Commander (later rear admiral) John A. Dahlgren developed a system of guns used extensively throughout the American Civil War (1861–1865) by both sides. In many ways, the Dahlgren gun marked the apogee of the heavy muzzle-loading gun at sea. Dahlgren first arrived at the Washington Navy Yard in 1844 as a lieutenant, assigned there to conduct ordnance-ranging experiments. Soon he was designing new firing locks for guns and had developed a new system of naval ordnance.
In 1849 Dahlgren produced a new boat howitzer for the navy. Cast of bronze, the howitzer appeared as a 12-pounder (light, 660 pounds, and heavy, 750 pounds) and 24-pounder smoothbore (1,300 pounds). There were also 3.4-inch (12-pounder, 870 pounds) and 4-inch (20-pounder, 1,350 pounds) rifles. Dahlgren boat howitzers were the finest guns of their time in the world and remained in service with the U.S. Navy until the 1880s. They were also copied by other navies.
Dahlgren is chiefly remembered, however, for the system of heavy smoothbore, muzzle-loading ordnance that bears his name. In January 1850 he submitted a draft for a 9-inch gun to the chief of ordnance. The first prototype Dahlgren gun was cast at the Fort Pitt Foundry and delivered to the Washington Navy Yard in May 1850. The original 9-incher had a more angular form and only one vent. Later the design was modified in favor of a curved shape and a double vent, and in 1856 the side vents were restored. The purpose of the second vent was to extend the life of the gun. Repeated firings enlarged the vent opening; when this occurred, the second vent, which had been filled with zinc, was opened, and the original vent itself sealed with zinc.
Dahlgren guns, with their smooth exterior, curved lines, and preponderant weight of metal at the breech, resembled in appearance soda water bottles and were sometimes so-called. Dahlgren designed them so as to place the greatest weight of metal at the point of greatest strain at the breech. The IX-inch Dahlgren smoothbore (shell guns were identified by Roman numerals) remained the most common broadside, carriage-mounted gun in the U.S. Navy in the Civil War; the XI-inch, the prototype of which was cast in 1851, was the most widely used pivot-mounted gun. Its shell could pierce 4.5 inches of plate iron backed by 20 inches of solid oak.
An 11-inch Dahlgren gun on a pivot mount aboard the U.S. Navy sidewheel gunboat Miami during the American Civil War. (Naval Historical Center)
Dahlgren guns appeared in a variety of sizes: 32-pounder (3,300 and 4,500 pounds), VIII-inch (6,500 pounds), IX-inch (12,280 pounds), X-inch (12,500 pounds for shell and 16,500 pounds for shot), XI-inch (16,000 pounds), XIII-inch (34,000 pounds), and XV-inch (42,000 pounds). There was even a XX-inch bore (97,300 pounds) Dahlgren, but it did not see service aboard ship during the war. The XV-inch Dahlgren was employed aboard Union monitors.
Dahlgrens also appeared as rifled guns, somewhat similar in shape to the smoothbores. Some of these had separate bronze trunnion and breech straps. Dahlgren rifles appeared in these sizes: 4.4-inch/30-pounder (3,200 pounds), 5.1-inch/50-pounder (5,100 pounds), 6-inch/80-pounder (8,000 pounds), 7.5-inch/150-pounder (16,700 pounds), and 12-inch (45,520 pounds, only three of which were cast). Dahlgren’s rifled guns were not as successful as his smoothbores, and in February 1862 most were withdrawn from service.
Apart from the rifles, Dahlgren guns were extraordinarily reliable. They remained the standard muzzle-loading guns in the navy until the introduction of breech-loading heavy guns in 1885.
Further Reading
Dahlgren, John A. Shells and Shell Guns. Philadelphia: King and Baird, 1856.
Olmstead, Edwin, Wayne Stark, and Spencer Tucker. The Big Guns: Civil War Siege, Seacoast and Naval Cannon. Alexandria Bay, NY, and Bloomfield, Ontario, Canada: Museum Restoration Service, 1997.
Tucker, Spencer C. Arming the Fleet: U.S. Navy Ordnance in the Muzzle-Loading Era. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1989.
The first guns were actually breechloaders, but the difficulty of effectively sealing the gases at the breech led to their abandonment and embrace of the muzzle-loader, both for cannon and for small arms. Improvements in metallurgical techniques and closer tolerances were one factor in changing this. The other factor was the change from a loose propellant charge in connection with the flint-and-steel method of firing to a metal cartridge case that contained both powder and projectile. Handmade cartridge cases, tailored to the gun so that their fire port matched one drilled through the gun breech, while possible for the very rich, were not practical for the equipment of mass armies.
