In 1909, further trials were announced. Fedorov would re-submit his 1906 model which was received with great acclaim from the military, for it was the only rifle that passed all endurance and shooting trials. This design would receive further development up to 1913, when Fedorov would also introduce a non-rimmed cartridge to pair with his rifle, 6x57mm. This 1913 rifle went as far as being ordered for field trials, 150 to be exact. However, due to the declaration of war in the following year, all developmental work was ordered to immediately cease.

A year passes, and the threat of a central power’s invasion dwindles and interest in automatic weapons picks up again, both in aviation and in the trenches. Fedorov is sent to France as an observer and there he examines the Chauchat automatic rifle and its deployment as a light machine gun. His findings inspire the Russian authorities to create an experimental battalion, the 189th Izmail division, to be armed with automatic weaponry, including C96 pistols, and most importantly, Fedorov M1913 rifles, some having been adapted to use Madsen magazines. This is one of the major myths permeating the Fedorov lineage, as the later 1919 rifle is often associated as being the version fielded during the Great War.

However, there was an actual model of 1916 Fedorov rifle which resembled, in part, the later 1919, being carbine length, using the 6.5mm Arisaka ammunition, and being fully automatic; These were designated for the air force, which received them with great enthusiasm, to the point where 25,000 automatic rifles, or “Avtomats” as they were now being called (to differentiate them from the infantry version) were considered to be necessary for the war. Obviously, for a country like Russia that lacked the manufacturing capacity to produce even bolt action rifles for their regular infantry, producing this number of complex automatic rifles was unfeasible. Even with this caveat, production of the Fedorov was deemed to be of great importance, leading to major factories like Putilov and Izhevsk to be built to produce parts for the Fedorov, which they allegedly did. By the end of 1917, the Kovrov Arsenal was also instructed to start production of the Avtomat. Although, this wouldn’t last long, for the Russian Revolution would temporarily halt any development or production of this new automatic rifle.

The Kovrov Arsenal, when originally built, was partially funded by the D.R.S. (Dansk Rekylriffel Syndikat) company to produce the Madsen light machine gun to the Russian forces, who were one of the first countries to field it in the Russo-Japanese war. When the Russian Civil War broke out, the Kovrov region fell into Soviet control and they confiscated all production of firearms from there, including the very few Fedorovs that had been produced to that point. These few guns captured did impress the recently created Soviet Army which contacted Fedorov to work as the main director of the plant. The Soviets also requested a further 15,000 Madsen rifles and 9,000 Fedorov rifles to be manufactured as soon as possible, investing heavily into the plant, with a new design bureau and manufacturing buildings.

For this effort, the Fedorov rifle was simplified to ease production, which resulted in the version that we identify as the Fedorov nowadays, the model of 1919. With a newly designed 25-round magazine, the iconic wooden front grip Even then, the task of manufacturing this order stalled quickly; supplies were hard to come by due to the Russian Civil War and lack of organization and manufacturing sophistication further killed the idea of producing the Fedorov in any significant quantity. Only about 100 guns were produced in the first year; peak production was in October 1923, with 822 guns.

Nevertheless, the Russians couldn’t let the opportunity of having such an innovative concept and (a genius firearms designer at their disposal) pass. Many prototypes and developmental models appeared in the early 1920s in an attempt to broaden the Fedorov system’s potential usage. Shpagin, famous for his WWII era submachinegun, collaborated with Fedorov in such an attempt. They worked to make an armored vehicle adaptation of the system, double-barreled, and with a ball mount. It was installed on early Soviet armor, such as the MS-1 tank and BA-27 armored car. Meanwhile, Degtyarev worked on a light machine gun version of the Fedorov, both a water-cooled and air-cooled, Lewis-style variant was tested with bipods and extended magazines. However, in 1925 the Soviet army canceled all firearm projects that used foreign calibers. As the Fedorov was still using the 6.5mm Arisaka cartridge, it was caught in the crossfire of the ban. Some projects would crop up later, but none would go past prototype stages. The remaining Fedorovs would end up being sent to depots.

An example of Shpagins and Degtyarevs modifications of the Fedorov, one porting a double barrel design, with inverted receivers and the other with a water-cooled jacket and bipod retrofitted.

Although it was such an innovative firearm, the Fedorov would not see much service along its troubled life. Around 120 rifles were used during the first world war, mostly converted semi-automatic M1913 rifles with extended magazines that were fielded by the 189th Izmail detachment in Romania, and a few others which were given to aviators. After that, it saw some use in the early history of the Soviet Union, but its main debut would be in the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland, where supply-starved Soviet troops were reissued with older surplus rifles, including Fedorovs. However, due to lack of maintenance of the somewhat complex mechanism and lack of spare parts, they were very quickly abandoned. For this reason, Finland has one of the biggest collections of Fedorov rifles.

To summarize, the history of the Fedorov has become quite murky due to the problems and conflicts that affected most, if not all, of this firearm’s history. From its humble beginnings as a semi-automatic Mosin conversion, to what some consider to be the first assault rifle ever fielded and made.
 

Most gun enthusiasts will know that the Swiss-made B&T MP9 rotary barrel sub-machine gun was developed by Steyr-Mannlicher and manufactured in Austria from 1992 to 2001 as the Steyr TMP; but that’s just scratching the surface. Things between Steyr and the rotary barrel go way back – to the early 20^th Century, to be more precise.

A LOT OF FIRSTS

At the turn of the 20^th Century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a centuries-old, declining global power, but a major power nonetheless; a status that it would formally retain until its defeat in World War I and its subsequent dissolution.

As such, it retained a massive military that strived to remain equipped with the latest, cutting-edge technology. In 1898, the Austro-Hungarian army had adopted a new sidearm in the form of the Mod.1898 Rast & Gasser revolver. It was chambered for a proprietary 8mm Gasser rimmed cartridge. Despite fairly modern (for the time) features such as an eight-round cylinder and a double-action trigger, the Rast & Gasser retained other characteristics, including an Abadie gate-loading system and an ejector rod, that made it obsolete right from the very get go.

And this, at a time when designers worldwide were already experimenting with increasingly reliable semi-automatic pistols that were seeing limited military adoption by the militaries of smaller countries and, in certain cases, by specialized troops and the navies of major powers, the Mauser C.96 was ordered by the Turkish Army, the Italian Navy, and saw success in China, while the Luger pistol first entered service in Switzerland, then with the Imperial Navy in Germany, a foreshadowing of the full-scale adoption that was to come.

Little did those countries know, the Habsburg empire would outrun them all, and with a domestic design nonetheless, the brainchild of Karel Krnka.

Born in Bohemia (which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and would now be in the Czech Republic), Karel Krnka followed in the footsteps of his father Sylvester, who had designed the breech-loading conversion for the 1857 Six-Line musket used by the Russian Empire. Early in his career, he designed a few ill-fated breech-loading, straight-pull, and bolt-action rifles. In the late 19^th Century, after a stint in England, he started working on handguns under the patronage of Georg Roth, owner of one of the biggest ammunition manufacturing companies in the empire.

Some years earlier, another handgun designer by the name of Wasa Theodorovic had worked under the patronage of Roth, coming up with a series of pistol prototypes, aptly dubbed the Roth-Theodorovic, that the company had not been able to successfully pitch. Karel Krnka extensively reworked the original Theodorovic design into various prototypes, adding or removing features as the development phase went by. Among other things, Krnka did without an external hammer and any manual safety of sorts, briefly experimenting with a grip safety before settling on a peculiar striker-fired trigger system that looks very familiar today.

The final iteration of the pistol, now known as the Roth-Krnka, was submitted to the Austro-Hungarian military in 1906 and officially adopted in 1907, hence the official denomination “Repetierpistole M.7” for “Model 1907 repeating pistol”. The Austro-Hungarian government acquired all rights and appointed the two major firearm manufacturers of the Empire to produce it broad numbers for the entire military, with cavalry units being designed as early adopters due to the specific features that made the Repetierpistole M.7 ideal for cavalry units.

The biggest manufacturer was, of course, OWG (a.k.a. Steyr), which further refined the project from an industrial point of view, adapting it to broad-scale manufacturing. It produced approximately 60,000 samples, which is why the pistol is today known as “Roth-Steyr”. However, the FEMARU Fegyvergyár Részvénytársaság of Budapest (later known as FÉG) was also in the game, manufacturing about 30,000 samples from 1907 until the end of World War I.

Just like that, Austria-Hungary had beaten all major powers in adopting a semi-automatic pistol as the standard service sidearm for its armed forces.

FAMILIAR FEATURES

The Repetierpistole M.7 is a hefty piece of machined steel, with a very long, sliding bolt assembly entirely enclosed in the frame. Locking is achieved by two cams machined on the barrel itself, which engage two slots within the front of the bolt assembly that wraps around the barrel.

As the pistol is fired, the barrel moves with the bolt for approximately 13 mm (½-inch) until a set of two front cams integral to its cylindrical body engage with a corresponding set of helical guides machined into the barrel bushing, blocking its rearward movement. This disengages the barrel from the bolt body and forces it to rotate 90-degrees clockwise while the bolt assembly completes its rearward movement, ejecting a spent case and picking a new round from the magazine and feeding it to the chamber as it is pushed back to the locked position by the return spring.

The Repetierpistole M.7 is a striker-fired pistol, with a trigger that can be described as half-way between a single and double action. When the plunger (which hosts the striker) at the rear of the pistol’s body is pulled back and released, the rear portion of the striker’s body protrudes from the end cap to signal the cocking status; but the striker is actually only half-cocked. As pressure is applied to the trigger, the sear pushes the striker all the way back to a fully armed position until it disengages it, allowing the striker to spring down and hit the chambered round.

Should the round fail to fire, the striker must be manually cocked by pulling again on the plunger; a built-in safety intercept system prevents the striker from reaching the primer and igniting the round if the gun is fired when out of battery. When all ammunition is spent, the bolt assembly locks back to the open position; once the Repetierpistole M.7 is reloaded, it’s brought back to the locked position by pushing on a slide stop tab located above the grip.

What we are looking at, here, is essentially not only the first semi-automatic pistol to be adopted by a major military, and not only the world’s first rotary barrel pistol, but also the first “Safe Action” pistol. Glock’s signature trigger goes back a long way, but its roots are traced back to Austria. The trigger system was one of the reasons why the Roth-Steyr design was considered to be particularly adequate to the needs of cavalry units; the gun simply can’t fire by accident and features a hold-open device for one-handed operation.

The grip of the Repetierpistole M.7 is one with the frame, features wood panels, and double as the pistol’s magazine, which is loaded from the top via the ejection port using stripper clips. The M.7 held ten rounds of a proprietary .32 caliber (dubbed 8mm Steyr or, more accurately, 8×19mm Roth-Steyr). Slightly more powerful than 32 ACP, it was originally made available to the Austro-Hungarian military by its own ordnance factories in a 113-grain load with greased, unplated steel-jacketed bullets, although some private suppliers, including Georg Roth’s own factory, did manufacture cupro-nickel jacketed loads.

Regardless, all ammunition for the M.7 came pre-loaded in a stripper clip with a plunger to assist loading and prevent mishaps that could cause rounds to be ejected uncontrollably under the pressure of the follower springs. The stripper clips were packaged individually, and the M.7 featured a tab located above the grip that could be pushed when the bolt was locked in the open position to unload the magazine by, you guessed it, just ejecting the rounds from the top window.

FORGED IN FIRE

The service history of the Repetierpistole M.7 is inextricably tied to the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as the pistol had its baptism of fire on the cruel battlefields of World War I. Outside of a small batch of German-produced Sauer variants of the design sold on the civilian market starting in 1900, in fact, the Roth-Steyr Model 1907 failed all military bids outside of Austria-Hungary, including two separate pitches to the militaries of the U.K. and the U.S., where it was unsuccessfully offered in a .45 caliber variant.

As the fortunes of war turned against the Central Empires, the number of M.7s in service quickly turned out to be insufficient. Starting in 1912, the Austro-Hungarian military had been complementing it with the Repetierpistole M.12, a.k.a. the Model 1912 Steyr Hahn, a hammer-fired, stripper-clip fed pistol that was easier to manufacture and more powerful than the Roth-Steyr, being chambered in 9×23mm Steyr and 9mm Luger.

Nevertheless, the Habsburg Empire’s need for handguns during the war ended up vastly outpacing the local industry capabilities; like their counterparts in the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian troops had to resort to the “Behelfpistole” (“Necessity pistols”), often privately equipping themselves with commercial handguns chambered in a myriad of different calibers. As the defeated Empire collapsed and disintegrated after World War I, a myriad of new independent states were born where it once stood. These states, including the Austrian republic, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, ended up inheriting vast quantities of Repetierpistole M.7s and all fielded them before and (in small numbers) during World War II.

Austria’s arch-enemy Italy ended up capturing swathes of Roth-Steyr pistols during World War I and received many more as reparations; those guns were retained in service as rear-echelon sidearms for decades, so much so that Italy’s biggest ammunition manufacturer, Fiocchi, produced vast quantities of jacketed 8mm Roth-Steyr ammunition. The 1920s and 1930s saw those guns issued to Askari units with the Italian colonial troops in Africa, and in the final chaotic months of World War II, the Italian fascist troops that remained loyal to Mussolini and to the Germans fielded them in the last desperate attempts to stop the Allied offensive across the country.

That was the swan song of the Roth-Steyr Repetierpistole Model of 1907. Today, a small (but not small enough to make them rare) number of these survive on the civilian collector market in Europe and the United States. Their conditions may vary, but those that are still in good condition can return decent results at the range. Among other companies, Fiocchi still manufactures an 8mm Roth-Steyr load with Boxer primers and 113-grain FMJ bullets, developing approximately 329 fps of muzzle velocity and 290-foot pounds of muzzle energy, considered safe for these old timers.

However, if well kept, the Roth-Steyr Repetierpistole M.7 can reasonably be tested with original ammunition. I remember such a case from early on in my career when I worked for the historical (and now defunct) Italian gun magazine “Diana Armi” in the early 2000s. My colleagues and firearm collectors Roberto Allara and Oscar Groppo fortuitously came into possession of ten 8mm Roth-Steyr rounds (marked “GR” (for Georg Roth!) and manufactured in 1910) that were recovered by a friend in the woods of northern Italy, the location of many bloody gunfights between fascist troops and partisans in the final months of World War II.

Once each round was inspected for lack of corrosion and painstakingly restored, and, fighting back the protests of antique ammunition collectors who wanted to prevent such a waste, the two colleagues brought a third party on board who happened to own a Roth-Steyr M-1907 pistol. Two attempts to use the original stripper clip failed, but third time is always a charm… and there they went, on a 15-meter range, putting nine rounds out of ten on target, progressively getting closer to the bullseye. That’s what you get from a 100-year-old pistol and 100-year-old ammunition… if you’re brave enough.

The things we do for science…

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

As long as you keep water in the water jacket and keep the loaded belts coming, it will keep on working as steadily as a sewing machine, only requiring a new barrel every 15,000 rounds; a change that can easily be done in 15 seconds. If a part does break, the Maxim is a modular design that allows the swapping out of the bolt or feed block with a spare to keep on firing. When faced with swarming infantry, this is a life-or-death matter. When the Russians attacked the Ukrainian Bakhmut meat grinder in waves, reminiscent of a WWI-style assault, the Maxim really came into its own, cutting down lines of attackers like wheat before a McCormac reaper.

There have been other ingenious applications of the Maxim, such as mounting telescopic sights and grouping four or six guns together in one mount. This enables 2000 to 3000 rounds per minute to be fired at attacking aircraft. When a modern jet comes in low with all the electronic warfare devices to hide it from sophisticated ground-to-air missiles, it’s still quite vulnerable to a low-tech anti-aircraft position that can raise a curtain of lead with a row of linked Maxims.

As the war drags on, the costs keep mounting and the Ukrainians are hard pressed to get enough ammunition, as they have drained the NATO stockpiles. Only Russia has kept all its WWII production lines intact and modernized and, while they are well-supplied, the cost of artillery shells necessary to deny continuous passage through an area is astronomical. A steady rain of indirect machine gun fire does the same job for a fraction of the cost. This requires a water-cooled gun that does not wear out quickly.

This is a job for a Maxim. Its toggle action spreads out the shock of operation so there is less wear and breakage of parts. When it does wear out, the bearing surfaces on the receiver are riveted on and can simply be changed for new ones while the modular parts are sent back to the ordnance depot for rebuilding. Being recoil operated, it does not have a gas system to foul and jam as the number of rounds fired adds up. The Germans were well aware of this issue with gas operated guns and stated that the gas operated systems had inherent problems. They kept designing recoil operated guns as a result.

TACTICAL USE OF THE MAXIM IN 2024

To get the best use of the Maxim today, you would want the WWI German 08-15 version with the optional Lafitte 34 mount. No one today seems to remember that the 08-15 with its shoulder stock and bipod was just intended as a more mobile heavy machine gun that storm troopers could emplace as they infiltrated the enemy lines and then dominate that sector with sustained machine gun fire. The mobility of the 08-15 eliminated the weakness of the emplaced heavy machine gun under artillery fire as the 08-15 machine gunner could move about like a rifleman, changing firing positions. Even though the weight was 50 pounds with a full water jacket and a 100-round belt in a drum magazine, the weight was so well distributed that many men could fire it from the shoulder like a rifle. This was something almost no one could do with the barrel-heavy Lewis gun, which was a true light machine gun and weighed considerably less. The ability to use a heavy, sustained-fire, water-cooled machine gun in the light machine gun role was a testament to the Maxim’s versatility.

For accurate fire in the heavy machine gun role, many of the remaining 08-15 Maxims were mounted in the Lafette 34 mount in the 1930’s. This ultimate machine gun mount features recoil absorption, telescopic sight, automatic traverse (if desired), and enabled accurate fire out to 3500 meters converting any machine gun mounted in it to a miniature artillery piece. We see these today with MG34’s and MG42’s primarily mounted on them, but they cannot deliver the sustained fire of a water-cooled gun in the Lafette 34.

HISTORICAL PRECEDENCE

The abandonment of the sustained fire machine gun and its replacement with air cooled guns had disastrous consequences. The air-cooled machine gun is a wonderful weapon in its place, but it can never do the job of a sustained fire machine gun. In WWII, the Germans found that the Russian human wave assaults kept coming until the air-cooled guns overheated allowing the Russians to overrun them. The Normandy invasion was admittedly a close-run affair and water-cooled Maxims fully deployed for both direct and indirect fire would have been more than enough to dip the balance in the German defender’s favor.

During WWII, in Burma, the British managed to sucker the Japanese into Banzai charges against WWI-style barbed wire backed by their Vickers machine guns (a Maxim variation) resulting in the annihilation of the attacking Japanese troops.

No machine gun is as reliable or able to fire as long as a Maxim. When John Basilone got his medal of honor defending Henderson Airfield at Guadalcanal with the two machine gun sections he commanded, his commendation stated, “he went from machine gun to machine gun repairing them and keeping them firing.” They weren’t supposed to need repairing! If they had Maxim guns, there would not have been any stopping for repairs. And if there was a problem, the gunner could have swapped out the modular part in a few seconds and kept firing without needing his commander’s help. It seems clear that water-cooled guns would have been a powerful help against Japanese Banzai attacks throughout the war as they could keep on coming long after an air-cooled gun overheated.

In the Korean War, the Chicom human wave assaults pushed back the American troops just as the Russian human wave assaults had done against the Germans in the preceding war. Water-cooled guns properly employed for direct and indirect fire would have foiled these assaults, but they were scarce, and the U.S. military has never wanted to invest the training time and equipment needed for effective indirect machine gun fire.

During the Vietnam War, American fire bases were overrun largely because of inadequate machine guns of modern design and the improper use of them. No one wants to learn the lessons of history if it involves using old ways. Newer is always supposed to be better and anything from the past tends to be dismissed out of hand if not ridiculed as anachronistic and obsolete. What could be more obsolete than the world’s first machine gun? A weapon designed back in 1884! The problem with that line of reasoning is that the inventor got it right and the design was perfected. Once you get to the top of the mountain of machine gun design, all roads go downhill… and the Maxim is the pinnacle. No gun made since has come near its longevity and reliability.

MORE THAN GUNS

Maxim was one of the great geniuses of all time. He patented the electric light bulb and Edison was only able to steal the design when Maxim went out of town and told his plant director to renew the patents… which he failed to do. The patents lapsed and Edison was able to grab the invention and run with it.

Maxim also flew the first airplane in front of England’s elite and the English press. When investors were not forthcoming, he wisely dropped the project. The airplane industry didn’t take off until many years later in WWI. When the Wright brothers wanted to build an airplane, they went to Maxim, and he gave them his notes, enabling them to build an airplane, as well.

When you look up and see an automatic fire sprinkler system in a building you are looking at another of Maxim’s inventions that has remained unchanged, defying improvement.

When you look more closely at the man behind the Maxim machine gun you realize why it has also defied improvement and still reigns supreme as the all-time greatest in its field.

Designed in 1886 and adopted the following year by the French military, the Lebel Modèle 1886 has the distinction of being both France’s first repeating service rifle, and the world’s first service rifle chambered for a smokeless round.

The defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/1871 and the subsequent fall of the Second French Empire forced the newly formed Third French Republic to re-evaluate its military needs in light of the increasing mistrust towards the neighboring and aggressive German Empire. Over a decade after the end of what was arguably the most important conflict fought in Europe between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the onset of World War I, French infantrymen were becoming seriously outgunned if compared to the German troops, which were being issued with the new Mauser Model 71-84 repeater rifle – an upgrade over the Model 1871, using an eight-shot magazine tube.

On the other hand, the French Army was still issuing the Gras Model 1874 single-shot bolt-action rifle, essentially a brass cartridge conversion of the old Chassepot design, designed by Austrian engineer Alfred Von Kropatschek and chambered for the 11×59mm rimmed black powder caliber. The French Navy had it substantially better, with the Kropatschek Model 1878 rifle, which was basically a repeater version of the 1874 feeding through a magazine tube that held eight rounds. Both would, however, go down in history as interim adoptions with the next quantum leap in individual firearm technology being just around the corner.

HARNESSING NEW TECHNOLOGY

Between 1882 and 1884, French chemist Paul Vieille perfected the first viable smokeless powder. His creation, named “Poudre B” (“B-powder”, where the B stood for “Blanche”, or “white”, thus meaning “white powder” in contrast to black powder), a nitrocellulose-based compound, was three times as powerful as black powder and generated a substantially lower amount of smoke and residue, keeping rifles cleaner and the rifleman’s field of view relatively unobstructed on the battlefield.

The formulation of smokeless powder, including the French Poudre B, would improve substantially in the coming years, but the French government was hell-bent on becoming an early adopter of such revolutionary military technology. The sitting French minister of war, revanchist general George Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger, ordered the institution of a commission to design a new repeating service rifle using smokeless powder ammunition. Headed by general Baptiste Tramond, the commission was given orders to have a rifle ready within one year.

Part of the commission was Lt. Col. Nicolas Lebel, who came up with the idea of the first bullet used by the 8×50mm rimmed round for the new rifle. Dubbed the “Balle M”, this was a nickel-brass jacketed, round-nose, lead 232-grain bullet that would be safe for use in the intended feeding system – a tube magazine holding eight rounds, plus an additional ninth round in the elevator, as holding an additional round in chamber would be considered unsafe.

Despite Lebel’s contribution being limited mostly to that aspect – and despite the Balle M being replaced in a few years by a more effective boat-tailed Spitzer bullet – he received the honor of becoming the namesake of the new rifle. In his defense, for most of his life and up until the end, Lebel would insist that the creation was a collective effort, and that other members of the commission would have deserved that honor more than he did; those included famed colonel Yves Gras – a familiar name in French gunmaking at the time – and captain Georges Desaleux, who worked on the concept of the new 8×50mm Lebel cartridge; colonel Jean-François Marie Bonnet, who designed the bolt and its two sturdy parallel locking lugs necessary to withstand the pressure levels generated by the new smokeless propellant; and engineers Albert Close and Louis Verdin, weapon inspectors at the Châtellerault arsenal (better known as MAC), who worked with Gras for the best part of the engineering process, concerning both the rifle itself and the manufacturing technologies and machineries.

BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY AND NEW FEATURES

The commission had been directed to design the new rifle so that it could be compatible with existing stock of spare parts for the Gras and Kropatschek rifles, particularly the Navy-issue Kropatschek Model 1878 repeater. Additionally, the 8×50R Lebel cartridge was designed to be manufactured on the existing tooling used to make 11mm Gras ammunition. Hence, features such as the magazine tube (slow to load but offering a relatively high capacity for the time and featuring a manual cut-off feature, a very popular feat among military rifles back in the day), the straight trigger, horizontal-handle bolt action with cock-on-open, 90-degree bolt throw, and rimmed cartridge case.

That’s not to say that the new Lebel rifle – designated as the Modèle 1886 – didn’t have any merit on its own, though. It was built on an incredibly robust machined steel receiver, to withstand what were arguably the highest pressures sustained by a service rifle back in the day. The wooden stock was composed of two separate pieces – buttstock and handguard – and despite inheriting a huge deal of drawbacks from the designs that preceded it, the Lebel 1886 rifle packed a hell of a lot of firepower for its time, being far superior to its most direct competitor, the German Mauser 1871/84. The 8mm Lebel round, loaded with smokeless powder, developed a muzzle velocity of 700m/s (2296.59 fps) and offered a maximum effective range of 3500 yards, making it superior in terms of performance to the .303 Mk1 cartridge being adopted around the same time for the MLM Magazine Lee-Metford rifles of the British Empire.

PRODUCTION, INITIAL RECEPTION, AND UPDATES

The three French state-owned arsenals of Saint-Étienne, Châtellerault, and Tulle were all instructed to start mass manufacturing the new Lebel Model 1886 service rifle at once. General Boulanger’s plans were to procure one million samples by May 1887, but that goal soon turned out to be unrealistic and in the same year Boulanger was sacked from his position as the minister of war for his revanchist approach that risked sparking a new war with Germany. Nevertheless, the combined effort of the three arsenals allowed the French military to acquire over two million Lebel Mle.1886 rifles in six years, along with a quadrangular épée-style bayonet aptly dubbed the Model 1886.

As usual with newly adopted service rifles, the troops immediately started reporting the first teething issues: the rear sight assembly – whose ramp was adjustable to engage targets at 2,400 meters, or a little bit over 2,624 yards, a very optimistic estimate for the average infantryman despite the technical capabilities of the ammunition – required strengthening, and the bolt needed to be modified with a gas shield to protect the shooter’s face from the hazard of potential cartridge case ruptures. Said modifications were applied in 1893; the modified rifle came to be known as the Lebel Modèle 1886 Modifié 1893, or Mle.1886 M93 for short. Basically, all pre-existing Mle.1886 rifles were retrofitted to the M93 standard in relatively short time, which is why original, non-modified Lebel 1886 rifles are exceedingly rare today.

FURTHER AMMUNITION DEVELOPMENT

Field experience with the Mle.1886 M93 issued across the board in the vast French colonial empire and elsewhere, such as in the French concessions in China, where it was used by the French troops that contributed to quell the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901, also led to modifications to the ammunition. As stated above, the original round-nose bullet was replaced with a Spitzer (a.k.a. pointed tip), boat-tail bullet for improved performance. The new round, dubbed “Balle D”, has the distinction of being the first boat-tail bullet ammunition ever adopted for military service. The new Balle D also featured a slight annular rebate around the primer pocket to prevent accidental ignition in the magazine tube, a wise and cautious move on the behalf of the French engineers. The modification was conceived by Georges Desaleux, a member of the original engineering team for the rifle, although, to be fair, no such catastrophic incident was ever recorded with any Lebel 1886 rifle and any type of ammunition. The 8×50R ammunition would be subject to a further safety modification much further on, in 1912, with the adoption of the “Balle D A.M.” load, with “A.M.” standing for “Amorcage Modifié” (“modified primer”), whose primers were crimped to prevent bulging and expulsion from their pocket when the ammunition was used in a machine gun such as the Saint-Étienne Mle.1907 or, later, the Hotchkiss Mle.1914.

After WWI, a new round would be launched for the Lebel rifles still in service. Dubbed the “Balle N”, which was loaded with a steel-jacketed, Spitzer, boat-tail, lead bullet that had initially been designed for the Hotchkiss machine gun and required rifles to be rebored before they could safely fire it. The fact that rifles introduced back in 1886 were still around at the eve of World War II shouldn’t come as a surprise for the reader: the Lebel was, after all, a mighty solid rifle, although pushed into early obsolescence by the widespread adoption of smokeless powder cartridges by other countries.

PHASING OUT THE LEBEL

With most nations adopting rimless cartridge designs, quick reloading via detachable magazines and stripper clips became feasible and improved the volume of fire that an individual infantryman could provide at any given time. In 1906, the French military started to research a new service rifle that would replace the Lebel and give them the edge against their arch enemy, Germany, once again. Berthier bolt-action rifles were issued as a stop-gap measure to colonial troops, chambered in 8×50R Lebel and, later, in 7.5mm. But at the turn of the 20^th Century, thus much before other countries, the French had their eyes already set on adopting a semi-automatic rifle. Tentatively, this had to be the Meunier A6, chambered in a powerful 7×59mm round, but the lengthy development process led to just about 1000 Meunier A6 rifles being manufactured before WWI broke out.

French troops thus found themselves fighting off advancing German armies for four years using a mishmash of Berthier 1892 rifles, a large quantity of Lebel Mle.1886 M93, and several tens of thousands of RSC M1917 and M1918 semi-automatic, gas-operated rifles chambered in 8×50R Lebel and designed to be assembled using numerous Lebel rifle components. The Lebel rifle could be equipped with a muzzle-mounted launcher for the VB Viven-Bessières rifle grenades, and it often was during the conflict. Accuracy of the rifle was deemed good enough that French snipers during WW1 were equipped with Lebel rifles supplied with two types of scopes – the APX Model 1916 and APX Model 1917, manufactured by the State-owned Atelier de Construction de Puteaux.

The retirement of the Lebel rifle was long postponed at the end of the “war to end all wars”, due to a lack of political interest in rearmament and the poor state of the French economy. Before, during, and after WWI quantities of the Lebel rifle were sold to Greece and Ethiopia, among others, as well as to the Republican side during the Spanish civil war. The MAS 1936 bolt-action rifle arrived too late, and the RSC 1917 and 1918 rifles were too scarce to fully replace it, and soldiers overall liked the high capacity of the old Lebel. A more advanced scope, the APX Model 1921, was developed for sniper-issued Lebel rifles and used up until the end of WWII, which saw French troops still fielding the old 1886 warhorse in very significant quantities.

Meanwhile, newly manufactured, refurbished Lebel rifles, and carbines had found their way through mail order to French civilians, with Manufrance being the biggest distributor. The history of Manufrance commercial developments over the Lebel rifle warrants an article on its own, but in the inter-war period, a significant quantity of Lebel Mle.1886 M93 rifles were repurposed, refurbished, and converted into short carbines or mounted colonial troops in French Africa by Manufacture Nationale d’Armes de Tulle (“Tulle National Weapons Factory”) the French state-owned weapons manufacturer in the town of Tulle, Corrèze. These carbines, dubbed the Lebel Mle.1886 M93 R35, along with pre-existing Mle.1886 M93 rifles, saw use during WWII. They were captured by Axis powers and deployed by their rear line units during the last chaotic months of the war, ultimately ending its tour of duty in the French military when they were issued to local colonial auxiliary troops in Algeria and Indochina before being finally being completely replaced across the board by the MAS 49 and MAS 49/56 semi-automatic rifles. To this day, functional Lebel rifles can still be found in the hands of irregular militias in Africa and the Far East.

