One of the very early entrants into the United States Ordnance Department’s semiauto rifle trials was the Auto-Ordnance Company, makers of the Thompson submachine gun. For the rifle trials, they designed a .30-06 rifle using the same Blish-locking principle as had been applied to the SMG. Since the Blish principle doesn’t actually work, this resulted…
Category: Military Weapons from the Past
Know Your Weapons: Hiram Maxim Invented More than Machine Guns
Hiram Percy Maxim, son of Hiram Maxim — inventor of the machine gun — is best known for his silencers. The younger Maxim developed the first viable firearm suppressors at the turn of the 20th century, securing a series of patents between 1909 and 1920. He sold his designs through the Maxim Silent Firearms Company, which would eventually become…
Military Weapons From The Past: WWII German Spreewerke VG-2
Five different companies in Germany produced designs for the last-ditch Volkssturm bolt action rifles, and they were designated VG-1 through VG-5. The VG-2 was developed by the Spreewerke company, and differed from the others in its use of a sheet metal stamped receiver (and consequently a pretty distinctive look). In total, somewhere between 16 and…
Military Weapons From The Past: The Suppressed M3 “Grease Gun”
The U.S. Army’s M3 submachine gun from World War II drew inspiration from the British STEN. Likewise, the suppressed M3 followed the suppressed versions of the STEN — the Mk. II and Mk. VI. The U.S. Office of Strategic Services formed in June 1943, modelling itself on the British Special Operations Executive. Like the SOE, the…
Military Weapons From the Past: Japanese 7.65mm Hamada Pistol
The Hamada was one of very few Japanese military weapons made by a private commercial firm. Designed and introduced in 1940, the basic Type Hamada pistol was a blowback .32ACP handgun similar in style to the Browning model 1910. About 5000 of them were manufactured during WWII, although most of these were sent to China….
Military Weapons From the Past: Japanese Type 100 Paratrooper
The Type 100 (sometimes called the Type 0) was one of the initial Japanese experiments in paratroop rifles. Manufactured from standard Nagoya Arsenal Type 99 rifles, the Type 100 used a set of interrupted lugs at the chamber to allow the rifle to be broken into two short sections. Only a few hundred of these…
Know Your Weapons: The History of the SIONICS Suppressor
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…
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…
Obscure Weapons: 1846 Norwegian Knife-Pistol
This is one of the more practical knife/pistol combinations I have seen – it actually has a pretty reasonable grip when used in either capacity. It has two muzzleloading smoothbore barrels, with a percussion cap hidden under each top ear of the crossguard and a folding trigger in the body of the grip. After I…
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…