The French RSC-1917 semiauto rifle was a major step forward in arms technology during World War One, offering a reliable and effective self-loading rifle for issue to squad leaders, expert marksmen, and other particularly experienced and effective troops. No other military was able to field a sem...

France fought the Great War with an array of weapons which were all sub-par in one way or another - the Lebel rifle was obsolescent by 1914, the Berthier was a cavalry carbine forced into rifle service, the Chauchat was an emergency wartime design optimized for production volume instead of qualit...

With the end of World War One, it was finally possible for the French military to replace the 8mm Lebel cartridge with a modern rimless cartridge, and they wasted no time in doing so. By 1924 a new round had been adopted, and along with it a new modern light machine gun. Next, the arsenals would ...

The French military had investigated the possibility of a Lebel carbine in the 1880s, but by the 1930s a different set of priorities was in place. In an effort to make some use of the vast stockpiles of obsolete Lebel rifles France had, a plan was put in place to shorten then into carbines for au...

The Model 1866 Chassepot was France's first military cartridge-firing rifle. It used a self-contained paper cartridge on the same basic principle as the Prussian 1841 Dreyse rifle, but was a substantial improvement on that system. The Chassepot fired an 11mm bullet at about 1350 fps (410 m/s), wh...

After the adoption of the single-shot Gras rifle in 1874, attitudes towards repeating rifles began to shift in the French military. The Battle of Plevna had shown that regardless of their hypothetic detriments, repeating rifles could substantially magnify a force's firepower and allow a smaller f...

This is a conversion of a French 1822 rifle to a single shot bolt action, using a newly manufactured receiver. It is unfortunately not marked with a patent name or date, and I have been unable to find any additional information about it. It actually seems like a pretty solid system, compared to m...

Hidden away up on the 4th floor of the Paris Army Museum (in Les Invalides) is the rather unexcitingly-named Musée de Plans-Reliefs. Up here in the dark is a collection of strategic dioramas dating back some 350 years. French King Louis XIV created a workshop to build these 1:600 sale models of t...

Soldiers will be soldiers...give them something that can be screwed up, and they will screw it up.

In the late 1950s, France was still part of the NATO integrated military structure. When the 7.62x51mm cartridge was adopted as standard for the alliance, France looked to be in a good position to simply convert their MAS 49-56 rifles to use it. After all, the 7.5mm cartridge the rifle was design...

Next week is Desert Brutality 2020, the big annual 2-Gun "nationals". I'll be shooting it in the Classic division (guns from 1946 and earlier) this year, with an SMG semiauto FG-42 rifle and a French Modele 1935A pistol. This is my last chance to practice with the gear, so I'm shooting the regula...

The Arcelin system was a capping breechloader provisionally adopted by the French military in 1854. It was a bolt action system with a folding bolt handle, firing a paper cartridge. It impressed Emperor Louis Napoleon III in initial trials, and he directed it be used to arms his elite Cent Gardes...

Gevarm, a gunmaking offshoot of the Gevelot cartridge company, produced a line of open-bolt semiautomatic rimfire sporting rifles from the early 1960s until 1995. This is an A6 model, the base type. It is chambered for .22LR, with an 8 round magazine and basic open sights. What makes these rifle...

In the aftermath of World War One, France would face the need to replace virtually all of its small arms, because nearly everything it had been using was either a wartime stopgap (like the Ruby, Chauchat, and Berthier 07/15) or had been obsolete before the war began (like the Lebel and Mle 1892 r...

http://www.flamethrowerexpert.com

You can find Charlie Hobson's book, "US Portable Flamethrowers" here:
http://amzn.to/1SP9yc5

Rather than doing a monthly Q&A myself, I decided to take advantage of a visit from Charlie Hobson and answer some questions about flamethrowers. These questions all ca...

http://www.flamethrowerexpert.com

You can find Charlie Hobson's book, "US Portable Flamethrowers" here:
http://amzn.to/1SP9yc5

Flamethrowers are a significant piece of military weapons history which are very widely misunderstood, as flamethrowers have never been the subject of nearly as much co...

After a dismal first attempt at designing a flamethrower (the M1) in 1941, the US Chemical Corps along with several universities and industrial partners put in a lot of research to develop a more usable and effective flamethrower. The result was the M2, which went into production in early 1944. I...

The Japanese Type 93 and its slightly-improved sister the Type 100 were the standard flame weapons of the Imperial Japanese Army for its fighting in China and the Pacific. They are a smaller and handier design than the American weapons, and less user-friendly. The Type 100 uses a rotating valve t...

Figured I'd post this since we got it all on video anyway - this is my final safety briefing/walkthrough with an M2 Flamethrower made in 1944, followed by my first short firings of it.

The gun was only partially filled with fuel, which is why the firing duration is so short.

Isaac Newton Lewis is best known as the designer of the Lewis light machine gun, of course - but that was not his only work in the firearms field. In 1919, he patented a semiauto handgun using the same gas-operated, rotating bolt mechanism as the machine gun. It is a pretty massive steel beast of...

I recently picked up one of the Pioneer Arms semiauto PM-63C pistols that are sporadically available here in the US. They have a pretty mediocre reputation and I wasn't expecting much, but the gun is so unusual that I really must have one myself (and the likelihood of me getting an original PM63 ...

Barton Jenks was parts of a family rifle with inventors. These included Joseph Jenks, who was granted the first patent in the American colony in 1646 (for a sawmill design), his uncle William Jenks who created the Jenks Mule-Ear carbine, and his father Alfred who was an innovator in textile machi...