LEGACY OF THE LEBEL RIFLE

Nowadays, the Lebel Mle.1886 M93 rifle and M93 R35 carbine are appreciated collectibles among shooters in North America and Europe. Paradoxically, up until fairly recently, their motherland of France was the country where they were least easily available.

Until France implemented the 2008/51/EC European Firearms Directive in its national laws (which back then considered every firearm ever fielded by the French military or any other armed force in the world in the past century or so to be still a “military firearm”), the Lebel Mle.1886 rifle was considered a 1ére Categorie or “Category 1” firearm – essentially a “weapon of war”, like a machine-gun. Lebel rifles were thus often converted to calibers such as 348 Winchester for civilian sales in France. With such restrictions gone, now the original 8mm Lebel rifle in all its variants is considered a Catégorie C firearm in France, requiring registration of ownership, but no license for purchase or possession by anybody over the age of 16.

Interestingly enough, the Lebel name still lives on in modern French gun making, having been adopted by Verney-Carron, a well-known manufacturer of hunting and sporting firearms based in Saint-Étienne, as the new brand name for its line of riot control weapons and MIL/LE armaments. On November 8, 2023, Verney-Carron was contracted to deliver 10,000 assault rifles based on the M4 platform, 2000 designated marksman rifles based on the AR-10 design, and 400 40x46mm SR grenade launchers, all under the Lebel brand, to the armed forces of Ukraine. The contract is worth €36m, or just over US$39m at the current exchange rate. Deliveries will start in 2024.

In World War I, the U.S. discovered that some of the low numbered M1903 Springfield receivers had burst because the metal had been burned by overheating it in manufacture. It was heated to the point that it was white hot with sparks coming out and held at that temperature long enough to burn most all the carbon out of the steel, leaving it porous where the carbon had burned out, very fragile, and brittle. When reading the description of this event in Hatcher’s Notebook, and the Army’s solution of going to temperature-controlled furnaces, one could get the impression that this problem was caused by judging the temperature by eye. Neither General Hatcher nor the Army Ordnance Department were experienced blacksmiths, though. As an experienced blacksmith of many years, I would like to set the record straight.

BURNING METAL

You harden metal at a cherry red heat. You burn metal at a white-hot heat with sparks coming off the metal as the carbon is burned out. It takes a little bit of time for it to burn out, also. There is a big heat difference between cherry red and white-hot, just as there is a big difference between the color of cherry red and white with sparks coming out. I would trust a careful apprentice to quench metal at cherry red. For an experienced blacksmith to burn metal is almost unheard of, and for him not to know that he had done it is not possible. To do this on multiple receivers is nothing but deliberate sabotage. Somebody was mad about something and taking it out on the work. There is just no other possibility.

It’s likely that Ordnance realized this while also recognizing a public scandal might ensue if news of failure were reported in the newspapers. It would be a scandal that could hurt the careers of all the men in charge of Ordnance, as well as destroying a lot of the confidence that the Army (and the public) had in the Ordnance Department. Better to quietly correct the problem and get temperature controls on the furnaces so they could blame the lack of them for the problem instead of causing a scandal.

Then again, it’s also possible that Ordnance never understood this, as their heat treatment of the receivers was the same as hardening a file. They wanted the glass smooth action of the Krag rifle and touted the great strength of file-hardened metal under a load but ignored the extreme brittleness of said metal under a sudden shock. Any good blacksmith could have told them this was a very bad idea.

Except for files, I’ve never hardened anything without tempering it, which is reheating it to anything from a straw yellow to a blue, the latter color being used for springs, knives, razors, and axes. Some folks have complained that the receivers of Mauser rifles were too soft. Well, they didn’t break or give trouble in over 100 years of hard service, and they have successfully been re-barreled for every cartridge that will fit through the action. Softer is better for sudden shock loads, such as those you get with a ruptured cartridge case… which will burst the file hardened receivers of the low numbered Springfield rifles.

BURSTING SPRINGFIELDS

The problem surfaced with the poor-quality ammunition that came out in WWI when Ordnance reported that their ammunition was getting worse. Soft brass and erratic loading of powder (with some loads that exceeding the 70,000 PSI army proof load) coupled with the fact that the last part of a cartridge case projects out over an eight of an inch (specifically 0.147 to 0.1485-inch) on a Springfield or M98 Mauser rifle is a formula for ruptured cartridge cases. When that happens, the brittle, file-hard receivers of the low number Springfield rifles burst. If the steel was burnt, it had very little strength; it burst even quicker.

THE FIX

Between 1917 and 1929, there were 61 cases of receivers blowing up. Attempts to reheat treat the receivers met with inconsistent results because often the steel used did not meet the specifications for composition. Ordnance finally gave up trying to repair the faulty receivers. They pivoted and made some good receivers that were hardened AND tempered, calling them double heat treated, and then went to nickel steel. During this time, some low numbered receivers got mixed in with the new, safe receivers… the cut-off date for manufacturing the old glass-hard receivers was not exactly recorded. How many ways can they screw up!? After thoroughly investigating the problem, Ordnance wanted to scrap ALL of the old receivers and replace them with updated, safe ones, but the money for this was never appropriated.

In their attempt to copy the M98 Mauser and call it an American invention (so that they wouldn’t catch the flak they had caught over previously adopting the Norwegian Krag rifle) Ordnance succeeded in making the only M98 variant that had its receivers blow up!

SAFETY, STOCK, AND SIGHT ISSUES

Ordnance also apparently didn’t appreciate that the thumb notch cutout on the left side of the M98 receiver was there as a last line of defense to protect the shooter’s eyes by diverting the gas from a pierced primer or ruptured cartridge case. They coupled the cocking knob from the Krag rifle with a 13-inch length-of-pull stock that resulted in some soldiers seriously injuring their eye on the cocking piece when rapidly working the bolt. Most soldiers learned to either move their head way back or drop the rifle from their shoulder when working the bolt.

In the British gun trade, rifle stocks are custom fitted to the shooter’s individual measurements to a sixteenth of an inch in all directions. A 13-inch length-of-pull is for people 4-and-a-half feet tall and shorter. That’s the average height of a 10-year-old. To make a soldier’s rifle stock that short is insane. The M1928A1 Thompson submachine gun had a 15-inch length-of-pull and was universally lauded for its extraordinary handling qualities.

Mauser rifles came with a “V” rear sight and an inverted “V” front sight. This front sight has a broad base that easily catches the eye in low light and a narrow top enabling minute-of-angle groups. It’s a rugged arrangement and can stand alone with no protection. In the U.S., Ordnance had long favored a narrow blade that needed a hood or side-mounted wings to protect it. A blade hood cuts down light on the sight, making it hard to see in low light. As a result, later rifles with protective side wings on the front sight sometimes had soldiers sighting on the wing instead of the blade in the hurried stress of combat.

Despite these shortcomings, the M1903 Springfield rifle series became one of the most respected and loved rifles in U.S. military history, even serving iron-sighted snipers in the Vietnam War some 70 years after the rifle’s introduction. It’s just a shame that it had to go through these unnecessary problems.

As the fronts hardened in World War I and little progress was made in trench warfare, the heroic bayonet charges showed less and less success and led to high losses. All sides were looking for new solutions to regain momentum.

The United States had long hesitated to intervene actively in the hostilities of World War I. As the conflict continued to escalate, the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) were formed in France on 5 July 1917, under the command of then Major General John J. Pershing. The first of the so-called Doughboys landed on the European mainland in June 1917. But Pershing insisted that his soldiers be well trained before they boarded ships. As a result, few troops arrived in France before January 1918.

Initially, four combat-ready U.S. divisions under French and British command were deployed to gain initial front-line experience by defending relatively quiet sections of the front. Initially, the equipment used also came from French and British stocks. Meanwhile, in the United States, resourceful tinkerers and engineers were searching for new and better weapons to give their soldiers an advantage in battle.

The Gas Service Section of the U.S. Armed Forces had a curious idea for increasing combat effectiveness: a kind of miniature flamethrower on the rifle was intended to cause the enemy to take flight in fear when attacking their positions. The development went under the name “Flaming Bayonet.” While work was still in progress, the Gas Service and Chemical Service departments were merged to form the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS).

The Flaming Bayonet was a square sheet metal container with six flame cartridges, three in each of two rows. Initial tests with liquid fuel had to be abandoned because of the danger to the shooter from leaks and difficulties with firing or spraying. Therefore, they switched to cartridges filled with powder. In front-line operations, these would have been much safer to handle and easier to transport.

The container was attached to the bayonet lug from below with a connecting piece when the bayonet was mounted. On both sides of the connector were two spring-loaded pushers that clamped the container in place. It could thus be easily removed and replaced. On its upper side was a metal bracket as a trigger, which was secured by a cotter pin with a ring.

After pulling the cotter pin, the shooter could operate the trigger. To do this, he gripped the rifle with his second hand at the front of the stock above the receiver, as in bayonet fighting. This allowed him to aim the weapon at the target. With the edge of his hand, he then pressed down the trigger and the fireworks went off.

Unfortunately, it is not known exactly how the system worked. It is not clear from the few surviving documents whether all six flame cartridges were activated simultaneously or somewhat delayed one after the other. The former would give a greater fire spell, the latter a longer lasting fire. According to the drawing, individual activation of each cartridge as needed does not seem to have been possible. It is also not known whether the device could be refilled on site or whether this had to be done at the factory.

The official designation was “Flaming Bayonet, Cartridge Type, Mark I”. The weight is given as 285 grams (5/8-pound). Depending on humidity and wind direction, the flame length was between 5 and 15 feet. That is about 1.5 to 4.5 meters. The few available photos of tests show the device mounted only on a rifle U.S. Model 1917. However, it could easily have been adapted to other rifles by altering the connecting piece.

Old but undated notes state that a consignment was shipped to France. However, there is no evidence of this, and no surviving specimen is known to date. Why the development finally came to nothing can probably no longer be explained.

However, the head of the overseas division of the Chemical Warfare Service, General Amos A. Fries, was an avowed opponent of incendiary weapons of all kinds. He saw them as completely useless. Even of flamethrowers, he wrote after the war that they were, “one of the greatest failures among the many promising devices tried out on a large scale in the war,” and one could simply duck under the flames. Fries relied entirely on poison gas and pushed developments in this direction.

Under a leader with this attitude, it is not surprising that the flame bayonet was not given a future. Whereby – based on the photos, the whole thing looks impressive. But would an opponent who had already survived weeks or months of barrage and all kinds of horrors really have been impressed by it?

When the tank first appeared on the WWI battlefields at the Somme on September 15, 1916, the British Mark 1 tanks had armor ranging from 6mm to 10mm and, thus, the German armor piercing 8mm S.m.K. ammo was effective against them. The Mark III tank increased this to 12mm, and the Mark IV tank had 14mm armor. This led to the Germans fielding the 13mm Mauser bolt action anti-tank rifle, the Tanksgewehr M1918. It had a 37.8-inch barrel, an overall length of 5.5 feet and weighed 38 pounds with an MG 08-15 bipod. About 16,500 were made and it proved effective, but a machine gun firing the same round would be even more effective and would also work on aircraft with far better results than the 8mm cartridge.

At this time, armor was being added to the vital parts of aircraft and the 8mm round was reaching the limits of its effectiveness. The problem with the single shot, anti-tank rifle was that unless a vital spot was hit, the anti-tank rifle was vulnerable to the return fire of the tank. This problem was so severe that the anti-tank gunner needed to fire and quickly change positions for each shot. A very perilous solution.

The War Ministry put out an urgent request for designs for such a 13mm machine gun in November of 1917 and the design of MG 08-15 producer Manschinenfabrik Augsberg-Nurnberg AG (MAN) was chosen.

Designed by the gifted engineer Konrad Haubner, the gun was an enlarged Maxim 08-15 and Konrad had developed a brilliant method of dealing with the increased recoil. A hydraulic recoil brake took care of the rearward motion of the gun while a recuperator spring brought the mechanism back to battery. This was patented, number 324,485, in early 1918. It worked so efficiently that the gun had a cyclic rate of just 300-rounds-per-minute. The gun was water cooled for sustained firing and also had a heavy barrel formed in two parts like an artillery barrel with an outer sleeve over the inner barrel. This made relining worn barrels much easier, plus the added weight soaked up recoil enabling the gun to be more compact while it also aided keeping the barrel from overheating.

The compactness of this gun for the size of its cartridge is most striking, and, perhaps is best shown by the fact that it could be fitted with the MG 08-15 bipod for use in the anti-tank mode by just one or two men. This enabled it to remain lower and more concealed (or completely under cover) to suddenly pop out and blast an enemy tank. Something virtually impossible to do with a Browning M2 HB .50 caliber machine gun. The gun has the spade grips of the MG08 and weighs in at 81.6 pounds. Its length is 5.25 feet, and its barrel length is 37.8 inches. There was a wheeled carriage enabling this beast to be moved about fast to escape incoming artillery fire. This carriage weighed 189.6 pounds which brought the total weight up to 294.8 pounds when carriage mounted. I would like to have seen a Lafitte 34 mount scaled up to fit this gun, but that is another era. Certainly, a tripod mount would have been added–had the gun stayed in service long enough.

The best thing about the MG18 was the fact that it was the reliable, trouble-free Maxim design that could fire into the millions of rounds only changing barrels and keeping the water jacket filled. No other design of the time had the longevity under sustained firing as the Maxim.

The cartridge was the 13×92 HR caliber. HR stands for “Halbrand mit Rille” meaning semi-rimmed. As such, it would hold its headspace longer than rimless cartridges as the barrels were shot out. Its projectile was made by Munitionsfabrik Polte in Magdeburg. Developed from the 8mm SmK armor piercing round, the bullet had a core of tungsten steel and could penetrate 24 millimeters of armor plate at 100 meters.

Proposals to increase the caliber first to 15mm and then to 18mm followed with the 18mm round capable of shooting through 35 millimeters of armor plate at 100 meters, but the war ended before any were prototyped. Of the 4000 initially ordered, around 50 were completed by wars-end and most of these were hidden from the Allies. The U.S. Army was not able to get its hands on one along with 82 rounds of ammunition until August of 1921. It was shipped back to Springfield Armory where it inspired the Browning .50 caliber machinegun. As the Browning does not hold up under continuous firing anywhere near as well as the Maxim machine guns, they would have done better to just adopt the German gun, but the intense hostility toward any German design prevented anything German from ever being adopted.

Due to its popularity in recent media, such as its appearance in the popular video games Battlefield 1 and Battlefield 5, the mystery of the Luger rifle has become quite infamous. As a consequence, more myths and misinformation have been shared about this unique rifle than many of its contemporaries. My objective today is to clarify a bit of the rifle’s history and speculate on where it might reside nowadays.

The Origins of the Luger

Hugo Borchardt was an innovative firearms designer, having made one of the first-ever automatic pistols in the world. He was infamous for his arrogance, holding such a high opinion of his pistol design that he felt it was flawless. This has caused his legacy to be overshadowed by his successor, Georg Luger.

Georg Luger was born in March 1849 at Steinach on the Bremmer pass in the Austrian Alps. He would join the army as an officer-cadet in 1867, giving him valuable experience in his later career. By 1882, he was already registered as a “Waffentechniker” ¹ and in 1892, Luger would move to Berlin and be employed by Ludwig Loewe & Cie, later renamed to Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken. Although he was an aspiring firearms designer, he was employed as a travelling salesman for the company’s products.

By 1893, he was given permission to have his own creations patented by DWM. In return, DWM would reserve the rights to profit from Luger’s inventions. Although he is known today for his toggle-locked-action pistol, Luger started out his engineering career with bolt-action rifles. Notably, the United States Navy was interested in adopting such a rifle, though the deal fell short when Luger refused to alter his rifle to meet with the calibre requirements of the trials. When Hugo Borchardt abandoned his semi-automatic pistol project to work on gas-operated appliances, Luger took over the project and refined it, leading to the Parabellum model of 1900; More commonly known today bearing the name of its creator, the Luger.

The Kaiser needs a semi-automatic rifle

In 1896, Paul Mauser would personally demonstrate his C96 pistol to Kaiser Wilhelm II. He found it to be remarkable, asking Mauser if such a design could work for an infantry rifle. “Five years, your majesty,” he reportedly replied. Until Mauser’s death in 1914, he would try to perfect such a design for the Kaiser, but, to no avail.

Luger would join Paul Mauser in his attempt to provide a successful self-loading rifle for the German military. His first patent taken out in 1905 was simply titled “Recoil-loader”. However, Luger’s earliest semi-automatic rifle, the one that is well known today, would be made in around 1911, when trials were held against the Borchardt self-loading rifle and possibly the Schwarzlose rifle, though I was not able to confirm that this rifle was ever made. The Luger rifle operated in a similar way to its pistol counterpart; It had a 5-round internal magazine, fed by either a stripper clip or by releasing the base plate and inserting rounds from beneath, similar to a RSC but without the en-bloc clip and the stock, which was similar in construction to the G98.

After the war, Luger was involved in a lawsuit with DWM about the rights to the guns he made while he worked there. During this trial, he exhibited a letter DWM received in 1914 from the Allgemeines Kriegsdepartment, a part of the German war department, where they reject the Borchardt and praised the Luger design, writing, “The Department most earnestly requests that the Luger self-loading rifle is kept secret until further notice.” Though, due to the war being declared later in the same year, no further testing was ever done with the Luger rifle.

PostbellumLuger passed away in 1923, leaving his son, Georg Luger Jr., in control of his estate. Luger Jr. persevered in attempting to promote his father’s rifles to the post-WWI successor of the GPK, the IWG. Having finally rejected it on the grounds of cost and complexity in 1927, he would sell his example of the rifle to the IWG’s study collection, where it remained in inventory until 1945, when the Russians raided the building during the Battle of Berlin. Most of the collection was taken to the St. Petersburg Artillery Museum, where it remains today. However, it is unclear if the IWG’s Luger rifle survived, as some expeditions into their private areas have failed to locate it. However, a Borchardt Self-Loading Rifle was found to still be under their care, so it is possible that they still have it somewhere on-site.

The only Luger rifle we know of today is serial number 4, which was located at the Mauser factory collection until the French took over and plundered it in the final stages of World War Two. It would stay at the St. Etienne Arsenal until it was sold off to the collector market, specifically the company Interarms, founded by Sam Cummings. In a “Guns Review” article from March of 1994, the author J. W. Sawyers got permission to visit the Interarms facility in Manchester and closely inspect the Luger rifle. After that, it was sold off in a Christie’s auction in 1995 and subsequently resold at an unknown auction-house in 1999.

Where is it today?

Sadly, no one has ever come out with this very rare and elusive rifle, so it is still unknown where it is located. The last time it was sold, from an unknown auction house, only gives a number of “167,500”, almost certainly this is how much it was sold for but there is no specific currency attached to it. The weight of the rifle is given in pounds and ounces, nothing uncommon for either the U.K. or the U.S., and there are no words that would give away if it was written in British English or American English.

So it is probable that the Luger rifle is still in the United Kingdom, although it is also possible someone exported it after it was sold. Possibly to the U.S., Switzerland or maybe even Malta.

Geoffrey Sturgess, a possible candidate for its ownership, sold his firearm collection around 2014 and some of his very rare firearms ended up in Maltese collections, like the unfinished 1921 Furrer Maschinenpistole, serial number 1.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the Luger rifle will be found unless someone comes forward with it, or it ends up in another auction. As always, if anyone has any additional information or leads, you can always send me an email at sircoutin@gmail.com.

Unfortunately, the word “propaganda” has come to be regarded as something bad; misleading at best and outright lies at worst. While this is true in too many cases, propaganda as originally intended is employed in various forms simply as a means of persuading its audience.

Between 1914 and 1918 – the period of “The Great War” (World War One, as we have come to call it) – poster art had achieved well-deserved prominence as an advertising and communications medium.

Usually big and bold, with colorful, eye-catching images and compelling words, posters were displayed almost anywhere a vertical surface was available on which to paste them.

So, posters were an obvious choice for mostly ethical propaganda as a means of encouraging a nation’s populace to support the war effort in all aspects. Messages included recruiting, training, honoring battle prowess, soliciting money, spurring greater war production, and certainly to negatively characterize the enemy.

As noted by O.W. Riegel, a propaganda analyst for the U.S. Office of War Information, “In the overall view, posters of the First World War were exhortations that sought to exploit people’s conscious or subconscious vulnerabilities to appeals to basic emotions of self-preservation, tribal patriotic pride, and traditional morality.”

What we’re offering here is a small selection from among thousands of these propaganda posters produced by combatant nations embroiled in the first war of a truly global scale.

And since our focus is, of course, on man portable weaponry, our choices are based on how some prominent examples of these weapons were skillfully and dramatically incorporated in the messaging.

MEN WANTED FOR THE ARMY. When this poster was created in 1914, the war in Europe had just started but America was officially neutral. Foreseeing what would soon become inevitable, the woefully undermanned U.S. Army stepped up recruiting. Here, a stalwart infantry corporal carrying an M1903 Springfield rifle leads his squad running toward their objective. The iconic felt campaign hats would be exchanged in 1917 for British style “tin hats” or French “Adrian” helmets in the trenches. Credit: Library of Congress via Wikimedia

May 18, 1918, Badonviller, France. These “Doughboys” of the American 42^nd Division are snipers, draped from head to toe in formless sack cloth camouflage and armed with M1903 Springfields, the Army’s standard infantry rifle. Highly accurate and very reliable, the 8.7-pound .30-06 caliber, bolt action rifle was sometimes fitted with an optical scope for target identification and longer-range sniping. Credit: US Army Signal Corps, National Archives

“AMMUNITION!” This American soldier has his hand outstretched in a plea for more ammo for his smoking hot French 8mm Hotchkiss Mle 1914 machine gun. Somewhat improbably slung over his shoulder, he has a .30-06 caliber M1903 Springfield Rifle with fixed bayonet. Civilians at home were urged to buy War Bonds to help finance the astronomical costs of war materiel. Credit: Library of Congress

May 10, 1918, France. U.S. 1^st Infantry Division soldiers on the firing range with a French Mle 1914 machine gun on the awkward Omnibus tripod. When serving alongside French forces, shortages of American weapons and ammunition, as well as logistical efficiency, dictated the need to equip American troops with these combat-proven, 8mm, strip fed, air cooled guns with distinctive “doughnut” cooling fins. Note their “tin hat” style Brodie helmets, a holstered .45 caliber M1911 pistol, and sheathed “bolo” knife. Credit: US Army Heritage and Education Center

FIRST IN FRANCE. Deployed to the European battlefields at Verdun in March 1918, American Marines were – along with elements of the U.S. Army’s 2^nd Division – the first U.S. troops to join the fight against Germany and its allies. The artist has portrayed this charging “Devil Dog’s” .30-06 caliber Lewis Gun on ungainly bipod with dead-on accuracy. While not specific in intent, multiple messages are conveyed in this poster including praise for courageous Marines, sparking admiration among civilians at home and inspiring young men to enlist in the Corps. Credit: Library of Congress

1917. No location noted but probably on the range at MCB Quantico, Virginia, the Marine Corps is conducting firing tests of the Lewis Machine Gun. Soon proving quite satisfactory, some 6,000 of these were quickly ordered from Savage Arms. These pan-fed, air cooled, .30-06 caliber Model 1917 guns armed Marines sent to France in 1917. Credit: Library of Congress

