small arm

small arm
small-armed, adj.
Usually, small arms. a firearm designed to be held in one or both hands while being fired: in the U.S. the term is applied to weapons of a caliber of up to one in. (2.5 cm).
[1680-90]

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Introduction

      any handheld firearm.

      Since the introduction of the flintlock musket in the 17th century, military small arms have gone through a series of significant changes. By employing different projectiles and successively improved chemical propellants, the dual goal of most arms designers has been the creation of man-portable weapons of greater firepower and reduced weight. But the attainment of this goal has continually been hampered by an inescapable physical relationship between the recoil forces generated by gunpowder weapons and the mass and velocity of their projectiles. In order to reduce the weight of a weapon, its recoil energy has to be reduced, but reducing recoil also affects the killing power of the bullet. Given the constraints of this relationship, military small arms may well have reached a level where, within reasonable economic limits, significantly higher performance cannot be obtained merely by improving existing gunpowder-based technology.

Shoulder weapons

Smoothbore muzzle-loaders
      Practical shoulder-fired small arms started with the perfection of the flintlock ignition system in the mid-17th century (see military technology). Earlier gunpowder small arms, based on the matchlock or wheel lock mechanisms, were generally too heavy, too unreliable, or too expensive to allow for general issue to infantry forces. Indeed, the first matchlock mosquetes (“muskets (musket)”) fielded by Spanish infantry weighed as much as 25 pounds (10 kilograms) and usually required a forked staff as a rest to enable a man of normal strength to fire them accurately from the shoulder. Nevertheless, they were capable of sending bullets through the best armour that could be worn by a mobile soldier. Almost overnight, firepower from muskets became the dominant force in war, and fully armoured soldiers almost disappeared from European battlefields toward the end of the 16th century. With armour-piercing power no longer necessary, muskets could be made smaller, and shoulder weapons without rests became the norm.

      The introduction of new ignition systems did not immediately render older forms obsolete, however; all systems, in many variations, existed side by side. Wheel locks and matchlocks, for example, persisted into the 18th century, long after flintlocks had established their primacy in Europe and America.

Standardized patterns and parts
       flintlock small arms emerged at the start of industrialization, with weapons production becoming one of the first industrial sectors to exploit the transition from craft production to the large-scale production of the Industrial Revolution. On the military side, these weapons entered service at a time when the scale of ground forces employed in battle was increasing. The ability to manufacture large numbers of muskets enabled military leaders to equip these mass armies.

      By the 1600s European military authorities had begun moving toward greater uniformity in order to eliminate mixed inventories of nonstandard weapons. England took the first steps toward creating a national system of small-arms manufacture. For years, completed muskets had been purchased from a variety of English, Irish, and Dutch gunmakers, who subcontracted for components and arranged for final assembly. Beginning in the early 1700s, ordnance officials, from their headquarters at the Tower of London, divided the manufacture of firearms into locks, stocks, barrels, ramrods, and furniture—all of which they sought to purchase directly from subcontractors. Since different components for the same weapon were made in different locations, Tower officials oversaw the establishment of “Sealed Patterns” (sample firearms) to serve as exact models for gunmakers.

      An Ordnance Office decree of 1722 led to a standard army musket, called the “Long Land,” which had a 46-inch (1,168-millimetre) barrel and a calibre, or bore diameter, of .75 inch (19 millimetres). The Long Land became popularly known in America as the first model Brown Bess musket. Fighting experience in the wilderness of North America during the Seven Years' War, or French and Indian War (1756–63), suggested the utility of lighter and shorter muskets, and in 1768 the Short Land musket, with a 42-inch barrel, became standard. Known as the second model Brown Bess, the Short Land became one of the basic weapons used in the American Revolution (1775–83). It was succeeded in 1797 by the “India Pattern,” with a 39-inch barrel. During the wars with Napoleon from 1804 to 1815, more than 1.6 million of these muskets were assembled in Birmingham, and nearly 2.7 million muskets of all types were “fitted up” in London and at the Lewisham Royal Armoury Mills. In 1816 assembly work was divided between London and a new Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield Lock, Middlesex.

      In France, standard-pattern muskets did not exist prior to 1717, when the government specified a weapon with a 47-inch barrel and a calibre of .69 inch. (This calibre remained standard until the 19th century.) After the Seven Years' War, the French army introduced the Modèle 1763, with a stronger lock and shorter (45-inch) barrel—a length that remained standard to century's end. The Modèle 1777 musket represented a major step forward because of improved production techniques, with the French creating a rigorous system of patterns and gauges that yielded muskets with nearly interchangeable parts. This process was intended to produce less expensive muskets that were easier to make and repair, but worker resistance delayed large-scale manufacture of small arms using interchangeable parts until the early 1800s. Had the program succeeded earlier, France would have been better equipped to fight the Napoleonic Wars. As it was, French firms in such provincial cities as Charleville, Maubeuge, Saint-Étienne, and Tulle fabricated fewer than two million small arms.

      The U.S. government created national armouries at Springfield, Mass., and at Harpers Ferry, Va., in 1794; work at Springfield commenced in 1795, and arms production began at Harpers Ferry in 1801. Both built an Americanized version of the French Modèle 1777 musket (known as the Model 1795 in the United States). These armouries and their private competitors later became important centres of technological innovation. With the adoption of the .69-inch Model 1842, the U.S. military introduced the large-scale assembly of weapons from uniform, interchangeable parts. By the mid-1850s arms makers around the world were beginning to copy this “American System” of manufacture, which contributed to the creation of the modern military small arm—especially after the introduction of percussion ignition and rifled barrels.

Percussion ignition
      The Model 1842 was based on the Model 1840 flintlock, but it featured a switch to percussion ignition. This newer system was based on the explosive property of potassium chlorate and fulminate of mercury, both of which detonate when struck a small, sharp blow by a striker. Several Germans experimented with detonating fulminates in the late 17th century, and the French did likewise in the 18th century, but it was Alexander John Forsyth (Forsyth, Alexander John), a Scottish clergyman, who successfully wedded priming powders to the ignition of firearms in 1805, receiving a patent in April 1807. Forsyth invented the “scent bottle” type of lock mechanism, so called because rotating on a tapered steel plug at about the location of a flintlock touchhole was a powder-filled container that looked like a perfume bottle. Turning the bottle upside down released some detonator powder into a cavity at the top of the plug, and turning the bottle back left the striker mechanism, consisting of a hammer rather than the cock and jaws of the flintlock, free to operate. When the trigger was pulled, the hammer fell, detonating the compound.

      Subsequent inventors simplified the percussion lock mechanism by using loose or pellet detonating powder. By 1830, percussion caps (attributed to the Philadelphian Joshua Shaw in 1815) were becoming the accepted system for igniting firearm powder charges. A percussion cap was a truncated cone of metal (preferably copper) that contained a small amount of fulminate of mercury inside its crown, protected by foil and shellac. This cap was fitted onto a steel nipple mounted at the weapon's breech, and a small channel in the nipple communicated the flash from the cap to the powder chamber. In the final form of this mechanism, a hollow-nosed percussion hammer came down over the percussion cap, thus eliminating the danger of flying copper when the powder detonated. Percussion cap ignition was easily adapted to existing flintlock muskets and pistols.

Rifled muzzle-loaders
Early rifling
      As killing machines, smoothbore infantry muskets were relatively inefficient. Their heavy, round lead balls delivered bone-crushing and tissue-destroying blows when they hit a human body, but beyond 75 yards even trained infantrymen found it difficult to hit an individual adversary. Volley fire against massed troops delivered effective projectiles out to 200 yards, but at 300 yards balls from muzzle-loaders lost most of their lethality. Also, while well-trained soldiers could load and shoot their muskets five times per minute, volley fire led to a collective rate of only two to three shots per minute.

      These ballistic shortcomings were a product of the requirement that the projectile, in order to be quickly rammed from muzzle to breech, had to fit loosely in the barrel. When discharged, it wobbled down the barrel, contributing to erratic flight after it left the muzzle. Rifled barrels, in which spiral grooves were cut into the bore, were known to improve accuracy by imparting a gyroscopic spin to the projectile, but reloading rifled (rifle) weapons was slowed because the lead ball had to be driven into the barrel's rifling. Greased cloth or leather patches eased the problem somewhat, but the rate of fire of rifles was still much lower than that of smoothbore muskets.

      One possible solution was the creation of mechanisms that allowed the bullet to be loaded at the breech instead of the muzzle. Many such ideas were tested during the 18th century, but, given the craftsman-based manufacture of the day, none was suited to large-scale production. Special army units in Europe and America used rifled muzzle-loaders, such as the flintlock British Baker rifle, to harass the enemy at long ranges, while most infantrymen continued to carry muzzle-loading smoothbores. For this reason, inventors concentrated on adapting rifled barrels to muzzle-loaders. In 1826 Henri-Gustave Delvigne (Delvigne, Henri-Gustave) of France, seeking a means of expanding the projectile without making it difficult to ram home, created a narrow powder chamber at the breech end of the barrel against which a loosely fitting lead ball came to rest. Ramrod blows expanded the soft lead at the mouth of the chamber so that, when fired, the bullet fit the rifling tightly. In 1844 another French officer, Louis-Étienne de Thouvenin, introduced yet a better method for expanding bullets. His carabine à tige embodied a post or pillar (tige) at the breech against which the bullet was expanded.

Minié rifles
      These rifles worked better than earlier types, but their deformed balls flew with reduced accuracy. Captain Claude-Étienne Minié (Minié, Claude-Étienne), inspired by Delvigne's later work with cylindrical bullets, designed longer, smaller-diameter projectiles, which, having the same weight as larger round balls, possessed greater cross-sectional density and therefore retained their velocity better. Moreover, while the flat base of Minié's projectile was deformed against the pillar as in Thouvenin's weapon, the rest of the bullet maintained its shape and accuracy. The French army combined these ideas in the Carabine Modèle 1846 à tige and the Fusil d'Infanterie Modèle 1848 à tige.

      In order to combat the tendency of muzzle-loading rifles to become difficult to load as gunpowder residue collected in the barrels, Minié suggested a major simplification—eliminating the pillar and employing in its place a hollow-based bullet with an iron expander plug that caused the projectile to engage the rifling when the weapon was fired. This new projectile could be loaded into dirty rifles with ease, and, because it was not deformed while loading, it had greater accuracy.

 Officials in several countries, notably Britain and the United States, saw the significance of Minié's invention. In 1851 the Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield, embarked upon production of the .702-inch Pattern 1851 Minié rifle. In the Crimean War (1854–56), Russian troops armed with smoothbore muskets were no match for Britons shooting P/51 rifles. Massed formations were easy prey, as were cavalry and artillery units. A correspondent for the Times of London wrote: “The Minié is king of weapons . . . the volleys of the Minié cleft [Russian soldiers] like the hand of the Destroying Angel.”

      Swiss experiments demonstrated that an expander plug was not necessary when a bullet's side walls were thin enough, and the British designed a smaller-calibre rifle using this type of Minié bullet. The result was a .577-inch weapon firing “cylindro-conoidal” projectiles—essentially a lead cylinder with a conical nose. “Enfield” as a weapon name was first generally applied to these Pattern 1853 rifles. Subsequent tests indicated that rifles with 33-inch barrels could provide accuracy equal to the 39-inch P/53 barrels. When the resulting P/53 Short Rifles were issued, there began a century-long trend toward shorter weapons.

      In the United States, experiments undertaken in the late 1840s led to the adoption of a .58-inch Minié-type bullet and a family of arms designed to use it. The Model 1855 rifled musket, with a 40-inch barrel, produced a muzzle velocity of 950 feet (290 metres) per second. All Model 1855 weapons used mechanically operated tape priming, intended to eliminate the manual placement of percussion caps on the nipple, but this system proved too fragile and was eliminated with the introduction of a simplified Model 1861 rifled musket. During the American Civil War (1861–65), the Union government purchased both Model 1861 and Model 1863 rifled muskets as its basic infantry weapon. In the Confederacy, domestic production was supplemented by purchases of Enfield P/53 rifles and other European weapons.

      The Civil War clearly demonstrated the deadly effect of rifled muskets, although many battlefield commanders only slowly appreciated the changing nature of warfare. Individual soldiers could hit their opposing numbers with accurate fire out to 250 yards, so that frontal assaults, in which soldiers advanced in neat ranks across open fields, had to be abandoned. By 1862 both sides were building field entrenchments and barricades to provide protection from rifle and artillery fire.

Breechloaders
      The American Civil War also previewed the importance of breech-loading rifles. For more than a century, soldiers carrying muzzle-loaders had been issued paper cartridges (cartridge) containing the musket ball and an appropriate powder charge. To use one of these cartridges, they simply bit off the end of the paper tube, poured a little powder into the pan (if the gun was a flintlock), dumped the rest down the barrel, and then rammed the ball and paper down on top. Some early breechloaders used slightly improved cartridges of nitrate-soaked paper or linen that contained the powder and ball and were inserted into the opened breech as a unit. The powder was set off when sparks from the flashpan ignited either the flammable case itself or exposed powder at the end of the cartridge. Other breechloaders employed metal cartridges that were pierced with holes or made with ends of flammable paper, so that the powder could be ignited by a percussion cap. But all of these systems, which relied upon externally mounted flintlock or percussion ignition mechanisms, were prone to misfiring, and they did little to prevent the leakage of gas and flame for which breechloaders were notorious. Breech-loading rifles became practical only with the design of cartridges that housed the primer as well as the propellant in a single case, and that provided an effective seal when the weapon was fired.

      The first such cartridge to be successfully employed in war was of the rimfire type, in which a ring of detonating fulminate was deposited in a hollow rim around the base of a thin copper case. An external hammer crushed the rim in one spot, firing the round. Unfortunately, some fulminate compounds detonated unpredictably, leading to both misfires and premature explosions. Also, a cartridge case that was soft enough to be crushed by a striker could not stand up to the heavy propellant charge necessary for a full-power infantry rifle. For this reason, rimfire cartridges were used most effectively in pistols or—during the American Civil War—in smaller repeating carbines such as the .56-inch Spencer and the .44-inch Henry.

      In Europe, a milestone in the development of breech-loading infantry weapons was achieved by Johann Nikolaus Dreyse (Dreyse, Nikolaus von), a Prussian. His Zündnadelgewehr (Dreyse rifle) (“needle-fired gun”), introduced in 1838, used a paper cartridge with a priming pellet located at the base of a solid egg-shaped bullet. A long, needle-shaped firing pin, shot forward by a spring, pierced the cartridge and powder charge to detonate the primer. This needle was housed in a steel cylinder called the bolt, which slid forward in the frame of the receiver until it was locked firmly against the base of the cartridge in the chamber. Once the weapon was fired, the soldier released a latch with his thumb, grasped a knob at the end of a handle projecting from the bolt, turned it until locking lugs on the bolt were disengaged from slots in the receiver, and slid the bolt back to open the chamber for reloading. This bolt action, simple in concept and yet requiring precise workmanship, constituted a revolution in small-arms design.

      The first Dreyse rifles were adopted by the Prussian army in 1843 and were used in campaigns in 1849 and 1864. In 1866, notably at the Battle of Königgrätz during the Seven Weeks' War, Prussian soldiers lying prone were able to fire six shots from their 15.43-millimetre (.607-inch) Zündnadelgewehr Modell 1862 for every one discharged from their Austrian opponents' muzzle-loading rifles.

      Prussia's success encouraged other European states to adopt bolt-action breechloaders. The French employed Antoine-Alphonse Chassepot's 11-millimetre Fusil d'Infanterie Modèle 1866 to devastating effect in such battles of the Franco-German War (1870–71) as Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte. Close-order troop formations disappeared from the European scene as a result of these fights, and the cavalry charge was relegated to the past. The Chassepot rifle employed a shorter firing pin than the Dreyse, because its cartridge was fitted with a detonating cap at the very base. About 1.03 million of these weapons were in hand when the war began, and Prussia had some 1.15 million Dreyse needle rifles—a quantity that demonstrated the value of machine production of weapons with interchangeable parts.

      Needle rifles offered a faster rate of fire, but their paper cartridges provided a poor seal at the breech, and their long firing pins warped or broke under heavy use. One solution was the metallic centre-fire cartridge with a percussion cap centred in the base of a hard brass or copper case. A shorter, sturdier firing pin was sufficient to detonate the primer, and a metallic case that was strong enough to withstand a powerful propellant charge also provided effective closure of the breech. Adopting centre-fire cartridges, France transformed its Chassepots into the 11-millimetre Modèle 1866/67 and 1874 rifles, which were named after their designer, Basile Gras. Germany went to rifles designed by Peter Paul Mauser, first the 11-millimetre Modell 1871 Gewehr and then the Modell 1871/84 Infanterie-Repetier-Gewehr. The latter was a 10-shot repeater that ejected the spent case as the bolt was pulled back and fed a fresh cartridge into the chamber from a tubular magazine beneath the barrel as the bolt was pushed forward.

      All other European countries soon adopted cartridge breech-loading rifles, usually by converting existing muzzle-loaders and then by purchasing purpose-built breechloaders. Many did not feature bolt action. For example, beginning in 1866, Britain converted its P/53 Enfields simply by hinging the top of the breech so that it could be opened sideways, the spent case extracted, and a fresh cartridge inserted. In 1871 the British went to new Martini-Henry breechloaders of .45-inch calibre. In these rifles, pushing down a lever attached to the trigger guard lowered the entire breechblock, exposing the chamber, and raised the breechblock back to firing position when it was pulled back. Russia adopted two new 10-millimetre breechloaders, the Model 1868 Berdan No. 1 and then the bolt-action Model 1870 Berdan No. 2, both of which were largely the work of American Civil War officer Hiram Berdan. The U.S.-made Remington Rolling Block Rifle, in which the breechblock was cocked back on a hinge like the hammer, was bought by a number of countries around the world. The United States itself adopted a series of single-shot rifles employing a hinged-breech “trap-door” mechanism, developed by Erskine S. Allin at the Springfield Armory, in which the top of the breech was flipped forward along the top of the barrel. The first Model 1866 was a converted .58-inch musket, the second Model 1866 was a new rifle in .50-inch calibre, and subsequent versions were built in .45-inch calibre. These weapons, born of postwar starvation budgets, continued to use components introduced with the Model 1855 muzzle-loaders.

The smokeless-powder revolution
      All early breechloaders used black powder as their source of propellant energy, but in the early 1880s more powerful and cleaner-burning nitrocellulose-based (nitrocellulose) propellants were perfected. Whereas black powder produced a large quantity of solid material upon combustion, quickly fouling barrels and pouring out huge clouds of smoke, nitrocellulose produced mostly gas and was therefore labeled “smokeless powder.” Also, it produced three times the energy of black powder and burned at a more controllable rate. Such characteristics made possible a shift to longer and smaller-diameter projectiles. Bore diameters were again reduced, this time to calibres of about .30 inch, or 7.5 to 8 millimetres. Muzzle velocities ranged from 2,000 to 2,800 feet per second, and accurate range extended to 1,000 yards and beyond. Because lead projectiles were too soft to be used at such increased power and velocity, they were sheathed in harder metal. In 1881 a Swiss officer, Eduard Alexander Rubin, was the first to perfect a full-length, copper-jacketed bullet.

Magazine repeaters
      France was the first country to issue a small-bore, high-velocity repeating rifle, the Modèle 1886 Lebel, which fired an 8-millimetre, smokeless-powder round. The tubular magazine of this rifle soon became obsolete, however. In 1885 Ferdinand Mannlicher (Mannlicher, Ferdinand, Ritter von) of Austria had introduced a boxlike magazine fitted into the bottom of the rifle in front of the trigger guard. This magazine was easily loaded by a device called a clip, a light metal openwork box that held five cartridges and fed them up into the chamber through the action of a spring as each spent case was ejected. Other magazine rifles, such as the Mauser (Mauser rifle), used a different loading device, called a charger. This was simply a flat strip of metal with its edges curled to hook over the rims or grooves of a row of cartridges (also usually five). To load his rifle, a soldier drew back the bolt, slipped the charger into position above the opened receiver, and pushed the cartridges down into the magazine, where they were held in tension against a spring. The efficiency of the box magazine was quickly recognized, as was its special compatibility with the bolt action, and all European states made the conversion. For example, Germany adopted the 8-millimetre Model 1888 Commission rifle, Belgium the 7.65-millimetre Model 1889 Mauser, Turkey the Model 1890 Mauser, and Russia the 7.62-millimetre Model 1891 Mosin-Nagant. In 1892 Britain abandoned movable-block action and went to the .303-inch, bolt-action Lee-Metford, and the United States began to purchase the .30-inch Model 1892 Krag-Jørgensen, a Danish design. In 1906 Japan adopted the 6.5-millimetre Year 38 Arisaka rifle.

      By World War I (1914–18) all major powers adopted smokeless-powder, bolt-action, magazine-fed repeating rifles, and some had shifted to a second generation. Austria, for example, issued the Modell 1895 Mannlicher, firing an 8-millimetre round, and German troops carried the 7.92-millimetre Modell 1898, designed by Mauser. For durability, safety, and efficiency, the 1898 Mauser was probably the epitome of bolt-action military rifles. It was sold and copied around the world. In the United States the Mauser was only slightly altered and issued as the .30-inch M1903 Springfield.

      Also following Germany's lead in the design of ammunition, all armies replaced their blunt-nosed projectiles with aerodynamically superior pointed bullets (in German, Spitzgeschossen). Barrel lengths continued to decrease, partly in response to more efficient propellants and partly to make rifles easier to use in the field. The British .303-inch Short, Magazine, Lee-Enfield rifle, known as the SMLE, had a 25-inch barrel, while the M1903 Springfield's barrel measured just over 23.75 inches.

      During the Great War, huge quantities of rifles were built. British factories made more than 3.9 million rifles, German sources produced about 5 million, and Russian factories built more than 9 million. Still, most armies suffered from shortages. Factories in the United States made 1.24 million rifles for the British and 280,000 for the Russians; for U.S. forces they produced 2.4 million between May 1917 and December 1918 alone.

Automatic weapons
The self-loading rifle
      Magazine-fed rifles provided a radical increase in rate of fire. Indeed, by 1914 many British riflemen could fire 15 aimed shots per minute, and some very skillful individuals could exceed 30 shots per minute. Nevertheless, in order to transcend the limits imposed by manual operation, gun designers such as Mannlicher and the American Hiram Maxim came up with experimental self-loading, or semiautomatic, rifles, which used the energy generated by a fired round to load a fresh round into the chamber. However, only a handful of these weapons were adopted in very small numbers by the major armies, whose interest in automatic fire from the 1880s through World War I was directed primarily toward heavier infantry-support weapons (see below Machine guns (small arm)).

      After the war, all nations having an arms industry sought to produce a semiautomatic rifle, but only the United States was successful in developing and manufacturing a battle-worthy weapon. Adopted in 1936, the U.S. Rifle, Caliber .30 M1, designed by John C. Garand (Garand rifle), was a technological tour de force. A small hole or gas port on the underside of its barrel near the muzzle directed part of the propellant gases into a small cylinder holding a piston that was connected to the bolt. As gas pressure forced back the piston and bolt, the empty cartridge case was ejected and the hammer was cocked. A spring then forced the bolt forward. As it moved forward, the bolt stripped the top cartridge from an eight-round, clip-loaded magazine within the receiver and seated it in the chamber, ready to fire. Gas pressure thus performed automatically the reloading task formerly done by hand.

      As the only semiautomatic rifle to become a standard-issue infantry weapon, the M1 was extremely durable and reliable in combat. Between 1937 and 1945, the Springfield Armory and the Winchester Repeating Arms Company produced 4.04 million of these rifles. Still, the infantry units of most other belligerents during World War II (1939–45) were armed with bolt-action rifles of the World War I era as their standard weapons.

      The ballistic performance of infantry rifles was tailored to the long-range requirements of a bygone era when foot soldiers demanded weapons that could reach out to halt the dreaded cavalry charge. Beginning early in World War I, however, battlefields became no-man's-lands pockmarked by shell craters and crisscrossed by miles of barbed-wire entanglements, and machine guns dominated the 1,000 or more yards between trench lines. While rifles were shot at those extreme ranges, they could not equal the destructive power of artillery and machine guns, and they were too cumbersome and powerful for offensive assaults on enemy trenches. A generation later, in World War II, the greater mobility of troops accompanying armoured vehicles reinforced the need for lighter, more portable weapons of improved effectiveness at close quarters.

      Such changing conditions led to experiments with automatic weapons firing rounds of lower velocity or lighter weight. One result, which saw its first use in World War I, was a new weapon called the machine carbine or submachine gun. Derived from the semiautomatic pistol and firing pistol-calibre ammunition with muzzle velocities of only about 1,000 feet per second, submachine guns were fitted with shoulder stocks (and sometimes forward hand grips). Such weapons offered easier handling than rifles while providing greater accuracy and more rapid fire than most handguns.

      The first successful weapon of this type was the Maschinen Pistole 1918 Bergmann, designed by Hugo Schmeisser and employed by the Germans during the last few months of the war. The barrel of the MP18 was less than eight inches long, and it was chambered for nine-millimetre rounds introduced in 1908 for Parabellum, or Luger, pistols. It operated under a principle called blowback, in which the spent cartridge case, blown backward out of the chamber by the gases generated by the firing of the round, forced the bolt back against a spring and tripped the mechanism that ejected the case from the gun. The spring then forced the bolt forward as a fresh cartridge was fed into the chamber. If the trigger was kept depressed, the new round would be fired automatically, and the cycle would continue until the trigger was released or the ammunition was exhausted. In blowback actions, the bolt had to be quite heavy, or it had to be subjected to various devices that retarded its backward motion, in order to keep the mechanism from operating faster than was desired. In the MP18, a heavy bolt and spring limited the weapon's rate of fire to about 400 rounds per minute.

      After the war, Vasily Degtyarev of the Soviet Union incorporated Schmeisser's principles into his own designs, culminating in the Pistolet Pulemyot Degtyarova of 1940. The PPD was fed by a drum-shaped magazine containing 71 7.62-millimetre cartridges, and it fired at a rate of 900 rounds per minute—far too fast for accuracy. In the United States, John T. Thompson's submachine gun (Thompson submachine gun), chambered for the .45-inch Colt pistol cartridge, was adopted by the army in 1928. Popularly called the “tommy gun,” the M1928 was effective, but its blowback operation was modified by a complex retarding mechanism that was deleted from later versions, when its large drum magazine was also replaced by a box magazine.

      Under the pressures of World War II, the major powers used millions of submachine guns. These included a second generation of simplified weapons that, being fabricated partly from sheet-metal stampings, could be produced in quantity almost anywhere and at little expense. The Germans led the way with the MP38 and MP40. Known to the Allies as “burp guns,” these weapons operated at 450 to 550 rounds per minute, the optimal rate for controlled fire. Also, they were fed by a box magazine, which did not jam as often as a drum, and had a wire shoulder stock that could be folded against the receiver. Meanwhile, the Soviets issued en masse the PPSh of 1941 and the PPS of 1943. The latter closely resembled the new German guns, as did the United States' M3, called the “grease gun” for its resemblance to a mechanic's grease dispenser. The British Sten gun, extremely simple and inexpensive yet very effective, was issued to paratroops and commandos beginning in 1941 and was also smuggled to partisans in Europe.

      After the war, almost all new submachine guns, such as the British Sterling and West German MP5, were chambered for nine-millimetre cartridges. As a class of weapon, they received a new lease on life with the telescoping bolt, pioneered by Václav Holek in the Czechoslovak Model 23 of 1948. This involved a hollowed-out bolt that slid partially over the barrel when a round was chambered, resulting in a much shorter weapon. A prominent example of this type was the Israeli Uzi (Uzi submachine gun), designed by Uziel Gal, which was only 25 inches long with its shoulder stock extended. The Uzi was adopted around the world as a police and counterterrorist weapon. Indeed, aside from arming special forces, the submachine gun lost importance as a military weapon. With an effective range limited to about 200 yards, it could not fill the broad gap between the low-power pistol cartridge and the full-power rifle cartridge. This gap, which constituted the ground upon which modern infantrymen found themselves fighting, had to be filled by another new weapon, which would fire a cartridge of intermediate power.

      A hint at this new weapon had been given during World War I, when Vladimir Grigorevich Fyodorov, father of Russian automatic weapons, married the 6.5-millimetre cartridge of the Japanese Arisaka rifle to an automatic rifle. In 1916 he unveiled his new weapon, the Avtomat Fyodorova. Owing to the turmoil of the Russian Revolution of 1917, only about 3,200 of Fyodorov's weapons were delivered. Nevertheless, they pointed the way to future infantry weapon design.

      During World War II, Hugo Schmeisser designed a light rifle to fire the Germans' 7.92-millimetre Kurz, or “Short,” cartridge, which was of the same calibre as the Mauser rifle cartridge but was lighter and shorter and was therefore of a less potent, “intermediate” power. The weapon, known variously as the MP43, MP44, or Sturmgewehr (“Assault Rifle”) 44, was loaded by a curved box magazine holding 30 rounds and was designed for most effective fire at about 300 yards. Only 425,000 to 440,000 of these rifles were built—too few and too late for the German war effort—but they were based on a concept that would dominate infantry weapons for the rest of the century.

      Late in the war the Soviets also began a search for a rifle to shoot their 7.62-millimetre intermediate cartridge, which produced a muzzle velocity of 2,330 feet per second. Historical evidence suggests that they were influenced by the Sturmgewehr, but to what extent remains uncertain. In 1947 they adopted a weapon designed by Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov, naming it the Avtomat Kalashnikova. Like the German weapon, the AK-47 was operated by diverting some of the propellant gases into a cylinder above the barrel; this drove a piston that forced the bolt back against its spring and cocked the hammer for the next round. At the turn of a selector switch, the action could be changed from semiautomatic to fully automatic, firing at a rate of 600 rounds per minute. The AK-47 was made of forged and milled steel, giving it a weight of 10.6 pounds (4.8 kilograms) with a loaded 30-round magazine. The receiver of the AKM version, introduced in 1959, was made of lighter sheet metal, reducing the weight to 8.3 pounds, and the AK-74 version, following later trends in the West, switched to a 5.45-millimetre cartridge.

 Kalashnikov's assault rifles became the most significant infantry weapons of the post-World War II era. In many variants, they were adopted and made by countries all over the world. Between 30 and 50 million AKs were produced within four decades of the series' introduction, more than any other firearm in history.

      The development of Western small arms proceeded more slowly, mainly because the United States insisted upon maintaining a power level comparable to the M1. As a result, in 1953 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) reluctantly agreed to standardize on a 7.62-millimetre cartridge that was a half-inch shorter than the M1 cartridge but of the same calibre and power. To fire this new round, the United States produced an improved version of the M1 rifle, featuring a 20-round detachable magazine and being capable of selective fire. Called the U.S. Rifle 7.62mm M14, it replaced the M1, beginning in 1957. As a self-loading rifle the M14 performed well, but it was too heavy as a close-quarters weapon, and the extreme recoil generated by the NATO round caused it to be totally unmanageable as an automatic rifle.

      Other NATO armies adopted more satisfactory 7.62-millimetre rifles, although even these were employed as advanced self-loaders rather than automatics. Most commonly, they were either the gas-operated Fusil Automatique Léger (FAL), introduced by the Belgian Fabrique Nationale d'Armes de Guerre in 1957, or the blowback-operated Gewehr 3 (G3), produced in West Germany by the firm Heckler & Koch, beginning in 1959. Millions of these weapons were sold to many countries.

      After the Korean War (1950–53), U.S. military researchers dissatisfied with rifle-power ammunition began to test a .22-inch (5.56-millimetre) cartridge that propelled a lighter projectile at a much higher muzzle velocity of 3,000 feet per second. To fire this “small-calibre, high-velocity” round, in 1958 they chose the AR-15 (M16 rifle) rifle, designed by Eugene M. Stoner for the ArmaLite Division of Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation. The AR-15 was gas-operated, but it eliminated the piston in favour of a tube that directed propellant gases directly into an expansion chamber between the bolt and bolt carrier. By reducing the number of working parts and chambering the rifle for a smaller cartridge, Stoner had come up with a lightweight weapon that, even on automatic fire, produced a manageable recoil and yet was capable of inflicting fatal wounds at 300 yards and beyond. In 1961 the air force purchased the AR-15, renaming it the M16. Six years later, with units in Vietnam finding the weapon very effective under the close conditions of jungle warfare, the army adopted it as the M16A1.

      After U.S. troops in Europe were issued the M16, a series of trials ensued that ended with the decision, in 1980, to adopt a standard 5.56-millimetre NATO cartridge. This fired a brass-jacketed projectile that, having a heavier lead core and steel nose, was lethal at longer ranges than the original AR-15 bullet. The M16A2 was rifled to fire this round, and other NATO armies switched over. West Germany introduced the G41, a 5.56-millimetre version of the G3, and Belgium replaced the FAL with the FNC. The British and French armies developed new assault rifles (rifle) with compact “bullpup” designs, in which the bolt, receiver, and magazine were behind the handgrip and trigger and much of the shoulder stock was occupied by the operating mechanism. This permitted a much shorter weapon than orthodox designs, in which the magazine and receiver were ahead of the trigger. As a result, the French FA MAS and British L85A1 were only some 30 to 31 inches long—compared with the M16, which was 39 inches overall. Many of the newer models were built with lightweight plastic shoulder stocks and magazines, as well as receivers made of aluminum.

Edward C. Ezell

Machine guns (machine gun)
      The search for greater firepower has not been limited to shoulder firearms. In addition to personal-defense weapons, a variety of infantry-support weapons classed as machine guns have been subjected to intense experimentation.

Early manual weapons
      During the flintlock era a number of heavy guns were developed that could fire several bullets either serially or in volley, but it was not until the mid-19th century, with the spread of centre-fire cartridge ammunition and better manufacturing techniques, that such weapons could be put to effective military use. The best known were the Gatling gun, invented by the American Richard J. Gatling (Gatling, Richard Jordan), and the mitrailleuse, produced by the Belgian firm of Christophe & Montigny.

 Gatling guns had several barrels (usually 6 or 10) mounted around a central axle and revolved by means of a hand crank. After a barrel fired a round, it went through successive unlocking, extracting, ejecting, reloading, and relocking. In the most successful Gatling guns, stacks of rounds could be fed by means of a feed device to give continuous fire for long periods. Gatling weapons were made to take a variety of ammunition, up to a full inch in calibre. A few were used by U.S. forces in Cuba in 1898 and in minor military operations around the world.

The mitrailleuse
      The French mitrailleuse was also a multibarreled weapon, but it used a loading plate that contained a cartridge for each of its 25 barrels. The barrels and the loading plate remained fixed, and a mechanism (operated by a crank) struck individual firing pins simultaneously or in succession. The mitrailleuse issued to the French army fired 11-millimetre Chassepot rifle ammunition. Weighing more than 2,000 pounds, it was mounted on a wheeled carriage and was usually employed in volley fire, all barrels discharging at once. French forces in the Franco-German War endeavoured to use it in a manner similar to artillery, but it was no match for breech-loading cannon firing explosive shells.

Heavy machine guns
      Self-actuated machine guns, which operated under energy generated by a fired round, became militarily effective after the introduction of nitrocellulose propellants. These burned at a more controlled rate than did the older black-powder propellants, generating pressures that built up over a longer time. The first automatic weapons to take advantage of this were heavy guns firing the new, high-velocity rifle cartridges.

 The first successful automatic machine gun (Maxim machine gun) was invented by Hiram Stevens Maxim (Maxim, Sir Hiram), an American working in Europe. Beginning about 1884, he produced a number of weapons in which the bullet's recoil energy was employed to unlock the breechblock from the barrel, to extract and eject the fired case from the gun, and to store sufficient energy in a main spring to push the bolt forward, pick up a fresh round, load the chamber, and lock the piece. Both barrel and breechblock, locked together, recoiled a short distance to the rear; then the barrel was stopped and the block continued back alone. If the trigger was held in firing position, the weapon would continue to fire until it expended all of its ammunition. Rounds were fed to the gun on belts, which could be clipped together to provide continuous fire, and overheating was solved by surrounding the barrel in a metal jacket in which water was circulated from a separate container.

      Maxim's salesmen provided armies with guns in any calibre, usually matching their current rifle cartridge. In Britain, Maxim guns were first chambered for the .45-inch Martini-Henry cartridge, but, as issued in 1891, they fired the .303-inch smokeless-powder round of the Lee-Metford rifle. During the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), the Russians used English-made Maxim guns chambered for their 7.62-millimetre Mosin-Nagant round. Their Model 1910 weighed about 160 pounds, including mount, water-cooling apparatus, and a protective steel shield for the gunner. The German Model 1908, chambered for the 7.92-millimetre Mauser cartridge, weighed 100 pounds with its sled mount. Such light weights, made possible because the cartridge was the sole source of power, allowed these weapons to be operated by special infantry units.

      Machine guns of the Maxim type had a destructive power never seen before in warfare. In the 1890s, British infantry units used Maxim guns, fabricated under contract by Vickers Sons, to cut down hordes of poorly armed rebels in Africa and Afghanistan. In World War I, a few of them could cause thousands of casualties. Their defensive fire so limited the offensive power of infantry that the entire Western Front, from the Swiss border to the English Channel, became one vast siege operation.

Gas operation
      Not all the early heavy machine guns were of the recoil-operated Maxim type. Gas operation was also employed. In this system a piston located in a cylinder below the barrel was driven to the rear by gas diverted from the barrel through a port. The piston unlocked the breechblock and sent the bolt back against the main spring; a new round was then picked up, moved into the chamber, and fired on the forward stroke.

      The best-known gas-operated heavy machine gun was the Hotchkiss, introduced in France in 1892 and modified several times until the definitive version of 1914. It was air-cooled, but the barrel itself was heavy and provided with metal fins to increase heat radiation. A slower method of feeding ammunition by short strips instead of long belts also helped to keep the weapon from overheating. The Japanese used Hotchkiss guns chambered for their 6.5-millimetre round against Russia in 1904–05. In World War I, two French Hotchkiss guns firing 8-millimetre Lebel cartridges were said to have fired 75,000 rounds each in the defense of Verdun and to have remained serviceable.

      A third principle of machine-gun operation was often called blowback. In this, the action and barrel were never locked rigidly together; the barrel did not move, nor was there a gas cylinder and piston. To prevent the breech from opening so early that propellant gases would rupture the spent cartridge case, the block was heavy and the main spring strong. Also, there was usually a linkage of parts not quite on centre to delay the actual opening. Finally, the barrel was shorter than usual, allowing the bullet and gases to leave the barrel quickly.

      The Austrian Schwarzlose of 1907/12, firing eight-millimetre Mannlicher rounds, operated by delayed blowback. It was entirely satisfactory in combat during World War I.

Light machine guns
      Heavy machine guns were satisfactory for defensive roles but were not really portable. A number of lighter machine guns (frequently called machine rifles or automatic rifles (automatic rifle)) began to be used in 1915. These included the British Lewis gun (invented in America but manufactured and improved in Great Britain), the French Chauchat, several German weapons, and the U.S. M1918 Browning automatic rifle (known as the BAR). Most, but not all, of these light weapons were gas-operated. Almost all were air-cooled. Generally, they fired from magazines rather than belts of ammunition because detachable magazines were more convenient and more easily transported. Weighing as little as 15 pounds, they were light enough to be carried by one man and fired rifle-fashion or from a prone position.

      After World War I, light machine guns virtually took over the functions of their heavier counterparts, although the older weapons continued in service around the world through World War II and for decades thereafter. In Germany, where heavy, water-cooled Maxim-type guns had been forbidden by the victorious Allies, an entirely new generation of light machine guns was introduced by the Maschinengewehr 1934 and 1942 (MG42). Recoil-operated and fed 7.92-millimetre rifle ammunition on belts, these were equally effective when fired from bipods or when mounted on tripods for sustained fire. Firing at an extremely high rate (as high as 1,000 rounds per minute), they dealt with the overheating problem by being built with barrels that could be changed in seconds. The MG34 pioneered the quick-change mechanism, while the MG42, being fabricated largely of stamped sheet-metal parts welded and riveted together, could be made cheaply and quickly even in factories designed for automobile manufacture.

      The Soviets began to issue their Degtyarev Pekhotny (DP) in 1933 and supplied it to loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War. In 1944 it was modified into the DPM. British infantry units fought World War II with the Bren, a .303-inch version of a weapon designed by the Czech weapons maker Václav Holek, and U.S. troops relied on the BAR. All were gas-operated and magazine-fed and weighed from slightly over 20 pounds to more than 30 pounds loaded. They fired slowly enough to deliver accurate bursts from their bipods, 350–600 rounds per minute.

