Weapons from all over the world. One of the first automatic rifles adopted for service, and even more so used in the First World War, was, as you know, the famous BAR - the M1918 rifle designed by John Moses Browning. Created by him in 1917, chambered for.30-06 Springfield (7, 62x63 mm), it was intended primarily for arming the US Expeditionary Force, which had previously fought in Europe with Shosh and Hotchkiss machine guns. But she fought there a little and really managed to prove herself later, namely on the battlefields of World War II, as well as in the Korean War and the "dirty war" in Vietnam. Of course, it is difficult to call it a classic rifle, since it is very heavy and, being equipped with a biped, is more suitable for the role of a light machine gun. In this capacity, it was later used in this way, but the fact that it is still a “rifle” was fixed in its name forever. This is all known and there is nothing new in it.
Of interest is the atmosphere in which this weapon was created, that is, was Browning's development a unique phenomenon, or was there already something in this area, that is, some samples of such rifles had already been created, and he could get acquainted with them, see advantages and disadvantages and then strengthen the former and get rid of the latter in their own design.
And here it turns out that even in the years preceding the First World War, the US Army's Combat Operations Department was considering the possibility of adopting a self-loading rifle, and this despite the fact that they already had the Springfield 1903 rifle that generally satisfied the military. However, in the following 1904 and then again in 1909, this department developed and published a testing procedure for new semi-automatic rifles that could be submitted for its consideration. That is, the designers received at their disposal all the performance characteristics of their future rifles and they only had to strain their heads and create something that met these requirements as fully as possible. And, by the way, in the period between 1910 and 1914, it was in the United States that as many as seven different models of self-loading rifles were created and tested. That is, the work in this area was quite intense. Among the seven samples were the Madsen-Rasmussen, Dreise, Benet-Mercier, Khellmann, Bang, the Rock Island Arsenal sample and one of the Standard Arms samples.
Of all this number, two foreign rifles attracted attention. These are the Bang rifle and the Madsen-Rasmussen rifle. The Bang Rifle was the first successful semi-automatic rifle presented to the U. S. Department of War. It was developed by the Dane Soren Hansen in 1911. Two were sent to the Springfield Arsenal for testing, where they made a very positive impression on its personnel. Both rifles functioned very well despite some shortcomings found. In particular, to meet the weight requirement, that is, to be no heavier than a 1903 Springfield rifle, Hansen made a very thin barrel and removed as much wood from the forend as possible. All this led to the fact that the barrel began to quickly overheat, and this in turn led to charring of the inner surface of the box.
The rifle had a very unusual automation system. On its barrel, in the muzzle, there was a sliding cap connected by a rod to the bolt. Powder gases, leaving the barrel, pulled this cap forward, and the bolt, respectively, due to this action, first opened and then went back. Then the return spring compressed by this movement came into play, and the whole cycle was repeated.
As for the Madsen-Rasmussen rifle, it can rightfully be called the mother of all automatic rifles in general. Back in 1883, the Danish army officer V. Madsen, together with the director of the Copenhagen arsenal, J. Rasmussen (later he changed this name to Bjarnov), began to create a fundamentally new type of rifle, which was supposed to have automatic loading and reloading. In 1886, they completed the development of the project and offered it to the Danish army.
The rifle was developed for a unitary cartridge 8x58 mm R from the Krag-Jorgensen rifle, which had rather high characteristics, and also devoid of the drawbacks of cartridges equipped with black black powder.
The designers proposed a new and very original automation scheme, which used the recoil force of the barrel during its short stroke. Of course, in our current opinion, their system looked really very unusual, but it was quite workable and even received a characteristic name: Forsøgsrekylgevær ("Experimental rifle using recoil").
The main part of the rifle was a metal receiver, to which the barrel and a fixed wooden forend were movably attached in front. In its rear part there was a frame on which the trigger was mounted and there was a buttstock mount with a straight neck. The right wall of the receiver looked like a door, which was folded to the side and back to service the parts inside, and in the closed position it was fixed with a latch. The hole for the ejection of spent cartridges was at the bottom, and was designed in the form of a triangular pipe. Ready-to-use cartridges were in a holder that was inserted into the grooves of the receiver shaft. Due to their own weight, they descended into the mine, where a special lever fed the next cartridge to the dispensing line. The authors did not envisage any springs that facilitated the supply of cartridges inside the receiver, since they believed that the structure is not simpler, the better it is.
However, this could not be said about the Forsøgsrekylgevær rifle itself, since it used a bolt swinging in a vertical plane, and at the same time the recoil of a movable barrel. Therefore, on the inner surface of the receiver there were a lot of all sorts of profiled grooves that interacted with the protrusions and levers, which, firstly, complicated the design of this rifle itself, and secondly, complicated (and more expensive!) Its production. By the way, its trigger provided fire only with single shots. And only later, when the "Madsen machine gun" was made on the basis of this rifle, it was changed so that it could shoot continuously.
The designers developed two samples of their M1888 and M1896 rifles, and both of them were put into service and, in limited quantities, were used in the Danish army until the mid-thirties of the last century, and only then were they written off due to their complete and hopeless obsolescence, as moral as well as physical. Nevertheless, both designers, not stopping at what has been accomplished, offered their rifle to several countries at once, and even, including, as we can see, in the United States.
And here is a rifle presented by Standard Arms, also known as Smith-Condit, after its developers Morris Smith and company secretary V. D. Condita was her own, American design. The company, founded in 1907, had high hopes for it. With a capital of a million dollars, she acquired a factory, which was planned to employ 150 workers and produce 50 rifles a day (source: Iron Age magazine, May 23, 1907).
But all these hopes did not come true. The reason is military tests. According to their results, the rifle was modernized, however, and the "Model G", produced in the amount of several thousand units, it turned out to be possible to sell only on the civilian weapons market. The military did not take her.
It was tested twice in 1910 and was rejected both times, primarily because it was considered too difficult for military service.
As for its design, it had a classic gas-operated piston mechanism located under the barrel. The piston consisted of two parts, the latter having a U-shape and thus "flowed" around the five-shot magazine. When fired, the piston first unlocked the bolt, and it began to move backward, removing and pushing the shot sleeve, and then, under the action of the spring, went forward, loading a new cartridge into the barrel. The rifle had a gas cut-off mechanism that turned the rifle into a conventional bolt-action weapon, which the military considered very important at the time. For 1910, such a decision should be considered unnecessarily complicated, and later, by the way, it was decisively abandoned.
Interestingly, the test rifle was presented in three different calibers. Under the standard 7, 62 × 63 mm Springfield cartridge, 30/40 Krag-Jorgensen cartridge, and the third, 7 mm caliber. But in the end, this rifle "did not go" under any of them.
Thus, Moses Browning had a lot to look at and rely on when he designed his famous BAR …