MINE MORE COAL. This poster serves dual duty in urging America’s coal miners to increase production because coal fuels war material factories and fires boilers in trains and in cargo ships transporting supplies to soldiers in France. Dramatically posed side by side with pickaxe and Browning Automatic Rifle at the ready, they both fulfill necessary and honorable duty in the war. Credit: Library of Congress

18 February 1918, France. US Army Lieutenant Val Browning, son of prolific firearms inventor John M. Browning, is conducting a demonstration of his father’s Model 1918 Browning Automatic Rifle. The 15½ pound weapon was fed by a detachable magazine holding twenty .30-06 cartridges. Although not arriving until very late in the war, these highly reliable and accurate machine rifles were a godsend to Doughboys previously armed with the crude but surprisingly useful French Chauchat. Credit: U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center

THEY SHALL NOT PASS! “Twice I have stood fast and conquered on the Marne,” saving Paris from German occupation. By 1918, French and Allied soldiers had been deadlocked in vicious, savage and increasingly futile trench warfare for four horrific years. With bayonet fixed on his Fusil Modéle 1886/93 “Lebel” rifle, this ragged, battle-ravaged Poilu stands defiantly amid the shell blasted desolation of “no mans land.” Credit: Author’s collection/Library of Congress

1912, France. Two years before the outbreak of war, these well dressed and fully equipped French Chasseurs pause briefly during training maneuvers. An impressively long Modéle 1886/93 rifle in the foreground is readily identified by its straight bolt handle and 30½ inch long barrel. Its tubular magazine holds eight rounds of 8mm Lebel smokeless powder cartridges. Credit: Bibliotheque Nationale De France via Wikimedia

AND YOU? Sign War Loans. Asking his fellow German citizens to give money to support the war, a somewhat forlorn German infantryman clutches a “potato masher” stick grenade, ready to assault enemy trenches. This not so subtle, guilt-inducing appeal to civilians of the Fatherland is seen in similar posters from all the other combatant nations. Credit: Philasearch.com via Wikimedia

STAHLHELM HELDEN (Steel Helmet Heroes). This propaganda postcard image is from a series depicting heroic German soldiers in WWI. Here, Stosstruppen (shock troops) assault French positions with a hail of Stielhandgranaten (stick grenades). Additional grenades are carried in pairs of sandbags draped over their shoulders. This is a late war scene, probably 1917 or 1918 when grenades of all types had become the primary weapons of trench warriors on both sides. Credit: Philasearch.com via Wikimedia

MILITARY WAR LOANS. The Imperial Russian Army was very poorly prepared when it entered the war against Germany in 1914. A rush to mobilization and necessary war production followed, including the need for large numbers of heavy machine guns. This 1916 poster shows a rather idealized and uncommonly clean gun crew in combat action, firing their Pulemyot Maxima PM1910 (Maxim’s machine gun Model 1910) and urges everyone to “aid our glorious troops, and all who can must subscribe to the 5½ percent war loan.” Credit: Baburina N.I. via Wikimedia    

Although this photo was taken a decade or so after the Revolution of 1917 that took Tsarist Russia out of WWI, it’s useful in depicting the similar composition of a typical Red Army heavy machine gun section. Under the watchful eyes of two pistol-packing officers and flanked by protective riflemen who double as ammunition carriers, the gunner and his assistant are prepared to engage the enemy with a torrent of powerful 7.62 mm bullets from their Pulemyot Maxima PM1910. This iconic water-cooled and belt-fed weapon, characterized by its steel shield and wheeled Sokolov mount, has a sustained fire capability of 600 rounds per minute. Credit: Ukrainian SSR via Wikimedia

One of the most famous machine guns of the World War I, the Lewis MG, was based on a basic design by Samuel McClean. However, the eager tinkerer and inventor himself was denied great success throughout his life.

The name Samuel Neal McClean means something to only a few machine gun enthusiasts today. Yet the man was extremely active in this field and ultimately held more than 150 patents for weapons technology alone. Along the way, he also invented and improved washing machines, spark plugs and other devices.

McClean was born in Columbus City, Iowa, in January 1857. At the age of 28, he successfully completed his studies in human medicine at the University of Iowa and then practiced medicine in Washington. In the course of time, however, his penchant for technology probably gained the upper hand and, in 1896, he dissolved his medical practice. From then on, McClean devoted himself to the development and improvement of all kinds of technical equipment. And, of course, weapons.

In 1900, he therefore founded his own McClean Arms & Ordnance Company in Cleveland, Ohio and hoped to successfully market his projects. One of the first was a self-loading pistol and automatic cannon called the 37mm L/51 Automatic Cannon Mk I. Basically, the cannon was equivalent to an oversized gas-operated semi-automatic rifle. A new feature was the possibility of continuous fire. In the spring of 1901, 670 rounds were fired with it at Sandy Hook Proving Ground, but the results were not very satisfactory. Malfunctions and defects brought the test to an early end. But even after revision and new trials, firing bursts never succeeded without problems. Even though the U.S. Army showed no interest in it, the company was able to sell some copies abroad, such as 218 rifles to Russia.

At the same time, another major project was underway, namely a water-cooled machine gun. McClean was so convinced of success that he invested almost his entire fortune in the development of this weapon. Contrary to expectations, the work dragged on and turned out to be more difficult than he had foreseen. The expenses were offset by only a small income from sales and McClean was forced to sell his company to investors. However, he himself remained general manager and continued to work on his projects. In 1908, he brought the U.S. Army officer Ormond Mitchell Lissak on board as support. Together they developed a water-cooled gas-operated weapon. The complicated design tended to jam and failed U.S. Army and U.S. Navy tests. By this time, the company’s coffers were already alarmingly depleted and in December 1909, the Arms & Ordnance Company was forced to close. All patents were transferred by the investors to the newly founded Automatic Arms Company the following year.

McClean was now no longer there. He moved to the innovation department of the automobile manufacturer General Motors as an employee. The Automatic Arms Company now recruited the U.S. Army officer and weapons engineer Isaac Newton Lewis to give the machine gun project a successful turn after all. And the decision was a good one, because on the basis of the preliminary work Lewis developed a light, air-cooled machine gun with a drum magazine on top, which was then produced in large numbers during the World War I. McClean took legal action against the transfer of his patents in 1920, but he lost the case. He was not allowed to share in the success of the Lewis machine gun.

Even after the World War I, Samuel McClean was not defeated. In the meantime, he had earned money again with his work at General Motors and his civilian inventions and tried his hand again in the weapons sector. He developed an automatic rifle that could also fire bursts. Ideally, it was fired from a tripod with a small seat for the shooter on the rear strut. The unusual magazine is built like a ring and is slid over the rifle from the front until it locks in its place. The cartridge feed is from the top, the case ejection to the lower left.

The gas-operated system of the weapon resembles that of his early machine guns. The weapon is not an aesthetically pleasing sight. Below the barrel sits an unusually large gas tube, containing a push rod with a sealing disc of a proud 2.6cm diameter. There is no fire selector, but there are two triggers. The rear one for semi-automatic function and the front one for continuous fire. The system is cocked by a handle on the right side. It moves during firing and can be folded down when not in use. The barrel and the gas tube are additionally connected with a clamp, on the underside of which the foregrip is attached. In contrast to most other automatic weapons, the bolt does not lock via a few sturdy lugs but via interrupted-thread style locking lugs milled into both sides.

McClean gave the rifle to the U.S. Navy in 1919 for testing at the Naval Air Station in Anacostia (Washington D.C.). Unfortunately, without success. After this renewed failure, he gave up gun building for good and continued to work at General Motors. Samuel Neal McClean died in Cleveland on 30 May 1930.

Due to fortunate circumstances, the only one produced has been preserved to this day. Albeit without a magazine. And unfortunately, partially cut open, because in the United States the weapon is considered a machine gun and one of the previous owners had legalized the unregistered weapon in this way by deactivating it.

Photos: Thanks to Morphy Auctions for photos and information.