In the early 1960s, former U.S. Office of Strategic Services operative Mitchell WerBell III founded a company dedicated to the development of cheap and efficient sound-suppressors for automatic weapons. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, WerBell had joined the U.S. Army, serving briefly as a second lieutenant with the Signal Corps before volunteering to…
Category: Know Your Weapons
Military Weapons From the Past: The Lewis Gun
It must be an automatic rifle, Robert Jordan thought. “How much does it weigh?” he asked. “One man can carry it, but it is heavy. It has three legs that fold. We got it in the last serious raid. The one before the wine.” “How many rounds have you for it?” “An infinity,” the gypsy…
Military Weapons From The Past: The Burton Machine Rifle aka Winchester Model 1917
We don’t know much about Frank Burton’s Winchester-Burton Machine Rifle — a.k.a., the Winchester Model 1917. Little documentation of the rifle survives, but historians believe Burton meant it to be an anti-balloon weapon. During World War I, observation balloons helped armies on both sides of the conflict direct artillery fire and track enemy troop…
Military Weapons from the Past: Yugoslav 8mm Chaucat/M1915/26
Reader Mihajlo sent me a couple cool photos of Yugoslav troops with Chauchats converted to 8x57mm. Here’s his commentary: Here’s a picture from WW2 Yugoslavia I’d like to share with you. The guy on the right is holding a Dutch M.20 6,5 mm Lewis gun and the other guy is holding a Yugoslav Chauchat CSRG…
Military Weapons From The Past: How NOT to Design a Machine Gun
In May 1915, Canadian designers Alphonse Huot and Joseph Prefontaine applied for a patent for their new machine gun design. The aim of the Huot-Prefontaine Machine Gun, the designers claimed, was to “provide a compact, durable and efficient machine gun which can be operated either mechanically or manually and can be quickly produced in large numbers…
Know Your Weapons: “Carlo” The Cheap, “Go-To” Gun For Palestinian Terrorist
Ater the knife, one of the most notable symbols to emerge from six months of Palestinian attacks in Israel and the West Bank has been the “Carlo,” otherwise known as the Carl Gustav submachine gun. The homemade or craft-produced rudimentary automatic weapon has been used in the majority of shooting attacks on Israeli civilians and…