The discovery of fulminate of mercury and the development of Alexander Forsyth’s percussion cap did away with the necessity of striking fire outside the gun. The next step was to incorporate the percussion cap into a cartridge holding both gunpowder and the bullet, while a hinged-block or bolt opening made in the breech allowed the cartridge to be inserted there. Pulling the trigger released a steel pin that jabbed into the percussion cap and ignited it and thus the main charge. The first was the pin-fire cartridge in the 1840s, followed by the rimfire cartridge and then the central-fire cartridge by 1860. Prussia took the lead. In the 1840s it adopted the Dreyse breech-loading rifle, better known as the needle gun, a bolt-operated weapon that, however, utilized a paper cartridge.
The Spencer carbine of the American Civil War (1861–1865) was another important step forward. First issued to units of the Union Army, it featured a magazine, loaded through the butt of the rifle stock, that could hold seven metallic rimfire cartridges. These were fed to the breech by means of a compressed spring. When the trigger guard was lowered, the breechblock dropped down, ejecting the spent cartridge case. As the trigger guard was returned to its normal position, the breechblock moved up, catching a new cartridge and inserting it into the breech. Among the most important weapons utilizing this principle were the .44-caliber rimfire, lever-action, breech-loading rifle designed by American Benjamin Taylor Henry in the late 1850s and the “improved Henry,” the Model 1866 lever-action Winchester, its most notable improvement over the Henry being the addition of a patented cartridge-loading gate system that allowed for a closed magazine tube and a wood forearm. The Model 1866 fired the same .44-caliber rimfire round as the Henry rifle; however, cartridge improvements allowed a shorter carbine barrel length. Its follow-on was the Winchester Model 1873, the weapon that is said to have “won the West.”
The breechloader could be loaded and fired three times as fast as the old muzzle-loader, but its chief advantage was that this could be easily accomplished in the prone position. By the 1870s breechloaders had magazines attached from which rounds could be fed to the breech as fast as the rifleman could aim, fire, and work the reloading mechanism that would eject the spent case, feed a new round into the breech, and cock the firing mechanism by either bolt or lever action.
By the first decade of the 20th century, such fine bolt-action repeating rifles as the German Mauser, the Austrian Mannlicher, the Russian Mosin-Nagant, the British Lee-Enfield, and the American Springfield provided riflemen with greatly enhanced firepower at ranges of up to 1,000 yards or more.
Further Reading
Blair, Claude, ed. Pollard’s History of Firearms. New York: Macmillan, 1983.
Smith, W. H. B. Small Arms of the World. London: Arms and Armour, 1984.
Johann Nikolaus von Dreyse of Prussia is credited with the invention of the first practical bolt-action, breech-loading rifle. The Dreyse employed a paper cartridge with the primer situated at the base of the bullet. The charge was detonated by means of a long, sharp needlelike firing pin that pierced the cartridge and drove through the entire length to crush the primer against the base of the bullet. The Dreyse came to be known for its firing mechanism as the needle gun.
The Dreyse mechanism was for all intents and purposes the same as that employed in bolt actions today. A rigid arm on the bolt was raised and pulled back, exposing the breech. Once the cartridge was seated, the bolt was then pushed forward and down, closing the breech. Pulling the trigger released a spring that drove the needle forward into the cartridge, igniting the primer. The Dreyse cartridge had no extractor because the cartridge was paper and combustible.
Dreyse introduced his rifle in 1828. The Prussian Army began tests with it and officially adopted it in 1848, the first army in the world to go over exclusively to the breechloader. Despite serious problems—the Dreyse needle gun leaked gases from the breech, leading soldiers to fire it from the hip rather than the shoulder. Its high rate of fire of up to six times that of the standard muzzle-loader proved to be a tremendous advantage. The needle gun was in large part responsible for the success of Prussian arms against the Danes and the Austrians in 1864. It proved inferior, however, to the French chassepot of 1866, another needle-type gun that also utilized a combustible paper cartridge yet had more effective sealing at the breech. After the Franco-Prussian War, the Prussians modified captured chassepots for use by their own army.
Further Reading
Blair, Claude, ed. Pollard’s History of Firearms. New York: Macmillan, 1983.
The cartridge is a case containing the charge for a gun. Later for small arms and most artillery it consisted of a single entity containing the powder charge, primer, and projectile. At first artillerists simply measured a loose amount of cannon powder to ladle into the bore of the gun. Cartridges came into general use in the second half of the 16th century. They offered the advantage of containing a precise amount of powder, which could vary and be so marked for the range desired. Once the desired sack of powder had been selected, it was rammed to the bottom of the bore and pierced by means of a sharp pick thrust through the touchhole of the gun. Fine gunpowder was then poured into the touchhole, and the gun was fired when this was ignited.
Cartridge cases were most usually of wool, paper, or parchment, but all left some residue in the bore, necessitating cleaning out the bore every few shots with a device known as a worm, which looked like a double corkscrew. The bore also had to be sponged out after every round, because burning residue might ignite the next powder charge as it was being loaded. Cartridges were usually made up by gunners in garrison on land or by a ship’s gunner and his assistants at sea, to be stored until use.
Small-arms cartridges consisted of the entire round of cartridge case, powder, and ball. The individual ripped open the end of the cartridge case with his teeth and poured a small amount of powder into the flintlock’s flash pan. He then poured the remaining powder down the barrel, to be followed by the ball and cartridge casing, which were seated at the base of the bore by means of a rammer. The cartridge case served as wadding to ensure that the ball did not move away from the powder charge when the weapon’s muzzle was lowered into firing position.
In 1807 Scottish Presbyterian minister Alexander Forsyth patented a gun lock utilizing newly discovered mercuric fulminates as a priming charge for firearms. A percussion cap, the inside of which was coated with the mercuric fulminates, was placed over the touchhole of a firearm. When struck a blow by a hammer, it ignited and sent a flame down the touchhole to ignite the main charge in the bore. This system revolutionized the firing of small arms by sharply reducing misfires. It worked effectively with smaller individual firearms but not in large cannon with long touchholes. These guns continued to be fired by means of a loose fine powder poured into the touchhole or a quill arrangement containing such powder.
A number of individuals in different countries experimented with ways to combine the percussion cap with the cartridge and projectile into one unit. In 1812 Swiss national Samuel J. Pauly patented a cartridge incorporating a metal base with a cavity for detonating powder and a striker to ignite it. It was certainly one of the most important inventions in the history of small arms.
In 1828 Johann Nikolaus von Dreyse of Prussia invented the needle gun. The first practical bolt-action, breech-loading rifle, it employed a paper cartridge with the primer situated at the base of the bullet. The charge was detonated by a long, sharp needlelike firing pin that pierced the cartridge and drove through the entire length to crush the primer against the base of the bullet. It was adopted by the Prussian Army in 1841.
In 1829, meanwhile, Frenchman Clement Pottet designed a cartridge incorporating a depression at its base to receive a primer of fulminates. A metal cartridge case with priming on the inside of the rim of the base was patented in 1846. Such rimfire cartridges continue in those for the small-bore .22-caliber rifle of today. Pin-fire cartridges had a pin in the center of the base of the cartridge case that exploded the primer. Mass-produced metal cartridge cases appeared in the 1850s, while the French Schneider cartridge of 1858 with a paper upper section and a brass base was utilized in the shotgun shell.
The center-fire brass cartridge case won out. It had a primer situated in the center of its base. This helped facilitate the development of the modern bolt-action and semiautomatic rifles as well as the automatic-fire machine guns that appeared in a large number of types by the 1880s. Metal cartridge cases could also be retrieved, resized, fitted with a new primer, and reloaded.
Powder-bag cartridge charges continued for the largest naval and land guns, but brass fixed one-piece cartridge cases containing the primer, charge, and projectile became the norm for light artillery. These facilitated loading and made possible the so-called quick-firing guns that appeared at the end of the 19th century. Although there have been experiments with other types of cartridge cases, mostly plastics, the vast majority of subsequent changes in ammunition have been in the projectiles and in their propellant charges rather than the cartridge cases itself.
Further Reading
Blair, Claude, ed. Pollard’s History of Firearms. New York: Macmillan, 1983.
Brown, G. I. The Big Bang. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton, 2005.
Hoyden, G. A. The History and Development of Small Arms Ammunition. Tacoma, WA: Armory, 1981.
Dynamite is a powerful explosive invented by Swedish chemist and engineer Alfred Nobel in 1866 and patented a year later. Nobel’s involvement in heavy construction work in Stockholm led him to try to develop safer methods of blasting rock. In 1846 Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero had invented nitroglycerine. It consists of a mix of sulfuric acid, nitric acid, and glycerine. A powerful explosive, nitroglycerine soon found application in commercial mining and blasting operations, but it suffered from the drawback of being highly volatile in its liquid state. Even a slight shock can cause nitroglycerin to explode, and it was thus very dangerous to transport and utilize.
Nobel discovered that nitroglycerin could be stabilized when absorbed in diatomaceous earth (kieselguhr). He named his invention dynamite after the Greek dynamos (“powerful”). It was the first safe and predictable explosive with a greater force than gunpowder and was certainly one of the great inventions of the 19th century.
Dynamite consists of three parts nitroglycerin and one part diatomaceous earth as well as a small amount of sodium carbonate. Dynamite most usually is formed into sticks about an inch in diameter and eight inches long and wrapped in paper. These sticks were so formed in order that they could be easily inserted in holes drilled into rock.
Dynamite is classified as a high explosive, meaning that it detonates instead of deflagrating. Nobel sold his explosive as “Nobel’s Safety Blasting Powder.” In order to detonate the dynamite, Nobel also developed a blasting cap, which he also patented. It was ignited by lighting a fuze.
Dynamite found wide application in such areas as construction, mining all sorts of materials, and digging canals and tunnels. Its military implications were also immense. Dynamite found its way into high-explosive fillers for artillery shells, bombs, and land mines. It was also used in satchel charges.
Nobel made a great fortune from his invention. The Republic of South Africa soon became the largest producer of dynamite, which was widely used in mining for gold. Nobel later used some of his money gained from the invention to establish prizes in the sciences, although the most recognized of these prizes is the Nobel Prize for Peace. Nobel’s invention ended centuries of experiment with gunpowder and inaugurated a new era of vastly more powerful high explosives.
Further Reading
Brown, Stephen R. A Most Damnable Invention: Dynamite, Nitrates, and the Making of the Modern World. New York: St. Martin’s, 2005.
Fordham, Stanley. High Explosives and Propellents. Oxford, UK: Pergamon, 1980.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) gave rise to a number of new weapons. Among these were several precursors to the modern machine gun, including Wilson Ager’s “Coffee Mill.” It took its name from the means of feeding the ammunition from the top of the weapon by a funnel and crank mechanism, all of which resembled a coffee mill.
Ager’s gun had a single barrel. The ammunition was formed of a steel tube that contained powder and a .58-caliber bullet and a nipple at the end for a percussion cap. Steady turning of the crank dropped a round into the chamber, locked the breechblock in place, dropped a hammer that fired the round, and ejected the spent case. Ager claimed a firing rate of 100 rounds a minute, although the gun barrel could not have long withstood the heat thus generated.
Ager demonstrated his weapon before President Abraham Lincoln, and the U.S. Army eventually purchased 50 of them. The Coffee Mills proved unreliable, however, in combat use and were never employed en masse. Ultimately they were employed in the defensives of the city of Washington.
Confederate Army captain D. R. Williams also invented a mechanical gun. Mounted on a mountain-howitzer carriage, it was a 4-foot-long 1-pounder of 1.57-inch bore. Operated by a hand crank, it utilized paper cartridges and could fire 65 shots a minute. It tended to overheat, and it was also not a true machine weapon in that ammunition was fed into it by hand.
Other such weapons also appeared, but the most famous of mechanical guns was that invented by Richard Jordan Gatling in 1862. Well aware of problems from the buildup of heat, Gatling designed his gun with six rotating barrels around a central axis; each barrel fired in turn and each with its own bolt and firing pin. Thus, in a firing rate of 300 rounds per minute, each barrel would have been utilized only 50 times.
The Gatling gun employed a hopper for the ammunition similar to that of the Coffee Mill. The first Gatling gun employed steel cylinders with a percussion cap at the end, a round, and paper cartridges with the charge. The production model did away with the percussion cap in favor of a rimfire cartridge. Turning the crank rotated the barrels, dropped in the rounds, and fired each barrel in turn. The chief difference from the Coffee Mill was in the rotating multiple barrel design.
The U.S. Army’s chief of ordnance Colonel John W. Ripley, who was well known for his opposition to innovative weaponry, blocked adoption of the Gatling gun. Gatling’s North Carolina birth also seems to have worked against him. Despite Gatling’s appeals to Lincoln, the army never adopted the gun. Its only use in the Civil War came when Major General Benjamin Butler purchased six of them at his own expense and employed them effectively in the siege of Petersburg at the end of the war.
In 1864 Gatling redesigned the gun so that each barrel had its own chamber, which helped prevent the leakage of gas. He also adopted center-fire cartridges. These and other refinements produced a rate of fire of about 300 rounds per minute. Finally in 1866 the U.S. Army purchased 100 Gatling guns, equally divided between 6-barrel models of 1-inch caliber and 10-barrel models of .50-inch caliber. Gatling worked out a licensing agreement with Colt Arms to produce the gun.
The Gatling gun provided effective service in the Indian Wars in the American West and in the Spanish American War. The V Corps’ Gatling Gun Detachment played an important role in the campaign in Santiago, Cuba, especially in the U.S. victory in the Battle of San Juan Hill of July 1, 1898. They also were utilized in the Puerto Rico Campaign.
Gatling guns also served with the U.S. Navy. Tested by the British government in 1870, the Gatling gun outshot its competition by a wide margin and was adopted by both the British Army and the Royal Navy in .42 caliber and .65 caliber, respectively. It remained the standard mechanical rapid-fire weapon until the introduction of the Maxim gun, the first true machine gun.
During the Vietnam War era Gatling-type weapons returned, this time electrically driven. The 20mm M-61 Vulcan automatic cannon was first designed as an aircraft weapon but was also used as a ground-based antiaircraft weapon. The smaller 7.62mm M-134 minigun was primarily a helicopter-mounted weapon.
Further Reading
Berk, Joseph. The Gatling Gun: 19th Century Machine Gun to 21st Century Vulcan. Boulder, CO: Paladin, 1991.
Wahl, Paul, and Don Toppel. The Gatling Gun. New York: Arco, 1965.
Willbanks, James A. Machine Guns: An Illustrated History of Their Impact. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004.
In the 1860s and 1870s a number of inventors attempted to produce a truly automatic machine gun. Among them, Belgian engineer Joseph Montigny developed the mitrailleuse (“grape shooter” or “grapeshot shooter,” today “machine gun”), a name that implied a weapon for the controlled dispersion of grapeshot on the battlefield.
Montigny’s mitrailleuse incorporated first 37 barrels, later reduced to 25, in one tubular casing. Rather than single rounds being fed into a rotating breech from a hopper or magazine, the mitrailleuse incorporated a metal magazine plate. A long lever moved back the breechblock with its 37 firing pins. The metal plate holding the 37 cartridges was then inserted into a slot in the face of the block, which was then moved forward, pushing the cartridges into their chambers. Revolving a crank at the rear of the gun caused all the barrels to fire simultaneously. A later cam mechanism allowed selective volley fire.
A well-drilled crew with preloaded plates could keep up a rate of fire of 150–250 rounds per minute and even reach 400. The chief drawback to the new weapon was its weight, for the mitrailleuse mounted on its field carriage weighed 2,000 pounds without the ammunition. Montigny sold his new weapon to the Belgian government to use in fortress defense. He also managed to interest French emperor Napoleon III, himself an apt student of artillery, in his new weapon.
In 1869 the French began secret manufacture of the new weapon at the Meudon Arsenal under Montigny’s direction. Meudon eventually produced 156 13mm 25-barrel mitrailleuses. Only its crews were allowed to see and use the new weapon, which was deployed in utmost secrecy.
The mitrailleuse proved to be a disappointment in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. The veil of official secrecy had prevented discussion in the military of its correct battlefield deployment. Perhaps in part because of its weight and transport problems, the French persisted in thinking of it as an artillery piece and located it with their artillery guns in the open with the plan of using it to provide covering fire for their infantry. The mitrailleuse, however, had a maximum range of 1,800 yards, while the Prussian artillery could range out to 2,500 yards. The result was predictable; as soon as the Prussians spotted the mitrailleuse, they opened fire on it with their artillery and destroyed it. If deployed forward using cover and concealment, the mitrailleuse could be very effective, as was demonstrated in the Battle of Gravelotte (August 18, 1870).
The war ended before the French Army had figured out the proper employment of the new weapon. Unfortunately, its failure on the battlefield led many European observers to denigrate the role and impact of the later machine gun and may well have caused the British and French to delay introducing the latter.
Further Reading
Howard, Michael. The Franco-Prussian War. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Wawro, Geoffrey. The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–1871. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Willbanks, James H. Machine Guns: An Illustrated History of Their Impact. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004.
In 1886 France was the first nation to add a high-velocity, small-bore rifle to its arms inventory. It was also the first standard weapon to incorporate the spitzer bullet. Two years earlier French chemist Paul Vielle developed a successful nitrocellulose powder for small arms; his Poudre B was the first successful smokeless powder adopted by any nation. Weapons utilizing it also had a much higher muzzle velocity than those employing ordinary gunpowder cartridges.
The French government was not slow to capitalize on Vielle’s work. Two years later it introduced the 8mm (.315-caliber) Lebel, based on the earlier 11mm Gras and officially known as the Fusil d’infanterie Modèle 1886. It was named for Colonel Nicolas Lebel, who chaired the committee that oversaw its development. Because the powder was more powerful, the French were able to reduce the caliber of the weapon and hence the weight of the ammunition, permitting individual soldiers to carry more rounds. With the Lebel, France captured the lead in small-arms development from Germany.
In 1898 the French introduced the spitzer boat-tail bullet in the Lebel. A more aerodynamic bullet, it had a tapered rear that looked a bit like a boat stern. The original bullet was 232 grains and had a flat nose and base. The spitzer was 198 grains. All military bullets are of this streamlined shape today.
The Lebel was an excellent long-range, high-velocity (2,380 feet per second) firearm but was also heavy, at 9 pounds 3.5 ounces, and in many ways an anachronism mechanically for its eight-round tubular magazine that was difficult to load with a stiff feed spring. Most new rifles were utilizing box magazines. The Lebel-Berthier 1907/1915 modification replaced the tubular magazine with a box magazine and Mannlicher clip, first for three rounds and then for five. The latter model had a weight of 8 pounds 8 ounces and remained in service until the 1950s.
