Small Arms
The Twenty-first Century’s Rifle
Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, early 2006 The fourteen Marines, ready to dash, waited for the signal. It was a cold February morning on a firing range just inland from North Carolina’s coast. The Marines, members of Second Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, were preparing for a deployment in the Anbar province of Iraq, and on this day they had set aside…
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Flammenwerfer
As World War I bogged down in the trenches, each side sought a means of breaking the stalemate. Germany’s first attempt was a weapon developed in secret more than a decade earlier. In 1901 Richard Fiedler rolled out a prototype of what he called a Flammenwerfer (“flamethrower”). Fiedler’s early design…
The Battlefield Changer – AK series Part I
Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov was born on November 10, 1919, into a world that had just seen the end of World War I—“The War to End All Wars”—and hoped for a lasting peace. His family had been exiled to the cold, desolate Altai village of Kurya during political purges, something that…
The Battlefield Changer – AK series Part II
The U.S. military was oblivious to the weapons revolution playing out in Europe. As World War II was winding down, American ordnance experts sent back samples of the German Sturmgewehr for study by the Springfield Armory that produced the M1 Garand semiautomatic rifle, considered one of the finest weapons of…
THE ASSAULT RIFLE
Sturmgewehr 45 Sturmgewehr MP 44 STEYR STM 556 A hint at this new weapon had been given during World War I, when Vladimir Grigorevich Fyodorov, father of Russian automatic weapons, married the 6.5-mm (.26-inch) cartridge of the Japanese Arisaka rifle to an automatic rifle. In 1916 he unveiled his new…
THE MARTINI-HENRY SERVICE RIFLE
The Martini-Henry rifle in .45-inch caliber (actually .443-inch) was adopted for use by the British Army in 1871. At the same time another weapon was available. The importance of this weapon was not in its action but the fact that it “really would shoot straight.”19 This ability was a result…
Mid-Nineteenth Century Firearms and Artillery
The Enfield ‘rifled musket’ Minie ball The Whitworth experimental 3-pounder during test firing at Liverpool. The breech and breech-screw can be seen. A quarter of a century after Waterloo the flintlock was in process of ending more than a hundred years of supremacy on the battlefield as it was replaced…