Small Arms
AKs against their Makers I
By the late 1970s, the Soviet Union was ramping up for what its leaders mistakenly thought would be a quick war in Afghanistan. At first the AK seemed to be one of the superpower’s main military assets, but the rifle later proved to be in part responsible for its defeat. The catastrophic Soviet defeat following a ten-year guerrilla war eventually…
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Early WWII German Semi-Automatic Rifles
Gewehr 41 The Gewehr 41 was Germany’s first attempt at a semi-automatic rifle in the class of the American M1 Garand. The designation Gewehr 41 was given to two different weapons (although they look rather identical, they differ a lot and are not based on each other). A first weapon…
Kampf/Sturmpistole
Kampfpistole The Kampfpistole with its respective warheads is a rather queer weapon developed by German weapon technicians to fight armor. It had it’s roots in a tool that was not really a weapon, but a signaling device: the signal pistol Leuchtpistole (“glow pistol”), gauge 4, weighing 1.3 kg, by the…
RPG-43/6 RKG-3
Soviet RPG-43 antitank grenade Shortly after the German invasion of Russia in 1941, the Germans introduced the Panzerwurfmine(L), an extremely lethal close-quarter HEAT anti-tank grenade that could destroy the heaviest armored tanks of the war. The grenade was tossed overhand to land atop the tank. After release by the thrower,…
Austrian Revolvers and Automatics
Gasser The Gasser firm of Ottakring, Vienna, and St. Polten designed and produced the majority of military handguns adopted and used by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Leopold Gasser began operations as Leopold Gasser K.u.K. Hof-und Armee-Waffenfabrik in 1862 to manufacture revolvers based on the Beaumont-Adams patents (Ezell, 1981: 90). The family…
THE COMPOSITE CARTRIDGE
The idea of the all-in-one cartridge was not a new one, even in the 1850s, for Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, had already issued orders in the early 1600s that his army was to carry shot and powder wrapped together in a cartridge. Two hundred years later men were still…
Self-Loading Rifles
Fusil M-1908 “MondragĂłn“ The development of firearms in the nineteenth century led rifle designers and inventors to conclude that once they had a reliable composite cartridge and a magazine system that worked, the next logical step was to harness the recoil of the weapon, or the gases produced by the…