The technological advances of the longer-range Lebel were obvious, and other nations quickly followed suit. Germany and Austria-Hungary produced an 8mm smokeless powder rifle in 1888. The standard German infantry rifle of World War I, the 7.92mm, 5-shot Mauser developed by Peter Paul Mauser, appeared in 1898 and incorporated the clip and magazine into one mechanism. Italy produced its first smokeless powder rifle in 1890. Britain was slower in this regard. Its .303-caliber smokeless powder Lee-Enfield, named for its designer, American James Lee, and its manufacturer, the Royal Small Arms Factory in Enfield, London, appeared only in 1895. The Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE) Mark III with which the British fought World War I was first produced in 1907. It incorporated a 10-round magazine and was suited to high-volume fire, as the well-trained professional British infantry showed in fighting at Mons in Belgium early in the war. An excellent weapon, it continued in service into World War II.
Perhaps three-quarters of the American troops in France in World War I were supplied with the M1917 American Enfield, which was chambered for .30-06 caliber. The remainder received the excellent M-1903 .30-06–caliber Springfield, manufactured at the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts. Comparable in performance to the Lee-Enfield, it utilized a Mauser-type action. Although the U.S. standard-issue rifle of World War II was the M-1 Garand, the M-1903A3 Springfield remained in service throughout World War II.
Further Reading
Blair, Claude, ed. Pollard’s History of Firearms. New York: Macmillan, 1983.
Smith, W. H. B. Small Arms of the World. 9th ed. Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 1969.
The German Mauser rifle Gewehr 98 (abbreviated as G98, Gew 98, or M98) was an extremely influential rifle design. Sold commercially to many nations, it was also widely copied. Designed by Peter Paul Mauser in 1895, it entered service in 1898 and remained a mainstay of the German Army until 1935 (when it was replaced by a shorter-barreled version, the Karabiner 98k) and with Volkssturm units through World War II.
The son of a gunsmith at the Württemberg State Arsenal, Mauser began working with the same firm and by 1866 had produced a self-cocking Dreyse needle gun. He then produced the Infanterie-Gewehr (Infantry Rifle) Model 1871, adopted by the Prussian Army in March 1872. It underwent modifications and ultimately became the Infanterie-Gewehr M1871/84.
With the introduction of new cordite smokeless gunpowder, Mauser modified his rifle to improve receiver strength because of the more powerful cordite and to incorporate a five-round box internal magazine. The result was the Gewehr 98 patented bolt-action rifle firing the powerful 7.92mm Mauser cartridge. In the opinion of many, Mauser had created the perfect infantry rifle. Rugged and easily operated, it is able to function effectively in adverse conditions. It is also considered extraordinarily safe for the user. The standard version was 4 feet 1 inch in length (barrel length 29.1 inches) and weighed 9 pounds 4 ounces.
The Mauser Model 1898 greatly influenced the development of a number of other infantry rifles, including the Anglo-American Pattern 1914 Enfield/M1917 Enfield, the Japanese Arisaka Type 38/Type 99, and the U.S. Model 1903 Springfield. Indeed, during the 1898 Spanish-American War, the U.S. Army secured a number of Spanish Model 93 Mauser rifles, and the Springfield utilized a Mauser-type action. Mauser brought suit, and the U.S. government was subsequently forced to pay royalties to him for patent infringement.
The Mauser Model 1898 remains highly sought after by collectors, and a great number have been converted to sporting use.
Further Reading
Ball, Robert W. D. Mauser Military Rifles. Iola, WI: Krause, 1996.
Blair, Claude, ed. Pollard’s History of Firearms. New York: Macmillan, 1983.
Smith, W. H. B. Mauser Military Rifles and Pistols. Harrisburg, PA: Military Service Publishing, 1946.
The Mauser Pistol Model 1896 (C96) developed by German Peter Paul Mauser was the first practical self-loading (semiautomatic) pistol. Manufactured beginning in 1896, it remained in service until 1937. During that period, the Mauser factory in Oberndorf am Necker manufactured more than 1 million C96 pistols. Germany issued some 135,000 to its forces during World War I, and the Mauser also saw World War II service as well as wide use by other countries. China was by far the largest foreign user, with Chinese workshops turning out hundreds of thousands of them during the fighting between nationalist and communist forces in the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949).
The distinctive shape of the Model 1896 pistol’s grip led to the nickname “Kuhfusspistole” (Cow-Foot Pistol) by German soldiers and the “Broomhandle” by English speakers. The C96 is a recoil-operated, locked-breech pistol. Its magazine is located in front of the trigger guard. Magazines for the pistol are both fixed and detachable and of various capacities from 6-, 10-, and 20- to even 40-rounds. Most of the C96 pistols were chambered for the 7.63mm round. Both fixed and adjustable rear sights were available.
