Lahti-Saloranta LS-26: Finland's Domestic LMG
Forgotten Weapons
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15m
Finland’s first domestic light machine gun was the LS-26. The prime designer was Aimo Lahti, but because of his relative inexperience and lack of formal credentials, Lieutenant A.E. Saloranta was assigned to assist him. The two did not get along well, and Lahti effectively designed the weapon on his own, with Saloranta helping on the bureaucratic side of things. The gun was a recoil operated on the insistence of the Finnish military, which liked the recoil-operated Maxim and decided it wanted the same system for a light MG. It is an overly complex weapon, but not a fundamentally bad one. It is chambered for 7.62x54R and uses single-feed 20-round magazines that are quite difficult to load. Production (at VKT) ran from 1930 until 1942, with about 5,000 made for the Finnish Army and Civil Guards. An additional 1,200 chambered for 8mm Mauser were shipped to China, where some 30,000 had been ordered – but pressure from Japan shut down the contract.
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