American Rifles & Shotguns of World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special feat. C&Rsenal

i'm indy neidell and this is another great war weapon special now we've done a whole bunch of these where we've talked about the rifles and the small arms used by many of the European nations and we've done them with our friend Matthias from the awesome youtube channel C and Arsenal and he is with us here today and today we're going to be talking about American rifles of the First World War [Music] all right so I want to get something out of the way because for a number of years we had people wanting me to cover what was the previous rifle remember we did handguns and we talked about the Colt new army the previous rifle for the US would have been the Krag Jorgensen from the spanish-american war and the failures of the Krag Jorgensen would lead to the later standard Springfield 1903 that we'll see in a moment but a lot of people wanted me to talk about this gun because it was used in a training purpose in World War one but then there was argument about whether or not it ever made of Europe and it turns out some Engineer units actually did take the Krag with a fixed amount of ammunition that was very hard for them to resupply and later they would just be swapped to either foreign weapons like the short magazine lee-enfield or they would be given a Springfield eventually so some of these did actually make it over probably not frontline service but hey it counts they got the punch mark in and a lot of people like the Krag Jorgenson so it's worth probably a mention so let me get this on in where you can see it now this gun came out before people were completely obsessed with stripper clips and M blocks actually I lie that we're still pretty much available but the u.s. decided they want to dump loading so the idea is that you open up the side gate throw your five rounds in loose close it up and it deposits them all the way on the other side of the action where they can then be picked up by this tray and part of that is so that you have an easier time single loading one around if you want to fire without the use of the magazine this used to be an old sort of standard of we don't want to burn through all the ammo and with America being a frontier army it kind of makes sense that they wouldn't want to just sort of shoot through their magazines they'd want to just carefully load one at a time and make their shots count anyway so turn down bolt handle basically a single locking lug in theory there are two but the way these were fitted by the factory you kind of lose that there's too much of a margin now and so the strength is fairly low they can only handle the 3040 Krag cartridge that could not make the leap to say the later 30.6 that America would adopt so basically they just they had a soft point where it was time to give up on this particular design after the spanish-american war so what happened was the u.s. won that war very handily but they noticed that an infantry fighting there reload speeds overall distance of their shots and accuracy were lower than the Spanish that they were fighting and so rather smartly even though they had won that conflict they said we need to look at the enemy's weapon and we need to get something a little bit better than this Krag Jorgensen so they would adopt a variation of the Mauser in the Springfield 1903 so what this is is this is an American version of the Mauser rifle now they started with the Spanish 1893 but then they must have observed some of the 1898 or some other designs because there's some other features that come in here that are not specifically from the Spanish Mauser but if we take a closer look you can probably see that heritage so again just like the mousers we've seen previously we have a cocking shroud a flag safety the cocking piece at the rear bolt handle back behind the receiver closed bridge and then two front locking lugs with a full extractor this is a Mauser rifle it's just been adapted by the u.s. it also has a unique magazine cutoff so that you can again either single load or load for fire from the magazine the u.s. is still thinking of saving their shots there was some argument over the rear sight they ultimately went with a modification of the buffington which is a sort of delicate looking finely adjustable sight and then for all the sort of fighting that went into this sight after you get up past about and I'm trying to get the exact measurement but I want to say it's passed fourteen hundred yards or so this sight is actually not calculated correctly so long range shots were a little difficult until that was fixed later on and then from there full handguard you guys know what these sort of military rifles look like otherwise the Springfield does take on the stripper clip which is a very good feature because you have to think it about the math here if you have a gun with no magazine a single loader all right and you load one around and fire it load one round and fire it load one round and fire that gives you three rounds well if it's a magazine gun but has no rapid feed system no rapid loading system rather so a tube magazine or like the Krag with a dump load the time it takes you to load one round versus three is three times so if I want to put in one round in the gun and then fire it one round fire it versus putting all three in and then firing it three times and putting all three and one by one and firing three to basically come out almost the same without rapid loading without some sort of packet that takes all the ammo together a single-shot rifle versus one with a magazine when you divide it over the course of a battle both soldiers will roughly fire the same number of shots the only advantage to the magazine is that when you need a burst of gunshots like a cavalry breakthrough or change in the line you can then burst the magazine but you're back down to zero and you don't have to take the time to either load that magazine all the way up or you're back to that one the time firing rate so a stripper clip is very important and that's why the US and many other countries would ultimately move away from something even like a marginal benefit like dump loading the Krag only tiny bit faster than single loading stripper clips are the way to go and block clips are the way to go and nowadays detachable magazines are the way to go in the case of this gun stripper clip front locking logs very strong action extremely powerful thirty-aught-six cartridge one of the heavier hitters of the war and ultimately though a fairly light rifle so sometimes a bit aggressive for this combination but most US soldiers really love this gun it's a universal short rifle so it was very maneuverable we did not adopt a full-length long rifle like we saw with Germany and France and things like that so these were very handy in the trenches this is a good fit for World War one in a bolt-action conflict and and this is where we started so where do we go from here well the 1903 would not be produced in enough numbers to satisfy a US demand for the war as a matter of fact despite being the official gun of the u.s. in World War one it was not the most common there are actually millions of another design produced starting in 1917 and they outnumbered this gun basically two to one so Wow almost you know most the photos show photos of this gun because they were careful to sort of stay with that sort of American exceptionalism even when they were doing the photography and this remain the official gun even after the war despite some debate this was not the most common gun on the US battlefield the most common gun would actually be the 1917 which I have to dig just a bit to get out oh now we probably mentioned this briefly on the British episode because this is actually derived from the British pattern thirteen later pattern fourteen rifle so before the war the just wanted a very long range very short very long range very flat shooting lighter cartridge basically like a small diameter magnum cartridge the idea is that they were coming off of the war in Africa and they were worried about long open spaces and they basically want to create a very precise very long range very accurate rifle in that case they were going to adopt a small bore high-velocity bullet and that didn't go so well cos war broke out so they had to take that same gun and produce it in 303 and have it produced in the US commercially the reason for that is because they get the u.s. to produce LeAnn the fields would be very complicated and it takes a number of years to sort of spool up and get used to how to produce the lee-enfield because it's a fairly complicated gun to make we talked about this in our Lee Enfield episode and in our pattern 14 episodes so the UK has us producing pattern 14s for them and then when the u.s. enters a war well they have the factories that were producing the pattern for teens turn around and produce this the 1917 which is the same gun without the volley sights and now chambered in 30.6 and because of losing the rim there's actually enough room in the magazine that you can fake six shots instead of the standard five although stripper clips still only came in five round clips so if we take a look this is another Mauser derived weapon we see our cocking trout cocking piece we see our front locking logs and long extractor although in this case it's [ __ ] on close we compress the spring as we close the bolt versus compressing it as we open the bolt it has a dogleg bolt that puts you down by the trigger it's a very heavy gun with a very large heavy barrel very clear sights and then most importantly on this at the rear we have a rear aperture sight so you look through a little peephole in order to see that front sight yeah these same sights would be adapted ever so slightly to work on the Browning automatic rifle because these are some exceptional sights and what is it that's so exceptional about them what makes them well you said the other one was inaccurate over say 1,400 yards and stuff it's interesting inaccurate is the right word because the gun the Springfield 1913 is precise far past 1400 yards but the problem is the sights were calculated incorrectly so the gun we also had this problem with the original Browning 1917 machine gun and so they had to replace those sights as well was only figured out during the war so it made for certain conflicts where you want to fire over the heads of your friendlies at the enemy well you don't want to get those calculations wrong that's how you take friendly fire so this one is set up properly it's calculated correctly these guns chamber the same thirty-aught-six cartridge they're much heavier and a little longer than the 1903 so troops didn't like them as much on first sight because they'd pick them up and this is just a brick by comparison it's not nearly as mobile or white however they were preferred by marksmen because the British were obsessed with fixing their precision problems from the previous short magazine lee-enfield there were lillienfield's beautiful rifle and a lot of people argue with me check out our episodes of what I'm talking about here but those guns you have to have a certain amount of knowledge and very careful manufactured to get them to be accurate because these thinner barrels lighter materials they didn't use a stepped barrel they had a sort of buffer in them and everything like that don't worry about the details the short answer is when you shoot a gun it vibrates it heats up and if it's not if the barrels not bedded properly or the barrels not heavy enough for the barrels not this or that you will start to get some wandering depending on temperature or you know distance or whatever this gun however the British really scientifically went at trying to make the most accurate gun they could get and so even though it wasn't designed for the 3006 cartridge it does a fantastic job and these would be retained even for sniping purposes through World War two like they are very good accurate guns I didn't you know I'm always fascinated when we see justice the sometimes slow developments and sometimes a real you know an instant thing and stuff you know like maybe not as dramatic it changes from like black powder you know but um but still this might think my favorite part of these so and where are we going from here well I have to talk about another 1903 interestingly but before I leave the 1917 you want to say one more thing that rear aperture sight you look through it it's a little circle you'll automatically center because people just want to center the front post it main training a lot faster it made it easier to see what you were pointing at and much faster sort of rapid-fire or rather acquisition and fire and then the aperture sight like I said would be applied to like the Browning automatic rifle and then after the war the US would actually go back and consider making this the official US weapon this bring filled one out in that regard but they still added a rear aperture sight to that gun because they like that part of this design so much because the rear aperture is a really good idea May from our series actually ranks this among her favorite rifles of the war hands-down in terms of just layout good ergonomics and rapid fire and accurate fire I just happen to have something this is not a widespread rifle but a lot of people might find this curious this is the Springfield 1903 air service now these were extremely limited use they were basically in trial in the air when the war ended so maybe a half dozen were up in the plains being tried out this was designed as a backup weapon for if the machine guns failed in the plane this is actually a perfect example of miscommunication during the war people is talked about this gun being invented in the war in that gun being invented in the war and the truth is it was much more of an evolutionary process there were thousands of designs before the war many of them under appreciated and then during the war some died off and some sort of bread they were produced more because they were useful well this is one of those weird chances where they had a chance to innovate and they kind of messed it up so the American Expeditionary Force Flyboys say that they want a light semi-automatic but still somewhat hard-hitting carbine for use in the plains in case the machine guns Jam well they're thinking Winchester like 1907 1910s with you know nice heavy hitting cartridges but maybe you know they went a little hotter than that even though they're going and 350 ones not doing it 401 might and we have a whole episode coming up on those guns but the US government doesn't have a way to produce those and they're already running out a bunch of these Springfield's and they say well let's just take what we're already making and adapt it for air use and they basically missed the point they put it you know 25 round magazine on this thing they cut down the stock they modify the sights to be a nice open buck horn those are all good things for trying to use out of an airplane but it's still a bolt-action which was at the very core of the what the a was asking was like can we get a semi-automatic rifle and they just said here's a bolt-action and so the plane guys were kind of like we're not into this thing and then luckily the war ended before it got any more embarrassing than that these are quite rare most of them were turned back into regular rifle we're disposed of because they're so unpopular this just happens to be an original which is pretty cool and that's just a little story of how a lot of people sort of expect all these secret weapons of war to be better but a lot of times this sort of secret weapons of the unheard of weapons were much worse and that's why we don't hear about them all in the same vein we've already done an episode on the Petterson device which was an attempt to take the Springfield 1903 and make it semi-automatic with a pistol caliber cartridge this was a secret weapon that's supposed to be released in the spring of 1919 but of course the war ended and I'm going to tell you from what we did we were lucky we did not issue those guns that would have been a huge waste of resources and maybe even a waste alive so they were not a very good design but you could go check that out on our channel as well and it's interesting you said that because I've always pronounced it Peterson so it's Patterson right to my knowledge is Patterson but who knows people were calling the u.s. World War II rifle the garand Earth's are the backwards now they were called it the garand because it had been written that way and then the man himself in an article wrote down phonetically how to pronounce his name he said his name was garand so we've spent 50 years saying garand but he called it garand and I think honestly it doesn't matter once you know what you're talking about it's a little pedantic to get worried about it now in terms of long arms we are out of rifles but there's something else I want to mention there were two combat shotguns and then a number of commercial shotguns with the u.s. in the war this happens to be the Remington Model 10 this is actually the rarer one and yet it's the one I have on hand I don't currently have a World War 1 Winchester 97 there's some slight differences by the time you get to World War 2 and those tend to be much more plentiful following the war I'll tell you about this in a second but basically following the war since the shotguns weren't really retained a lot of attrition happened on the original Winchester's or entance because they were sort of turned back into more commercial style shotguns because generally people didn't favor the hand guard or bayonet lug for sporting purposes and a lot of them were surplus so it can be hard to get these in original condition but so this is a trench shotgun in this case it has a bayonet lug that would take the same bayonet as that 1917 rifle because there were many more of those produced in the Springfield bandits and then it has a this one has a wood handguard the Winchester's had a nice perforated steel metal handguard and the whole idea here is that you can get a hold of the shotgun while it's so that you can still use the bayonet when it's attached even after firing the problem with this though is that as much as there's a big sort of fan club for American shotguns in war a lot of it comes from World War two experience in which the shotguns were fairly effective and World War one they were not now I've already done an episode on this but in that time I've worked with another researcher and we've managed to turn up documentation from the National Archives in the US and the truth is the soldiers hated these trench shotguns and I'm gonna get a lot of blowback on that I know just hold out for my episode I'm gonna have absolute proof for this in memos and other things that were written by the u.s. ordnance Department sworn statements things like that but it all came down to the ammo because we were issuing 12-gauge paper shell cartridges in the muddy trenches of World War one not even waxed paper paper shell later they try wax cartridges later they try brass jacket like just pure brass cased shotgun shells which have their own problems but for the for the most of the service life of the shotguns in World War one you are lucky to get two shots out of it before it jammed up from the moisture and build up in the magazine tube from having swollen paper cartridges in them so they were only really used effectively for like night raids because then one shots not a big deal oh thing I said we've we've said a lot and certainly and out of the trenches and people have asked about it that the Germans particularly complained about the American use of trench shotguns saying that it was it was an immoral or unethical whatever you want to call it weapon to be used in the war can you tell us a bit about that yeah that was often taken as a marker that these were incredibly effective and I admit I fell for that too if you watch her episode knees I kind of mention hey the Germans got real riled they must have had a problem with them but like I said the US side said nope these are not working very well and the truth is the Germans probably suffered very few casualties the guns like these but here's the thing Germany had been in trouble in the media since the rape of Belgium but they had all this pitted against them and actually there's a we're gonna do a whole episode just on the Belgian comm lanes to explain how that whole situation kicked off with the Germans sort of reading one sort of people as civilian terrorists and the Belgians reading them as a military force and that's what sort of kicked off that whole misunderstanding and we've got a rifle that sort of represents that story we'll get there eventually but Germany had bad press and they're launching gas and all these other things so one of those things one of the things you want to go with is okay you're the bad guy on the world stage you will grab on to anything you can you've already been told that you have serrated bayonets and gas and that you're killing civilians and all the sort of stuff well the Germans would do two things that really stand out in small-arms world they would say that the US was using shotguns and then therefore that's a war crime and they'd also point at Britain and say that Britain was intentionally making dum-dum bullets snub-nosed bullets in order to maim their own soldiers both of which are kind of ridiculous like there's German footage of taking a bullet and shoving it into the magazine cut off of a lian field and snapping the tip off and being like look they design their guns that you can make dum-dum ammo which is just silly and so is sort of the claim of the shotgun being an unnecessary weapon of war in the case of you know conflict in trenches with gas and everything else but it's just when these things its political it's just them sort of pushing back it doesn't actually mean that these were all that effective unfortunately now again they would do fine in World War two because they had better ammo really it's not the gun it's the ammunition but unfortunately with the ammo they had they were very unpopular and like trying to can't wait to get into that story because people really sort of assumed the other way around well how did they not see problems coming with paper paper cartridges okay you know having it wrapped in paper how did they not think oh this might be a problem in a muddy filthy wintery war it's more than likely that they just bought up commercial ammo like they would do for any of this stuff when they needed to go like you think this is the first really widespread issue of shotgun the Winchester 97 was popular matter of fact I should put this down I have a winchester 97 commercial shotgun a lot of these were sort of brought over the Philippines and shortened configuration than used militarily there and they did quite well because of their sort of limited use and not sustained exposure to trench fighting like you keep it in your cabin or whatever in the Philippines and yes the cartridges create a little soggy but mostly you could store them well load them go out on patrol use them come back store them again whatever it takes what they don't figure on is they're gonna spend days and days and days at the front in a trench in muddy wet conditions that's what really spoiled up those cartridges while they're sitting in the magazine tube unattended so you don't even necessarily know that there's a province lead until you start pumping this thing and nothing's coming out so I get the oversight and they tried to correct it but realistically shotguns represented a very small portion of the overall u.s. loadout so it's not like they wanted to put a ton of effort into them versus getting more of what they really needed commercial shotguns like this one with the long barrel and everything just literally sporting purposes the kind that you'd go out for bird hunting a lot of these were bought by the US and used at say prison camps or factory guards or things like that you can see a lot of photos of American servicemen with big old shotguns shouldered from everything from like Winchester to Remington and things like that there's ever happened to have a long arm that they could sort of put on their shoulder and free up a proper gun for the frontline you'll see some of that as well without the cartridge problem the shotgun is actually very effective in trench combat like it it's not hard to imagine they were the only issued double-aught buckshot I get this a lot people are like well they had birdshot for this in blah blah blah and maybe a few cases would sneak in here and there but the way the US inventory system was set up they only had buckshot but when they could get birdshot they could use it for sort of side hunting or shooting down carrier pigeons or things like that generally they didn't have that ammo available so it didn't happen as much as people like to think but I'm sure some of it got up there or some people were careful with their buckshot or they just ship fired enough to hit the thing we did some testing because there's an old myth that you could return a grenade with a shotgun so we actually went out there and got some reproduction German stick grenades threw them up over a hill and tried shooting them with buckshot which actually took a lot of arrangement because buckshot is not really safe to fire into the air so we had to make sure of our backdrop and everything but the thing about buckshot is you got to imagine you're shooting however many pellets you know depending seven or five you get some the different sizes but you're shooting pellets of what is essentially 32 acp so you get a big burst of 32 ACP sized pellets and so in that regard it's kind of like magged every shot is like a half mag dump of a pocket pistol and so when you do that in a trench it's actually fairly effective the problem is you just couldn't keep a reliable stream of those things coming the the cartridges and what about the what about the rifles how do they stack up effectively compared to some of the European counterparts that we've seen on the world stage the US weapons were honestly in this case appear and I try not to toot that horn but the Springfield 1903 is a very handy short rifle it could have some minor improvements done to it but realistically it was as good or better than most of the stuff that was on the field at that time there were no mechanical problems with it we're not seeing these Ross rifle issues or anything like that it's very accurate there's not there's no problems with it even with those sort of sight miss calibrations nobody was really using those ranges anyway because the you know trench warfare mostly up close like we see a lot of guns shortened their length we see small early things tend to tighten up after World War II because we realized we're not firing at multiple thousands of yards for this 1917 that was a clearly superior rifle it was kind of heavy you didn't really want to have to haul it everywhere you went but realistically it did everything that the Ross rifle should have been able to do but couldn't so it was very accurate hard-hitting easy to maintain beautiful sights very adaptable to being scoped like these are the 1917 is just a beautiful platform overall with very good ergonomics so fantastic gun britain had the p14 like I said they almost didn't issue them at all they really kept them for home guard use because they weren't the standard Lee Enfield even though they were in many ways superior the US had no qualms about that the u.s. sent them right up to the front line and used them heavily and found a lot of love for them that's cleared it for now there's obviously automatics and things that we don't have here because of you know laws and effort but for rifles and pistols that's pretty much the spread we have episodes for most of the US long arms now we're working on them for the pistols so as you get a chance to come by the show maybe subscribe and see it when it turns up if you're wondering why they're not there yet it's because we like to go nice and deep and get all the facts before we say anything we don't want to assume that what's sort of the general zeitgeist is actually true we're not going off on Wikipedia we're going and looking at original sources whenever possible ok everybody and thank you guys once again that was fascinating and that was fantastic now if you would like to see his episode about the pettersen device Peterson Pettersen device you can click right here for that now Althea so you want to say goodbye to everybody yep thank you guys for watching this special if you get curious about me and stuff come check out our channel I flop I promise it's a political it's just a nice history lesson that sort of wrapped around the development of a small arm you can learn all sorts of extra stuff by studying one thing and that is C and Arsenal C ampersand Arsenal okay well we will see you next time

Channel: The Great War

Views: 269,730

Rating: 4.9477124 out of 5

Keywords: History, History channel, Documentary, Footage, Great War, First World War, World War I (Military Conflict), WWI, 20th Century, 1914 to 1918, British Pathé, Indy Neidell, Wilhelm II, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Winston Churchill, Mediakraft, Original, Battlefield 1, Springfield 1903, Enfield 1917, Pederson Device, Remington, Shotgun, Rifle, Firearms, Shooting

Id: fvrIVZn1jH8

Length: 25min 20sec (1520 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 15 2018