In the previous video, we looked at the Winchester G30M rifle as it was submitted to Marine Corps trials in 1940. When the trial result came back with the G30M in last place, Winchester immediately assigned David Williams to work on adapting it to resolve the problems found in testing. What Willi...

The German Sturmgewehr and the Soviet Kalashnikov are widely and rightly considered the two most influential and iconic of the modern military rifles. While the German rifle certainly influenced the Soviet design, the two were designed with different intentions and goals. The Sturmgewehr was an a...

One of the most common types of AK rifle in existence today is the Chinese Type 56 in its several variations, although very few of those rifles are in the United States in authentic full-auto form. This particular one was captured by a US soldier in the Vietnam War, who brought it back and regist...

North Korea was one of several recipients of Soviet military technological aid during the Cold War, being provided the design package and manufacturing assistance for both he SKS and AK-47 rifles. The AK was adopted by North Korea in 1958, in the Type 3 milled-receiver style. This was just shortl...

This is an example of a craft-made pistol captured in Vietnam and brought back to the US. While many Vietnamese fighters were supplied with good-quality weapons from other nations (primarily Chinese-made AK and SKS rifles), weapons are virtually never in sufficient supply for guerrilla-type force...

Paul Mauser spent nearly 20 years attempting to perfect a self-loading rifle for military service. He came closest with this, his 1913 patent model, which was used by German balloon and aircraft fliers as the Model 1915 and Model 1916 respectively - but these rifles were also sold on the commerci...

The Hagen is an early semiauto rifle designed by a Norwegian, manufactured in the UK, and tested by several different militaries - but adopted by none. It uses a long stroke gas piston and a two-lug rotating bolt to operate. Compared to other contemporary rifles, it was a quite light and sleek de...

The original design of the M1 Garand as adopted in 1936 used a “gas trap” system instead of a gas port drilled in the barrel. This system used a type of muzzle cap and false muzzle to redirect gas into the gas cylinder in the short distance between the end of the rifled barrel and when the bullet...

The Lahti L39 was the Finnish answer to the need for an anti-tank rifle, developed just before the Winter War. The rifle was created by noted Finnish designed Aimo Lahti, who had pressed for it to use a 13.2mm cartridge. However, arguments for using a 20x138B cartridge won out, based on hopes to ...

In a last hopeful attempt to get a rifle adopted and produced for the US military, John Pedersen designed his own copy of the M1 Garand rifle in the late 1930s (approximately 1939). His toggle-locked rifles had been irreversibly rejected, and the Garand rifle fully adopted by 1936. Pedersen's exa...

The Sturmgewehr was the result of a German intermediate cartridge development program that began in the mid-1930s. It was sidelined for a period as the focus of German Ordnance shifted to full-power rifles in 8x57mm with telescopic sights, but as the German fighting in Russia became more desperat...

The Swiss factories of SIG and W+F Bern both produced a remarkable number and variety of experimental self-loading rifles in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. Nothing would be adopted by the Swiss military until the StG-57, but these two firms were continuously working to develop a military self-load...

With the advent of successful self-loading pistols, one of the additional markets that many companies tried to appeal to was the compact carbine. Self-loading rifles in proper rifle cartridges would not be developed as quickly as the pistols because their much greater chamber pressures represente...

"Pom-Pom" was the name given to the 37mm Maxim gun by the Boers of South Africa, based on the gun's sound. It was a Maxim machine gun scaled up to the quite impressive 37mm caliber, intended primarily for naval use defending large vessels against small torpedo boats. This particular example is se...

The Colt 1907 was one of the significant developmental iterations of the design that would eventually be adopted as the Model 1911 by the US military. This pistol began as John Browning’s Model 1900 in .38 caliber, with the .45ACP cartridge being first created for the Model 1905 iteration. That 1...

The Mauser Selbstlader M1915 was the result of many years of work by the Mauser brothers to develop a semiautomatic rifle suitable for military use. They tried many different types of operating systems, and this one is a particularly unusual recoil-operated mechanism.

Only about 600 of these rif...

On October 1, 1928, the US War Department published a request for semiautomatic rifle designs. The Colt company submitted this .276 caliber rifle to the ensuing trials in 1929. It was designed by Jonathan Edward "Ed" Browning (half brother of John Moses Browning) and was a recoil-operated, tiltin...

Like most other nations with modern military forces. Czechoslovakia was interested in developing a semiautomatic infantry rifle in the 1920s and 1930s. The most successful such rifle to come out of Czech factory during this time was The ZH-29, but it did have competition. A major series of trials...

With the failure of the G30M and G30R to lead to any military orders (American or otherwise), the Winchester company took the advice of the Ordnance Department to scale the design up to an automatic rifle. The BAR had a number of known shortcomings in WWII, and the military was interested in repl...

The Astra 900 was a pistol developed to take advantage of a large Chinese demand for semiauto pistols with shoulder stocks, following on the massive sales of the Mauser C96 "Broomhandle" in that country. In the 1920s and 30s, civil war in China drove a huge market in arms, but international treat...

The MP-43 (which is mechanically identical to the MP-44 and StG-44; the differences are the subject for another video later) is a tilting bolt rifle with a long stroke gas piston. It was manufactured primarily from complex sheet steel stampings, as a way to minimize the amount of high-quality and...

In the 1930s, the Italian military (like all major military forces at the time) was investigating options for a semiautomatic service rifle. Beretta's Tulio Marengoni developed one such rifle, and submitted it in two forms.

The first version of the rifle was produced in 1931, chambered for the t...

The primary sniper rifle used by the United States in World War II was the M1903A4 Springfield, a version of the exisiting 1903A3 with the iron sights removed and replaced with a Weaver 330C scope (adopted by the military as the M73B1). This was a low-power optic, but was centrally mounted on the...

With the death of Jonathan "Ed" Browning in 1939, development of the Winchester G30 rifle was passed into the hands of a new employee at Winchester by the name of David Marshall Williams. Williams would become widely known as "Carbine" Williams in later years thanks to Jimmy Stewart and Hollywood...