#WorldWarI

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.

Burgeoning channels The Great War and C&Rsenal continue to expand their partnership on coverage of the First World War in ever more interesting ways. While C&Rsenal focuses on individual weapons in their deep-dive “Primers”, The Great War continues to put their use into an extremely large picture perspective. Fortunately for us, we do not have to parts the micro and macro by watching both and the two channels partner on live streaming episodes that give a broader view with details of weapons from individual countries in World War One.

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.

What was the first double-stack .45 ACP handgun in the world? Well, Springfield Armory Inc might have you believe it was their XD (originally called the HS2000 – and then and now made in Croatia), but more plugged in gun nuts will point to the Para Ordnance P14-45 wide-frame 1911 pistol. It turns out that double stack .45s go back before then… WAY before then. Meet a gun that never lived long enough to get a real name, a double-stack 15-round .45 ACP handgun designed by Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis:

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.

The history of modern small arms is in part so fascinating because of how many firearms have been developed even in obscure circumstances, and how many of those obscure small arms still exist in museums and private collections around the world. Even though I make learning about obscure modern small arms my hobby, I am continually surprised by the new and unique weapons I uncover both on the Internet and in real-life excursions to some of the aforementioned collections.

There must be something Italian in the waters. Berettas seem to be popping up all over the place, this time the progenitors of the US M9 Service Pistol. C&Rsenal (a clever name for a Curio & Relic YouTube channel) has their hands on two rare service pistols from a century prior to today, the Beretta Models 1915 and 1917.

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.

These days, it’s easy to forget that once upon a time at the dawn of the smokeless powder era there was a huge variety of bolt-action repeating rifles being developed to re-arm the military powers of the world. While the Mauser 98 and its progeny eventually took the world by storm, in the early days of repeating bolt actions rifles like the Krag–Jørgensen, Mannlicher, and Belgian Mauser competed on the world stage for contracts.

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.

The paradigm was established by the 1870s: Future infantry combat would focus on a combination of entrenchment, and long-range concentrated fire from well-drilled units to defeat the enemy beyond his own effective range. The arms race for a smaller-caliber, lighter-weight cartridge accelerated, but it was the Americans and the British that would discover a need for an even higher performance round that could outmatch any fielded by their enemies. Two key conflicts were the Second Boer War, fought between the British Empire on one side and the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State on the other, and the Spanish-American War, fought by the United States versus the Kingdom of Spain, most importantly in Cuba and the Philippines. These two conflicts shared one common feature: The opposing sides of each were chiefly armed with advanced quick-loading 7x57mm caliber Mauser rifles, firing high-sectional density 173gr round-nosed bullets at a nearly 350 ft/s muzzle velocity advantage versus the .303 and .30 caliber rounds fired by the British and Americans.

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.

I normally try to keep the worlds of guns and games separate, but sometimes, when everybody’s talking about it…

The gear of the US infantryman during World War I was some of the best in the period, from the ammunition pouches, to the uniform, and the rifles. Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons has taken a reproduction uniform and an original M1917 rifle and M1911 handgun out to the Two-Gun Action Challenge Match, to put them to the test: