As part of his effort to imbue Italy with a fascist culture, Mussolini formed the ONB, or National Balilla Organization as a replacement for all other youth organizations in Italy in 1926. It was intended for boys aged 6 to 18, and included military training. Older boys practiced shooting and dri...

When the French occupied the Mauser factory in April 1945, they found all the tooling to produce .22 caliber rifles still in place and in good order (among other things). The French military did not have a proper training rifle at the time, and they decided to have Mauser design and produce one....

As World War 2 exploded in Europe, rifle training suddenly because a very important topic in Great Britain. Typical solutions are small bore rimfire training variants of service rifles, but the British also wanted an option that could be used indoors and without any actual ammunition expenditure ...

The effort to create a .22 rimfire training and competition version of the 1903 Springfield rifle began just after World War One, as a project of the esteemed then-Major Julian Hatcher. His work would result in the M1922 rifle, of which about 2000 were made. However, the design would go through s...

During World War II, the US military had a simultaneous need to put machine guns into combat service, and also a need to train new soldiers on the operation of those machine guns. Cutting up existing guns to make demonstration models reduced the number available for field use, and the solution wa...

In a couple videos last month about American .22 LR rimfire training rifles, I got a surprising number of comments from viewers who did not understand why a military would train with a .22 caliber rifle instead of their actual issue cartridge. There were enough of these comments that I decided it...

Developed by BSA immediately after World War Two, the No7 MkI training rifle was the only one of the British Enfield trainers to use a magazine. Only 2500 of these rifles were produced, contracted by the Royal Air Force and delivered in 1948. Their magazine is a commercial BSA 5-round magazine mo...

When the USMC adopted the M1 Garand in 1942, they decided they would like to have a new semiautomatic training rifle in .22 rimfire to go along with it. Eugene Reising, working for Harrington & Richardson, promptly produced a semiauto .22 LR version of his military submachine gun to fulfill that ...

With the advent of aircraft, marksmanship instruction gained a huge new element of complexity. Now there were gunners firing at rapidly moving aerial targets from the ground and worse, gunners in moving aircraft shooting at other moving aircraft! Classic shotgun sports were often used to train gu...

In many countries prior to WWII, it was not uncommon to begin preparing children for military service at fairly young ages, and several countries produces small-scale rifles for training boys who could not yet handle full-size weapons. These include France and Italy (with miniaturized Lebel and C...