#WorldWar2

Listen up, World War 2 fans. U.S. Armament Manufacturing LLC is reviving the legendary DeLisle carbine. This rifle is a legend and one of the best-known integrally-suppressed firearms ever made. Let’s check it out!

Ian McCollum, the face and brains behind the Forgotten Weapons, has a new book for your consideration. With help from photographer James Rupley, McCollum has released Small Arms of WWII: Soviet Union, through Headstamp Publishing. By the way, one of our writers, Vladimir Onokoy, worked as a technical reviewer on this book!

The roller-locked* Heckler & Koch G3 rifles and MP5 submachine guns have become iconic weapons of the Cold War era, being used in conflicts everywhere from civil wars in Africa, to hostage rescues and counter terror operations in Europe, to anti-cartel operations in South America. The operating system of these rifles is as unique as they are, and dates back to the death throes of the Nazi regime at the end of World War II. Desperate to save their failing state, the Nazis tasked engineers with developing new weapons, and the engineers were all to happy to oblige, lest they too be handed an old rifle and sent to the front!

Your chance to own a semiauto reproduction StG-44 is coming soon: Hill & Mac Gunworks recently announced that the first of their Sturmgewehr rifles would be shipping before the end of this month. In an announcement made through the latest InRange TV Question & Answer Session with the company, HMG founder Mac Steil explained that series production of the Sturmgewehr has, at long last, begun, and that the first rifles will be shipping to pre-order customers before the end of August. Further, he stated that HMG would be publishing a Sturmgewehr release calendar, so that preorder customers could figure out when exactly their rifles would ship based on their preorder dates.

Manufacturing artillery pieces is an utterly fascinating process – especially if one has any knowledge of manufacturing. Specifically, creating the barrels is perhaps one of the most technically challenging parts of making the howitzers. Outside of the physical forming of the barrel itself, putting in precision rifling over the length of the part usually measured in meters is a challenge that few companies have mastered. Its far harder than making a mere AR barrel.

Quick: What’s the definition of “assault rifle”? I’ll give you a moment to think about it.

Since we’ve discussed the .30 M1 Carbine caliber, it is probably only a matter of time before someone mentioned another .30 caliber round used by the Allies during the Second World War, that being the 7.62x25mm Tokarev. The round is a turbocharged derivative of the 7.63 Mauser, itself a hopped up variant of the very first successful rimless pistol cartridge, the 7.65 Borchardt. It was adopted in 1930 by the new Soviet Russian government for use with the Tokarev TT pistol, and later was also used in the PPD-40, PPSh-41, and PPS-43 submachine guns. Outside of Russia, it has been a popular cartridge as well, being used by the Vietnamese, Czechs, Yugoslavs, and most notably, the Chinese (with whom it remains in service today).

The US .30 cal M1 Carbine is one of the most important developments in the personal defense weapon story, being one of the very first* intermediate calibers to be adopted as standard issue by a nation, and arguably the first purpose-designed PDW caliber in history. Even today it occupies a strange halfway point between pistol and rifle cartridges, being similar in design to a long pistol round or magnum revolver round with its straight-walled case and round-nosed bullet, but loaded with rifle powders designed for the 18″ barrel of the handy little M1 Carbine.

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.

As a researcher and history enthusiast, one of the issues I often have to wrestle with is that of eyewitness accounts, specifically when to trust them and when not to. That subject itself is one for another time, but today I want to look at a specific example of an eyewitness account as an illustration of how they can be misleading to someone trying to reconstruct historical events.

The M1A1 carbine is perhaps one of the more iconic rifles from American forces in World War Two. It was specifically designed for the Paratroopers, and was used extensively in numerous campaigns of the War. With a folding stock, it allowed Paratroopers to carry less weight, and squeeze the carbine into their gear for their combat jumps over Sicily, Normandy, Holland, and Germany with the 17th Airborne Division. Today it fetches a collector premium over other M1 carbines in their original, unaltered form.

In the fourth part of the series of articles I am writing on the Lightweight Rifle program of the 1940s and ’50s, we looked at some of the experimental rifles that were being tested and evaluated during and just after World War II as potential replacements for or upgrades to the excellent M1 Garand semiautomatic rifle. The goal of these programs was ambitious: To create a rifle – based on the M1 – that would provide all the functions of the military infantry rifle, submachine gun, and automatic rifle, thereby achieving the “all in one” squad level infantry small arms package. This concept was called the “paratroop rifle”, possibly in reference to the German Fallschirmjeagergewehr (translated: paratroop rifle) FG-42 which itself was designed as an “all in one” weapon for paratroops.

We’ve all heard it at gun shows or with friends: The M1 Garand was the first rifle that brought true semiautomatic firepower to the battlefield, but it came with a fatal flaw – the ping, which would alert German soldiers that the hapless GI was out of ammo, allowing them to pop up and strike!

Many would consider this next round to be the first intermediate cartridge ever, and while that isn’t really true, it is one of the most influential rounds of all time, and perhaps the most influential intermediate round ever developed. I am talking of course about the Nazi-era Kurzpatrone 43 Spitzgeschoß mit Eisenkern, or as it is more commonly called, the 7.92×33 Kurz. This round became the model – in one fashion or another – for numerous intermediate rounds developed all around the globe after World War II, including the promising .280 British, and ubiquitous 7.62x39mm Soviet, as well as several others we’ll discuss in later installments.

Well, sort-of-not-really, although it makes for a pretty great title. The Bendix-Hyde Carbine was in fact one of the nine prototypes initially submitted to the Light Rifle program (not to be confused with the Lightweight Rifle program  that is the subject of my ongoing serie s), and it’s in many ways the most interesting one to me. First, though, a brief overview of George J. Hyde, the brilliant designer who invented it: