The Mosin-Nagant rifle, a classic bolt-action firearm, holds a rich and prolific legacy in the annals of military history. Originating in late Imperial Russia in the late 19th century, the Mosin-Nagant rifle became the primary infantry weapon for Russian and later Soviet through both world wars amongst other conflics, cementing its reputation for ruggedness, reliability, and longevity.
The Lee-Enfield rifle, a truly legendary and iconic military rifle, is a bolt-action, magazine-fed rifle that has left an indelible mark on military history. Known for its reliability, rapid fire capabilities, and remarkable accuracy, the Lee-Enfield played a crucial role in numerous conflicts throughout the 20th century and beyond.
When it comes to the iconic infantry weapons of World War II, the M1 Garand rifle stands tall as one of the most influential firearms in history. Known for its reliability, accuracy, and distinctive "ping" sound, the M1 Garand played a pivotal role in shaping the outcome of the war and left an indelible mark on the battlefield and beyond.
Today we are going to explore a family of weapons that was the latest thing in the 19th century, and still has quite a following today, even if they are, generally speaking, obsolete. We're talking about revolvers, specifically military and ordnance revolvers.
While the Prussian Army, and the later Imperial Army, was very forward looking with rifles and artillery, they were slower to adopt new models of handguns initially, although they were eventually a highly innovative and aggressive adopter of semi-automatic pistols. Similarly, until the true fully automatic Maxim gun arrived on the scene, the German army showed no real interest in machine guns, but after they were one of the most prolific early adopters.
Today we are going to take a look at a very influential book in both tactics and military history, famous for it content, but probably more so for its author: Infantry Attacks, by Erwin Rommel. He wrote the book prior to World War II, and it was published in 1937, quickly translated into several other languages and became recommended reading for officers in many armies, including the US Army.
The German Empire came into existence in 1871, following the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian war, and then ceased to exist in 1918 with the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I. Of course, the German Empire didn't come from nothing; the heart of the Empire was the Kingdom of Prussia, whose arms and doctrine over the 18th and 19th centuries foreshadows the course of the empire. Similarly, the collapse of the empire merely transitioned to the Weimar Republic, and subsequently the Nazi Reich and then the modern German Republic. In the early 19th century the rise in German Nationalism began pushing the patchwork of independent kingdoms, Prussia, Saxony, Baden, Wurttemberg, Bavaria, among others, relics of the aftermath of the 30 years war 2 centuries earlier, towards greater integration under the Hohenzollern family who ruled Prussia. The biggest barrier to unification was other powers which claimed parts of the prospective German super-state, including France and Denmark, as well as Austria (another presumptive part of the empire, as Austria is German and very important historically to the German kingdoms) already being the seat of the sizable empire of the Habsburgs.
Sometimes, the most important tools on the battlefield are not ones that kill, or even wound. They are the tools and technologies that make it possible to fight the battle, or that give advantage to the side that uses them most effectively, even if they don't fire a bullet or otherwise directly cause injury. Likely the most important tools of modern warfare, that began to change the shape of war as early as the mid-19th century, are communications technologies. From the telegraph and its lower-tech but ingenious sibling, the heliograph, through radio and ultimately satellite and wireless networking, real-time long distance communications made things possible in warfare that couldn't even have been imagined a few decades earlier.
Today we are taking a little bit different a path, as I present to you this handy little manual by Alfred Hutton, The Swordsman. This one is the more accessible and introductory of his books that are still in print. This is a foundational manual of fencing, but as this is Hutton, the audience is students of the sword as a weapon, not necessarily sport fencers. Some of the moves and techniques Hutton describes would likely get you banned from sport fencing.
The most ancient and storied symbol of war, the sword. Today relegated to ceremony and sport, saw a brief resurgence before obsolescence prior to the First World War. New designs were adopted, and prominent officers and writers promoted its study by all upstanding gentlemen, and its use by the military.
World War I was the war that mattered, an inflection point in history and technology. Before the war, despite decades of incremental change, the old elites (the royals, the nobility) could continue to believe that nothing had changed; that stratification of society by birth and predetermined (and immutable) social class could continue, much as it always had. Before the war, the old school generals could still believe that the ancient tactics and command structures could continue, soldiers charging across open fields, failure due to cowardice of the men, not intrinsic flaws in strategy or command.
The 1980's was a time of amazing action movies, known for gratuitous violence, and machine pistols. Infamous guns like the Tec-9 and the Uzi dominated pop-culture, from video games (Operation Wolf) to music (Guns 'n Roses, Public Enemy). The intrinsic pop-culture marketing ensure that these guns, the Uzi, the MAC, the Tec-9, sold well, but serious shooters and gun collectors have ever since been stuck with the question: what is the point of these guns, which are neither target pistols nor carry pistols?