British Rifles of WW1 I THE GREAT WAR Special feat. C&Rsenal

i'm indy neidell and this is a great war livestream special together with epheus from SI and Arsenal about British rifles from the first world war [Music] alright I think we've come that time where we need to discuss rifles now I'm sure nobody is even a little bit excited to see me pick up one of these guys this is the there's a lot of people that care a lot about this gun this is the British short magazine lee-enfield mark 3 now this particular rifle is a pure mark 3 and I'll get into the details of that in just a second but this gun came about from a longer Enfield that had been around for the Boer War and they had sort of learned their lesson about two big problems which one was a cure izing the rifle and also getting the sights dialed in to where they're really usable and to the dang thing was so long and heavy that nobody liked it infantry or cavalry so Britain made a very good step long before the bullet long but you know a good decade before the war Britain made the step to go to a standard short rifle so everybody gets the same gun and it's kind of short it's kinda long it's not as light and flimsy as the carbine it's not as grossly over heavy as long rifle it's something in between and it does the ticket just right and it's pretty true this gun is very well designed around the idea of that 303 British cartridge and getting just the right amount of performance out it was out of it without wasting powder or having a ton of burn off like you'll see with later like number five carbines this is a good system built again like I said with the pistols out of an existing system the British really likes reusing what they already had so we can take a closer look and I can walk you through some of the details that you guys are going to care about now this is infamously a [ __ ] on close action so the cocking piece comes back and sets up our firing pin to fire as we stroke the bolt forward that means they're locking lugs are at the rear and a lot of people say that's what gives this thing its speed but realistically what it's doing is compared to some of the front locking designs it's saving us some length out of that throw and that's what's picking us up we don't have to pull it back as far therefore we don't have to take as long to operate the gun now there are a lot of fans of this system I will say as designed originally before the inclusion of this piece up here it made the action kind of weak and prone to torquing out to the left like stretching out to the left just because of repeated use it'd be fine for a couple thousand rounds but you guys it's hard to argue with anybody that owns one of these things they walk out a headspace pretty quickly even for a rimmed cartridge and a lot of that has to do with the fact that the system's not designed for prolonged wear now the good thing is at some point they later added the ability to load from a stripper clip and they did that when they came into the short rifles they did it with a mark 1 rifle that's really not significant to World War 1 at this point although we do have an episode with it included then they figured out this nice bridge and what this does is it allows us to line up the clip and drop our cartridges in or yeah drop our cartridges in and at the same time because it's been sort of riveted and welded on here it's found the receiver together a little bit better across the sprit bridge and added a little more rigidity it's just a good overall solution to a problem that existed from a previous rifle that was not adapted to stripper clip technology now this had been an earlier magazine repeating system so that's why it started without the benefit of being able to strip rounds into the magazine you had to singularly load them and the gun speaking of single loading still keeps a magazine cut off so in this position we can only load one round at a time and then if we pop her out we can feed from our magazine so basically this gun is sort of a compromised evolution of an existing design that was good and that makes it also good a lot of people are already getting fuming because they're going to say this is the best battle right of the war I recommend you come check out our episode to see where there are a few little hiccups with this thing most of it coming from the fact that they used a rimmed cartridge for their ammunition most repeating rifles in the reliable bolt actions are going to see rimless cartridges by then because when you start to move ammo around it doesn't have a surface to sort of catch on another cartridge now the mark 3 again standard rifle and again we have to produce as many as possible and as you noted there's a lot of things like site protectors and guards and then you get the magazine cut off in different piling swivels and dial sights there's all these little bits and bobs that go into that gun well for every one of those bits and bobs that you cut out you save a number of hours of production time which means another gun gets produced that day or another two guns get produced that day and so Britain would make the decision around 1916 even though weirdly they filled the pattern for the things that could be ditched off the gun they sealed it after they had already started ditching things off the gun so you have examples that predate the the orders to do it because the manufacturers especially really yeah we're not doing that anymore now that becomes the mark 3-star so it's just the revision of the mark 3 pattern and I have one here the big focus are basically they need three things there's more little things like whether or not they have unit markings and stuff like that but the big three things that get name are get rid of the long range style sight get rid of the windage adjustment and then if you want you can get rid of the magazine cut off now because a lot of receivers were already built or set up for it or because certain units like naval units requested that they keep the magazine cut off for their own doctrine of