Pulling the bolt back cocked the exposed hammer. Releasing the bolt allowed the spring to carry it forward, stripping a round from the magazine and seating it in the chamber. The C96 also introduced a bolt-open device whereby the bolt remained open when the last cartridge had been fired. This feature also allowed the pistol to be reloaded more quickly.
The most common of the many types of the C96 issued to the German Army was the 5.5-inch model with a l0-round magazine and weighing only 3 pounds. It had a tangent leaf sight marked out to 1,000 meters. The pistol could be fitted with a combination wooden shoulder stock/holster that in effect turned the C96 into a carbine.
The Model 1932, the last in the series, was a selective-fire weapon permitting both semiautomatic and automatic fire. A switch on the left side of the pistol allowed the operator to select the mode of fire. In automatic fire it was a true machine pistol and was therefore often known as the “Schnellfeuer” (Quick Fire).
Further Reading
Blair, Claude, ed. Pollard’s History of Firearms. New York: Macmillan, 1983.
Kinard, Jeff. Pistols: An Illustrated History of Their Impact. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003.
Smith, W. H. B. Mauser Military Rifles and Pistols. Harrisburg, PA: Military Service Publishing, 1946.
If any one weapon symbolized World War I, it was the machine gun. Efficient manually operated rapid-firing small arms were in service in the 1860s and 1870s, including the Agar “Coffee Mill” (ca. 1860) and the Gatling gun (1862) employed at the end of the American Civil War (1861–1865). The French utilized the 25-barrel mitrailleuse (1869) in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). But the Maxim gun of 1884, named for American Hiram Maxim, was the first truly automatic machine gun. Development of the metallic cartridge made possible rapid loading at the breech.
Maxim Gun at the Battle of Omdurman
In 1898 under orders from the British government, Major General Sir Horatio Kitchener, commander in chief of the Egyptian Army, led a sizable force of some 26,000 British, Egyptian, and Sudanese troops southward to reconquer the Sudan. On September 1 Kitchener and his men arrived at Omdurman on the west bank of the Nile across the river from Khartoum to face the main Mahdist army.
After some preliminary skirmishing, the next morning at dawn some 35,000–52,000 Sudanese attacked the British lines. Perhaps 15,000 had rifles; the remainder of the men were armed with spears and swords. In a series of charges against the British position, the Sudanese were simply annihilated. The British employed their magazine rifles and Maxim guns to kill perhaps 10,000 Dervishes and wound as many more, with 5,000 taken prisoner. The cost to the British side was 48 dead and 434 wounded.
Kitchener, surveying the battlefield from horseback, is said to have announced in a considerable understatement that the enemy has been given “a good dusting.” For all practical purposes, the Battle of Omdurman gave the British control of the Sudan. It also led Hilaire Belloc to write:
Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim gun and they have not.
Maxim’s innovation was to use some of the energy of the firing to operate the weapon. Using the recoil energy, which he called “blowback,” Maxim designed a fully automatic rifle fed by a revolving magazine. He then applied the same principle to a machine gun, which fired as long as the trigger was depressed. In the Maxim gun, the firing of the cartridge drove back the bolt, compressing a spring that in turn drove the bolt forward again, bringing a new round into position for firing. The Maxim gun was both self-loading and self-ejecting.
Maxim demonstrated his prototype machine gun in 1884. The gun weighed 60 pounds (the mitrailleuse had weighed 2,000 pounds because it was mounted on a towed field carriage, like an artillery piece). The Maxim gun was both belt-fed and water-cooled. It fired a .45-caliber bullet at a rate of up to 600 rounds per minute and could be operated by a crew of only five men. The gun was fired principally by a single gunner. The other crew members assisted in carrying it and in bringing up belts of ammunition for it. Aided by the British firm of Vickers, Maxim had his gun largely perfected before the end of the 1880s.
The British employed the Maxim gun with great success against the Zulus in South Africa and the Dervishes in the Sudan. Maxim was later knighted by Queen Victoria for “services to humanity,” in the false assumption that the machine gun would make wars shorter and thus more humane. Despite the experiences of the Boer War (1899–1902) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), almost all armies had failed to come to terms with the new lethality of the increased firepower by the start of World War I in 1914. At 450–600 rounds per minute, one machine gun could equal the fire of 40 to 80 riflemen. It also had greater range than the rifle, enabling indirect fire in support of an attack. In the German Army machine guns initially were deployed in companies as opposed to dispersing them among infantry formations, but as the war progressed the Germans altered their tactics and organization to make the light machine the centerpiece of the German infantry squad. Light machine guns, such as the excellent Lewis gun, appeared later and saw widespread service in World War I.