 After the war, with assault-rifle cartridges becoming standard issue, terms such as automatic rifle, light machine gun, and medium machine gun gave way to general-purpose machine gun (GPMG) and squad automatic weapon (SAW). Most GPMGs were chambered for the intermediate-size 7.62-millimetre cartridges of NATO and the Soviet Union, while SAWs fired small-calibre, high-velocity rounds such as the 5.56-millimetre NATO or the 5.45-millimetre Kalashnikov. Significant belt-fed GPMGs included the West German MG3, a modernized version of the MG42; the Mitrailleuse d'Appui Général (MAG), built by Fabrique Nationale of Belgium; the U.S.-made M60; and the Soviet Pulemyot Kalashnikova (PK). Of the SAWs, the most prominent were the belt- or magazine-fed Minimi, built by Fabrique Nationale, and the magazine-fed Ruchnoy Pulemyot Kalashnikova (RPK).

Large-calibre machine guns
      With the eclipse of the early water-cooled machine guns, the term heavy was applied to machine guns firing cartridges of several times rifle calibre—most often .50 inch or 12.7 millimetres.

      Even before World War I, fully automatic weapons were used with ammunition more powerful than rifle cartridges, but such ammunition was not necessary for infantry missions until foot soldiers encountered armoured vehicles. During the 1930s, many higher-powered weapons were adopted, although only two had outstanding success. One was the United States' M2 Heavy Barrel Browning. Essentially a .50-inch version of the .30-inch M1917 Browning (a Maxim-type machine gun produced too late to see much fighting in World War I), the M2 was still widely used throughout the noncommunist world decades after World War II. Its cartridge delivered bullets of various weights and types at high muzzle velocities, with roughly five to seven times the energy of full rifle-power ammunition. The weapon was recoil-operated and air-cooled, and it fired at about 450 rounds per minute. The Soviet 12.7-millimetre weapon, the Degtyarov-Shpagin Krupnokaliberny 1938 (DShK-38), was similar, but it was gas-operated. It went into wide use in Soviet-supplied countries. Both of these weapons, as well as their successors (such as the Soviets' Nikitin-Sokolov-Volkov, or NSV, machine gun), were used by infantry units on wheeled or tripod mounts, but they were also mounted on tanks to provide defensive fire against ground vehicles or aircraft.

      After 1945, several superheavy machine guns (more than .50 inch) were developed, mostly for antiaircraft use. The single most important was a 14.5-millimetre weapon first introduced by the Soviets for use in armoured vehicles. It was recoil-operated and belt-fed and had a barrel that could be changed quickly. Later it was fielded on a variety of wheeled carriages and was known as the Zenitnaya Protivovozdushnaya Ustanovka. The ZPU-4, a four-barreled version towed on a trailer, shot down many U.S. aircraft during that nation's involvement in the Vietnam War (1965–73) and remained in service throughout the Third World long afterward.

Jac Weller John F. Guilmartin, Jr. Edward C. Ezell

Pistols (pistol)
      Since the 16th century, soldiers have carried handguns to supplement their basic shoulder weapons. However, because the firepower of pistols must be kept low in order to reduce them to manageable weight, and because only skilled soldiers can shoot them accurately beyond 10 yards, they have never been satisfactory military weapons. By World War II, pistols were issued principally to officers as a badge of rank and as a defensive weapon of last resort. Currently, they are most frequently carried by military police and other security personnel.

Revolvers (revolver)
      Until the mid-1840s most pistols were single-shot muzzle-loaders fired by wheel lock, flintlock, and percussion ignition systems. In 1835 Samuel Colt (Colt, Samuel) patented the first successful percussion revolver. In the frame of this weapon was a revolving cylinder drilled with several chambers (usually five or six), into which powder and ball (or combustible paper cartridges containing powder and ball) were loaded from the front. In the rear of each chamber a percussion cap was placed over a hollow nipple that directed the jet of flame to the powder when the cap was struck by the hammer. This type of revolver was eventually called “cap-and-ball.” Where earlier revolvers required the shooter to line up a chamber with the barrel and cock the hammer in separate steps, Colt devised a single-action mechanical linkage that rotated the cylinder as the hammer was cocked with the thumb.

      Colt dominated the manufacture of revolvers until the expiration of his U.S. patent in 1857. At that time two other Americans, Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson, produced the first cartridge revolver, based on a design purchased from Rollin White. Using rim-fire copper cartridges and eliminating the percussion-cap nipple, this weapon could be quickly loaded from the rear.

      When the Smith & Wesson patent expired in 1872, a host of new revolver designs appeared in the United States and Europe. The most important innovations were quick ejection of spent cartridges and double-action cocking. By linking the trigger to the hammer-cocking and cylinder-revolving mechanisms, double action permitted a pistol to be fired with a simple pull of the trigger. This mechanism was first introduced on a cap-and-ball revolver, the English Beaumont-Adams of 1855, but it was quickly adapted to cartridge revolvers. There were several mechanisms for removing spent cartridge cases. In the 1870s Smith & Wesson produced revolvers with hinged frames. When such a revolver was “broken open”—that is, when the barrel and cylinder were tipped on the hinge away from the hammer and handgrip—an ejector rod, located in the middle of the cylinder but having a star-shaped head that radiated into each chamber, pushed out all the cartridges simultaneously. In the 1890s some Colt revolvers were made with solid frames but with cylinders that swung out to the side, where pushing an ejector rod forced out the cartridges.

      By the end of the 19th century the revolver had reached its definitive form and its highest possible effectiveness as a military weapon. Indeed, from the 1880s through World War II, British officers carried such revolvers as the .45-inch Webley and the .38-inch Enfield, both of which were the hinged-frame design. The U.S. military adopted various revolvers, usually Colts or Smith & Wessons of .38-inch or .45-inch calibre, until 1911, when it switched to autoloading pistols.

Self-loaders
      A high rate of fire was especially crucial to last-ditch, close-quarters defense, and, with handguns as well as shoulder arms, this meant automatic (automatic pistol) loading. Following Hiram Maxim's experiments with self-loading weapons (see above Machine guns (small arm)), automatic-pistol designs appeared in the last years of the 19th century.

      In 1893 Ludwig Loewe & Company (later known as Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken) introduced the first commercially viable self-loading pistol. Designed by an American, Hugo Borchardt, this 7.63-millimetre weapon operated on the principle of recoil. When the gun was fired, the barrel and breechblock, locked together by a “toggle-link” mechanism, slid back together along the top of the frame. The toggle, essentially a two-piece arm hinged in the middle but lying flat behind the breechblock, also recoiled for a short distance before it was forced to buckle upward at its hinge. This unlocked the breechblock from the barrel and allowed it to slide back on its own, extracting and ejecting the spent case, cocking the hammer, and compressing a coiled spring in the rear of the gun. The spring then pushed the breechblock forward, stripping a fresh cartridge from a magazine in the handgrip, and the toggle locked the breechblock once more against the barrel.

      Borchardt's toggle and spring mechanisms were improved by a German, Georg Luger, who came up with the 7.65-millimetre (later 9-millimetre) Parabellum pistol (Luger pistol). This was adopted by the German army in 1908.

