#WWI

There must be something Italian in the waters. Berettas seem to be popping up all over the place, this time the progenitors of the US M9 Service Pistol. C&Rsenal (a clever name for a Curio & Relic YouTube channel) has their hands on two rare service pistols from a century prior to today, the Beretta Models 1915 and 1917.

In the early winter of 1918, it seemed as though the Boche wouldn’t stop, and the war was sure to continue on into 1919. New, secret weapons were needed to complete the victory over Germany, and one of these was John Pedersen’s “device”, officially called “Cal. 30 Automatic Pistol Model of 1918”, a drop-in replacement for a standard (but modified) Model of 1903 Springfield rifle that would give every American infantryman autoloading firepower for close range engagements in the expected 1919 offensives.

These days, it’s easy to forget that once upon a time at the dawn of the smokeless powder era there was a huge variety of bolt-action repeating rifles being developed to re-arm the military powers of the world. While the Mauser 98 and its progeny eventually took the world by storm, in the early days of repeating bolt actions rifles like the Krag–Jørgensen, Mannlicher, and Belgian Mauser competed on the world stage for contracts.

One of the early automatic rifles that has caught my interest for several years going now is the Winchester Machine Rifle, also known as the Burton Machine Rifle or the Light Machine Rifle. The Burton – as I’ll call it for the purposes of today’s post – is interesting primarily because it qualifies retroactively as an “assault rifle”, sharing all the normally ennumered characteristics of that class of firearms, 26 years before the MP. 43 would erupt onto the world’s stage.

One of these days, when I have enough money, I’m going to start investing in old firearms (but the new ones are just so darn cool, too…). Tempting us poor commoners again is Ian at Forgotten Weapons, this time with a German compact handgun commonly known as the “Jager” pistol.

C&Rsenal is at it again, continuing their coverage of World War I weapons turning their attention to the British Pattern 14 rifle. With over 1.2 million built, the rifles served the Empire admirably and would later go on to serve as the inspiration for the US M1917 Enfield rifle, which was the primary weapon of the US infantry in the war.

The classic American M1917 revolver was a much needed answer to a very evident problem: not enough standard issue .45acp 1911 pistols to go around. Smith & Wesson and Colt both produced these revolvers at the request of the US Government, and they served in at least some capacity until Vietnam. Today however, it seems like many people are unaware that even during the era of the 1911 in US military service, the Army was still buying revolvers.

A trend towards ever more powerful and longer-ranged ammunition was cut short by the realities of the First World War: Technologies not previously invented or accounted for, such as the man-reaping machine gun and the portable infantry mortar, made the existing infantry tactics of long-range volley fire not just obsolete, but quaint. Further, new essential small arms projectile designs like tracers, armor piercing bullets, and exploding observation rounds demanded more space in the projectile envelope, putting the previously cutting-edge small-caliber 6.5mm rounds at a disadvantage. The advantages of these small-caliber rounds were virtually negated, too, by the advent in 1905 of the German S-Patrone, a flat-based, pointed projectile that was vastly more efficient in supersonic flight than previous round-nosed designs. Although French engineers preceded this design with the superior (and top secret) Balle D round, it was the German bullet that became the pattern for military rifle projectiles worldwide.

The paradigm was established by the 1870s: Future infantry combat would focus on a combination of entrenchment, and long-range concentrated fire from well-drilled units to defeat the enemy beyond his own effective range. The arms race for a smaller-caliber, lighter-weight cartridge accelerated, but it was the Americans and the British that would discover a need for an even higher performance round that could outmatch any fielded by their enemies. Two key conflicts were the Second Boer War, fought between the British Empire on one side and the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State on the other, and the Spanish-American War, fought by the United States versus the Kingdom of Spain, most importantly in Cuba and the Philippines. These two conflicts shared one common feature: The opposing sides of each were chiefly armed with advanced quick-loading 7x57mm caliber Mauser rifles, firing high-sectional density 173gr round-nosed bullets at a nearly 350 ft/s muzzle velocity advantage versus the .303 and .30 caliber rounds fired by the British and Americans.

The gear of the US infantryman during World War I was some of the best in the period, from the ammunition pouches, to the uniform, and the rifles. Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons has taken a reproduction uniform and an original M1917 rifle and M1911 handgun out to the Two-Gun Action Challenge Match, to put them to the test:

Arcane Teutonic space magicks gave Imperial German assault troops the advantage in trench warfare during the first Great War, as the Kaiser’s sturmtruppen made deadly use of Arch-Industriemage Georg Luger’s fearsome Lange Pistole 08 “long Luger” semiautomatic handheld transforming death machines – err, I mean stocked pistols.

One of several interesting automatic individual weapon designs from World War I, the Winchester Machine Rifle was a concept for a dual-purpose anti-observation-balloon/ground weapon that featured several concepts that, for better or worse, were definitely ahead of their time. Matthew Moss of the Historical Firearms Blog posted an excellent overview of the Winchester Machine Rifle, both there and on WarIsBoring:

While the base principle of how a bolt-action rifle functions has not changed since its invention, its always fun to see the individual takes that each designer uses when creating a rifle. The rifle served in multiple wars, principally to great acclaim in World War I. While replaced by the Karabiner 98k, which derived much of its design from the Gewehr 1898.

I recently gushed on what I consider one of the best YouTube channels out there *that is not guns-only, but is highly correlated. The Great War is a fantastic project documenting World War 1 week by week exactly as it happened 100 years later.

This week, C&Rsenal takes a look at the Italian Bodeo revolver, an interesting transitional type that served all the way through the 1960s.