briefly, as are the different types of .30-06 ammunition to be fired out of the rifle, including:

• M-2 Ball FMJ
• Tracer (red tip)
• Armor Piercing (black tip)
• Rifle Grenade M3
• Blank rounds
• The section on the anti-aircraft sights explains how to train the sights on an attacking aircraft and how marks engraved on the sight arms correspond to speed and distance. In other words, the narrative explains how to use the sights to shoot at aircraft. (Golden B.B. notwithstanding). The A.A. sight was virtually useless during the war in the Pacific and laughably ineffective against Korean War-era jets fighters.

Even if your Arisaka is factory original 7.7 x 58mm, and not a .30-06 Springfield conversion, the contents of this book are interesting reading and, for the most part, apply to the Imperial Japanese type 99 Arisaka rifles.

Finally, our editors took the time and trouble to retype the manuscript from cover to cover rather than merely scanning the original, yellow-faded Training Manual and being done with it. As a result, its text is crystal clear instead of washed-out, hard-to-read photocopied pages. We also corrected some of the original typos and cleaned up the grammar. Printed in large format (8" X 11"), the book is modestly illustrated, including a schematic drawing of the rifle and listing each of its 53 parts.