-
Title (Dublin Core)
-
The development of american automatic weapons
-
Article Title and/or Image Caption (Dublin Core)
-
Title: How America has developed the world's best automatic weapons
-
Subtitle: Yankee inventive genius, plus the lessons of the war, give us the lead in the arms that are making history
-
extracted text (Extract Text)
-
AUTOMATIC weapons made history and
changed the entire nature of war-
fare between 1914 and 1918. Auto-
arms are dominating the present war even
more completely, and have undergone su-
perb technological development, ranging in
size from the toylike .25-caliber dress pis-
tols worn by staff officers in some European
armies up to bulky quick-firing antitank
and antiaircraft guns of 40 or 50 milli-
meters.
Machine guns and automatic cannon, roll-
ing across Poland on tanks and motorized
vehicles, blasted the Polish armies and cut
their famed cavalry to ribbons in a matter
of days. The underarmed Poles used their
own weapons to advantage at a few points,
and when it was over the Nazis—to show
that they were broad-minded—adopted an
excellent antitank rifle of Polish design.
Parachute troops with light machine
rifles and snub-nosed submachine guns cap-
tured bridges and canals, sprayed lead over
air fields, and had a great deal to do with
the swift collapse of the Netherlands. One
type of Finnish submachine gun is credited
with inflicting 70 percent of the estimated
250,000 Russian casualties in 1939-40.
The lesson could go on indefinitely. Fire
power wins battles, and automatic weapons
provide heavy fire power for relatively small |
combat teams. |
And it is good to know that the U.S.
forces are being plentifully equipped with
automatic arms which, on performance and
history, probably can be called the world's
best, flatly and without qualification. The
list of American weapons is so long, in fact, |
that some might wonder why we have so |
many. The answer is that each has its |
peculiar function and mission in war.
Starting from the bottom we have the |
famous Colt .45, the finest, surest, and
hardest-hitting of all automatic pistols. This
arm of officers, gunners, and specialists has
a notable history, but it may be in its twi-
light, since the Army plans to replace it
with the new .30 caliber M-1 carbine, a
beautiful gas-operated rifle that weighs only
5.12 pounds and takes a 15-shot magazine.
Next comes the most celebrated of new
American arms, the Garand semiautomatic
rifle, developed to replace the glamorous old
Springfield as the standard shoulder arm of
our soldiers, and the first weapon of this
type to be adopted as the regular arm by
any nation.
Between the admirers of the Garand and
the Springfield there is no ill will. The Gar-
and itself was developed at the Springfield
Armory. Army riflemen explain it this
way: In a peacetime competition they
would take the Springfield with its un-
rivaled long-range accuracy and augmented
fire power. The Springfield is a magazine
repeating rifle with a hand-operated bolt;
the Garand is gas-operated and delivers
eight shots as fast as the trigger can be
pulled. The same soldier, in actual war,
can get off three to six aimed shots with the
Garand for every one with the Springfield.
There is a special bracket for submachine
guns, of which the most notable is the cele-
brated Thompson (Tommy) gun. This is
being turned out in large quantities not only
for our own forces but for the British, who |
love it. (Ask the commando who owns
one!) Two other American submachine
guns have been developed, the Sedgely and |
the Reising. The Reising, made by Harring-
ton & Richardson, has turned up with the
TU. S. Marines in the Pacific. |
These submachine guns are highly port- |
able weapons, spitting clips of pistol-type
cartridges and capable of terrible execu- |
tion at close range. Most popular calibers |
are the .45 and the 9-millimeter Luger type.
Above that comes the solid family of
American machine guns: The Browning
automatic rifle, or BAR; the .30 caliber
light MG and the heavy, water-cooled one;
the light and heavy .50 caliber guns. All
are brain-children of the late John M.
Browning, the world’s greatest inventor of |
automatic weapons, whose designs have |
been copied by most of the great powers
and plenty of the small ones. |
At the top are the 37-millimeter guns,
for use in or against airplanes, and the |
40-millimeter dual-purpose Bofors, which
can be used against either planes or tanks.