Further Reading
Goldsmith, Duff L., and R. Blake Stevens. The Devil’s Paintbrush: Sir Hiram Maxim’s Gun. 2nd ed. Toronto: Collector Grade Publications, 1993.
Willbanks, James H. Machine Guns: An Illustrated History of Their Impact. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004.
Iron armor for ships, introduced in the Crimean War in 1854–1856, grew increasingly thicker in an effort to counter more effective naval ordnance. The first armor protection took the form of 4-inch wrought-iron plates bolted to the ship’s wooden hull. The next step was rolled-iron armor on double layers of wood, the whole supported by iron girders and an inner iron plate. In 1870, sandwich iron appeared. It consisted of layers of rolled iron plates alternating with wood and inner layers of sheet iron. Compound armor was introduced in 1877; it consisted of steel-clad wrought-iron plates. But improved armor-piercing projectiles of tremendous striking energy could penetrate test plates of 24-inch wrought iron, the maximum armor thickness on the British battleship Inflexible of 1876.
The new process of steel manufacture, introduced in warship construction in the mid-1870s, expanded to armor. Steel enabled ship constructors to build thinner yet tougher armor plating. At the end of the 1880s the French Schneider works added some 3–4 percent nickel to its steel armor plates, which reduced the tendency to crack. In 1890 American H. A. Harvey improved on this process by introducing what became known as Harvey plate: nickel steel alloy armor that was face hardened by a carbonizing process that raised the carbon content of the outer inch or so of the armor from .02 percent to more than 1 percent.
In 1895 Krupp engineers in Germany introduced KC, or Krupp-cemented, plate steel. It involved heating the plate to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and playing coal gas across its face. The heat broke up the gas and deposited carbon on the face, which was then ingested into the armor to form a hard skin. This process took some three weeks to complete, but the resulting armor was stronger than Harvey plate. Chromium and manganese were also added to nickel steel, further increasing the hardness of the face of the armor and the toughness and elasticity of its back; all major navies of the world adopted it.
Harvey, Krupp, Armstrong in Britain, and Creusot in France all experimented with combinations of nickel, carbon, chromium, and manganese in their steel to produce ever more effective rolled armor plate that also yielded significant savings in weight and thickness.
By World War II, the U.S. Iowa-class battleships employed maximum 18-inch armor (on the turret face plates), while the largest battleship ever built, the Japanese Yamato class, had maximum armor protection of 25.6 inches on its turrets.
Further Reading
George, James L. History of Warships: From Earliest Times to the Twenty-First Century. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998.
Tucker, Spencer C. Handbook of 19th Century Naval Warfare. Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2000.
In the ongoing race between guns and armor at sea, naval ordnance designers developed armor-piercing projectiles to overcome armor in warships. In 1881 Hadfield of Sheffield in England began manufacturing cast-steel projectiles. In 1885 that same firm patented a “Compound Armour Piercing Shell.” As with compound armor, it combined a hardened steel point and a resilient body (a completely hardened shell would shatter on impact). Other types of hardened projectiles followed, including one of chrome steel. But most broke up when they struck the new armor.
In 1878 a Captain English of the Royal Engineers came upon capping the tip of the projectile. During tests of shells and armor at Woolwich Arsenal, a number of shells had broken up when fired against steel plate. Quite by accident, a 2.5-inch iron plate was left in front of a steel armor plate. In consequence, a 9-inch Palliser shell passed through the iron plate and penetrated 13 inches into the steel-faced plate. English then proposed manufacturing a shot with a wrought-iron cap of approximately the thickness of the plate that the other shell had passed through. When this was done and the shell was fired, it went entirely through the compound armor. Strangely, nothing was done to exploit this discovery, and it was left to the Russian admiral Stepan Makarov to reinvent the capped projectile in 1890.
When the capped shell struck its target, the cap received the full shock of the initial impact and distributed it over the length of the shell. The cap also served to lengthen the time during which the shock was distributed to the shell and acted as a support for the point at the beginning of penetration, softening the plate slightly so as to give the point a better opportunity for penetration.
The U.S. Navy came up with the Johnson capped shell. The French improved on this in their 1896 Holtzer cap. In spite of evidence of the success of the capped shell, the Royal Navy resisted adopting it until 1905. Nonetheless, by World War I all the world’s major navies employed capped armor-piercing projectiles for use against enemy ships. The same process was applied to armor-piercing projectiles for land artillery.
Further Reading
Hogg, Ivan, and John Batchelor. Naval Gun. Poole, Dorset, UK: Blandford, 1975.
Lambert, Andrew, ed. Steam, Steel & Shellfire: The Steam Warship, 1815–1905. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1992.