#WWI

There are few firearms more quintessentially British than the Webley revolver and a Lee-Enfield rifle. Today, we’re going to take a look at the Webley MkIV, adopted by the British Army right at the very end of the 19th Century.

This is a neat old photo of World War I era soldiers relaxing in a library at a YMCA. It’s clearly a staged photo, but still cool nonetheless. All the natural goings-on in a library are shown via the soldiers: one reading a book, one reading a magazine, one selecting a book from the shelf, and two engaged in the check-out process.

Taken on May 16, 1919, this US Signal Corps photo shows a new potential mode of transportation in the immediate WWI era. What is believed to be a Columbia brand bicycle has been outfitted with a metal scabbard of sorts – complete with ‘US’ embossing – that enables the rider to have easy access to his M1917 rifle.

If you love history and old firearms there are a few YouTube channels you probably follow. For many, two of those will definitely be Forgotten Weapons and C&Rsenal. Ian, Othais and Mae have come together to put seven original World War One vintage light machine guns and automatic rifles through their paces to see how they might have performed 100 years ago.

British historian Stephen Wisdom has built a full-scale replica of a World War One tank from fibreglass and wood.

We often wish old firearms could speak, share their stories and tell us what they’ve seen. Well a Smith & Wesson revolver, recently acquired by Britain’s National Army Museum, has a hell of a story.

Looking like the bizarre lovechild of a bolt-action rifle, a boat oar, and those weird prop rifles from the original Planet of the Apes movie, the Thorneycroft Carbine is one of the unsung “firsts” of the 20th Century. Specifically, this British repeater is the world’s first military bullpup rifle. Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons gives us a real-time look at one of the Thorneycroft prototypes, located at the Royal Armouries museum:

Episode 65 of C&Rsenal’s landmark rundown of the weapons of the Great War covers something very, very special – the Pedersen Device.

If you’re not following both C&Rsenal and Forgotten Weapons you are missing out on some of the best gun history videos around. With C&Rsenal’s current World War One focus, systematically working their way through the weapons of the Great War, and Ian’s impressively prolific output the two occasionally cover the same subjects.

Every year, the historical firearms reviewing wizards at C&Rsenal create a  high quality educational firearms poster. [Note: This fund-raiser expires on Wednesday, December 6th 2017]. This is the 4th-such poster produced by C&Rsenal, two having been done for the WWII era, and now two for the WWI era. If you ask me, they keep getting better.

In this fourteenth installment of Personal Defense Weapon Calibers, we’ll be looking at a highly minimalist incarnation of the PDW/SMG round: The 7.65x20mm French Longue. The story of the French Longue begins with the US entry to World War I and the brilliant inventors John D. Pedersen and John Moses Browning. Faced with the stalemate of trench warfare, these designers were tasked with finding a solution in the form of handheld autoloading weapons. Both came up with semiautomatic rifles firing small, low recoil .30 caliber rounds. Pedersen’s “Device” converted a standard M1903 rifle into a rapid fire semiautomatic, but it was Browning’s autoloading rifle and its .30-18 round (very similar to the .30 Pedersen used with the “Device”) which caught the eye of the French Ordnance officials. The .30-18 Browning, as it is called, was evidently cloned to become the 7.65x20mm Longue used with the interwar French Mle. 1935 pistols and MAS-38 submachine gun.

Ok, the title is just a hair “click-baity”, but the quality of the information and work put into by C&Rsenal is well worth one’s time. Over the last two years, Othias and Mae have been working to catalog the absolute plethora of weapons used in The Great War (in fact, also partnering another fantastic channel, The Great War for period-specific content).

In January, just before the 2017 SHOT Show, I got the opportunity to travel to Cody Wyoming to visit the Cody Firearms Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, to see some of their rare firearms and bring photos of them to our readers.

Drones are a huge boon to the filmmaking world. Coupled with high-quality small cameras, drones can and do capture breathtaking footage of the world’s modern-day events. I would say there has not been a writer’s event that I have been to where there has not been a drone. The steady hum reassures us that all is being captured from above.

In World War I, the Germans developed a secret technology that helped them dominate the skies during 1915 and early 1916. The tech? A device that synchronized the firing of a machine gun with the rotation of an aircraft’s propeller, allowing accurate low-mounted forward-firing weapons on warplanes for the first time.