#GreatWar

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Beginning in the last decade of the 19th Century, the French government began work on the next great advancement in infantry small arms technology: The selfloading rifle. By 1916, after the outbreak of World War I, they had produced what many consider the most advanced rifle of its time: The Meunier A6 Carbine.

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.

The title of this article is an Anglicized version of the title of the article linked below.

Some of John Browning’s contributions to the effort of the First World War – like the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle and the M1917 Browning Machine Gun – are well-known, but there’s one that never made it to production, or even any substantial degree of recognition: A Browning infantry rifle design, utilizing a totally unique hesitation locked mechanism.

During World War I, manufacturers on both sides, including sporting arms manufacturers, lent their material support for the war effort. One of the more mysterious instances of this has come to be known simply as the “Beholla”, after its primary producer, the German sporting arms firm Becker & Hollander.

I am partnering with C&Rsenal’s Othais to bring you companion articles to his Primer series of videos looking at some of the most important firearms in history. First, Othais tackles the iconic Mauser C96 pistol, used by diverse characters from Chinese resistance fighters in WWII, to fictional rogue smugglers from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Keep a look out for further articles in this set as they come out!

It’s a good time to be into firearms history. Between Forgotten Weapons, Vickers Tactical, and other great series, what more could the gun history nerd ask for? Well, Othais of CandRsenal has started a YouTube channel that answers that question, covering in medium-length videos individual rifles and other arms of the period from 1870-1960. The first two episodes, covering the 1886 Lebel and the Berthier, are delivered in a format very well-suited to viewers just getting into firearms, but I still learned quite a bit:

Chuck is feeding the beast with his most recent post of a cutaway TT-33 Tokarev over at GunLab.If you’re like me, you just can’t get enough of cutaway firearms! Pictures are embedded below, but please click through to Chuck’s site to see more: