What did your Gurkha want it for
They were kept as pets. The Ibans, who had lived there since whenever, treat monkeys as a food source. It tastes like a mixture of pork and chicken because I had to dine with a headman once as it was preferable to my head being shrunk. The used either blowpipes or shotguns, both equally accurate, to shoot them down from the trees. When they killed a mother they would keep the infant until it was big enough to eat. If the Gurkhas saw one they would buy it off them and look after it.
When the Gurkhas returned to Nepal the monkeys they had would end up at Jesselton, now Kinabalu. Zoo, where they would eventually be returned to the wild. (Probably to be shot again).
Going back to the old Smith & Wesson; I was issued with one in Borneo, probably the same one as yours. With it came the tatty cardboard box with twelve (1947) rounds. I had been in the Rhodesian Army so I was a dab hand with a shooter but we were getting a new batch of pilots who had gone straight through training without seeing a gun. There wasn't a range at our home base so we were allowed to fire six rounds just before we came back from a forward area.
A fuel drum at fifty yards was the target and none of us could hit it, including me. My last round I fired into the air into wind and I could see the shell going. Something had to be done for my personal safety so I decided to use a ploy I had heard about. Using 9mm. ammunition in a .38 revolver.
To overcome the fact that 9mm. used rimless cartridges against the rimmed variety on the .38 the trick was to run a few turns of thin helicopter blade tape in the recess so it would hold it in the chamber when the hammer hit it. Blade tape was easy, 9mm. ammo not so.
I was taking some Intel people from Pensiangan to a border longhouse called Kabu, sit there for an hour or two and then fly them back. During this period I ask the Intel chap of what the chances of getting some 9mm. was. No problem, he would fix it. When I dropped them off I waited until a Gurkha came along and with a thump deposited a box of 1,000 rounds in the back.
I now had too much but the crewmen were issued with Sterling sub-machine guns that used 9mm. so I was handing out 50 round boxes like Santa Claus. They all had to unload their RAF ammo if they wanted to shoot because if they handed back magazines with shiny rounds in the armourers would know that they had fired the stuff that they had purloined off Montgomery. I then taped up fifty rounds and next day we went down to the fuel drum.
The bullets are about the same size though the 9 mm. case is a looser fit in the chamber. They needed a bit of a push to compress the tape so that the rear face was flush. Just one round; up with the gun, both hands, and fire.
BANG-Berdoing, Fantastic!
A bigger kick because there was more powder but the gun didn't throw at all. I opened the chamber and because it had no rim for the extractor I poked it out with a screwdriver. The chamber looked fine, and a look down the barrel confirmed that was fine too. My crewman then returned from behind a tree.
I loaded up six and off I went; Bang-Berdoing X 6.
Nobody else was interested in doing it for their pistols; something to do with Elfin Safly. I carried the same pistol around for a further six months and must have sent a couple of hundred rounds though it with no problem. It was a bit of a bind wrapping them and then poking them out but in the end I could hit the drum at a hundred yards which is about the maximum range you are ever going to get in the jungle so I felt a lot more secure.