Lahti-Saloranta LS-26: Finland's Domestic LMG
Light MGs
•
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.
Up Next in Light MGs
-
The MG-15: A Flexible Aircraft Machin...
The MG-15 was the first standard flexible-mounted aircraft machine gun adopted by the Luftwaffe in the 1930s. Both it and the MG-17 are evolved from a Rheinmetall/Solothurn design which would also become the Austrian and Hungarian M30 infantry light machine guns. As used by the Luftwaffe, the MG1...
-
ZB26: The Best of the Light Machine Guns
The ZB-26 stands as one of the best magazine-fed light machine guns developed during the 1920s and 30s - it was a very popular gun for small military forces and many countries which did not directly buy it were strongly influenced by it. The Japanese Nambu Type 96 and 99 were heavily based on the...
-
Shooting the ZB-26: A Jewel of an Int...
Today we have a chance to do some shooting with a ZB-26, a German-occupation 8mm light machine gun made at Brno in Czechoslovakia. The ZB-26 does not get nearly as much attention as LMGs made by the better known powers during the war, but it is an excellent weapon. In addition to being adopted by...