‘Then there is the 20-millimeter Hispano-
Suiza, like the Bofors a European design,
which we are now adapting as an airplane-
carried cannon. The Navy uses a 20-mm.
Oerlikon against dive bombers.
Occasionally military writers speculate
on larger automatic guns, and there would
appear to be no technical reason why large
artillery pieces could not be designed to
load, aim, and fire by remote control, es-
pecially in antiaircraft emplacements. The
limiting factors would be rather such con-
siderations as size, weight, and mobility.
Production figures on American manu-
facture are secret. But President Roosevelt
disclosed last summer that in one month we
had turned out more than 50,000 machine
guns. That did not include submachine
guns. Those weapons are telling their own
story now, in many parts of the world.
The history of automatic weapons goes
back into the early 16th century, and yet
its entire significant development lies with-
in the last two generations. Moreover,
American gun experts, who were almost the
last to tackle the problem, have made the
most important advances.
As nearly as we can determine, the name-
less genius who put together the first gun—
some kind of wooden tube to blow out a
missile with the force of burning gun-
powder—must have started an hour later
trying to do something about rapid fire.
The first technique was several barrels on
a single mount, discharged simultaneously,
or in quick succession, by means of a pow-
der train. The first certain use in battle was
by Pedro Navarro, a Spaniard, against the
French at Ravenna in 1512. The idea was
amazingly persistent, and was still in use
in our Civil War, with the “volley guns” of
Billinghurst & Requa.
These were clumsy weapons with 24 bar-
rels side by side between wide-set carriage
wheels. The makers put on demonstrations
in front of the New York Stock Exchange,
but the Army showed little enthusiasm.
The idea survives today with the familiar
double-barrel shotgun and the four-barrel
multiple anti-dive bomber guns British
Navy men call “Chicago Pianos.”
The stumbling block for 300 years was
the problem of igniting the powder charge.
One design tried to meet this by loading
along the barrel with successive charges of
shot and powder. Touchholes were provided
at suitable intervals, and the trick was to
start near the muzzle and go down the
barrel.
An automatic gun became a real possi-
bility with the development of the metallic
self-igniting cartridge, which could be dis-
charged by the percussion of a hammer or
firing pin. The first application resulted in
mechanical rather than machine guns. As
early as 1718, an Englishman named James
Puckle took out a patent on a machine
called a “Defence,” which in profile drawing
looks amazingly like a modern machine
gun. It had a single barrel and a set of
revolving breech cylinders, turned by a
crank, but it had to be fired by a slow
match. Mr. Puckle couldn't resist including
a provision to fire round bullets at Christian
enemies and square ones at Turks.
The French developed a crank-operated
gun, the mitrailleuse, between 1855 and
1869. This had 37 barrels in a circular
housing like the barrel of a field gun, and
was loaded with a breechblock clip having
cartridge chambers lined up with the bar-
rels. The gun had serious mechanical bugs
and was misunderstood by the French, who
used it as medium-range artillery rather
than a close-range infantry weapon. Its
failure in the Franco-Prussian War gave
quick-firing weapons a black eye for years.
The first thoroughly successful mechani-
cal gun was invented in 1862 by Dr. Rich-
ard J. Gatling, of Chicago. It had from
four to ten barrels, revolving by crank
power and firing from a breech mechanism
with ammunition fed from a hopper. The |
Gatling gun was adopted and modified all
over the world, and was in general use for
20 years after a genuine machine gun had
been brought out. |
This first true machine gun, in which the
shells were loaded, fired, and ejected in a
continuous automatic cycle, was invented
around 1885 by Hiram Maxim, a native of
Maine, who later became a British subject.
Maxim's gun employed the recoil of the
explosion in the cartridge to move the bolt |
° backward and eject the empty shell. Two
heavy springs absorbed this motion, then
drove the bolt forward again, loading and
firing another cartridge. Maxim also devel-
oped a belt feed. Since his gun had only
one barrel, he designed a circular water |
jacket for it to prevent overheating. ]
The next great basic invention was the
Colt Browning gas-operated machine gun.