use or you have producers like Australia who are just like well we're fine we can just keep including it we've already got a bunch of them in a pile ready to go the magazine cutoff tends to actually be present on a fair number of mark three stars even though it could just be gone it doesn't have to be there so if we take a look this particular example has retained its magazine cutoff but it doesn't have - it could have been gone if it had been they would have just built up the stock higher over where that line would be in the receiver and they have gotten rid of that fine adjustment dial here and on the far side we've got nothing we have no flip up aperture we have no dial sight all that's over here is our regular safety so this simplified pattern is actually the one most people are familiar with because it would carry on after the war yes some places which build is magazine cut-offs but you really don't see the dial sites or windage adjustment coming back post-war the mark 3 star is sort of it for the mark 3 series of Enfield until you start seeing things like the number 4 developed so that makes this the ubiquitous smelly that people like to say although short mega young fields fine by me I can spare the syllables again I probably haven't said this yet because people are so familiar with it I should probably back up just a bit this by the way one of the big things that people like to quote on this gun is a 10 round magazine capacity which is significant for the war definitely of the standard issued rifles it's double almost all of them so a good thing about having a higher capacity in World War one is that most nations found that the way their guns got jammed up was not being thrown in the mud or carried around or even you know slept on top of or something most of the damage these guns in the muck was done when you took the time to load them loading the gun with the time that garbage was introduced and problems occurred so the one good thing is that mud resistant or not which is very mud resistant but discounting that a gun that you load less often has less instances or fewer instances of mud getting shoved into the the sensitive areas so it's a good thing when you have a 10-round capacity because that means that you can sort of isolate yourself long enough to keep it clean to get rounds in there and then you have ten rounds of action so that you're not just shoving mud back into the gun there was some problems with accuracy although the problems with accuracy they were having was way way out you're talking about thousand yards shots we're talking about you know sniping essentially and they were trying to get the action bedded just right and they were doing all this fiddling at some point these guns have very thin barrels at this point they came out with a heavy barrel model as well but compared to other guns this is a fairly thin barrel it uses a kind of a weird clamping system and you know held as a nose cap to balance the barrel out this is getting the finer points that we don't need for this video but basically when you're pushing a thousand yards this starts to walk out a little bit more than some of the contemporaries like the Mauser I know a lot of you looking scream bloody murder about that but it's true it's just when you are trying to mash accurized when you're trying to produce them on an assembly line and have them come out accurate it takes more tweaking to get this system in line than it does say a Mauser system so Britain was aware of this and the post Boer War they were obsessed with long-range accuracy out of sort of a short rifle ish pattern close to this length and they would start developing what would be the pattern 13 which was an experimental gun that did not get into the war because the war broke out and interrupted that process but that gun was supposed to use a smaller diameter faster flying bullet in order to get a nice flat long-range shot and they built the whole gun around heavy barrel Mauser action and then what's called site radius which is the distance between your front and rear sight is very helpful to quickly and accurately assessing what you're shooting at so the further apart these are the more accurate your shot is just based off the way the human brain registers that distance and sight radius so on this gun you can tell this rear sight is actually fairly far up the barrel so it's not a strong position on the gun they could even have walked it back here and gotten a little bit better out of it instead they look at a totally new design and that design like I said did not get done for the war but they had built up all these plans for how to manufacture it they had the understanding of what they needed to do it was practically ready to roll and then the war broke out and they knew that they couldn't do it at home but they needed weapons and they were looking at the US and they realized that it would be easier to get the u.s. to produce the new you know gun that was designed for modern manufacturing than it would be to try to train the u.s. how to assemble these things because they're so finicky about how you have to make them that it would take two years to get the crude just right to make this gun so give the new crew a new gun instead of trying to teach them the weird semi old-world craftsmanship of the lee-enfield so that became the pattern 14 because they took that experimental gun and they turned it into just a regular 303 and that's this guy so just taking a broad look very recognizable profile but let's take a zoom in and we'll see some big improvement so we have front locking lugs it is still [ __ ] on clothes they like that nice fast stroke we still have the nice bent bolt handle that puts our finger down by the trigger we have a rocker style safety although it's better positioned by the thumb instead of across the back of the gun this is interesting because remember this predates the war in design and then was initially rolled out right at the beginning of the war so this still has the old long-range dial sights and flip up aperture because this is before they made the improved or simplified model of the mark three-star and then if I flip it back we have a aperture site which means a little hole that we look through and the brain is very good at eclis centering that front sight post on the hole so that makes it very rapid to acquire your picture to acquire your target the sight picture has a much longer sight radius I mean down the entire length of the gun practically this is a gun built to be heavy long-range accurate with a cartridge that it's no longer chambered in so this is now set up for 303 British which it still uses well and as a matter of fact these would be preferred by snipers and would be outfitted with you know optics and things like that you're going to see them even into world war ii being favored as a good sniping platform we're also going to see the u.s. adopt the same gun in 30.6 but we'll talk about that later this is a terrifically accurate rugged more ready rifle but it's heavy and it's new and it took until about 1917 for a significant number of them to show up and so britain would treat it as a second line or dedicated sniper rifle and that was about it so not a lot of these despite like 1.8 million being made ended up on the front instead they would replace practically everything else so that they could move Enfield to the front a lot of people probably recognize this the Canadian Ross rifle now this particular one took a bit to put together so it's got a few dings and Dangs but she's up and running and we definitely shot her and done an episode on this gun this thing is infamous in terms of basically people tend to think of it as a suicidal rifle just to use it which is not an entirely unfair assumption but I think people go a little too far criticizing this gun the big thing about this is that it came about because Canada was having a hard I'm getting equipment from Britain during the Boer War and then they want to set up their own domestic production of the short magazine lee-enfield and Britain was not helping them with that so they said well you're not going to help us get set up making your rifle we're going to make our own rifle and it's going to be cooler and we're going to kick your rifles butt and they've brought in a mad Scot essentially turned Canadian Charles Ross has a biography that everyone should read the man is his own version of Teddy Roosevelt and Hemingway anyway Charles Ross basically takes the Austrian 1895 system and has been working on it for years already and then Candida sort of goes well we could do something with your gun and he turns it into a straight pull rifle for Canada and that's like the mark 1 mark 2 and then there's all these problems with it they finally get it just right but at the same time there's a lot of politics around why it doesn't work right and so then they come out with the mark 3 which is this one in 1910 so this can be called a model 10 or the mark 3 this is supposed to solve all the problems it's actually very different from the earlier mark 2 although it is still straight pull rifle with the same sort of walking system and a lot of this was pushed by the way by Sam Hughes and so this gun is really tied to sort of the downfall of Sam Hughes in his political career for pushing sort of a favoritest industry that he was sort of tied to personally above the interests of the Canadian you know soldiers because these things just weren't dialed in where they needed to be and the biggest problem with the Ross isn't that it was unreliable or you know somehow inferior inherently the problem was just refinement they just inspection was not good testing in rugged conditions was not good they treated it like a big sporting rifle and it's beautiful sporting rifle but it's not a good military rifle until you make these X number of tweaks to be fair the lee-enfield was the same way there's nothing about this gun that is so radically different from the earlier problems of the Lee Enfield except the Lee Enfield received the attention it needed to get to be the final product so let's take a closer look and just see what the heck I'm talking about so this is in 303 and it's a straight pull action you just pull back on this guy and the system automatically turns down will turn its unlock and then pulls out now the big thing that a lot of people are familiar with this gun and actually our friend Ian who you know as well Indy has a video on this is that if you assemble this sort of 180 degrees the wrong way you can manage to shove this forward and it will not actually turn into lock so when you pull the trigger the whole thing that blows out the back and into your face so that would be fixed by setting a rivet into the action so that you could not assemble it backwards which is great but obviously that to save some people some eyesores or potential naming or death if they've done a little sooner but it's infamous that that is that's not the big killer in World War one the big killer in World War one is a combination of factors that took them so long to track down that by the time they nailed all the problems in this gun everyone had given up on it it was pulled from the frontlines and it was never deemed to be used again the big problem is that the soldiers would use this gun here let me back out for a second they use this gun and they boom boom boom and at some point she gets stopped maybe one to three rounds in and then the natural tendency because it's a straight pole is that if this bolt is stock and you really can't get it with your hand you just set it on the ground just kick it open because why not it's a straight pole it's got a nice flat surface here your the human tendency is going to be kick kick it hard and that's going to open her up now the reason it was tight to begin with was because British ammunition was of looser spec than the Canadian ammunition and so they would get this sort of odd British ammo they had a nice tight sporting style chamber not a wide for giving military chamber this is a hyper accurate gun that needs the ammo to be just so well that would cause it to sort of initially bind I just you know it's swell upping its stock and that's that's not an inherently horrible problem you just get to reread the chamber and they would eventually do that but when you go to solve that little problem by kicking it open they have hey let's zoom in they have a serrated bolt head you have these interlocking locking lugs so a lot like it's an interrupted screw pattern a lot like an artillery piece of time so what this does is it provides more locking surface so the surface area of the locking logs is quadrupled essentially well I guess tripled from what it normally would be which is just this back surface here it means that this is an extremely strong action and actually the concept does work but these individual wings are easier to deform and you see how they kind of come they come down to the root of the bolt the there's a bolt stop right here so when I pull the gun and the bolt stops you can't pull any further that's this half circle of metal back in here well if that half circle isn't deep enough to go deeper than the base of this rear left piece the natural mechanical thing is that it's going to deform it if you hit it too hard and that's exactly what happened they made the stop too shallow and so it was only like two-thirds the depth of this piece that it needed to be so that it would hit the root and so when you picked it open so you have a minor ammo issue there only is enough you have a minor ammo issue you kick it open to solve that issue and when you do you deform the bolt head which also at the same time they were not properly heat treating the bolt head so it deforms that bolt head and then you go to slam it shut again and fire it again well yes it's deform just enough that you can close it but then when you fire it deforms you now have a stuck cartridge and a deform bolt head and every time you kick it open to solve it you make the problem worse so within five six rounds you've made the rifle practically inert and so people just hated this gun and then some guy standing next to you would have a properly T treated bolt head or they weren't kickin their gun or the chamber is Allah and he just didn't have the problem that you had or maybe you were part of some division of a given Canadian ammo or something and you know and so it's just weird report of every these guys are fine these guys hate it with nobody could figure out what was going on it wasn't until the British ordered their own pile of these the mark 3b which has a slightly different rear sight the British ordered them and they had to send over a British inspector because it was a British order and he looked around I went what the heck is going on why isn't this that that and so the British inspectors sort of helped them sort out what was happening but by then the Canadians were so fed up that they were just like get rid of Sam Hughes get rid of rifle give us LeAnn fields were done with it and so it's interesting though historically we know all the changes they made that was the last problem like they got all the problems we know of no other additional problems with this gun after that point and in kind of reverse engineering these we don't see any other problems with them and they're going strong for a hundred years but they solved the problem right before they pulled it off the line because it's the third problem in a row they solved they couldn't know that there was not a fourth problem they just assumed there was going to be a fourth problem and a fifth problem and so they just got them out of there this is my favorite part of this stream so far this gun actually that was the most interesting for me that was a fascinating story that's great yeah the Ross rifle is just one of those things where you have three interlocking issues and the you have to untangle the troubleshooting is great you got to find like you got to reduce it to the one variable but you have three variables that affected this gun and so it made it very hard to discover what was happening and this gun was an absolute favorite for snipers because they were given much better kind of match grade ammo like they gave snipers were issued better ammo so they never had the initial problem so they would just fire their rifle and then they just worked the bolt like a normal person and they never develop the issues that the other people did so they would just sit there and dump a ton of oil in it to make sure that it didn't walk up and feed it prime ammo and they thought it was the best thing in the war because it was very very accurate it has an extremely heavy long barrel it's getting a lot of muzzle velocity it's burning all that powder it's got a flip-up rear aperture sight or if it slips down you've got a simple leaf battle sight but it's at the rear of the receiver like that p14 so you have a very long sight radius is a beautiful sniping platform it is a terrible infantry rifle up until those fixes were made but I think that pretty much wraps us up for our rifles today there's going to be some other stuff the British were known to use the audio socket the Japanese are tacos for naval use and they would have things like Chilean mousers they also bought a handful of commercial arms in the US but these are all sort of small and away from the front and can be talked about in other episodes or just over at CNR so if you'd like to see a science video about the Ross rifle you can click right here for that now you absolutely have to subscribe to its channel see and Arsenal and in terms of our channel do not forget to Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter see you next time

Channel: The Great War

Views: 352,881

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, SMLE, Short Magazine Lee Enfield, Lee Enfield, Rifle, Shooting, Firearms, Firearms History, Ross Rifle, Long Enfield, British Rifles, WW1 Rifles

Id: iDutnQpHUoM

Length: 22min 41sec (1361 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2017