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That axiom was proven to be 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 stop gap, the United States supervised the conversion of World War II surplus Type 99 Arisakas. Similarly, the Chinese converted a goodly number of its captured Arisakas to 8 mm Mauser (7.92).

Originally 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 Corps supervision at the Tokyo arsenal to fire the U.S. Military M2 30-06 Springfield cartridge. Besides re-chambering, these rifles were fitted with an elongated magazine well and featured a notch cut in the top of the receiver ring in order to accommodate the .30-06 Springfield round's 1/3 of an inch greater overall length. The bolt was notched to accommodate US Army, five-round stripper clips. As a final step, the imperial chrysanthemum emblem was ground off and steel parts were phosphated.

The Pentagon rather wisely commissioned a Training Manual for converted Arisaka Type 99 rifles and addresses their care in a military manner. To whit:

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

• M-2 Ball FMJ
• Tracer (red tip)
• Armor Piercing (black tip)
• Rifle Grenade M3
• Blank rounds
/ul>

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 BB notwithstanding). Truth be told, the AA sight was found to be virtually useless during the war in the Pacific and laughable useless 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 make interesting reading and for the most part are applicable to the Imperial Japanese type 99 Arisaka rifles.

Finally, rather than merely scanning the original, yellow-faded Training Manual and be done with it, our editors took the time and trouble to retype the manuscript from cover to cover. As a result, instead of washed-out, hard to read text, it is crystal clear. 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 phantom drawing of the rifle along with a list of each of its 53 parts.