Instead of using the recoil to actuate its
mechanism, this gun had a tiny hole tapped
in the underside of its barrel. A slight
amount of the gases driving the bullet
rushed into this opening, striking a piston
and knocking down a lever which worked
through a connecting rod and performed
the ejecting, cocking, and loading. This
was soon modified to employ a piston driven
backward instead of down.
There are many variations of these two
systems. Gun experts talk of “simple-
blowback” or “delayed-blockback” recoil.
And there are weapons in which the gas
“expands” or “impinges” against the pis-
ton. Further differences exist in the man-
ner in which the counter spring is connected
with the gas-driven piston. But in general
all automatic weapons are operated either
by recoil or gas.
Even a superficial study brings proof of
the dominant influence of American in-
ventors. The celebrated German Luger
automatic pistol, for example, is a modifi-
cation of the toggle-joint action marketed
in 1893 by a Connecticut man named
Berchardt.
But American gun design reached its peak
in the incredible career of John M. Brown-
ing. When he died in 1926 on a visit to
Belgium, his body lay in the great National
Arms Factory at Liege. During the World
War he had been decorated with the Bel-
gian Order of Leopold at the completion of
the 1,000,000th Browning pistol there.
Browning designed weapons for all the
great American companies—the full line of
Colt automatic pistols, including the .45;
most of the Winchesters for 30 years; auto-
loading shotguns and rifles for Remington
and Stevens.
He was born in Ogden, Utah, of Mormon
parents. His father, Jonathan Browning,
had run a gunshop in Council Bluffs, Iowa,
before moving west. In his early teens,
Browning made a rifle: by 1880 he had de-
signed a single-shot weapon that opened the
eyes of Winchester’'s experts, and ten years
later his Colt Browning machine gun was
adopted as the official weapon of the U. S.
Army. Browning's fame didn’t reach the
public, however, until the first World War,
when it was suddenly announced that our
Army was adopting an entire new family
of machine guns designed by an “unknown”
named Browning. They are still our stand-
ard—the handy shoulder-operated Brown-
ing Automatic Rifle; the light and heavy
.30's for use against personnel; the en-
larged .50-caliber MG with its extra punch
against airplanes or light vehicles. The BAR
is gas-operated, the others by recoil.
America has designers today carrying on
the tradition. Will they produce new weap-
ons to blast our enemies? Well, new weap-
ons are necessarily secret weapons in war
time, and our Ordnance chiefs say only that
surprises are in store.
But it is not out of line to discuss two
“surprise” weapons now no longer secret—
one of them a new gun in this war, the
other a World War invention which missed
fame by the accident of time.
The first is the British “Sten” gun, a
slightly overgrown machine pistol which
looks almost comically like a youngster's
popgun but throws a murderous stream
of slugs at short range. It is being mass-
produced for less than eight dollars a gun.
The second gun was the mysterious
“Pedersen device.” It was officially known
as the “U. S. Pistol, caliber .30, Model
1918.” That was done for secrecy, so that
even the workmen who made the parts
wouldn't realize what they were doing.
Actually the Pedersen device was a spe-
cial bolt-and-breech assembly designed to
replace the standard bolt of the 1903 Spring-
field and convert it into a submachine gun,
spitting out 80-grain bullets from a detach-
able 40-shot box magazine.
More than 80,000 of these bolts were
ready when the Armistice came in 1918;
unquestionably they would have been one
of the meanest surprises of the war. They
were scrapped when development of the
submachine gun and automatic rifle out-
moded them. But it may be that something
as ingenious and lethal is in the making.
-
Contributor (Dublin Core)
-
John H. Walker (Article Writer)
-
Language (Dublin Core)
-
eng
-
Date Issued (Dublin Core)
-
1943-01
-
pages (Bibliographic Ontology)
-
124-131
-
Rights (Dublin Core)
-
Public Domain (Google Digitized)
-
Archived by (Dublin Core)
-
Matteo Ridolfi
-
Marco Bortolami (editor)
Popular Science Monthly, v. 142, n. 1, 1943