      In the United States and many parts of Europe, John M. Browning's (Browning, John Moses) handgun designs dominated the first half of the 20th century. In his .45-inch pistol, manufactured by Colt and adopted by the U.S. military in 1911, the barrel and breechblock were covered and locked together by a housing called the slide. When the gun was fired, the recoiling slide pulled the barrel back a short distance until the barrel was disengaged and returned to its forward position by a spring. The unlocked slide and breechblock continued back, ejecting the spent case and cocking the hammer, until a spring forced them forward while a fresh cartridge was picked up from a seven-round magazine in the grip. The M1911 Colt did not begin being replaced until 1987. Its successor, the nine-millimetre Italian Beretta, given the NATO designation M9, reflected post-1970 trends such as large-capacity magazines (15 shots in the Beretta), double-action triggers (which could snap the hammer without its having to be cocked manually or automatically), and ambidextrous safety levers.

Grenade launchers
      Soldiers have always favoured grenades for the killing and stunning effect of their explosive power, but the effectiveness of hand grenades has always been limited to the distance they can be thrown. Extending the range of grenades requires that they be launched by some sort of infantry weapon.

Single shot
      During World War I, most armies developed attachments for standard service rifles that permitted the launching of “rifle” grenades. However, although range was increased with these devices, accuracy remained poor. An effective answer was a shoulder-fired grenade launcher developed in the 1950s by the Springfield Armory. Resembling a single-shot, break-open, sawed-off shotgun, the M79 lobbed a 40-millimetre, 6-ounce (176-gram) high-explosive fragmentation grenade at a velocity of 250 feet per second to a maximum range of 400 yards. This covered the area between the longest range of hand-thrown grenades (30 to 40 yards) and the middle range of 60-millimetre mortars (300–400 yards).

      The M79 employed a “high-low pressure system” developed by Germany during World War II. This involved an aluminum cartridge case with a sealed propellant chamber in front of the primer. The propellant chamber was perforated by a number of partially completed, carefully sized holes leading into a separate expansion chamber within the cartridge case. Upon firing, the high pressures created inside the propellant chamber flowed into the expansion chamber through the previously prepared holes. The resulting moderated gas pressure produced a low impulse that launched the grenade at an adequate velocity and with an acceptable recoil impulse.

      M79 grenade launchers were made from 1961 to 1971 and saw a great deal of action in Vietnam. Production was terminated in favour of a launcher attachment for the M16 rifle.

Automatic fire
      Grenade-launching machine guns also appeared during the Vietnam War. Instead of the thin-walled projectiles fired by the M79, these shot higher-velocity cartridges. The weapons were first mounted on helicopters but afterward appeared on tripods and armoured vehicles. On these mounts, grenade-launching machine guns such as the U.S. Mark 19, firing 40-millimetre rounds, and the Soviet AGS-17, shooting 30-millimetre projectiles, frequently replaced or supplemented .50-inch heavy machine guns.

Antitank weapons (antitank weapon)
      Upon their introduction in World War I, tanks posed a very serious problem for foot soldiers. The Germans quickly reacted by introducing the 13-millimetre Tankgewehr (“Antitank Rifle”), a very large-scale single-shot version of the Mauser bolt-action rifle. British designers created the magazine-fed, bolt-action .55-inch Boys antitank rifle in the late 1930s, and the Soviets introduced 14.5-millimetre bolt-action and self-loading antitank rifles during World War II. The increasing thickness of tank armour soon made all of these infantry weapons obsolete, since kinetic-energy weapons that could penetrate tank armour became too heavy and produced too much recoil to be fired from the shoulder.

      The search for a shoulder-fired antitank weapon took another turn with the application of a principle discovered in the 1880s by an American inventor, Charles E. Munroe. Munroe found that a hollow cone of explosive material, when detonated with its open end a few inches from metal plate, produced a jet of white-hot gases and molten steel that could penetrate many inches of the best armour. Utilizing the Munroe principle, various “shaped-charge” projectiles were first delivered during World War II by low-velocity, shoulder-held rocket launchers such as the bazooka or by recoilless devices such as the German Panzerfaust (“Tank Fist,” or “Tank Puncher”). Issued in the latter half of the war, the German weapon was a 30-inch-long, 1.75-inch-diameter tube containing a charge of gunpowder. A six-inch-diameter bomb, mounted on a stick with collapsible fins, was inserted into the front end, and the weapon, held over the shoulder or under the arm, was fired by a simple firing pin and percussion cap on the outside of the tube. The propellant gases blew a cap off of the rear of the tube, in effect canceling the recoil forces generated by the launching of the bomb, which could be lobbed to ranges of 30 to 100 yards. Its powerful shaped charge of RDX and TNT could penetrate any tank armour.

 Following World War II, the Soviet military perfected the Panzerfaust-type recoilless launch mechanism in their Ruchnoy Protivotankovy Granatomet 2 (RPG-2), a “Light Antitank Grenade Launcher” featuring a reusable launcher that lobbed an 82-millimetre shaped-charge warhead more than 150 yards. After 1962, with their RPG-7, they combined recoilless launch with a rocket sustainer to deliver a five-pound warhead to targets beyond 500 yards. The Soviet RPGs became powerful weapons in the hands of guerrillas and irregular fighters in conflict against more conventionally armed and heavily armoured forces. As such, they were used by the Viet Cong to destroy U.S. armoured vehicles in Vietnam and by militiamen in the protracted conflicts of the Middle East.

  Other countries also developed small, shoulder-held recoilless launchers firing shaped-charge warheads (bullet). Some of them, such as the American AT4, came preloaded and were designed to be discarded after firing.

Edward C. Ezell

Additional Reading
On small arms, basic reference works offering encyclopaedic treatment include Claude Blair (ed.), Pollard's History of Firearms (1983); Jaroslav Lugs, Firearms Past and Present: A Complete Review of Firearms Systems and Their Histories, 2 vol., trans. from Czech (1973); and Harold L. Peterson (ed.), Encyclopedia of Firearms (1964). Histories of small-arms development in various countries include Howard L. Blackmore, British Military Firearms, 1650–1850 (1961); M.L. Brown, Firearms in Colonial America: The Impact on History and Technology, 1492–1792 (1980); John Walter, The German Rifle: A Comprehensive Illustrated History of the Standard Bolt-Action Designs, 1871–1945 (1979); and Edward C. Ezell, The AK-47 Story: Evolution of the Kalashnikov Weapons (1986), including a history of shoulder-weapons development in Russia and the Soviet Union from 1800 to the 1980s, and The Great Rifle Controversy: Search for the Ultimate Infantry Weapon from World War II Through Vietnam and Beyond (1984), on U.S. and NATO small-arms development. Other works by Ezell are Handguns of the World: Military Revolvers and Self-Loaders from 1870 to 1945 (1979); and Small Arms of the World: A Basic Manual of Small Arms, 12th rev. ed. (1983), with chapters that summarize the development of rifles, handguns, submachine guns, machine guns, and special-purpose weapons from 1945 to the 1980s. Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (1977), discusses the American system of manufacture in its human and technological contexts. John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (1975, reprinted 1986), is an essay on the social impact of the machine gun.Edward C. Ezell

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Universalium. 2010.

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