#Autoloading

Now that all the guns of Ian’s educational videos have been auctioned off, it is time for a more traditional Forgotten Weapons post, of the kind he’s been doing for several years now. The subject of his latest is the Mannlicher 1885 self-loading rifle, an extremely special example of a semiautomatic hand weapon designed around blackpowder cartridges. Without some practical experience with blackpowder weapons, the ambition of Mannlicher’s goal cannot be fully understood; blackpowder is a nasty, corrosive substance that fouls even simple single-shot weapons to the point of hopeless inaccuracy and uselessness without regular cleaning and attention. To attempt to design a practical self-loading weapon is approaching an exercise in total futility, but it was a challenge that Ferdinand von Mannlicher felt he was nevertheless up to:

Fifty-four years ago plus five days, nearly thirteen hundred troops of the paramilitary Cuban exile group Brigade 2506 landed in Cuba, in an attempt to overthrow the Communist Cuban government, led by Fidel Castro. Sponsored by the CIA, the Brigade was armed with a motley of weapons, many ex-US military examples left over from World War II. Historical Firearms has posted to their Facebook page an album of photographs showing a cross-section of the weapons used by both the Brigadiers and the Communist forces.

The Czech Republic has always been a nation that hits above its weight in the small arms field. Despite being a relatively small country with a somewhat checkered history, it has consistently put out high quality, innovative firearms that compete very well with those offered by much larger and older nations. For having risen from the ashes of the shattered Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Czechs have done quite well.

Sometimes, it seems like there just isn’t enough innovation in the firearms world. Most firearms on the market today are the result of a century of product improvement, and the overwhelming majority of those that aren’t are designs that have roots going back three or more decades.

Following on the heels of another clone of John Garand’s M1 rifle, was the Type 4 (ambiguously synonymous with the designation “Type 5”) another product-improved copy. Compatible with existing 7.7mm ammunition and stripper clips, the Type 4 fed from a 10-round fixed box magazine. Interestingly, the Japanese had before the war experimented with Pedersen-derived toggle-locked rifles (with the assistance of Pedersen himself), and at least two different models were made. Given that Pedersen himself would later copy the Garand, and the Japanese would follow suit, this makes the whole cycle of development of selfloading rifles in both the United States and Empire of Japan dizzyingly interrelated and circular. The toggle-locked Japanese Pedersens were in the standard 6.5mm Arisaka caliber, but the project was cancelled when the war in China broke out in 1936. Eight years later, Japanese engineers would undertake the design of the Type 4, which is the subject of a recent article posted to the Historical Firearms blog:

The Gewehr 41 was Nazi Germany’s first attempt at a standard-issue selfloading infantry rifle. It utilized a front flap-locking bolt coupled with a Bang-type gas trap operating mechanism. This mechanism has a reputation for not working very well (more on that below), but how well would the rifle hold up in an actual shooting situation, provided they did work? Forgotten Weapons’ Ian and Karl take the G. 41 (W) out to the 2-Gun Action Challenge match to find out:

Rock Island Auction seems to always have something special, but this particular item is exceptional even by those standards. Forgotten Weapons has a video overview of an extremely rare Pedersen GY rifle. This rifle was a Pedersen design from the late 1930s that copied its entire mechanism from the M1 Garand rifle. John D. Pedersen, it seems, was not above acting on the old axiom “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”:

With the introduction of the successful metallic cartridge in the 1840s, an explosion of innovation directed towards rapid-firing infantry weapons rocked the world. The culmination of this would be the mass-produced self-loading rifle, realized with the adoption of the Garand in 1933, its standardization in 1936, and eventually its mass production after 1939. However, the Garand was far from the first self-loader ever devised; many know of the Mexican-Swiss Mondragon rifle, but even earlier than that were the Cei-Rigotti of 1898, the STA series of rifles from France beginning in 1896, and the Madsen-Rasmussen of 1888, to name a few. Many of these early rifles worked fairly well, even; the Madsen-Rasmussen, Mondragon , RSC 1917, Mauser Selbstlader, and several other weapons were successful enough to be adopted in some capacity by military forces. Why, then, did the world have to wait until the late 1930s to finally realize the standard-issue selfloading rifle?

As our regular readers have by now guessed, early selfloading rifle design is a major point of interest for me. It’s not well-known, but before the US entrance into World War I, Ordnance was extremely interested in procuring a self-loading rifle design to arm US troops in combat. A significant round of tests followed as a result, and between 1910 and 1917, the US government tested designs from Standard Arms Co, Dreyse, Kjellman, Benet-Mercie, Rock Island Arsenal, Bang, Mauser, Mondragon, Rychiger, St. Etienne (what would become the RSC 1917), Stergian, and Liu, at least. One other rifle tested during this period was the Bommarito rifle, on which Forgotten Weapons has posted an article with description and photos.

Rock Island Auction time means we get to look at a bunch of really neat guns, thanks to Forgotten Weapons’ Ian. Today he examines one of the most important early selfloading rifles, the model 1908 Mondragon: